THOMAS A. REGELSKI
Edited by Vincent C. Bates
November 2025
Published in Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 24 (6): 22–34 [pdf]. https://doi.org/10.22176/act24.6.22
Abstract: In the early 2020s, Tom Regelski and I (Vincent Bates) started a book project together that was to include a collection of his articles and a concluding chapter of questions and answers. Because the Critical Theory that Tom championed so forcefully rests upon a social constructionist foundation, I felt it would be fitting for the book to include Tom’s autobiography. The general idea was that, because Tom’s thinking also was socially constructed by his upbringing and subsequent life experiences, it would be helpful to know more about him. In a sense, this chapter might provide the “rest of the story” for those of us who have followed and benefitted from Tom’s work. After some coaxing (including making it a condition for my involvement), Tom agreed to provide such an autobiography. He sent multiple drafts, and I responded with questions along with requests for additional information. Tom’s death in October of 2024 effectively ended our collaboration. In the place of the planned autobiography chapter, I lightly edited Tom’s most recent draft of his autobiography for publication here, as an article in the journal that he started.
Keywords: Thomas A. Regelski; Critical Theory; The MayDay Group; Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education (ACT)
I was born in a small village north of New York City called Florida, NY. Many of the residents were first-generation Polish Americans, such as my father and his family. The main industry was onion muckland farming (black dirt), and my grandfather and his sons (including my father) ran an onion farm for many years. Onion farming was so extensive that the (exaggerated) village motto was “Onion Capital of the World.” My father somehow became a butcher and later, when I was in college, he was a Vice President of the ShopRite supermarket chain. I declined to follow him into the supermarket business, though, and he supported my choice to go into music education,
Every four years during my youth there was an Onion Harvest Festival in the fall, with Polish music, dancing, food, and culture celebrated. Even village youth who were non-Poles participated in this major village event. I participated in two of these Festivals and learned all the traditional Polish dances that were choreographed and danced in authentic costumes for the main stage. I was quite good at these dances, and I still harken to a polka or oberek. An illustrated account of one Festival (not one I was in) was featured in an issue of National Geographic magazine.
My father spoke Polish, especially when visiting with my aunts and uncles. One of the two Catholic churches held masses where vernacular prayers (and the sermon) were in Polish. Along with the Latin, I had little idea what was going on during mass. Upon arrival at church, the Holy Rosary Society was finishing its oral prayers on the rosary, in Polish, and the choir, all five of them, sang unison in Polish. To say I grew up endowed with a significant Polish identity goes without saying. However, I never learned the language, in part because my mother was not Polish and thus the language was not spoken at home.
My mother’s parents were separated. Her mother was a starlet, and no doubt met my grandfather in the business. He was an accomplished ragtime and honky-tonk piano player, and he put together a vaudeville act with my mother based on an imitation of the then renowned Shirley Temple. Her stage name was Baby Bobby Miller, and she danced and sang, touring the Atlantic City circuit and the Eastern cities. When the act finished, she was cared for in her youth by a (wicked) aunt and was glad to marry and be free to live a normal life.
There was a piano in our home when I grew up, and plenty of recordings and sheet music, though I don’t recall ever hearing my mother play or sing. She started me with piano lessons at age five, beginning with my first-grade schoolteacher, and later with a traveling piano teacher, Mr. Shumahorn, who came to the house for lessons featuring literature of distilled symphony segments arranged for piano. He wasn’t a very good teacher, and the owner of a local music store became my next teacher. Only the original classics were the new focus of my study. Mr. Blackman was an extremely unpleasant tyrant, an old-world archetype offering every possible ad hoc scolding for mistakes of any kind, all of which were difficult to take as a youth of my age. Once, while waiting for my lesson, the previous student, a girl of about 12 years old, my age, came out of his studio crying, and exclaimed to me, as if an excuse, “Mr. Blackman doesn’t care about the music, only the notes.” The prescience of this remark for my eventual career seems clear in retrospect, and his 19th-century pedagogy almost ruined my love for the piano.
Eventually, my mother learned of a “real” piano teacher, a lovely, cultured woman, Mrs. Elmeda Specter, with whom I studied for six years. Thus my study of piano fortunately turned from a piano lesson into a music lesson at the piano, a distinction I never forgot. My mother was unflagging in her attempts to bring me to what passed those days as high culture. Thus, I was enrolled in a mail-order drawing course (John Nagy), and a book club that had a new book, mainly novels, appearing each month. Unlike most of my age, then, I had a small library of books, though no notable literature. But I gained the habit of reading for pleasure—eventually reading as research with pleasure.
