Centennial Publications - Music Educators Journal

Music Educators Journal Centennial Series

During 2007, MENC's hundredth anniversary, each issue of MEJ will feature a special article celebrating the centennial in a series guest-edited by Patrick K. Freer. Each article is intended to help readers reflect on the past one hundred years and consider where we might go from here. The following articles make up this special series:

• “Reflections on Fifty Years of Publishing with MENC” by Bennett Reimer, January 2007
• “Extending the Vision: Three Women Who Saw the Future of Music Education” by Patrick K. Freer and Diana R. Dansereau, March 2007
• “Democracy and One Hundred Years of Music Education” by Randall Allsup, May 2007
• “MENC in International Perspective” by Marie McCarthy, September 2007
• “Music Education at the Tipping Point” by John Kratus, November 2007

Reflections on Fifty Years of Publishing with MENC
By Bennett Reimer
From Music Educators Journal, January 2007, Vol. 93 / No. 3

Copyright © 2007 by MENC: The National Association for Music Education. One copy may be made for personal use. No additional reproduction without permission.

A student recently asked about an article I had written long ago, and in checking my records, I was struck with a fact I had forgotten: my first professional articles were published in 1956, a little over fifty years ago. One was in Music Educators Journal, another in the Virginia Music Educators Association Notes. (I was teaching in Virginia at that time—my first job.) That brought to mind the fact that MENC would soon be one hundred years old, and I had been publishing with them for half that time. In addition to the five MENC-published books I worked on as organizer or editor, my articles have proliferated in various MENC journals and projects. So many words, over so many years, about this fascinating, perplexing, sometimes frustrating profession that has captured my mind and soul so deeply and constantly.

I’d like to share some reflections about three aspects of my MENC-based writings that represent the major issues and dilemmas I’ve addressed in articles and books outside MENC. This gives me an opportunity to gain some long-term perspective on the profession, both for myself and, I hope, for others devoted to music education (see the Questions about the Future of Music Education sidebar).

That so much of my work, both as my career began and to the present day, appears in the primary journals and other projects of MENC and its state associations is significant in itself. Because, despite my increasingly scholarly leanings over the years, it has been important for me to aim toward applying what I have learned to the daily work of music educators, to enhance their influence on the musical learning of real students in real schools. For me, both then and now, scholarship—philosophy, psychology, history, research, curriculum—is not an end in itself but is a means for achieving the real payoff: improved practices for teachers of music, resulting in enriched experiences for those we teach. Our national organization, in its publications function, is the ideal venue for transforming theoretical understandings into practical applications for the profession.

1. Performance, of Course
In reviewing my earliest writings, I was struck by how thoroughly I had been acculturated by my music education training to see the world almost entirely through the perspective of performance. I began performing as a youngster, primarily in school ensembles; my concentration for the bachelor’s degree was instrumental music education; and my first positions entailed teaching instrumental music as a band director, then instrumental methods and techniques, conducting, and a private studio. Nevertheless, my attraction to philosophy evidenced itself from the start. In my very first article, “The College Course in Supplementary Instruments,”¹ I focused on the need for performance teaching in schools to be guided by philosophy and for philosophy to be applied to forging better practices. The second, “Teaching the Beginning Instrumentalist: A Guiding Philosophy,”² also attempted to unite philosophical thinking with practice in regard to performance. My concluding sentence was, “From the very first lesson it should be mutually understood that the object of it all is not the gaining of specific motor skills, but the increasing intimacy with things musical.” Skills, I argued, must serve the musical experience of being a performer, and the performer’s experience, if it is to be musical, requires that the skills be fully available as an essential ingredient of that experience.

Since those initial attempts, I have often written about performance, given its predominant position in American music education and my own base as a performer. In recent years, the ongoing tension in our profession about technique versus musicality has led to the broader question of how learnings related to performance can be subsumed within performance settings, such as those stipulated by the National Standards for Music Education,³ which aim toward performance saturated with and deepened by contextual understandings beyond singing and playing. The MENC book Performing With Understanding: The Challenge of the National Standards for Music Education,⁴ an outgrowth of the first of four Northwestern University Music Education Leadership Seminars I directed, with chapters by the attendees and two by me,⁵ is testament to our profession’s long-standing devotion to performance as its central mission. One challenge that mission presents is uniting the technical and the musical so that each contributes its indispensable dimension, achieving what I call “the intelligence of the enacting body” in the unique and powerful way that musical performance allows.

