The Changing Music Education Curriculum

I. Music Teacher Education

In order to understand better the training of a professional, one needs to know what
distinguishes a profession from being a routine job that merely requires a skill. First, there
must be an accumulated body of knowledge that requires lengthy, continuous study,
usually culminating in a college degree. This knowledge is not static, but is in a constant
state of flux as research and technological advancements open and expand new horizons
for learning. Second, there must be established standards that permit members to enter
the profession. Third, if the profession requires education, there need to be objectives
that are constantly assessed and evaluated in terms of knowledge, growth, and their
impact on learning. Fourth, members of a profession have a genuine commitment to
their discipline; it is not just an 8 to 5 job. Fifth, professionals have responsibility for
making judgments and decisions. Teachers make decisions regarding what students
must study.

One cannot isolate one’s specialty from the total professional responsibility. For
example, instrumental music teachers need to be aware of the musical needs of choral
directors and general music teachers, and vice versa. In fact, music training focuses
initially on acquiring the basic skills of the art of music.

Most concerns in teacher training have not changed. They revolve around three basic
responsibilities: (1) curricular decisions as to what students should learn to achieve
professional competency, (2) classroom procedures that implement these decisions, and
(3) evaluation of student achievement.

In 1968 the National Association for Music Education (formerly Music Education
National Conference) president, Wiley L. Housewright, along with Frances Andrews,
then president-elect, appointed a commission to examine teacher education programs
in music and to recommend changes that would lead to to the improvement of these
programs. The three major areas of music teacher training are: (1) general education, (2)
music, and (3) professional education.

Personal Qualities

Music educators must:

Inspire others.
Continue to learn in their own and other fields.
Relate to other disciplines and arts.
Identify and evaluate new ideas.
Use their imaginations.
Understand the role of the teacher.

Musical Competencies
 Producing Sounds (Performance)
All music educators must be able to:
Perform with musical understanding and technical proficiency.
Play accompaniments.
Sing.
Conduct.
Supervise and evaluate the performance of others.

Organizing Sounds (Composition)

All music educators must be able to:
Organize sounds for personal expression.
Demonstrate an understanding of the elements of music through original
composition and improvisation in a variety of styles.
Demonstrate the ability to identify and explain compositional choices of
satisfactory and less-than-satisfactory nature.
Notate and arrange sounds for performance in school situations.

Describing Sounds (Analysis)

All music educators must be able to:

Identify and explain compositional devices as they are employed in all music.
Describe the affective results of compositional devices.
Describe the means by which the sounds used in music are created.

Professional Qualities

The ability to communicate with students is essential for teachers. Therefore, music
education must be able to:

Express their philosophy of music and education.

Demonstrate a familiarity with contemporary educational thought.
Apply a broad knowledge of musical repertory to the learning problems of music
students.
Demonstrate, by example, the concept of the comprehensive musician dedicated to
teaching.

II. The Music Appreciation Movement

From the music appreciation pamphlet of the 1920s:

How do you listen to music?
a) with your ears
b) through your ears
c) with your brain
d) with your mind
e) with fastidious attention of all the faculties above
 The answer is apparently e; but in order to achieve this fastidious attention we need
to make use of a to d, the pamphlet tells us while smoothly evading the mind brain
dualism along the way. The rather pushy tone of this pamphlet is typical central face of
the music appreciation movement which grew out of self-help manuals in the 1890s
which fizzled out on the radio around the 1970s. It proved to be an opening stage in the
construction of the modern consumer with the latest emphasis on the gadgets of aural
reproduction. The movement had almost become a craze. Music appreciation had that
very notion of how people evolved to better and ever better moral beings by listening
with fastidious attention to classical music. The movement was aimed at the working
class who after all in the eyes of their betters had a long way to go at getting better.

This movement started out at the United States close to the 19th century. It did so as
a splinter of the cross of Christian evangelism. Past times such as singing, choir and
playing in bands have been promoted as physically healthy and morally fulfilling, as they
had in Britain. This recreation was said to keep the growing urban workers away from
gambling and drink, but music appreciation was freakish. Its emphasis was on listening
rather than doing. This was inspired by literary appreciation, where the silent reader and
the verbal writer were as one. The first American music appreciation books were guides
to help the hesitant beginners to figure out constant music on their democratizing path
to social integration. Then, the academics got a hold of it to produce a fresh, scholastic
market.

