Latest issue (Vol. 31, no. 1) Spring, 2023 is now available!

We are pleased to announce the arrival of the spring 2023 issue of PMER. Aditi Gopinathan and Leonard Tan’s provocative essay features an analysis of Vedic views of music and education and suggests some lessons we might learn from Indian philosophy’s approach to such topics. Tessa MacLean problematizes our assumptions about democratic music education by examining contradictions embedded in the discourse surrounding that concept—contradictions that often stem from a lack of clarity on which definition of democracy is assumed to prevail at any given point in time. And Brent Talbot and Donald Taylor show how the artistic choices of Lil Nas X, a young black queer musician, can be understood as disrupting the status quo and challenging hegemonic views of music in ways that suggest a more hopeful future.

 

There are also two illuminating book reviews—Kim Boeskov’s review of Geoffrey Baker’s Rethinking Social Action through Music: The Search for Coexistence and Citizenship in Medellín’s Music Schools (2021), and Graça Mota’s review of Alexandra Kertz-Welzel’s Rethinking Music Education and Social Change (2022). Additionally, a new type of article is introduced in this issue. The Book Review Essay is an extended reflection on a publication or body of work, and we include two here. Øivind Varcøy discusses Estelle Jorgensen’s Values and Music Education (2022) from a Scandinavian / North European perspective, and Renato Cardoso takes a critical look at David Elliott and Marissa Silverman’s Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education, 2^nd edition (2015) by comparing it to the earlier edition.