American String Teacher

About American String Teacher

American String Teacher — Overview

American String Teacher (AST) is the journal of the American String Teachers Association (ASTA), the professional association for string and orchestra teachers and players in the United States. It is a quarterly, practitioner-facing journal — part scholarly publication, part professional magazine — that keeps string teachers up to date through feature articles, teaching tips, music reviews and association and industry news. The Journals World record lists print ISSN 0003-1313 and electronic ISSN 2515-4842 and names SAGE Publishing as publisher. ASTA's own site confirms the publishing arrangement in exactly those terms: the journal is ASTA's, it is published quarterly, it reaches members as a benefit of membership, and non-members may buy subscriptions and single issues through SAGE Publishing, with which ASTA partners to produce the journal.

Understanding the title means understanding its audience, which SAGE's description spells out: the content applies to many levels of string teaching and performing, including K–12 school string and orchestra educators, pre-collegiate and collegiate studio teachers, music education professors, students, conductors and performers. This is not primarily a journal of laboratory research — ASTA has a separate, peer-reviewed research title, the String Research Journal, for that purpose — but a journal written by and for the profession, in which a rehearsal technique that works on Monday morning, a review of new repertoire or teaching materials, and a feature on the state of the profession carry as much weight as a formal study. Its articles receive DOIs through SAGE (the prefix 10.1177, with the print ISSN embedded, as in 10.1177/00031313211045427), and its content is indexed in education research services such as ERIC.

ASTA describes American String Teacher as award-winning, and describes its reach concretely: the journal offers a platform reaching more than 6,000 members four times a year. The current issue listed on ASTA's site at the time of research is volume 76, number 3, a volume number that by itself testifies to a very long continuous run for a professional journal. This profile sets out the journal's history through its association, what it publishes, how it is produced and distributed, how it differs from its research sibling, and what a contributor needs to know — grounding each statement in ASTA's and SAGE's own pages, and leaving unstated anything that could not be verified there.

History: The Journal and Its Association

The journal cannot be separated from the association that owns it. ASTA states that it was founded in 1946 and exists to support string and orchestra teachers and players; its members range from budding student teachers to artist-status performers, and it provides teaching resources, professional education, local and national events, a career centre, insurance programmes and a collaborative strings community. Its published history records the founding meeting at which nineteen initial members adopted the name American String Teachers Association, set objectives that included improving string pedagogy, promoting orchestras at all educational levels and establishing high artistic and pedagogical standards, and each contributed a single dollar to establish an operating fund. More than 75 years later, ASTA counts more than 6,000 active members.

American String Teacher is the printed and digital voice of that community across its whole history, and its volume sequence — reaching volume 76 — tracks the association's growth from a small post-war gathering of string teachers into the national professional body for the field. ASTA's mission, as it states it now, is to foster and advance string teaching, learning, performing and scholarship as a community of diverse members, with core values that include teaching and learning, inclusion, access and excellence. The journal is one of the main instruments of that mission: it is the channel through which the association speaks to every member four times a year, carries the profession's news, and preserves its collective practical knowledge in citable form.

Two developments in the journal's modern history are documented on ASTA's own site. The first is the partnership with SAGE Publishing to produce American String Teacher: ASTA states that the partnership provides better online access to its journals, makes articles easier to search, and increases accessibility for the string community — in practice, the move of the journal's back catalogue and current issues onto SAGE's journal platform, with members given full access to the complete back catalogue and non-members able to browse issue and article listings and to buy subscriptions or single issues through SAGE. The electronic ISSN in this record, 2515-4842, belongs to that digital era of the journal's life. The second is the journal's position in a small family of ASTA publications: alongside AST sit the peer-reviewed String Research Journal, an assessment guide, a string curriculum and syllabi, so that practitioner writing and formal research each have a designated home.

Scope: What American String Teacher Publishes

SAGE's description, quoted in substance by ASTA's distributors, defines the content: the journal covers subjects of interest to those who teach stringed instruments and perform all types of music for strings, providing feature articles, teaching tips and music reviews, as well as association and industry news. ASTA's article guidelines add the submission-facing version of the same rule: articles submitted should be written on subjects of interest to the membership and should relate to the teaching of stringed instruments and/or the performance of music for strings.

An independent content analysis of the journal, published in the String Research Journal in 2023 and indexed by ERIC, gives an evidence-based picture of what that scope produces in practice. Examining 376 featured articles by 415 authors published between 2000 and 2019, the study found the largest content categories to be the profession itself (about 14.9 per cent), instrument pedagogy (about 13.8 per cent) and repertoire and instructional materials (about 11.4 per cent). Within instrument pedagogy, violin articles were the most common, with guitar and harp the least common — a distribution that mirrors the membership's instruments. Categories such as exceptional learners, assessment and administration formed only a small share of featured content. Authors were based predominantly in higher education, which matches the journal's mixture of professor-written features and school-teacher practice.