My school was very small. Our graduating class was 21, of which I graduated 11th! The leading reason for this low academic standing was that I was also heavily committed to sports, being a star pitcher in baseball and a high-scoring center in basketball. In track and field, I ran cross-country and was a high jumper. Doing the latter, I broke my left arm landing (in those days) in a sand pit. I also played mediocre soccer where, as the goalie, I re-broke my left arm and got grounded from soccer by my mother. I was socially a very popular student, elected by classmates to various class offices, including the senior class president, necessitating memorizing a speech at graduation—which I stumbled through successfully.
In high school, the mother of my best friend, Jimmy Sturr, had the idea of us starting a dance band, and thus was born the Melody Makers. He played saxophone and later the clarinet. With an accordionist, two trumpets, a drummer, and me at the piano, we played at school dances and weddings, specializing in polkas and obereks. When the group continued into my collegiate years, I came home for summers and played bass viol (thus avoiding having to transpose on out-of-tune pianos to get in the same key as the accordion). The band became Jimmy’s sole preoccupation and went on to become the Jimmy Sturr Orchestra, winner of so many Grammies for polka music that the category was eventually scrapped due to a lack of competition.
I was thus always recognized locally as “musical,” though my rendition of a Beethoven sonata movement earned me only second place in an amateur competition, after a yodeler! And it seemed that I never seriously considered any other career than music after graduation from school. So, I applied to attend college in Fredonia and Ithaca to become a music teacher, got accepted at both institutions, and in 1958 chose to attend the State University of New York at Fredonia, which even then was a leading institution for educating music teachers. At the time SUNY Fredonia was called a “teachers college” because teaching was its sole focus. Since then, it has added liberal arts degrees and other professional diplomas, but music education remains a major program, and the college offers a full range of liberal arts degrees.
As a freshman, I was a solid “C” student in all my music studies. I sang in the non-auditioned chorus and played in the third Wind Ensemble. This mediocre record was perhaps to be expected since my small school had offered no music classes except band—no theory, not even a chorus. I did have the lead in the operetta Prince Charming in grade 6, but an embarrassing memory lapse of lyrics has left me wary of memorizing anything ever since. In any event, I was in musically over my head for my freshman year, except for my non-music required classes where I did well. In my sophomore year, I suffered an injury playing Varsity basketball that revealed a major illness which, among other effects, meant I could not drink alcohol (or so I was informed). Thus, and I mean thus, from that point on I was a Dean’s List student excelling in all my studies, but especially the liberal arts and humanities requirements.
At Fredonia, I studied to be a general music and chorus teacher, although I also played euphonium and tuba in the “C Band,” sitting first chair before freshmen majors on those instruments, and studied the major orchestral instruments required of all in those days for certification as a “music teacher.” My piano studies were above average. I complained to my professor about the literature he was assigning and thus was invented “Tom’s recreation piece,” a repertoire choice of my own, one after the other. As might be expected, this literature (e.g., Rachmaninov Prelude in C# minor, Bach preludes and fugues, Hindemith sonatas) was always the best prepared and always the most accomplished for recitals. I broke my right wrist playing soccer and spent one semester with left-hand literature, none of which interested me, but it was good technically for my left hand which was weak from the twice-broken left arm in high school. Soon, I was deeply committed to becoming a choir director, took my conducting studies seriously, and started to collect recordings of the major choral literature.
In my junior year arose the Fredonia supported (tuition) opportunity to study abroad at the Antwerp (Belgium) Conservatory. I went in a group of 19 and was assigned to live with an Antwerp family that had five children at home. The father was a Dutch Orthodox minister. He had one room in the house that was off-limits. Being, for a moment, the “Ugly American” (the best-selling book at the time about badly behaved American tourists), I asked what was so special about the room. Smiling, he took me in. The walls, including over and under the windows, were lined with books. This was his library where he wrote sermons. I noticed that almost all the books dealt with religions other than his and asked why. With a twinkle in his eye, he answered, “Know thy enemy!” I took the lesson for my career as a scholar.
