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There is a global shortage of music teachers, and this deficit is continually growing. While there is a considerable body of research on the sources of concern, attrition, stress and burnout for practising teachers, studies investigating the perspective of pre-service music teachers instead are comparatively rarer. This gap in the literature is problematic, considering its relevance to the development of teacher education programmes and the prevention of discouragement and unrealistic expectations among teachers-to-be. Based on the case of pre-service music teachers from a Swedish university, this research investigates the challenging aspects of the profession through qualitative means. While the results cannot be directly extrapolated to other contexts, the insights gained in this case study expand the theoretical knowledge in the field by identifying seven main categories as sources of concern, of which the aspects that are typically inherent to the profession were dominant (e.g. assessing students, teaching groups of students, etc.). Moreover, the findings reveal differences among the views of pre-service and in-service music teachers that may influence career development. Finally, I provide implications to prevent discouragement among pre-service music teachers based on the results of the case under study.

Our aim is to identify the challenges of teaching music composition to today's students of composition at a tertiary or professional level. We undertake this by two different approaches: on one level, by establishing a context through reviewing literature on the teaching practices of three renowned teachers from the twentieth century; on a second level, by considering current practice in the UK through a qualitative case study of six distinguished composers involved in the professional and academic world: George Benjamin, Robert Saxton, Michael Finnissy, Judith Weir, Michael Zev Gordon and Nicola LeFanu. Together these two complementary approaches will provide our first look at an insufficiently researched area.

Contemporary music from the Western Classical tradition, a term usually reduced to simply “contemporary music,” is widely considered as being quite under-represented on the current musical scene in comparison to the music from any other period. As a perspective from which to explore this aversion beyond the obvious likes and dislikes, our aim was to find non-observable variables or latent dimensions by means of psychological constructs modelling attitudes towards contemporary music in a relevant population, such as music teachers to-be, in order to inform thinking about how to effect a change in this aversion. In doing so, a quantitative psychometric instrument was developed, validated and applied to a sample of this population during their university training period. Retrieved data was analysed by exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, leading to the proposal of a second-order, structural equations model comprising three constructs identified as “Perceived complexity & stridency”, “Desire to discover” and “Aesthetic respect”. Results could help in a) finding strategies to address aversion, both by the identification of its latent components and their interrelations; and b) proposing a model suitable to be compared to that of other population subgroups and to be connected to other variables for testing the effectiveness of future experimental actions in the teacher training context.

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