2 What is there to learn in music?

Music teachers are constantly involved in making decisions about what should be taught in music lessons and how it should be taught. Such decision making needs to be underpinned by an understanding of what there is to learn in music, and how different kinds of musical knowledge promote different kinds of music teaching and engender different kinds of musical learning. In this section you are going to look at one particular conception of musical knowledge developed by Reid and adapted by Philpott. We will ask you to consider the implications of this model in the work of a secondary music teacher.