A study of the purposes, procedures, and evaluative criteria for both qualitative and quantitative research in music education. Skills will be developed for the planning and execution of individual research projects, and for the critical evaluation of studies in the research literature of music education.

This course will be a continuation of the course "Introduction to Research in Music Education" where students will hone their skills in particular research methodologies. Having identified a research problem, students will refine their methodological frameworks. The course is designed to respond to each individual's research needs for advancing their research abilities.

This course investigates issues of gender/sexuality in queer music performance, participation, listening, and learning practices. Examining musical implications of Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, we take up in relationship to music, issues, and topics central to queer theory, such as norms and normativity; identities and dis-identifications; bodies, matter, and mattering; time, temporality, and collective movement; queer of colour critique, assemblages, and intersectionalities. Students use methods of analysis appropriate to their expertise and experience (cultural, musical, educational, performer-based) to research queer music genres and scenes of popular (broadly defined) and concert music cultures.

With recent scholarly discourse surrounding the need to decolonise music education, how do music educators effectively include Black music performance and pedagogical practices in music curricula? This course critically examines research related to various forms of Black music and music education. We will explore the historical/social/cultural context and performance practices of various forms of North American and global Black music genres (derived from African history and culture) such as hip hop, jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, reggae, calypso, and African music. Students will engage in discussions centred on the role and impact of Black music studies in music curricula while examining pedagogical approaches for integrating Black music into elementary, secondary and postsecondary music curricula. This course will provide students with the theoretical grounding to further explore and expand research in Black music studies and music education.

Over the course of the two centuries the Indigenous population of Canada has been subjected to colonial educational models, cultural suppression and in many cases physical and emotional abuse through the institution of residential schools. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) gathered the testimony of individuals who attended residential schools, documenting the enduring generational and cultural effects of this government mandated policy. As a result, 94 Calls to Action were published to redress the systematic cultural genocide and continuing emotional trauma. Among these a significant number were addressed to educational and academic contexts.

This course will use the Calls to Action in the Final Report of the TRC as the framework for addressing reconciliation through music education in schools and universities. Students will research the work of current indigenous artists, collaborations between indigenous and non-indigenous artist/teacher/scholars, as well as identify curricular areas that could be implemented in response to the Calls. Students will examine scholarly literature on colonialism, decolonialism and reinscribing colonialism as they problematize issues surrounding ethical inclusion of cultural art forms. The TRC process in other countries will be referenced with the purpose of disrupting the role that the current discourse of multi-cultural music education plays in negotiating Indigenous music in the academy. Culminating research projects will explore a specific area of interest to individual students.

The ubiquity of death and endings surrounding our day-to-day in the wake of not only a global pandemic, but also dominant international policies of late capitalism that have accelerated the climate crisis and paved the way for the increased power of populist ideologies is the hotbed of debate across academic disciplines including philosophy, international affairs, political science, sociology, and public health among others. This graduate seminar will explore some of this scholarship as it intersects with music, education, and pedagogy. Central to the seminar will be questions surrounding how different institutional, cultural, and musical practices and communities govern, grapple or come to terms with literal and metaphorical dead (racialized, gendered, aged, differently abled) bodies, dying educational and cultural programs and geographies, and disappearing memories. Some themes to be discussed are: necropolitics, hauntology, nostalgia, grief, and trauma-informed pedagogies.

In this seminar, graduate students will engage with concepts and debates in sound studies as a way to re-think music education scholarship and practice. As calls for more inclusive, anti-oppressive, and socially just music education intensify (Talbot 2018, U of T Faculty of Music Alumni 2020), current understandings of what constitutes music education and the roles of the music educator and the music education scholar must adapt and expand. Sound studies is an interdisciplinary area of study that examines sound production and reception socio-historically, and it contemplates these processes' material effects. Insights from sound studies offer conceptual and methodological avenues for interrogating and reconceptualizing music education.

Through critical engagement with course readings, seminar discussions, conversations with guest speakers, and individual and group hands-on assignments, students will interrogate current understandings of music education, reflect on their personal and professional connections to course themes, and contemplate new ways forward for music education. Course materials will include sound studies scholarship with different disciplinary focuses, as well as non-academic and audiovisual sources that speak to music education topics and concerns. This selection of course materials will be informed by a conscious effort to amplify the work of scholars from historically underrepresented communities.

This course examines research and current concepts related to the pedagogy and curriculum for music instruction in higher education. Topics include: philosophy of higher education, philosophy of music and music education, developmental theories of music learning, theories of adult learning, issues in the study of music curriculum design, administration, student evaluation, and continuing professional development. An emphasis will be placed on the preparation, implementation and evaluation of post-secondary music curricula specific to the specializations of course participants.

An examination of current sources and future directions in jazz music education emphasizing literature, interpretation, improvisation pedagogy, materials and rehearsal techniques. Topics include the selection and preparation of jazz repertoire for the school curriculum; approaches to teaching jazz improvisation, vocabulary and styles, and Canadian jazz repertoire for schools.

Description: Students analyze, synthesize, and critique several philosophical positions and perspectives related to music and music education in terms of theoretical and practical applications, professional implications, and personal articulations.

This course analyzes music and music education practices, processes, content, and contexts in relationship to issues currently impacting the profession generally and specifically. Using multiple lenses, including critical, feminist, queer and queer of colour critique, we will examine how music and music education research literature, pedagogical approaches, and curricular materials address emergent and persistent musical, educational, and societal concerns particularly as they intersect with and are informed by gender, sexuality, race, and class.