In Britain, it went the other way around. The first British book of the movement was
written by Stewart Macpherson, a professor of the Royal Academy of Music. ‘Music and
Its Appreciation’ came out in 1907. There were three key issues that propelled this British
movement into being: class, nationalism and formalism. First of these concerned the
simple economics of concepts. During the 1890s, the elites of the British cities turned
away from the public exhibitionism of the grand concert; they hosted instead exclusive
recitals in private homes. This upper crust trend of showing off your property was to
culminate in the interwar sensation of the private opera house in Glyndebourne. But this
relocation of patronage left a huge economic hole in the free market fortunes of the
public concerts. The solution was to coral the new suburban audiences and the other
aspirant workers they'd been lowed back into the city centers (by public transport, streets
made safe by electric light) to enjoy the new genre of the musical comedy and for
classical music to take them on it needed a mass audience to narrow down the monetary
gap between the upper gallery and the lower gallery. The part of music appreciation in
this was to promote concert going as a worthy occupation. The listener had a job to do
as imperative to the success of the concert as the musician on stage and the composer’s
score, leisure was converted into labor.

Secondly, there was Britain's scrawny cultural status. The Russian pianist Anton
Rubinstein made this clear in his autobiography in 1882. He wrote “I speak friendly but
without malice... among the English, not more than 2% of the people can be found with
any knowledge of music. Even the Americans have a higher appreciation of music than
the English.” Early music appreciation writers tended to agree with this but with a
historical condition: they accused immigrants of the early 18th and 19th centuries of
 taking over the musical culture, a musical dark age they called it. Later on, writers blamed
the church of England for bathing British music in the blood of the lamb, obsessed with
oratorios and liturgical dreariness.

The third issue was the need to elevate music as an intellectual act. The problems
around that have certainly been given by foreign influence. During the 19th century
German music and German thought of music had the supreme influence on the British
scene. Several British composers trained in Berlin and the roots of the appreciation
movement can be found in German tracks. According to Eduard Hanslick, a German
music critic, “Instrumental music is the purest because it refers to nothing but itself.” He
despised the idea that music represented feelings. He pointed out that a forest may be
cool and shady but it doesn't represent the feelings of coolness and shadiness. His
influence was profound and it's set at the heart of the music appreciation agenda which
insisted on the autonomy of music and to explain how this is so. The problem is that they
took this formalism at the time when Richard Strauss showed just how much materialistic
music could be. Strauss proudly pointed out that for the first time in an orchestral score
his cowbells represented cows.

III. The Rise of Instrumental Programs

The fifteenth century witnessed vastly increased freedoms, most particularly in terms
of what is actually perceived as 'harmony' and 'polyphony' (the simultaneous movement
of two or three interrelated parts). Composers (although they were barely perceived as
such) were still almost entirely devoted to choral writing, and the few instrumental
compositions which have survived often create the impression (in many cases entirely
accurately) of being vocal works in disguise, but minus the words.

During the Baroque period, the foundations were laid for the following 300 or so years
of musical expression: the idea of the modern orchestra was born, along with opera
(including the overture, prelude, aria, recitative and chorus), the concerto, sonata, and
modern cantata. The rather soft-grained viol string family of the Renaissance was
gradually replaced by the bolder violin, viola and cello, the harpsichord was invented, and
important advances were made in all instrumental groups.

Until about 1700, the old modes still exerted themselves from time to time by
colouring certain melodic lines or chord progressions, but from the beginning of the 18th
century the modern harmonic system based upon the major and minor scales was
effectively Pan-European. Choral music no longer dominated, and as composers turned
more and more to writing idiomatic instrumental works for ensembles of increasing
colour and variety, so 'classical' music (as opposed to 'popular') gradually began to work
its way into the very fabric of society, being played outdoors at dinner parties or special
functions (e.g. Handel's Water Music), or as a spectacle in the form of opera. On a purely
domestic level, every wealthy lady would have a spinet to play, and at meal-times the
large and rich houses would employ musicians to play what was popularly
called Tafelmusik in Germany, of which Telemann was perhaps the most famous
composer.
 The Baroque era witnessed the creation of a number of musical genres which would
maintain a hold on composition for years to come, yet it was the Classical period which
saw the introduction of a form which has dominated instrumental composition to the
present day: sonata form. With it came the development of the modern concerto,
symphony, sonata, trio and quartet to a new peak of structural and expressive
refinement. If Baroque music is notable for its textural intricacy, then the Classical period
is characterized by a near-obsession with structural clarity.

IV. The Changing Choral Art

The origins of choral music are found in traditional music, as singing in big groups is
extremely widely spread in traditional cultures (both singing in one part, or in unison, like
in Ancient Greece, as well as singing in parts, or in harmony, like in contemporary
European choral music).

The earliest notated music of western Europe is Gregorian chant, along with a few
other types of chant which were later subsumed (or sometimes suppressed) by the
Catholic Church. This tradition of unison choir singing lasted from sometime between
the times of St. Ambrose (4th century) and Gregory the Great (6th century) up to the
present. During the later Middle Ages, a new type of singing involving multiple melodic
parts, called organum, became predominant for certain functions, but initially
this polyphony was only sung by soloists. Further developments of this technique
included clausulae, conductus and the motet (most notably the isorhythmic motet),
which, unlike the Renaissance motet, describes a composition with different texts sung
simultaneously in different voices.

