Building and maintaining a research career in music education requires thoughtful planning and a persistent commitment to a research work ethic. For most people, the research career will begin in graduate school with selection of a dissertation topic, and this topic will often set the course for the first years of research after the doctorate. Careful topic selection can give the student the start of a unique research identity. When the doctoral graduate moves into a full time college teaching job, it becomes a major challenge to remain productive in research while meeting the demands of new job responsibilities. There are certain pitfalls that the new researcher must anticipate and avoid. As the researcher's career matures, he or she will take on new responsibilities that make it even more difficult to remain productive. A good way to meet this challenge is to work more or less simultaneously on a number of research projects that are all in different stages of completion. If, as a researcher, you have developed the personality characteristics and work habits to remain productive in research throughout your career, you will be rewarded with the satisfaction of having contributed to the betterment of our profession.

In a series of two experiments we tested music listening preference opinions of 1093 participants in Brazil, Greece, Japan, Portugal and the United States using a listening test composed of jazz, popular, and art music excerpts that represented stronger or weaker presentations of rhythmic beat. Listener ages ranged from 9 to 13 years, and sex was fairly evenly distributed in each country. Effect of beat strength was highly significant influence on music listening preference, with music that had a stronger rhythmic beat receiving consistently higher preference ratings. There were signifcant interactions between beat strength and country, beat strength and sex, and country and sex. Among the main effects, beat strength accounted for 34% and country accounted for 2% of preference variation in this study. Interactions of beat strength and country, beat strength and sex, and country and sex accounted for 12%, 9%, and 2% of preference variation respectively.

Paul Farnsworth was an important figure in the second generation of American music psychologists--the generation that came after Carl Seashore. Farnsworth was the originator of a line of research, the study of music listening preference, that has continued to the present day and is of great interest to music educators and music therapists. During a long career at Stanford University, Farnsworth authored three important books, served in leadership roles in the university, the American Psychological Association, and the American Musicological Society, and worked to establish a department of music at Stanford.

We tested the music listening preference opinions of 914 participants in Brazil, China, Italy, South Africa, and the United States using a 24 item listening test composed of traditional jazz music examples that represented four increasingly faster levels of tempo. Listener ages ranged from 10 to 14 years, and listener gender was approximately equally distributed to each country. Tempo was a highly significant influence on music listening preference, with each increasingly faster level of tempo receiving significantly higher preference ratings. The effect of country and age were also significant influences on preference ratings. Tempo accounted for 46%, country accounted for 12%, and age accounted for 3% of preference variation in this study.

We tested the music listening preference opinions of 2,042 participants in Greece, Korea, and the United States using an 18 item listening test composed of art music, traditional jazz, and rock music examples. Listener ages ranged from 8 to 18 years, and listener gender was approximately equally distributed in each country. Age, country, and gender were all significant influences on music listening preference, but every variable was involved in significant two and three way interactions. We concluded that considerable caution must be exercised in attempting to apply research findings from one culture to predict music listening preference in another culture.

Participants from Grades 3, 4, 5, and 6 ( N = 238) rated selections on an 18-item music listening tape four consecutive times at 2-week intervals, alternately using pictorial and verbal Likert-type response scales. The order of response scale administration was counterbalanced among the classrooms involved. There was no significant difference between preference scores generated by participants using either form of response scale. Test-retest reliabilities ranged from .65 to .88 using a 4-week time interval, with higher grade levels associated with higher reliabilities and the pictorial scale generally associated with higher reliabilities. Internal consistency reliabilities measured by coefficient alpha ranged from .90 to .93 for the verbal scale and .92 to .93 for the pictorial scale. A large and statistically significant majority of participants (84%) expressed a preference for using the pictorial scale to record their music listening preferences.

Tekman's study is a useful exploration and benefits from his consideration of published research on music; however, his interpretation of music tempo research by LeBlanc and associates cannot be supported. It would be worthwhile for Tekman to conduct a follow-up study with a larger number of participants and music excerpts from other styles of music in addition to art music (“classical” music).