Oddly, our studies were to cover the same ground as though we were at Fredonia. Of course, we studied French and Flemish—the latter being quite easy to learn for an English speaker. I was fortunate to study art history with Marcel Van Jole, a noted Belgian art historian who, for example, was friends with Picasso and had a houseful of Picasso prints (that one day, years later, were all stolen). My art education, thus, was entirely in museums, with the originals, not in lectures with slides. The son of my age in the family I stayed with thought I was a communist because my group’s money supporting tuition had been pooled. I thought I was a beatnik, grew a goatee, affected a beret, and seriously began studying existentialism. This intense visit to literature not usually associated with music education has had a lasting impact on my theory of praxis, as seen in the section on existentialism of my book, Curriculum Theory and Philosophy for Music Education Praxis. It merged easily with the humanistic psychology I also took an interest in when I returned to the US.
My piano studies went well with Professor Eugène Traey, and I began serious study of my Fredonia graduation recital literature, Bach, and Hindemith. The Antwerp group also studied “secondary” instruments as we would have done at Fredonia. What a misnomer “secondary” was in my case! I was assigned to study organ with Flor Peeters, the leading organ virtuoso of the time. Things did not go well with legato fingering, but even worse was the feet, which Prof. Peeters proclaimed were just too big (US 13.5) ever to master the organ. Thus, instead of organ, I studied choral composition with him, beginning an interest that eventually led to composition and arranging skills that I mainly used years later in teaching conducting, building in all kinds of difficulties for a conductor’s technique and ear. Pedagogy from the podium, too, was required of this literature, and more than a few of my students have gone on to university-level conducting careers. My own conducting studies were orchestral, with Steven Candael, conductor of the Brussels Symphony Orchestra. This accounts for my technique looking more orchestral than is typical for many US choir directors. Upon return to the US, I played an effective graduation recital and thrived in philosophy, psychology, and history studies, and took on leadership roles in several student groups (e.g. initiated Phi Mu Alpha, The International Club, Student President of the College Lodge Association) along with being a dormitory resident student counselor.
Upon graduation in 1962 I didn’t feel quite ready to face the “real world,” in part because of my age. I had started public school at age 5 (with no kindergarten) and thus had graduated at 17, much younger than most of my Fredonia classmates. I graduated from Fredonia at 20, so I went to Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City to study choral music with Harry Robert Wilson who, at that time, was the leader in choral music education. I also took music history courses at Columbia with P. H. Lang and sang in a choir across the street at Julliard. The first term saw straight A grades. Then, after learning to play bridge and while teaching as a substitute music teacher in New York City schools, my grades suffered to mainly B, and I graduated in 1963.
Upon graduation, I was fortunate to be offered a position in Bemus Point NY Central School, the school where I had student taught. I taught general and choral music, specializing in middle and high school (though my student teaching there had been strictly elementary). I also got unwanted experience conducting band because the burned-out band teacher often took long weekends beginning on Friday and then was hung over on Monday, requiring another sick day. After establishing myself in Bemus Point, not far from Fredonia, I accepted student teachers for several years. After subsequently teaching in the small city of Middletown, NY, I was asked to join the faculty at SUNY Fredonia when a music education professor retired. This is unheard of today, but I was well known to the faculty, having given demonstration lessons to methods classes and had supporters on the music education faculty while the music faculty ignored the music education department.
I accepted and taught there for two years, finding teaching music educators to be more difficult than teaching school itself. I was asked to develop the first psychology of music graduate course, which was helpful later in my career. During this time, I also got married to an artist who was a painting graduate of Syracuse University School of Art. Through my art contacts in Antwerp, I helped her meet gallery owners who sponsored two shows, one of which won an award for the best exhibition of the year. However, she didn’t come back to the US for many years, preferring the fertile art world of Belgium.
Teaching as a young faculty member alongside senior faculty at Fredonia who had been my own professors was uncomfortable. While still married to a practicing artist and having my European studies in art history still freshly in mind, I decided to leave and take a Ph.D. in Comparative Arts/Aesthetics at Ohio University. Comparative arts/aesthetics was attractive to me for combining art, aesthetics, and music theories in comparison to each other—all my interests and background at the time—so I focused on relations between music and the visual arts. Being married to a practicing artist was also an incentive for this change of pace from music.
