ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to connect what has been learnt from eight teachers and their individual pedagogies, with the music education landscape more generally, to suggest actions that might be taken, roads that might be followed. The structures and forms of music are analogous to those of conscious experience; in music we recognise and create, both individually and collectively, the interactions that both shape and express our thoughts and feelings and ultimately, our spirituality. Music education texts in the Western world, at least from the renaissance, have tried to explain how music should be taught, and there is a continuing need for texts that provide well-argued, research-informed advice as to what teachers should do. Empirical research can act as a helpful restraint to some of the more extreme claims to emerge from idealism and advocacy, whether expressed through political slogans on the one hand, or detailed, philosophical theorising on the other.