This study chronicles the first three decades of the Council for Research in Music Education in the School of Music-Division of Music Education-at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The investigation focuses on the origins and development of the Council and its research journal, the Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, during the editorships of Richard Colwell and Marilyn Plederer Zimmerman. The paper discusses chronologically the makeup of the Council, circulation of the Bulletin, the process of dissertation critiques, editorial assistants, special issues, articles, book reviews, and the implementation of the Outstanding Dissertation Award. This brief history traces the organization from its inception through the Winter 1994/1995 issue of the Bulletin, the last in which Zimmerman was listed as editor.

We tested 27 male and female high school band members performing solos under three levels of audience presence. Participants performed alone in a practice room, in a practice room with one researcher present, and in the rehearsal room with all researchers, a peer group, and a tape recording being made. Dependent measures were an analog scale self-report of perceived anxiety, heart rate recorded during performance, judges' rating of the final performance, and an exit interview. Self-reported anxiety rose with each succeeding performance condition, and each reported increase was significant. Heart rate was steady across the first two performance conditions, but rose significantly at the third. Female participants presented better performances, reported significantly higher anxiety levels than did males in the third performance condition, and attained significantly higher heart rates than did males in the first and third conditions. Gender emerged as a significant predictor of heart rate during performance, with female performers attaining higher heart rates.

We measured the music preference opinions of 2,262 listeners for examples of art musk, traditional jazz, and rock. Our subjects were enrolled in Grades 1 through college, and we also tested adults who were not college students. Participants ranged in age from 6 to 91 years. We found that music preference means for the different styles were comparatively similar across grade levels, and when style subtest scores were pooled to make a general index of music preference, a characteristic pattern of responding across grade levels emerged. Listeners in Grade 1 had a high level of preference, but preference levels then declined to a low point at Grade 6. From that point, preference steadily rose into the high school years, reaching its highest point at college level. Preference declined again for our adult group, which included a good representation of senior citizens. However, adult preference was higher than that of any other grade levels except Grade 1 and college.

Iwanaga's research procedure was quite different from ordinary life and from the methodology used in traditional research on musical preference. This might explain the difference in the results he obtained.

Albert LeBlanc is the recipient of the MENC's 1992 Senior Researcher Award. The following speech was presented on April 10, 1992 at the business meeting of the Society for Research in Music Education at the National Biennial In-Service Conference, New Orleans, Louisiana.

The research results reported here are drawn from two studies. Each study offers the reader a new per spective on a problem or presents suggestions for more effective teach ing, learning, and evaluation at the secondary level.

The purpose of this study was to measure the relationship between humor perceived in music and the self reported music preference opinions of subjects representing four different age levels. We administered a listening test composed of humorous and nonhumorous song excerpts in three popular music styles to 445 subjects in Michigan, Missouri, and Pennsylvania. Male and female listeners in Grades 3, 7, and 11 as well as college undergraduates participated in the study. Perception of humor was largely a function of age, with younger listeners perceiving significantly more humor than older ones until age levels began to approach adulthood in the upper grades. Higher levels of perceived humor were significantly associated with higher levels of preference. Listener age exerted a distinct influence on overall preference scores, which were highest with the youngest listeners, were lower in the middle age-groups, and rose again at the college level. Listener gender was influential in the case of some music examples.

Rock Music Styles: A History, by Katherine Charlton, is publisher William C. Brown's entry in the growing collection of books intended to serve as textbooks for the serious study of rock music. A Brown company representative said that the retail price would be set by bookstores that stock the 208-page paperback, but that a reader could expect to pay between $25.00 and $30.00 for a copy. Produced on excellent paper, Rock Music Styles features highquality photographs of rock performers. Author Katherine Charlton did not select the same photographs that have been published so often in other writings about rock music. She supplies a superb glossary and a very detailed index, the quality of which is rare in published writing about rock. Technical musical terms are introduced where

We selected 24 journals to represent scholarly publication in the academic fields of music in the United States. We then contacted each editor, along with two members of each journals editorial committee and 48 publishing scholars whose work has appeared in these journals, asking them to identify the characteristics of an excellent scholarly journal in their own field of music. While some responses were specific to individual branches of music scholarship, a number of generic indicators of journal quality emerged that are endorsed by all branches of academic scholarship in music.