The Musical Experience ─ Rethinking Music Teaching and Learning

The Musical Experience proposes a new concept - musical experience - as the most effective framework for navigating the shifting terrain of educational policy as it is applied to music education. The editors and contributors define musical experience as being characterized by the depth of affective and emotional responses that music generates. The chapters map out the primary forms of musical engagement - performing, listening, improvising, and composing - as activities which play a key role in classroom teaching. They also address the cultural scope of musical experience, which calls for the consideration of time, place, beliefs, and values to be placed upon musical activities. The Musical Experience discusses how music teachers can most effectively rely on means of musical communication to lead students toward the development and refinement of musical skills, understandings, and expression in educational settings. This book serves to expand upon the dimensions of musical experience and provides, from the forefront of the field, an integrated yet panoramic view of the educational processes involved in music teaching and learning.

Janet R. Barrett is the Marilyn Pflederer Zimmerman Endowed Scholar in Music Education, Professor of Music and Graduate Program Coordinator at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is co-author of Constructing a Personal Orientation to Music Teaching (2010) and Sound Ways of Knowing: Music in the Interdisciplinary Curriculum (1997).

Peter R. Webster is Professor Emeritus of Music Education at the Bienen School of Music, Northwestern University and a Scholar-in-Residence at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California. Webster is co-editor of the MENC Oxford Research Handbook on Music Learning (2011), co-author of Experiencing Music Technology (2008) and author of Measures of Creative Thinking in Music (1994).