Music Education

Navigating the Future

Clint Randles, Clint Randles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317692164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

Education involving music is a multifaceted and ever-altering challenge. As new media, technologies, and pedagogies are developed, academics and practitioners must make sure that they are aware of current trends and where they might lead. This book features studies on the future of music education from emerging scholars in the field. These studies are then supplemented by commentaries from established leaders of the music education community. Music Education covers topics such as music and leisure, new forms of media in music teaching and learning, the role of technology in music learning, popular music tuition in the expansion of curricular offering, and assessment of music education research. As such, it is an excellent reference for scholars and teachers as well as guide to the future of the discipline.

Part I
Working Within the Domain

1
Music Education History and the Future

Michael L. Mark

Introduction

This chapter describes four historic rationales that supported music education during certain periods of American history and how they were made a real part of American life. Taken together, they describe a history of success for music education in a changing world. The four rationales illustrate how music education has adjusted to social, political, and economic change and how it became an integral part of those contexts. This brief review of the role of music education in American life shows that it has historically been tied closely to the greater society, and that music teachers have been valued since the early times of our nation.

As times changed, so did music education. But some things do not change because they are right and because they work. An instructive example of something that has not changed throughout Western history is the contribution that music education has always made to the society that sponsors it. Another example is the joy of learning and making music in school settings. Music has existed in schools throughout Western history, often for religious purposes, at other times for a variety of other cultural reasons.¹ These are historic truths that music educators might convey to administrators and other decision makers who influence the role of music in schools.

A simple, basic principle that is probably known to most music educators expresses what it is that has made music education so successful for so long: education follows society. Society establishes new needs and new goals and music education adjusts. We, the music educators, lead from the rear, not the front, and this is how it has to be. It is why certain important planning symposia have been held periodically. For example, the primary purpose of the influential 1967 Tanglewood Symposium was to identify the role of music education in a society already undergoing such rapid change that it was no longer possible to predict needs beyond the next few years. A character in the novel Gone Girl (Flynn, 2012, p. 9) said it well: “We had no clue that we were embarking on careers that would vanish within a decade.” And the speed of societal change becomes faster and faster to this day.

Four Rationales for Music Education

The four rationales are derived from the principle that education follows society. They serve as a backdrop for a look at the broad scope of American history during the last 175 years. These are the rationales:

• Cultural Elevation. It was a common belief in the young United States that European culture was supreme. The other side of that coin, of course, was that American culture was immature and not yet ready to advance to a higher level. From Lowell Mason’s time in the 1830s, American music education perpetuated an Americanized version of the elite European musical tradition. It was really only during the second half of the 20th century that we finally began to shed our inferiority complex about our own music. American conductors were expected to train in Europe until well into the 20th century, and the music education profession did not officially recognize jazz in the curriculum until the Tanglewood Symposium of 1967 sanctioned it.
• Cohesive Society and Immigration. The music education profession played an important role in helping immigrants adjust to their new country while performing a valuable service to itself by sponsoring a songbook that appealed to the masses, both children and adults.
• Commercial Prosperity. This rationale has to do with the prosperity of business and industry, a key component in the evolution of school bands. It illustrates how the music business analyzes the needs of the music education profession and finds ways to satisfy those needs.
• Social Justice and Multiculturalism. This rationale briefly reviews the history of segregated schools and the effects of the civil rights revolution on them. Multicultural education began to influence the music education profession during this time.

The narratives that follow illustrate how music education has supported national goals and even helped further them at times. Each rationale had implications for classroom practices. They influenced the day-to-day work of music educators in one way or another. These four rationales—cultural elevation, cohesive society, commercial prosperity, social justice—are points of reference for a look at the broad scope of American history during the last 175 years. Each rationale had a place in American history and each had a role in shaping music education.

The Four Rationales in American Life

Cultural Elevation: The Industrial Revolution and Music Education

Music was not taught in most public schools before the Industrial Revolution of the early 19th century. Instead, itinerant music teachers traveled to villages, towns, and cities to teach music reading and singing to adults and children. Their popularity was an indication that music instruction was valued early in American history. Many of the teachers composed the music that they taught, and some of their music still lives today in church hymnals. The best known of the composers/teachers was William Billings. The music of these New England composers was strong, robust, and enjoyable to sing, but their training was minimal and their music crude in comparison to that of European composers.

A profound occurrence took place in 1838, when the new American nation was only 62 years old. In that landmark year, the Boston School Committee [board of education] became the first school authority to approve music as a curricular subject, meaning that its status in schools was equal to reading, writing, and arithmetic. Although music had been taught in some schools before 1838, at that time it was an extra activity rather than a curricular subject. To put this in historical perspective, when music was first adopted as a curricular subject in 1838, European classical music creativity was thriving. Mendelssohn and Schumann were actively composing. Schubert had died only ten years earlier and Beethoven one year before that.

As the expanding Industrial Revolution began to replace hand labor with machine production, manufacturing increased, as did the size of the upper and the middle economic classes. The proliferation of new wealth made it possible to realistically envision a new American cultural life. Affluent Americans wanted their country to resemble Europe’s more cultured nations. To do this, the old musical offerings of itinerant singing masters had to be replaced with music on par with European music. That transition would only be possible if the schools provided music education to the masses.

Returning to the year 1838—from the humble beginning of music education as a curricular subject in Boston, music education spread throughout the rest of the 19th century to other schools and to other cities. By the beginning of the 20th century, school music was well established. The Industrial Revolution was a catalyst for profound change in American society, and one of its side effects was the remarkable transformation of music education.

