The article uses methods of philosophical enquiry and historical research to clarify questions surrounding the epistemological basis for music education. It critically examines the idea of ‘music as aesthetic education’ in the context of evolving policy and practice within the English National Curriculum. It argues for broadening the concept of aesthetic education as a necessary antidote to an impersonal curriculum where an undifferentiated notion of knowledge distorts the character of goals, pedagogy and the valuing of musical endeavour.

In Scotland, assessment procedures tend to dominate the teaching and learning of music. Teachers are concerned that the recording and measuring of pupils' output against set criteria are achieved at the expense of engaging them in meaningful, creative experiences. The authors have proposed elsewhere (Byrne & Sheridan, 2000) that music educators should consider the use of Csikszentmihalyi's ‘flow’ model (Csikszentmihalyi, 1992) as a possible reflective tool for monitoring, regulating and assessing learning in music.

The writer has conducted an extensive historical investigation into music in the Irish primary school system. One individual, Peter Goodman, Ireland's first music inspector, emerged as being a character central to the introduction of music to primary schools in 1900, and to the subsequent in-service education provided for teachers. This paper outlines Goodman's work in this area, and traces his promotion of the Curwen sol-fa system, and his contribution to the promotion of church music. Goodman wrote prolifically describing his work, and his reports were included in the annual Reports of the Board of Commissioners of National Education. From these archival sources emerges a picture of an individual full of enthusiasm and zeal for his mission, and with some ideas and aspirations that are just as valid today as when he first conceived them a century ago.

This paper describes what improvising came to mean to a group of 12-year-old children who, as members of a weekly lunchtime ‘Music Creators' Soundings Club’, were watched, listened to, and invited to reflect upon the process of group improvisation. Focusing on musical interaction as it emerged in the earliest stages of this work, this paper shows the relationship between children's actions and their reflective talk. It identifies emerging principles in a sequence of musical examples that portray children making music together and shows the nature of group improvisation as socially and musically inclusive. These children valued group improvisation most for its immediacy and continuity. Ways of delighting in how children behave musically and reveal their musical learning through conversation are discussed.

Motivational research in academic subjects has demonstrated that when students are interested in an activity and feel free to choose whether or not to do it, they are more likely to engage in higher-level cognitive functioning, find it easier to concentrate, persevere, and enjoy their learning. This case study of a young beginning clarinettist named Clarissa consisted of interviews and computer analysis of videotaped practice sessions. Clarissa's practice behaviour in teacher-assigned repertoire was compared with her work on a piece she chose to learn herself. Results show that when practising self-selected repertoire, Clarissa was more likely to engage in strategies that are typical at more advanced stages of development, such as silent fingering, silent thinking and singing. She also spent more time practising the piece, and persevered when faced with difficulties. Implications for instrumental pedagogy are discussed.

This paper is the pedagogical embodiment of accumulated understandings drawn from discussions of postmodern and poststructuralist theory and suggests some forms that an ethical music education might take. Music education in the postmodern era calls for and revives an attention to the relations between music and cultural narrative. Students bring diverse locational and historical narratives to the classroom. Bearing this in mind, this paper examines difference in the context of a music education that is now charged with both obligations as a result of internationalism, and with a role in resistance to the homogenising forces of globalisation. It suggests music education as a possible site for a critical concept of knowledge and as a dynamic site of cultural narrative.