The pace of change in digital technology is fast: yesterday's technologies become dated quickly and new ones are becoming available all the time, so it is difficult for music educators to keep up. As Teresa Dillon says, ‘innovative practice tends to be spearheaded by individual teachers and is inadequately disseminated’ (Chapter 10). This timely and useful book helps disseminate such practice.

The editors have assembled an impressive list of contributors – 17 academics, teachers, researchers and musicians, who are mainly from the UK but also from Ireland, Australia, Hong Kong and the USA. Between them they are charged, in the words of the series editors, to contribute to ‘the reframing of a theory of knowledge which challenges accepted thinking and pedagogies [and] to stimulate thinking and contribute to the development of practitioner professional knowledge’. Because it deals with cutting-edge technology this book also fulfils more humdrum functions: to describe the technologies for those who are not familiar with them, and to explain how these technologies are used in music education.

In my view it achieves the latter functions extremely well. It explores a wide range of digital technologies, including iPods, ring tones, DJ mixing, MIDI workstations, sound synthesis, recording, sequencing and scorewriting software, and the affordances of Web 2.0, including blogs, podcasts, wikis and social networking sites. It introduced me to technologies that I hadn't previously heard of, and gave me areas which I look forward to exploring, including online peer reviewing, online jamming and sonic postcards. Perhaps the only significant matters not dealt with in the book are visual technologies such as digital video and interactive whiteboards.

Similarly, it has some detailed descriptions of how these technologies are used, mostly with learners of 11–18 years old. As Mike Challis (Chapter 8) says, ‘Immense power is available – what matters is what we do with it’. ‘What we do with it’ appears in several accounts of teachers exploring their teaching, not by claiming it to be exemplary but by describing it as it is. Hannah Quinn (Chapter 2) tells how she involved a teaching assistant and an able Year 10 pupil in modelling performances for younger pupils. Kevin Jennings (Chapter 7) shows how he taught a pupil the difference between pulse and rhythm, using a novel type of scorewriting software. And Alex Baxter (Chapter 5) describes how he enabled his pupils to compose ring tones and transfer them to their mobile phones; he includes interview data to show what the pupils felt about this. These descriptions of music technology teaching in action are supplemented by instructive case studies of individual learners – John Finney's account of ‘PJ’, producing his rap tracks, Mike Challis’ description of ‘Beckie’ learning DJ skills in a Pupil Referral Unit and Kevin Jennings’ account of ‘Becky’ being inspired by the visual aspect of a piece of software.

Predictably, because this is the difficult bit, the book is less good in terms of ‘reframing a theory of knowledge’. Most authors theorise by relating their own experience of teaching music with digital technologies to existing educational theories but few of these are dealt with in sufficient depth to allow meaningful links to be made between theory and practice. For example, the concept of musical identities is quite strongly in evidence in several chapters but it is not clear how this is conceptualised in relation to music technology, nor how having an ‘electronic musical identity’ (p. 3) might be evidenced. Similarly, Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, Lucy Green's informal learning theory, Swanwick's distinction between musical encounter and instruction and Eisner's principles of arts education are related to the book's focus; but there are not strenuous attempts to worry at these theories, and to tease out where they fit and where they don't, in the spaces between theories and ‘real world’ educational practice. Perhaps the strongest attempt to do this is Serena Croft's chapter, in which she gathers data from her General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) pupils to make a case for the presence of Csikszentmihalyi's nine dimensions of flow in their work with music technology. ‘Flow theory’ provides a promising framework for research of this kind and Croft explores her understanding of it thoroughly but she sometimes builds her claims on quite flimsy evidence, and I found myself wanting to know more about the limits of the fit between theory and practice.

There are notable examples of authors theorising from experience. Jonathan Savage makes a useful distinction between extrinsic practice, in which technologies are used to facilitate established music making practices, and intrinsic practice, in which the music making is rooted in the technologies, leading to ‘a greater exploration and engagement with sound itself’ (Chapter 12). This theme is developed in Ambrose Field's chapter, which argues that music technology education should be primarily about the music that the technology produces, rather than music which could be generated in other ways. He sees the computer as ‘a tool for enabling new forms of creativity’ (Chapter 13), and offers seven strategies for encouraging creativity through digital technologies, each of which is based around the work of contemporary musicians. He concludes that, ‘by making music technology more culturally relevant, avoiding dry technical skill teaching, and by demonstrating the musical achievements of young people currently working with technology, we can begin to rethink the subject area as a discipline in its own right’. This is the sort of challenge that, in my view, can lead to vigorous debate which might inspire the theoretical thinking implied by the series editors.

The publication concludes with a call from Pamela Burnard (Chapter 16) to become ‘a more research-informed and research-based profession’, in order to enable teachers to become ‘the authors of change in their own classroom’ and ‘to author new agendas for change’. She postulates a programme of research which might be undertaken largely by practitioners. If followed, it would have potential to develop theories and practices of music education with digital technologies, far into the future. Perhaps, in years to come, this book will be seen to mark an important stage in such a development.