Amateuring and Belonging in Music Education addresses a long-standing issue in music education research: What becomes of the amateur musician when ‘amateur’ denotes deficiency rather than dedication? This book argues that the amateur-professional binary was established in the nineteenth century when conservatories replaced informal apprenticeship with standardised training, and reproduced through pedagogical choices in repertoire and assessment. The editors propose that more relational and participatory approaches can dismantle this binary. They frame their argument using Small’s concept of musicking (Small, Reference SMALL1998) and Regelski’s call to reframe ‘amateuring’ (Regelski, Reference REGELSKI2007) as passion and dedication rather than low skill. The editors avoid simply inverting the hierarchy, noting that romanticising disdain for professionals only reinforces the binary.

The three parts of the book track the binary across pedagogy, institutions and community practice. Part 1 opens with McPhail and November’s argument that studio pedagogy’s drift towards the presentation of performance rather than a focus on participation could explain high dropout rates in instrumental music. The authors connect the Suzuki method to Regelski’s amateuring, identifying participatory learning and holistic growth in Suzuki’s original approach, though noting that contemporary Suzuki practice has itself drifted towards technical presentationalism. Rakena’s chapter studies thirteen voice alumni, coding their interviews against a typology of social power to show how Generation Z singers redefine professionalism as collaboration. These chapters show the breadth of Part 1, but also raise a question about their engagement with Māori and Pacific perspectives, given the broad focus of the book on Aotearoa New Zealand perspectives. McPhail and November cite Rakena’s work on postcolonial studio pedagogy as a supporting reference, but it could be further woven into their own analytical approach. Rakena’s chapter goes further, connecting one participant’s testimony directly to Māori identity.

Part 2 is the book’s most evidence-based section, with three chapters building a shared argument about institutions. McPhail traces curriculum reform in New Zealand secondary schools, revealing a shift towards student-directed, amateur-friendly learning, but warns that increased school autonomy and student choice could narrow students’ knowledge. Atchison and Morris extend this critique by analysing graded recorder and voice exam repertoire lists, arguing that belonging also depends on repertoire’s connection to place, evidenced by students’ engagement with New Zealand composers. Their analysis documents systematic exclusion, both stylistic and demographic, but stops short of testing post-2020 diversity initiatives against Citron’s (Reference CITRON1993) critique of tokenistic diversification. When the chapter turns to ABRSM’s and Trinity’s post-2020 diversity initiatives, the authors raise the same question of whether these efforts are genuine or superficial, but leave it as an open question rather than testing the initiatives against that same standard.

Part 3 includes Morgan-Ellis’s autoethnographic comparison of old-time string band jamming and shape-note singing, Bell’s practitioner case study of community choirs and Camp’s analysis of Disney’s choral canon. Morgan-Ellis details how authority shifts between paid, structured camps and in informal jams and singing settings organised by local hosts. However, questions of inclusivity are framed around musical style and etiquette rather than demographic boundaries, a shift from Part 2’s focus on race and representation. Bell’s chapter raises a theme McPhail previously discussed: removing skill development from choral teaching in the name of inclusion can backfire, underestimating amateur singers and limiting achievement. Bell extends this, arguing that rehearsals and performance work best as a two-way cycle, with the director guiding the choir towards a shared vision of a satisfying performance. Camp’s closing chapter traces how a Disney song canon forms and circulates from groups ranging from school choirs to professional groups, with directors needing to balance popularity against what can be sung by members.

