The author reflects on his work with music teachers and students during three weeks in Buenos Aires in November 1994.

Free improvisation has two sources in the avant garde jazz, and experimental classical practices of the 1960s. Appeals to freedom, musical or otherwise, often result in more limitations. Sessions at Thames Valley University are managed by the students, and involve intense debate concerning how best to maximise collective musical freedom. Performances are triggered by individually prepared plans, which take the form of intervallic and rhythmic cells, registrally distinct roles, formal markers, dynamic processes, and even evocative poetics. Free collective improvisation in the classroom rewards sensitivity and sustained, intense concentration with a confrontational and convivial, ethical and musical, experience.

The requirements of the National Curriculum in England make it compulsory for all students training for primary teaching to take curriculum courses in all the core and foundation subjects and RE. [Music is a foundation subject established in 1992 and revised in 1995.] The need to make this type of course stimulating and encouraging has been a major concern for many years. This article describes one course that is designed to meet these needs. Students' evaluations of the course have been very favourable. This has encouraged the writer to share the experience with others in the field and seek constructive criticism. The course, in this form, ran first in 1992–3.

paper deals with a central concept in music education, that of ‘appraising’ music. Through a series of incidents surrounding the development of the Music National Curriculum this concept, new to many, was left undefined. Using research which shows how people cope with change and successfully take on innovations, a need for deeper information on what appraising entails, and the underlying principles involved, was identified – that is, the ‘how-to’ and ‘principles’ knowledge of appraising. The paper reports research carried out with a group of teachers to define the activity of appraising music in a way which takes account of real classroom situations and can be used by the 90% of primary teachers who are not music specialists. Because the definition is developed by teachers it is more likely to be understood by other teachers. The paper ends with an example of a programme of work which uses the developed understanding. This includes nine areas of appraising, an explanatory definition and four stages in the process of appraising as well as an understanding of progression in this activity using seven words to indicate progression and identifying a ‘putting in’ and ‘drawing out’ stage within this.The children's appraising and progression is discussed and the paper argues that, in choosing this term, the Music Working Group has identified the way in which we come to know and understand the processes involved in music and musical thinking within the three activities of Composing, Performing and Listening.

Now that the system of functional tonality is regarded as obsolete by many composers and some British universities have abandoned the teaching of tonal harmony and counterpoint, it is time to re-examine the role of this area of the curriculum. This article argues that there is still a place for it but that up-to-date, scholarly materials are needed for the preliminary and intermediate stages of study.