Concrete examples make the range plain. A recent teaching-tips article, "The Warm-Up As Teaching Time", works through how a conductor can turn the opening minutes of a school orchestra rehearsal into structured teaching, using a Bach Brandenburg Concerto excerpt to separate and then combine right-hand and left-hand skills. Conference and professional-development coverage in ASTA's channels shows the topics the profession brings to the journal's pages: beginner through advanced instrument technique, chamber music, conducting, curriculum, improvisation, eclectic and non-traditional styles, instrument purchase, repair and maintenance, body awareness and injury prevention, technology for teaching, student motivation, and recruitment and retention of teachers and programmes. Music and product reviews are a standing department, and ASTA offers submission routes for articles, for reviews and for advertising as distinct categories — a useful signal that a review proposal and a feature article are handled as different things.

How the Journal Is Published and Who Produces It

Ownership and production are divided clearly. The journal belongs to ASTA and is an association publication; SAGE Publishing is the production and distribution partner, hosting the journal online, handling non-member subscriptions and single-issue sales, and assigning DOIs. The Journals World record's publisher line — SAGE Publishing — is therefore correct as the publisher of record for distribution purposes, with ASTA as the owning association and the source of the journal's editorial identity. There is no conflict between those two statements; they describe the two halves of a standard society-journal partnership.

Distribution follows membership. ASTA states that the journal is available to members as a benefit of membership, with the annual subscription price included in membership dues, and that members receive full access to the back catalogue. Non-members purchase subscriptions and single issues through SAGE; ASTA directs single-issue orders to SAGE Customer Services. For libraries, the title is a conventional SAGE-distributed quarterly, catalogued under both its print and electronic ISSNs. Individual article PDFs circulate through the SAGE platform under standard society-journal permissions.

Editorial leadership sits within the association's publications structure rather than with the commercial partner, and ASTA invites submissions through its own site, where the current article and review submission routes and advertising information are maintained. Because named editorships and board compositions for association journals rotate and are updated on the association's pages, this profile does not reproduce a named editor or board list that could go stale; contributors should take the current masthead and the current guidelines from ASTA's American String Teacher pages, which are the authoritative and maintained source. What can be said from those pages is the standing invitation and its scale: the journal reaches more than 6,000 members four times a year, and offers submission opportunities across articles, reviews and advertising.

American String Teacher and the String Research Journal: A Necessary Distinction

Catalogues and authors alike regularly confuse ASTA's two journals, so the distinction belongs in any serious profile. American String Teacher (ISSN 0003-1313 / 2515-4842) is the quarterly practitioner journal: features, teaching tips, reviews and news, written for the whole membership. The String Research Journal (ISSN 1948-4992 / 2164-0661) is ASTA's peer-reviewed research journal, publishing quantitative, qualitative, historical and philosophical research studies relevant to string settings. The 2023 content analysis of American String Teacher cited above was itself published in the String Research Journal — a neat illustration of the division of labour: the research journal studies the profession, including its practitioner journal, while the practitioner journal serves the profession month to month.

The practical consequence is a routing decision. A completed research study, with a method, data and analysis, belongs to the String Research Journal or another research outlet, and its author should not expect American String Teacher to function as a research journal of record. A classroom-tested rehearsal strategy, a repertoire discovery, a programme-building account or a reflective piece on the profession belongs in American String Teacher, where its readers — the teachers who can use it next week — actually are. Sending each kind of writing to the right title is the single most useful piece of submission advice this profile can give, and it follows directly from how ASTA itself describes the two publications.

Metrics, Indexing and Honest Limits

American String Teacher is a practitioner journal, and its bibliometric footprint should be described without inflating it into something it is not. It is not a Journal Citation Reports title with a widely quoted impact factor, and no Clarivate or SCImago headline figure for it could be verified from the sources consulted; none is quoted here. What can be verified is its scholarly traceability: articles carry SAGE DOIs, its content is indexed in ERIC, the education research database, and it is itself the object of published bibliometric study — the 2023 String Research Journal content analysis indexed as ERIC record EJ1381822. A small citation-analysis service reports very low two-year citation averages for the title, which is exactly what one should expect of a journal whose principal purpose is professional practice rather than research citation, and which says nothing about its standing within its profession, where its measures are its membership reach, its longevity and its award-winning status in ASTA's own description.

