Musicianship in education: ideology and practice

Everyone is musical and has the potential to be a musician (Mills, 2005; Welch, 2008). Are secondary school teachers simply acquainting young people with a selection of musical experiences or do they seek to plan a curriculum which will enable developing musicians? This paper outlines a part of ongoing doctoral studies and reports on some of the initial data exploring the musical competencies considered to be central to the development of musicians and how far, in actuality, these competencies are central to school musical activities. It describes sorting activities (ranking musical competencies) undertaken by the participants (n = 34) and the activity evident in a small sample of case-study music lessons