A Cohesive Society: Immigration and Community

From about 1880 to 1918, a huge wave of immigration brought millions of people seeking better lives to the New World from Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe. These new Americans—Hungarians, Czechs, Italians, Slovaks, Poles, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Russians, Ukrainians, Romanians, Greeks, and others—changed the demographics of the United States and its schools dramatically. These immigrants took advantage of their New World opportunities and they were welcomed by the owners and managers of American mills and factories. As hard as they had to toil, their living and working conditions in their new country were generally better than what they had left behind in their homelands.

The well-known term, “the Melting Pot,” was created in this milieu. The melting pot was a metaphor for the “Americanization” of the new arrivals. The term originated in a play of the same name that Israel Zangwill wrote in 1908. A line in the script read, “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming” (Zangwill, 1908). Ideally, immigrants would be expected to shed their old national identities and live as Americans. This indeed happened over the course of the next generations. Succeeding generations spoke English, they lived in communities with neighbors from many countries, they belonged to the same labor unions, they served together in the military, and their children attended schools with the children of immigrants from other countries.

There was an amusing example of this melting pot ideal in Henry Ford’s automobile factory. Recognizing the value of an educated work force, Ford founded a school for immigrant workers in his factory. The students presented a play about the melting pot in which immigrants were disembarking from the ship that carried them from the Old World to the New. They were dressed in threadbare immigrant clothes and carrying their tattered immigrant luggage. They climbed into a huge melting pot, a crucible. Their teachers stirred the contents of the pot with long ladles and when it began to boil over, out came the immigrants, now dressed in their best American clothes and waving American flags. As trivial as this play might have been, it effectively demonstrated the ideal of the melting pot metaphor.

It so happened that music educators were organizing their professional association during the massive surge of immigrants. The creation of the Music Supervisors National Conference in 1907 provided a framework for music educators to actively participate in the immigration phenomenon. In 1913, only six years after MSNC’s initial organizing activities, a committee of its members compiled a pamphlet of eighteen songs that all Americans should know. 18 Songs for Community Singing was intended for both adults and children and it helped many new Americans become familiar with American culture. The eighteen songs provided music that all immigrants could share with each other and with already established Americans. The pamphlet also helped Americanize children when it was used as a school songbook. The booklet’s introduction explained:

This pamphlet represents a movement which will be encouraged by all interested in Education in the United States—that the whole country shall know by heart and unite in singing the words and music of some of the best of the Standard Songs.

But of a much deeper significance than the mere singing of these few songs is the animating idea back of such performance, which is the spread of community feeling voiced in a better understanding, good will, a real brotherhood.

The singing, in its larger significance, is extended as a means of stimulating a feeling of solidarity which should exist in a community between man and man. For when a country becomes one in lifting its voice in singing the same good songs, a note is struck for harmony of understanding, mutual good-will, and similar ideals.

(18 Songs, 1913, inside cover)

These are the 18 songs in the pamphlet:

• America
• Annie Laurie
• Auld Lang Syne
• Blow, Ye Winds, Heigh-Ho
• Dixie
• Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes
• Flow Gently, Sweet Afton
• Home, Sweet Home
• How Can I Leave Thee
• Love’s Old Sweet Song
• My Old Kentucky Home
• Nancy Lee
• Old Folks at Home
• Round: Row, Row, Row Your Boat
• Round: Lovely Evening
• Star Spangled Banner
• Sweet and Low
• The Minstrel Boy

18 Songs was so popular that it underwent numerous revisions during its first few years. It evolved into a collection called 55 Songs for Community Singing, then Twice 55 Songs. It aided the nation’s efforts in 1918 during World War I by providing songs for civilian and military community sings. There were thousands of military song leaders and Twice 55 Songs was the songbook of choice for many of them.

Americans recognized the need for music education partly because music was a normal participatory element of community life through the 1930s and even later in some fortunate places. Industries sponsored choruses, bands, and orchestras. Community singing was popular. Between double features, movie audiences followed “the bouncing ball” on the screen as it skipped from one syllable of a familiar song to the next. Communities employed paid music directors as late as the 1950s, even later in some cities. They were often assigned to departments of parks and recreation, and many of them were also school music educators. Parents appreciated the value of preparing their children to be adults who would actively participate in the musical life of the community.

The End of an Era

This topic begins the transition from the end of an era to the beginning of a new one. The emergence from the Great Depression and World War II as the leader of the free world revealed new, unforeseen conditions for the United States. The emphasis on community singing gradually became less relevant in the emerging society. Clearly, technology was going to bring changes to society that would have implications for music education, but no one knew what those implications would be. Music education leaders were concerned that their profession did not have a credible philosophical foundation to meet the needs of the time. Visionary leaders like Allen Britton of the University of Michigan and Charles Leonhard of the University of Illinois helped lead music education into a new era. They steered the rationale toward the inherent properties of music itself and away from its ancillary outcomes. That was when we began to use the term “aesthetic education.”

At the same time, psychologists were beginning to analyze how students learn and how teachers teach. Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, published in 1956, helped educators shape new curricula and teaching methods. In 1960, Jerome Bruner presented a new theory of cognitive development in his book, The Process of Education. Psychologists were advancing new education theories as philosophers were working to relate aesthetic philosophy to the music curriculum. Their synergy helped music educators build a strong justification for curricular acceptance.

Commercial Prosperity and School Bands

Business and industry were key factors in the growth of music education. The transportation industry is a good example because it played a central role in the evolution of school bands, which helped solidify the place of bands in schools throughout the country. Frederick Fennell, renowned director of the Eastman Wind Ensemble, describes the process by which it took place in his book, Time and the Winds (Fennell, 1954, pp. 37–9, 48). Fennell explains how a business-oriented economic interest aligned itself with music education to help establish school bands throughout the country.

America loved bands. At the turn of the 20th century, professional concert bands played under conductors like Sousa, He...