With a hundred years (1912-2012) of Norwegian master's and doctoral theses written within the field of music as a backdrop, this article reports from an extensive study of the academisation of popular music in higher music education and research in Norway. Theoretically, the study builds on the sociology of culture and education in the tradition of Bourdieu and some of his successors, and its methodological design is that of a comprehensive survey of the entire corpus of academic theses produced within the Norwegian music field. On this basis, the authors examine what forms of popular music have been included and excluded respectively, how this aesthetic and cultural expansion has found its legitimate scholarly expression, and which structural forces seem to govern the processes of academisation of popular music in the Norwegian context. The results show that popular music to a large extent has been successfully academised, but also that this process has led to some limitations of academic openness as well as the emergence of new power hierarchies.

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This article presents a study of Norwegian-recorded music for children from World War II to the present, combining a historical perspective with an ethnographic approach. The underlying research has employed both quantitative and qualitative approaches, producing various data sets. The results of the data analyses indicate that the evolution of children's phonograms is characterized by some distinct genre-and style-related development features. This article describes and interprets such features in light of concepts and theories of children's culture and music sociology. It also elaborates on the emergence of a music market aimed at children, with an emphasis on phonograms. The association with the popular music industry enables an apparent contradiction, addressed in this article, between pedagogical and commercial considerations and outcomes.

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Processes of musical canonization occur at different levels of culture and society. People have a strong propensity to categorize, differentiate, and evaluate the music that is important to them, and music is ascribed value in action by people in real-life settings. Based in these premises, the article discusses two questions: First, how does the idea of a canon of children's music influence the daily musical activities and repertoires used in children's day care facilities and family homes? Second, in what ways is music legitimized in the everyday lives of children? Our data is collected by observation and interviews conducted in two pedagogical day care facilities and nine family homes. Children, day care staff and parents participated in the study. We find that a discussion of canonization in children's music along the following four paths of legitimation is meaningful: the "good, old stuff," the need for renewal, the inclusion of other types of music other than that aimed at a child audience, and the need for a wide array of genres and sentiments. Finally, we argue that although the legitimation and canonization in children's music obviously involve considerations of musical aspects, separating these canonization processes from the prevailing socio-cultural ideas of childhood and children's best interest is impossible.

In a chapter that takes its point of departure in a prophetic citation concerning sound and music by Francis Bacon, Petter Dyndahl examines how different epistemological positions and metaphors can contribute to the imagination and understanding of musical knowledge and learning. Dyndahl’s main focus is on discourses regarding these subjects, and he considers how knowledge in music both consists of, and is expressed by and communicated via, musical imagination. In doing so, Dyndahl discusses how different kinds of metaphors and tools are central to learning in general and how the presented approaches and perspectives, in terms of music and music education, are relevant to learning communities and to educational and professional fields of music.