As a musician, I was exempt in my Ph.D. studies from the special music courses required of others in the program and thus had more electives than most, taking courses in Kant, aesthetics, psychology of music, social psychology, and Italian. I could easily pass the French requirement from my previous studies and the Antwerp experience, but the university was unable to test me in Flemish (or Dutch), so I needed to pass a qualifying exam in Italian. My graduate studies covered the history of the major fine arts (including music) with an emphasis on historical relations among the arts—except for only a seminar devoted to literature and drama.
I also was a graduate assistant, teaching two sections of a required undergraduate course in comparative arts, which I also repeated at the satellite community college program some miles away. I undertook a major independent photographic study of domestic 18–19th century architecture in southwestern Ohio and Fredonia and offered a series of lectures on the topic to students in a 19th-century American architecture course.
In my final spring term, the university was wracked by student anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, as a direct result of the shooting deaths of students at Kent State University by National Guard soldiers. After days of rioting (in lovely spring weather), the Ohio State University System closed all institutions and students got as final grades their grades at that point, two weeks before the end of the semester. I was among the graduate teaching assistants enlisted to guard university buildings but fortunately had nothing to do. During this time of an empty campus, I defended my thesis, a study of the influence of Chopin’s piano harmonies on the color theory paragon of his good friend, painter Eugène Délacroix. It earned the Dean’s Award for the best thesis of the year, and I also earned the Dean’s Award for the best comprehensive exam, which consisted of ten questions posed by the faculty to be answered within five days and demanding mastery of key facts, ideas, literature, and leading figures in the several arts.
During that final term, I went looking for positions in art history and turned down one offer due to money and the lack of teaching resources for art history instruction (i.e., no slide collection; I had to bring my own for the demonstration lecture). But there were no more offers or interviews and, as it turned out, I ended up returning to my former position at Fredonia, which had remained unfilled for two years. Four years into my new job, I was appointed the Chair of Music Education when the person in that position who had been hired with much acclaim from a major university turned out to be incompetent and was not offered a new contract. Rather than moving expenses, which were common for a university to pay new faculty in those days, I was offered the summer position of working on a special grant with the Instructional Resource Center to write a branching-programmed music appreciation course. I did this, for the money, despite a philosophical disinclination to equating music appreciation with the acquisition of information from music and history. The grant, and my work in it, were shared with other SUNY units, and with the local high schools. Fortunately, it has disappeared along with the trend of programmed learning.
I taught secondary general music methods, choral conducting, adolescent psychology, and philosophy of education—the latter two having been rescued from the School of Education where the corresponding courses were taught in an appalling manner, not only with no relevance for music education majors but with the professor of one lamenting the inclusion of music in public schools. My first success as Chair of Music Education was wrestling these courses from the School of Education—along with the FTE (viz., full-time equivalent) credits for students being allocated to the School of Music, not the School of Education. I also regularly taught a graduate course each semester and, later in my career, the advanced section of class piano. These courses remain today in the School of Music’s music education program.
Despite this load, I was a popular teacher with excellent student feedback (that I extended with a short evaluation form per each class). In my seventh faculty year (1977), I was honored to be nominated for the Outstanding Teaching Award (by several students, unheard of at the time). However, the selection committee judged that I was overqualified for that award, having published articles in multi-disciplinary journals starting with the Music Educators Journal and expanding along with my interests to other journals (e.g., The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Journal of Musicology). They instead put my supporting portfolio forward for the Distinguished Teaching Professor rank, which I was awarded at a time when the honor was SUNY-wide (now it is per campus). The same year my first book appeared, Principles and Problems of Music Education, in effect a “foundations” text written in a behaviorist style as branching-programming (thus following the short life of behaviorism).
Writing came to me easily, I think because I read so voraciously in a variety of disciplines outside of music, especially philosophy and sociology. My ideas were clearly presented early on and tended to lead well to subsequent papers, giving a sense of progression that started with Action Learning in the MEJ and progressing topic by topic in various journals, favoring online journals on the theory that they reach more people, especially developing nations. From Action Learning to Praxis was a gradual and substantial evolution as I explored topic after topic to test the relevance of praxis theory to all aspects of music education that seemed relevant. Along the way my training in aesthetics, not common in music education circles, led me to debunk aesthetics as a foundation for music education praxis. Thirteen years spent teaching PhD students how to write in English for publication honed the technical and organizational aspects of my writing as I learned more than the students did.
