Editorial & Table of Contents - Volume 6 (2013)

Editorial:

This volume consists four outstanding papers, each has a unique niche that could potentially be a landmark in the field. First, Humphreys’ paper is based on his keynote address presented at the Suncoast Music Education Research Symposium held in February 2011. The paper illuminates a convincing historical and democratic view on popular music pedagogy that could benefit music educators today. The Humphreys and Humphreys paper is one of its kind as far as I can tell. In the current educational milieu where reading is an emphasis, information regarding the readability of research publications in the field could be useful for professors, students, librarians, and others interested in writing or reading research papers. Smith’s autoethnographic approach in viewing “success” in popular music helps us to understand the fluidity of the concept and what could determine success in the future. And finally, Thibeault’s award winning paper (2013 Outstanding Emerging Researcher Award of the Center for Music Education Research, University of South Florida) guides us through a more than century-long theoretical journey of musical experiences from live performance to recording to data processing. The current domination of music as data, rather than performance, sheds important lights on how music educators’ mindset about musical experiences should shift.

I would like to thank the reviewers who have exerted utmost rigor on each of the papers. I also would like to acknowledge the technology systems staff of the College of The Arts, University of South Florida, where this journal resides. Appreciation is due to Hong Chen, as she assisted with the editing process and translated abstracts into Chinese, which has allowed the content of this publication to reach a wider audience. The Chinese abstract appears at the end of each paper.

We welcome paper submissions at any time throughout the year. See http://cmer.arts.usf.edu/content/templates/?a=904&z=135 for more information.

C. Victor Fung
Editor, Music Education Research International

Table of Contents:

Jere T. Humphreys
Relationships between popular music and democracy: Implications for popular music pedagogy (pp. 1-14)

Alexandra H. Humphreys & Jere T. Humphreys
Reading difficulty levels of selected articles in the Journal of Research in Music Education and Journal of Historical Research in Music Education (pp. 15-25)

Gareth Dylan Smith
Seeking “success” in popular music (pp. 26-37)

Matthew D. Thibeault
The shifting locus of musical experience from performance to recording to data: Some implications for music education (pp. 38-55)