During the Renaissance, sacred choral music was the principal type of formally
notated music in Western Europe. The madrigal, a partsong conceived for amateurs to
sing in a chamber setting, originated at this period. Although madrigals were initially
dramatic settings of unrequited-love poetry or mythological stories in Italy, they were
imported into England and merged with the more dancelike balletto, celebrating
carefree songs of the seasons, or eating and drinking. To most English speakers, the
word madrigal now refers to the latter, rather than to madrigals proper, which refers to
a poetic form of lines consisting of seven and eleven syllables each.

The Baroque period in music is associated with the development around 1600 of
the figured bass and the basso continuo system. The use of figured bass was a dramatic
change in the way composers thought of musical pieces. Unlike a typical Renaissance
piece, which was based around interweaving, independent melody lines, a Baroque
composer using figured bass thought of a piece as a chord progression.

Independent instrumental accompaniment opened up new possibilities for choral

music. Verse anthems alternated accompanied solos with choral sections; the best-
known composers of this genre were Orlando Gibbons and Henry Purcell. Grands
motets (such as those of Lully and Delalande) separated these sections into separate
movements. Oratorio, pioneered by Giacomo Carissimi, extended this concept into
 concert-length works, usually loosely based on Biblical stories. Lutheran composers
wrote instrumentally accompanied cantatas, often based on chorale tunes.

Composers of the late 18th century became fascinated with the new possibilities of
the symphony and other instrumental music, and generally neglected choral
music. Beethoven wrote only two masses, both intended for liturgical use, although
his Missa solemnis is probably suitable only for the grandest ceremonies due to its length,
difficulty and large-scale scoring. He also pioneered the use of chorus as part of
symphonic texture with his Ninth Symphony and Choral Fantasia.

At the turn of the 21st century, choral music has received a resurgence of interest
partly due to a renewed interest in accessible choral idioms. Some composers began to
earn their reputation based foremost on their choral output, including the highly
popular John Rutter and Eric Whitacre.

V. Methodologies from Abroad

Gordon's Music Learning Theory

Edwin Gordon's Music Learning Theory is based on an extensive body of research and
field testing by Edwin E. Gordon and others in the larger field of Music Learning Theory.
It provides music teachers with a comprehensive framework for teaching musicianship
through audiation, Gordon's term for hearing music in the mind with understanding and
comprehension when the sound is not physically present. The sequence of instructions is
Discrimination Learning and Inference Learning. Discrimination Learning, the ability to
determine whether two elements are the same or not the same using aural/oral, verbal
association, partial synthesis, symbolic association, and composite synthesis. Inference
Learning, students take an active role in their own education and learn to identify, create,
and improvise unfamiliar patterns. The skills and content sequences within the Audiation
theory help music teachers establish sequential curricular objectives in accord with their
own teaching styles and beliefs. There also is a Learning Theory for Newborns and Young
Children in which the Types and Stages of Preparatory Audiation are outlined.

World Music Pedagogy

The growth of cultural diversity within school-age populations prompted music

educators from the 1960s onward to diversify the music curriculum, and to work with
ethnomusicologists and artist-musicians to establish instructional practices rooted in
musical traditions. 'World music pedagogy' was coined by Patricia Shehan Campbellto
describe world music content and practice in elementary and secondary school music
programs. Pioneers of the movement, especially Barbara Reeder Lundquist, William M.
Anderson, and Will Schmid, influenced a second generation of music educators
(including J. Bryan Burton, Mary Goetze, Ellen McCullough-Brabson, and Mary
Shamrock) to design and deliver curricular models to music teachers of various levels and
specializations. The pedagogy advocates the use of human resources, i.e., "culture-
bearers," as well as deep and continued listening to archived resources such as those of
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

Conversational Solfège

Influenced by both the Kodály method and Gordon's Music Learning Theory,
Conversational Solfège was developed by Dr. John M. Feierabend, former chair of music
education at the Hartt School, University of Hartford. The program begins by immersing
students in the musical literature of their own culture, in this case American. Music is seen
as separate from, and more fundamental than, notation. In twelve learning stages,
students move from hearing and singing music to decoding and then creating music
using spoken syllables and then standard written notation. Rather than implementing
the Kodály method directly, this method follows Kodály's original instructions and builds
on America's own folk songs instead of on Hungarian folk songs.

Simply Music

Australian music educator Neil Moore founded Simply Music on the core belief that
all humans are naturally musical. Simply Music offers programs for students from birth
through old age, with the stated goal that "students acquire and retain music as a lifelong
companion." To meet this goal, the repertoire includes a wide variety of musical genres,
such as classical, blues, jazz, and popular. Simply Music patterns its approach after
primary language acquisition, where speaking comes first. In this it shares some
philosophical ground with other developmental approaches like Kodály, Orff-Schulwerk,
and the Suzuki Method. Simply Music currently licences teachers at over 700 locations
worldwide.