Three observations are worth noting. First, the volume features an impressive methodological range, spanning conceptual syntheses, semi-structured interviews, repertoire analyses and case studies across its eight chapters. This diversity highlights the book’s breadth of evidence. Second, two chapters raise concerns about prioritising openness in music education without attending to depth or skill. Bell argues that skill-building in choral approaches is crucial for amateur singers’ accomplishment, while McPhail suggests that greater student choice in New Zealand secondary schools may reduce access to conceptual and generative knowledge. This is framed as a social justice concern, given that this access varies across schools. These chapters suggest that widening access or participation alone does not guarantee good educational outcomes and that the quality of what is taught remains a concern even within an avowedly inclusive frame. Finally, it is important to clarify the introduction’s claim to ‘critical distance’, and how far it holds across the book. The editors state that authors from non-European contexts gain ‘critical distance from the epicentre of Western Art Music’ (p. 7). This can be interpreted geographically with Europe as the center of Western Art Music, or as a broader detachment from Western Art Music itself. The first interpretation holds easily enough, as most of the contributing authors are based in Aotearoa New Zealand, with one from the United States, supporting the non-European perspective. However, the second interpretation is harder to sustain when one looks at what each chapter actually studies and which theoretical traditions it draws on to do so. McPhail and November, Rakena, and Atchison and Morris study institutions with European roots, conservatoire pedagogy, or British exam boards, leaning on theoretical frameworks of similarly western origin. For instance, McPhail and November draw on the work of Green, Ericsson and Poole, while Rakena draws on French and Raven’s power typology alongside Foucault and Arendt. In each case, a stated bicultural or postcolonial concern sits alongside the authors’ analysis, rather than reshaping it. The clearest exception is in Rakena’s data rather than framework, as one participant’s testimony speaks directly to Māori relational values in the studio, providing the chapter with a direct Indigenous voice not found in McPhail and November’s more conceptual chapter. Atchison and Morris’s own data on exam repertoire likewise engages Māori and Pacific representation directly, even as the institutions they study, ABRSM and Trinity College London, are both British organisations still centred on the Western Art Music canon. Bell’s chapter directly engages Māori and Pacific choral practice, including the integration of Māori singing styles in the national choirs. Morgan-Ellis and Camp step outside this pattern altogether, exploring American traditions and Disney rather than European ones. Therefore, while writing from outside Europe offers some distance from Western Art Music’s institutional centre, this distance is uneven, with some chapters remaining tied to Western Art Music’s canon and frameworks, while others venture beyond it into Māori, Pacific, or American contexts.

Amateuring and Belonging in Music Education grew, as the editors explain, out of Regelski’s (Reference REGELSKI2007) push to rehabilitate amateuring, treating it as a mark of passion rather than as a lesser form of musicianship. Regelski’s argument, with participatory musicking as a basis for education, overlaps closely with how community music scholarship defines its core concerns around participation, ownership and music as a relational and social activity. Morgan-Ellis makes this connection explicit in Chapter 6, drawing directly on Higgins’s and Bartleet’s work on community music, Schippers’s model of community music and Wenger-Trayner’s account of communities of practice. An additional useful lens the volume could draw on is the free-choice learning tradition developed in adjacent fields (Falk, Reference FALK2005). Built around voluntary, learner-driven engagement, this framework could have complemented the book’s recurring interest in music-making pursued for its own sake rather than for professional obligation or formal instruction.

Facilitator power could be explored more evenly across the volume. Rakena directly addresses this in formal, one-to-one studio settings. However, Morgan-Ellis offers a different perspective, noting that hosts of old-time jams and shape-note singings generally refrain from directing the music or decision-making. Nonetheless, power has not disappeared, it has simply diffused within the group itself. Certain instruments and song requests remain unwelcome, and these collectively upheld norms allow low-barrier communities to function without designated teachers at the centre. Yerichuk and Krar (Reference YERICHUK, KRAR and Willingham2021) provide a useful perspective for understanding this shift from individual to collective authority. They posit that boundaries are an unavoidable and necessary feature of any functional community, though this does not exempt those boundaries from scrutiny. Someone, or some collective process, remains responsible for understanding the conditions being established and why. Read alongside this work, Morgan-Ellis’s groups appear less as power-free spaces and more as communities that have relocated authority from an individual to the group. This distinction matters for the volume’s central claim that participatory, relational teaching can loosen the amateur-professional binary, a claim that partly assumes that open teaching addresses the gatekeeping inherent in formal pedagogy. Yerichuk and Krar’s work suggests that the more pertinent question is not whether power and boundaries exist, but who holds them, how visibly, and how consciously that arrangement is made.

Despite some unevenness between its rigorously evidenced and more reflective or descriptive chapters, this book is a substantial and genuinely useful contribution to amateur musicianship scholarship. Scholars working on participation, belonging, or institutional gatekeeping in music education will find this a valuable addition to their shelves, even if not every chapter speaks equally to every reader’s concerns.