On charges, the position is similarly plain: no article processing charge for American String Teacher is published on the ASTA or SAGE pages consulted, and the journal is financed in the conventional society way, through membership dues and subscriptions. A submission fee or page charge is therefore not stated here, because none could be verified; a contributor should confirm the current position in ASTA's submission guidelines. Advertising, by contrast, is an openly offered category with its own route on ASTA's site.

Reading American String Teacher as a Historical Source

One further use of the journal deserves recording, because it explains why libraries preserve it and why researchers cite a practitioner title at all. A quarterly that has spoken to the same profession for more than seventy volumes accumulates a documentary record that no research journal can supply: what string teachers were advised to do, what repertoire and materials were recommended to them, what the association debated, and how the profession described itself, decade by decade. The 2023 content analysis discussed above is one scholarly use of that record, coding nearly two decades of featured articles to show how the profession's attention was distributed — heavily toward pedagogy, repertoire and the profession itself, lightly toward assessment and administration, and unevenly across instruments, with violin dominant and guitar and harp marginal. Studies of curriculum, of teacher preparation and of the changing place of eclectic and non-traditional styles in school programmes draw on the same archive. For that purpose the complete, SAGE-hosted back catalogue that ASTA makes available to members is the essential resource, and citations to the journal in such work should give volume, issue and year in the ordinary way, with the DOI where the article carries one.

Guidance for Contributors

ASTA's own guidelines set the frame: write on a subject of interest to the membership, related to the teaching of stringed instruments or the performance of music for strings, and keep the journal's readership in view — school string and orchestra educators, studio teachers at every level, music education professors, students, conductors and performers. Choose the right submission category from the start, since articles, reviews and advertising are routed separately on ASTA's site. Write for use: the articles the journal is remembered for give a teacher something specific — a sequence, an excerpt, a fingering or bowing solution, a rehearsal structure, a repertoire judgement — that can be carried into a classroom, studio or rehearsal room. Ground professional claims in experience or evidence as the piece requires, and if the work is in truth a research study, consider the String Research Journal first, for the reasons given above. Guidelines, word expectations and the current submission route should be taken from ASTA's American String Teacher pages at the time of submission, since association pages are updated as editorships change.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of American String Teacher? Print ISSN 0003-1313 and electronic ISSN 2515-4842, as listed in the Journals World record.

Who publishes it? It is the journal of the American String Teachers Association (ASTA), produced in partnership with SAGE Publishing; non-member subscriptions and single issues are sold through SAGE, which the record names as publisher.

How often does it appear, and who receives it? Quarterly, four times a year. ASTA members receive it as a benefit of membership, with the subscription included in dues, and have full access to the back catalogue.

What does it publish? Feature articles, teaching tips, music reviews and association and industry news on the teaching of stringed instruments and the performance of music for strings, for K–12 educators, studio teachers, professors, students, conductors and performers.

Is it the same as the String Research Journal? No. That is ASTA's separate peer-reviewed research journal (ISSN 1948-4992 / 2164-0661). American String Teacher is the practitioner journal.

Does it have an impact factor or an article processing charge? No impact factor for this title could be verified from the sources consulted, and no APC is published on the ASTA or SAGE pages consulted; the journal is supported by membership dues and subscriptions. Check ASTA's current guidelines before submitting.

How large is its reach? ASTA states that the journal reaches its more than 6,000 members four times a year, and lists volume 76, number 3 as the current issue at the time of research.

Sources

• ASTA — American String Teacher Journal page (quarterly, membership benefit, SAGE partnership, current issue vol. 76 no. 3, submissions, 6,000+ members): https://www.astastrings.org/site/american-string-teacher
• ASTA — About / history and vision pages (founded 1946, membership, mission and core values, founding objectives and nineteen founding members): https://www.astastrings.org/site/about , https://www.astastrings.org/site/history and https://www.astastrings.org/site/vision
• ASTA — Teach Strings page (American String Teacher alongside String Research Journal, curriculum and other publications): https://www.astastrings.org/site/teach-strings
• ASTA — AST Article Guidelines (subjects of interest to membership; teaching of stringed instruments / performance of music for strings): https://www.astastrings.org/site/ast-submissions
• SAGE journal description via distributor record (content and readership: K–12 educators, studio teachers, professors, students, conductors, performers; quarterly): https://www-prod.fachmedien.de/product/pdf?productRef=01049770003131001
• ERIC record EJ1381822 — A Content Analysis of the American String Teacher (2000–2019), String Research Journal, 2023 (article and author category evidence): https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1381822
• SAGE article example with AST DOI pattern (10.1177/00031313211045427, "The Warm-Up As Teaching Time", American String Teacher, November 2021): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/00031313211045427
• Journals World record for post 333934 (title, slug, ISSNs 00031313 / 25154842, publisher SAGE Publishing).