Students investigate and analyze historical and current theories and models related to conception, development, design, implementation, and evaluation of curriculum from several theoretical perspectives, focusing on professional and practical engagement with curricular practices, processes, and products.

This course examines narrative inquiry as a research methodology which may be employed to explore philosophical, psychological, and sociological underpinnings within the field of music education. Through critical review of scholarly literature, students will uncover various approaches of, and issues surrounding, narrative inquiry research in various music education contexts. Students will participate in reflective examination of their own teaching or learning practice, and critical discussion of prevailing paradigms of music teaching and learning. Students will also engage in narrative activities designed to develop their skills and proficiency utilizing this emerging research methodology.

This course will be a research-based study of the social-psychological variables that influence practical and theoretical aspects of music teaching and learning. Social Psychology is the scientific study of the feelings, thoughts, and behaviours of individuals in social situations and as imagined by the real or imagined presence of other people. Topics covered will include the evolutionary function of music, music as an expression of the human spirit, eudaimonia, musical identity, structural racism, stereotypes, emotions, ethics of care, music therapy during medical assistance in dying, and music teaching as a psychosocial phenomenon.

An examination of connections between instrumental music instruction and the curriculum of educational institutions. Perspectives from the field of curriculum studies will provide the background for the investigation of selected topics in instrumental music education and pedagogy.

With the increasing diversity of voices and ways of being in music education, and growing challenges toward the foundations of the field and what it means to be a researcher, musician, and music educator in today's climate, it is pertinent to investigate how the field is adapting to these changes. One of these challenges has been the inclusion of popular music in school music and beyond as an avenue to create lifelong affinity toward and engagement with music. However, the presence of popular music as a concept, practice, project, content, and pedagogy in school music, and also beyond the boundaries of school, has brought with it a plethora of questions, apprehensions, and existential quandaries. Who benefits from popular music, and who is harmed by it? How inclusionary or exclusionary is popular music? Whose popular music matters? Does popular music dismantle the hegemonic practices in the field or is it just another way to reaffirm the dominant discourse? Attending to such questions, in this seminar we engage with the literature in the field of music education, ethnomusicology, and sound studies to grapple with these issues, and re-examine popular music's role in education and individuals' everyday living practices.

An examination of music education research studies on specific topics of interest to staff and students. This course is intended to contribute to the development of individual research abilities in areas of particular concern to students.

This course is intended to broaden the comprehensive understanding of the historical and contemporary wind band, its history, and its literature.

An examination of current sources and future directions in choral music education emphasizing choral literature, score analysis and interpretation, conducting and rehearsal techniques. An interactive laboratory seminar will offer students the opportunity to develop their theoretical, pedagogical, and diagnostic abilities in relation to current research in curriculum and instruction.

The study of choral literature and conducting techniques with an emphasis on Contemporary choral and World musics (including selected choral-orchestral repertoire). The weekly class will meet in a combination literature seminar and conducting practicum with piano and/or small instrumental ensemble.

Under the supervision of a staff advisor, students will develop an individual research proposal, conduct the required research, and complete the written presentation of their research for approval by members of the music education graduate staff.

The student will identify an area of investigation within the field of music education, and will undertake independent research in that area under the supervision of the candidate’s advisor. Completion of this course includes a seminar presentation to the candidate’s committee to further demonstrate the candidate’s knowledge and ability to communicate.

An independent reading and research under the supervision of a faculty advisor on an advanced topic in music education.

Independent composition work by master's students under the supervision of a faculty member.

Individual instruction in Composition. Continuation of MUS3100Y.

This seminar centers on one of the central and most value-laden genres in Western art music during the first quarter of the twentieth century: the symphony. It focuses on select works both by some of the genre's major practitioners (e.g., Mahler, Sibelius, Nielsen) and by composers who approached the genre as "outsiders" (e.g., Elgar, Strauss, Rachmaninoff, Schoenberg) that, taken together, provide a representative image of the diverse strands of "symphonic modernism" between 1900 and 1925. Combining score study with readings of relevant recent music-theoretical and musicological literature, the seminar pursues a double goal. On the one hand, it seeks to explore analytical approaches to form, tonal organization, and hermeneutics in these works; on the other, it aims to situate them both in the broader cultural-historical context of early twentieth-century modernism and in relation to the nineteenth-century symphonic tradition.

An abstracted 21st-century rethinking of the traditional concept of counterpoint as a matrix of developing maximal melodic identity and independence while bound by and optimized for vertical harmonic cohesion. The composition students will creatively explore contemporary concepts of identity, diversity, and how these can interact within a redefined framework of "social" cohesion and cooperation. A series of small experimental compositions informed by this principle will form the core of the student work for this course, accompanied by in-class presentations and short essays addressing their contemporary solutions to this age-old matrix. Mixed with the above, career development strategies (how to frame and disseminate the artistic message) will be discussed as part of the course curriculum.

A look at the practice of Counterpoint as a metaphor of the societal forces that shape individual and collective behavior in democratic societies expressed as a constant negotiation between the "vertical" rules of engagement (harmony-law) and the "horizontal" limits of individual self-determination (multiple melodies, interacting as independently as possible from one another). The main focus of the course will be the study of the critical limits within which individual self-expression and social balance are maintained, and of how this balance is translated into musical discourse. The aim of the course is to help rethink the practice of Counterpoint, not as a colonial product but as a musical practice that can evolve independently of its colonial association and be practiced in various cultural contexts and musical traditions, a distillation process from a practice that can then be rethought in completely non-European cultural and musical contexts. Depending on the background of the students, the assignments for the course will be compositional experiments, extensive essays or a combination of both, in addition to in-class presentations.