INTRODUCTION The current situation within music teacher education in Finland, Norway and Sweden is to some extent characterized by a lack of interrelational communication between the musikdidaktik traditions of instrumental teaching and classroom teaching. In fact these traditions live more or less separate lives. In Finland, the two traditions are taught separately, entitled differently and to a large extent they use different terminology. They also have different historical roots: instrumental pedagogy has strong Russian and Central European influences whereas the school music tradition has its main roots in German-Scandinavian music education along with educational science. At a general level, the characteristics of instrumental didaktik in Sweden can be described as focusing on the instrument, it’s repertoire, challenges and techniques whereas the classroom didaktik is primarily focused at group activities and the importance of shared musical experience. The circumstance that the teachers of instrumental didaktik are often employed not only at the academy but also work as municipal culture school teachers or musicians differ from that of the classroom didaktik teachers who more frequently holds positions at the academy. This difference makes it hard to organize meetings between the two traditions. In Norway, a fully instrumental music teacher education separated from a parallel education for becoming school music teachers was offered by one of the conservatories up to the middle of the 1990ies. Today, music teacher education is organized so that the two paths run in parallel during one educational course, but still their cultural characteristics still entail differences: While the instrumental tradition seems oriented towards instruction and inherent value positions along with keeping and nurturing the advantages of the teacher role in master-apprenticeship relations, the classroom tradition is more generally oriented, including a variation of teaching forms as well as searching for a balance between musical and non-musical values and between child centered and subject centered teaching. In a broader picture the differences between the two educational traditions appear as embedded in two different cultures. The instrumental tradition origins in the several hundred year old master-apprenticeship tradition which can be said to constitute the educational practice of music and musicians themselves. The school music tradition appears as melanged by two ingrediences: Educational theory and music education approaches like the ones connected with Jaques-Dalcroze, Orff and Kodaly. In addition to that the situation in question seems to be similar in all the three countries in question, so, too, does the challenges at the labor market. New challenges for the music teaching profession emerge at an increasing speed. For example, to an increasing degree both instrumental and classroom teachers are required to teach various genres and styles of music, they face a big variety of learners and have to cope with different learning situations and environments as well as having to relate to the challenges of their pupils' informal musical learning outside school. THE STUDYThe overarching aim of the present study is to map and describe the various musikdidaktik traditions in Finland, Sweden and Norway and to reach knowledge upon which suggestions can be made to attain closer contacts and cooperation between different didaktik traditions. By studying and articulating the differences and similarities between countries and traditions we are looking for the ways in which the teaching traditions can learn from and empower each other. We believe that this can be done through acknowledging the specific features and goals of the two traditions and through having them to mirror each other. In sum we believe that this will contribute significantly to inform the field of music teacher education with respect to existing as well as new challenges at the labour market.The first phase of the research process which is in progress examines how music teachers' professional competence is defined and described along with how the process of becoming a ”good” teacher is treated in the Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish instrumental (pedagogy) and classroom didaktik traditions as embodied in relevant literature. In the second phase of the study, we will observe and interview teachers in each country as regards the strenghts, weaknesses and possibilities of the two traditions, including their potential for empowering each other. The research material of the first phase of the study consists of the syllabuses of music teacher education at one institution for higher music education in each of the countries. Along with this we will study the textbook material which is used at the various courses of classroom and instrumental didaktik.Hermeneutic text analysis will be applied to grasp the traditions as they appear in/through the texts studied. This includes analyzing the texts from each country and then compare the results in order to create a full picture of the phenomenon. Interpretation will depart from posing questions like the following to the collected material: (1) How is the process of the student music teachers’ teacher development described or discussed? (2) How is this related to the teacher-student relationship? (3) What principles for content selection are utilized and what content is selected? (4) What is considered as good teaching in the texts? (5) What qualifications and competences is given priority and how are these qualifications and competences described and treated? Finally we will look for reasoning indicating how the educating organization’s responsibility for the process of becoming a good teacher is considered as well as when, where and how the learning process of becoming a good teacher should take place. In the paper presentation, the preliminary results concerning the differences and similarities between countries and traditions will be discussed followed by a discussion about what the traditions can learn from each other. The presentation will also invite a discussion about the study at large including its importance, challenges, and implications.