Music education is an eclectic field of study, and those concerned with questions of musical learning and teaching draw upon a variety of disciplines including psychology, sociology, history, philosophy, ethnomusicology, and music therapy. For this Special Issue, we have asked leading scholars within these disciplines to share insights on how their research area might contribute to a greater understanding of the learning and teaching of music. Our aim and theirs is to communicate recent developments in the disciplines to music educators, and hopefully to stimulate in the pages of BJME a dialogue with colleagues in related fields of interest.