Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the Universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good and just and beautiful. Plato (attributed, origin unknown) [i] Plato considered music as…
Category: Uncategorized
Disentangling the entangled: Thinking about and through Musicology
After much deconstruction and analysis of music, my Year 11 Music students are about to embark on their first formal Musicology task. In Queensland, Australia, Musicology is a dimension of the current senior syllabus.[i] It involves “the study of music in social, historical and cultural contexts… it entails researching, analysing and evaluating repertoire… in a…
Learning an instrument is hard… but that’s why it’s so good!
Learning an instrument is hard work. When we learn an instrument, we can also learn a lot about our character. My school has adopted the VIA Character Strengths[1] from the positive education movement as a frame for educative interactions on academic, co-curricular, social and pastoral levels. Learning an instrument speaks to and allows us to…
Sunshine Coast Music Education Conference 2015
In the July holidays, St Andrew’s Anglican College is hosting the inaugural Sunshine Coast Music Education Conference – a conference for Primary and Secondary Music teachers from across the State. We are welcoming the inspirational Richard Gill, OAM, to present alongside specialists Maree Henessey and Russell Bauer, on the conference theme of ‘Engaged Teachers, Engaged…
It’s All About the Verb…
It has been quite a number of years now since I became acquainted with the work of Christopher Small. His works Music, Society and Education (1977), Music of the Common Tongue (1987) and Musicking (1998) were intelligently combative to the institution of music education in Australia at the time – in fact, they still are……
Welcome
If you’ve landed here, then welcome to my blog/site. Here I will post my reflections on music teaching and learning, and also music education research. Some of the pages on this site are static, and provide information on my teaching and research. Feel free to get in contact if you want to talk music education…
Dr Cade Bonar 