“Practice” – the punchline to the old joke about the tourist asking “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” – has been the basis for practical music pedagogy since time immemorial. Although misattributed to Albert Einstein, it was probably novelist Rita Mae Brown who came up with another idea: that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing multiple times and expecting different results, and yet this is also the definition of practice. In fact, repetition is the foundation stone of inductive experiential learning. There is no deductive learning without foundational learned experience to build hypotheses with and about. So what can pedagogy research tell us about the ways that these two forms of learning be combined and interwoven in a variety of contexts? This project seeks to provide an overview and analysis of a range of more detailed and focuses studies (see below). It encourages discussion, based on the detail of other more focused and contextually specific work, about the big picture that either emerges inductively from the combined findings of those studies or about the theory and premises that deductively inform and determine the structure of those studies. As such, those discussions will also suggest directions for future work which might involve proposals that shed light on factors such as:

• The most effective ways to turn practical skills into subconscious tacit knowledge.
• Learning how to control those tacit skills intentionally to achieve strategic and aesthetic goals.
• Understanding how different personalities, identities and backgrounds may require different teaching and learning strategies in different contexts and for different skills.
• Understanding the processes of goal setting, aesthetic development and the formulation of values as both socially and individually constructed.
• Translating these more complex and theoretical ideas and established pedagogical concepts (e.g. Zone of Proximal Development, 3E or 5E cognition etc) into pragmatic and useful tools and strategies for professional educators and policy makers.