The Distinguished Professor award and the book (first ever published by a music faculty member at Fredonia) did not go over well with older faculty all of whom, even full professors, were instantly outranked by a younger-faculty-member-former-student-music-educator-who-didn’t-perform. This attitude hung over the rest of my career at that institution. Everything about music education was uphill. Then, to make things worse, the State Board of Regents mandated that all teacher education training should be competency-based (CBTE). This required a total revision of a music education program that had been in place it seemed almost since Lowell Mason (after whom Mason Hall, the home of the School of Music, was named). Of course, as Chair, I was entrusted with that revision.
Among other changes, most of which faculty didn’t understand or care much about (namely competency-based coursework, even though it had always been their commitment for applied music standards), there was no room in a four-year program except to cut back applied study by one semester (from 7 to 6). This more than rankled faculty; it marshaled them almost collectively against music education studies, requirements, and students. My proposed revisions faced a week-to-week two-year-long faculty meeting until they were finally resolved. Students were enabled to elect a seventh semester of applied study (the eighth being devoted to off-campus student teaching).
Alas, faculty nonetheless were to “motivate” the election of this free-choice semester for many students and did so! This did not take the taint away from music education and its students. However, most better student performers were “motivated” to adopt double majors in performance and music education—a decidedly ethical failing since most had no chances for performance careers, as they tended to learn when applying to performance-based master’s programs (especially voice majors).
My relations with many faculty were not improved by a sabbatical, financed by the Japanese equivalent of a Fulbright Award, to teach at Aichi University in Nagoya (where I was simultaneously translated and have no idea what I taught). A result of this experience was that my Japanese colleague sent his two children ages 7 and 9 at the time to live with my second wife and I to attend the local school. He wanted them to be “International,” not “too Japanese.” They were a joy since, with them, I had the experience of being a parent, otherwise missing in my busy life—for example, of taking the eldest to Alfred College and leaving her on her own.
In 1991 I was accepted as a teaching “associate” at the Philosophy of Education Research Center at the Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, where I worked with Professor Israel Scheffler, the renowned philosopher of education whose pragmatism had a lasting influence on me. This involved weekly seminars commenting on student and faculty papers attended by Prof. Scheffler, other faculty, and teaching associates. I was also assigned to lead a seminar that discussed Prof. Scheffler’s three lectures per week (which I audio-taped) and assigned readings. He got word that I was somewhat harsh in my comments in the seminar, and I had the opportunity after that to tone it down to his pleasant style.
By then, I was widely published in many journals and had published several books. By chance, J. Terry Gates, a noted music educator, took a teaching position at nearby SUNY University at Buffalo. One evening we got together for dinner and, among other topics, lamented the status of music education as a profession. I had just read about a women’s “Committee of 100” assembled for the purpose, it was reported, of addressing women’s standing in society. I offered offhand that we should do the same for music education—to assemble a group of leading music educators to challenge the paradigms current at the time and to renew what had, in our judgment, become so weak as to degrade the status of “profession.” Terry, ever positive, said “Let’s do it!” and we did.
With a mind towards the difficulty of getting travel expenses for a “seminar” having no title or announced agenda, we contacted colleagues from a 500-mile range of Buffalo, and some 30 attended, most of whom were well-known in the field (plus 1 from England who happened to be visiting me at the time). The seminar started on May 1 and lasted for two days. I read a paper asserting the need for a concerted attempt to make things happen anew in the field, to challenge old ways, and to promote an ethos of change. A discussion followed, and at the end of the seminar, we raised the issue of whether such a group might be formalized, with a name and agenda for change. There was discussion, with Estelle Jorgensen the only voice in the negative, but Richard Colwell pronounced, “Let the boys do it” (referring to Terry and myself). The votes had it, and we did.
