Music Education in America's Public Normal Schools

Celebratory and Troubled Beginnings of Music Teacher Education

Danelle D. Larson, Jill M. Sullivan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781978766181
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Capturing the beginning of music participation and engagement in many of the public universities that started as normal schools, this book provides a history of American music education in the 19th and 20th centuries.

American music-teacher education evolved from teacher education in public normal schools, many of which eventually became state universities. For social and religious reasons, students learned hymns, European art music, folk songs, and military music; segregated Black and Native American normal schools included Jubilee choirs and powwow music. Student- and teacher-led music ensembles were ubiquitous, mirroring music-making in American society. Eventually, normal schools educated music teachers and music supervisors. In this book, the contributing authors discuss the early history of arts education, specifically music, in the first public normal schools in America through the lenses of class, gender, and race, revealing both celebratory and troubling beginnings. Schools were built on confiscated Native lands and segregated by race, and separate spheres existed for men and women. The embodied experiences of teacher-education students would live on to influence music teaching and learning curricula not only in the K–12 schools where they taught, but also nearly two centuries of music education in the colleges and universities from which they stem.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Establishing Normal-School Music
• 2 The Music Offerings, Degrees, and Certifications of Twelve Normal Schools
• 3 “A Trained Teacher in Every Classroom”: Music and Belonging in Brave Nation
• 4 The Non-Public Normal School: The National Normal University of Lebanon, Ohio
• 5 Musically Infused Teacher Training: Music Education at the New Jersey State Normal School at Trenton
• 6 Normal College of the City of New York: Music Department and Education Program
• 7 Mary McLeod Bethune and the Rise of Music Education at the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute
• 8 Music in the Eastern Illinois State Normal School
• 9 Music Education in the Normal Schools of Minnesota
• 10 Music in the Winona Normal School
• 11 The Northern Arizona Normal School: Its Music and Music Teachers, 1899–1925
• 12 The Lives and Teaching of Three Music Teachers at the Tempe Territorial Normal School: 1895–1916
• 13 Tracing the Evolution of Music Curriculum and Faculty at the Tempe Normal School, 1886–1905
• 14 San Jose Normal: A Transformative Institution 1862–1921
• 15 Conclusions
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Copyright