Thus was the MayDay Group (MDG) formed, but it is not discussed in more detail here because its history is outlined on the MDG website. The group now has over 900 members, its own website, and a formalized leadership organization. For the MayDay Group, I started two journals, Action, Criticism, and Theory (ACT) and TOPICS for Music Education as Praxis, with ACT enjoying a high status among leading music education journals today and TOPICS working its way up. Its Action for Change Agenda, consisting of 10 Action Ideals (since updated and expanded) has, in fact, fostered change, not the least of which has been to champion, at my urging and modeling, an agenda of music education as praxis—this following my seminal article, “The Aristotelian Bases of Music and Music Education” (The Philosophy of Music Education Review, 6/1, 1998: 22–59), which argued the idea of praxis as an action ideal for music education. I have pursued that ideal ever since with a program of research addressed to every nook and cranny of music education, arguing for praxis to replace the aesthetic rationale that was common for the previous 75 years. That work is still ongoing, but the effect of my work and the MDG has seen the introduction of praxis theory as a serious candidate for supporting music in schools, guiding both curriculum and pedagogical praxis.
In 1997, I was invited to give a lecture tour of Finland, Estonia, and Sweden and that led, in 2000, to a Fulbright Award to teach philosophy of music and music education at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland, where I still occasionally lecture. A year after my return from Finland, I retired from my position at Fredonia and returned to Finland (attracted by cross-country skiing). There, I married a Finnish marine biologist, Kaisa Kononen, and we have a home in a Helsinki suburb. Soon, I was asked to become a docent and to teach courses in the writing of scholarly English at Helsinki University: the university wanting the research of its graduates to be available to non-Finnish speaking scholars around the world.
I have continued with my participation in the MayDay Group and, after seven years as editor of ACT, and start-start-up editor of TOPICS, I passed those assignments on to others. I continue to do research and since retiring, have published over 140 articles and several books in peer-reviewed journals according to a 1998 research plan. In 2022 I published my “opus magnum,” Curriculum Theory and Philosophy for Music Education as Praxis with Oxford University Press, culminating a research program begun in 1998 while at the Sibelius Academy, eventually producing 140+ articles on many aspects of Critical Theory and Praxical Music Education that examine in some depth a wide variety of topics essential to my overall theory at this point.
With time on my hands, I have been able to resume my hobby of collecting Japanese antiques (started during my Japanese sabbatical) and have assembled a collection of about 3200 remarkable Japanese antiques of all kinds, truly a museum collection in my home. My wife Kaisa photographs and keeps an annotated record of each. She and I have started a website, miyabiantiques.fi, to display and educate about these remarkable works of art, and now have a business to sell excess, duplicates, and the like. With this biography, I’m embarking on a book that collects some of my most influential articles for posterity to weigh whether my efforts have made a lasting difference to the field and hopefully to school-based music education as praxis. Like the former Nike motto, the pitch for praxis should be, “Just do it!”—musicking in all its bounty.
Editor’s note: When I first brought up the idea of including a biography in the book, Tom sent the following profile, which I have included here to further honor Tom by aligning his article with an ACT tradition he started, concluding each ACT article with information “About the Author.”
About the Author
Thomas A. Regelski, PhD, is “Distinguished Professor of Music” (Emeritus), State University of New York at Fredonia NY. A former public school music teacher, he pursued doctoral studies in the aesthetics and social history of art and music and has taught pedagogy and didactics courses for secondary school music education, choral conducting, and foundations courses in philosophy, psychology, and sociology to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as publishing his research in a wide array of journals in- and outside of music education. He has taught at Aichi University in Nagoya Japan, the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland (where he had a Fulbright Award in 2000), and Helsinki University, and was a research fellow at the Philosophy of Education Research Center at Harvard University. Lectures and papers have been presented at conferences and universities in Japan, England, Estonia, Sweden, Poland, and Finland, in addition to many locations in Canada and the US. A leader in music education, he is the co-founder of the MayDay Group, an international/interdisciplinary society of scholars interested in music, music education, and cultural studies and, from its inception until Fall 2007, editor of its e-journal, Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education. Author of Principles and Problems of Music Education (Englewood Cliffs, NY: Prentice-Hall, 1975), Arts Education and Brain Research (Washington D.C./Reston Virginia: Alliance for Arts Education / MENC, 1978), Teaching General Music: Action Learning for Middle and Secondary Schools (New York: Schirmer Books, 1981), Teaching General Music in Grades 4-8: A Musicianship Approach (Oxford University Press, 2004), and Music Education for Changing Times (ed., with J. T. Gates, Springer 2008). He is presently a Docent at Helsinki University, teaching courses in research writing to graduate students in the Faculty of Education and often is invited to lecture at the Sibelius Academy. For several years he wrote a regular column for the Finnish Journal of Music Education.