At present, in addition to the continuing need for us to be aware of the technique/musicality dynamic in performance, we are facing a much more challenging task, dramatically brought to our attention by the advent of the content standards. They make it starkly clear that, of all the ways people can be and are musical in our culture, we have overwhelmingly focused on the first two, singing and playing (listed in the Standards as 1 and 2 because of their predominance). Students have few, if any, opportunities to gain experience and expertise in the others since our programs so heavily emphasize performing composed music primarily in large ensembles. Unfortunately, performance, as we have made it available, has been, remains today, and is likely to always be (perhaps increasingly be) of interest to only a small part of the school and general populations, despite our desperate efforts to advocate it as the be-all and end-all of everyone’s musical choices. We must ask ourselves whether our all-eggs-in-one-basket concept of music education will ever allow music to be what we want it to be: a basic subject relevant to all, rather than the beleaguered, at-risk, “special” subject it has historically been.

2. What Really Matters about Music?
In 1959, my next article for MEJ, “What Music Cannot Do,”⁶ turned directly to philosophy, and, as has occurred regularly over the years, it got me into hot water. Under the influence of my studies in philosophy of music education with Charles Leonhard at the University of Illinois, I found myself increasingly disillusioned with the usual justifications for music education I had previously and thoughtlessly absorbed. I argued in that article that we were ignoring the emerging, powerful insights into the deeper values of music and musical experience stemming from the then eye-opening revelations of Susanne K. Langer, Leonard B. Meyer, John Dewey, and others.⁷ These thinkers were explaining, in ways directly pertinent to music education, how music could be conceived as a unique way to refine and extend—that is, to educate—ll people’s ability to know themselves and their world. It had become dramatically clearer to me that few if any endeavors are capable of educating our human affective nature as potently as music and we could actually teach in ways that would encourage that to happen. Yet we went on and on claiming all sorts of benefits of music education that could be achieved just as well, if not much better, by a great variety of other learnings.

Does this sound familiar today, forty-eight years later? We’ve learned a great deal more about music’s capacities to fulfill human needs for deep, meaningful, affective experiences. Important insights from brain research have taught us about the essential role that feelings play in consciousness itself.⁸ Yet we still seem to rely for support on values of music not only trivial in comparison but cynically intended to capitalize on whatever the current panacea is for “saving” education by arguing that music is the best possible route to that salvation.

In 1959, some perceived my article to be a threat to our profession’s safety, and therefore believed it should not be published, while others, luckily for me, thought that the issue of our fundamental values deserves—even requires—full discussion. Still, today, we need to remind ourselves that, while we inevitably make a variety of very positive contributions to our students that deserve recognition and support (and some, just as inevitably, not so positive), we must not allow ourselves to be co-opted by advocacy special interests, losing sight of our distinctive primary contributions. In my 1999 MEJ article, “Facing the Risks of the Mozart Effect,”⁹ I found myself having to dance the same old dance about our need for caution in embracing a rationale that, if understood and applied thoughtlessly, could harm us in fundamental ways. Indeed, that particular advocacy spasm soon fell apart under the weight of careful analysis, leaving us, once more, with egg on our collective face.

Many more philosophical articles were published over the years, too many to mention here, all of them reflecting my ongoing struggle to clarify the nature and values of music and to apply those clarifications to how we could become more effective professionals. For a long time, my philosophical efforts were practically the only ones being made in the profession.¹⁰ In those years, I had no developed community of music education philosophers to interact with, learn from, and sharpen my ideas against (as philosophers, among many others, need if they are to retain their edge). But by the late 1980s, the quantity and quality of philosophical work in our field had become so impressive that we could claim, finally, to have produced a thriving professional specialization. What had previously been largely homophonic had become rousingly polyphonic. This benefited all, not just those who were drawn to philosophy but the profession as a whole. We were being educated about the reality that issues of what we stand for as a field, and therefore of our actions as educators, are complex and multidimensional.

Also, unavoidably, these issues are subject to controversy, which soon leads to heated debate. A new challenge presented itself: how could we both accept, even revel in, dissenting positions about who we are and what we should aim for while preserving a sense of unity in our self-image and guiding ideals? This issue has become a central one the profession needs to address.¹¹

3. It’s the Curriculum, the Curriculum, the Curriculum
As fate would have it, my emerging career ran head-on into the most extensive and concentrated effort in American education history to reform the school curriculum, from the 1960s well into the 1970s. The Curriculum Reform Movement, as it came to be known, encompassed the entire education profession, in all subjects and at all levels, including teacher education, research, policy, educational philosophy and psychology, assessment, and every dimension of the massive education enterprise. These were exciting times indeed, with giants of education and associated fields, supported by generous government grants, working toward pathbreaking programs in just about every dimension of schooling and school organization, entirely unlike No Child Left Behind, with its regressive focus on the canonical basics and a conformance-seeking mentality driven by a relentless high-stakes testing regimen.

The reform movement engaged me from its beginnings, as director of a major grant from the U.S. Office of Education. The grant, spanning three years, was to develop and demonstrate a newly conceived general music curriculum.¹² In addition, I was the author of a textbook series for grades 1–8,¹³ and director of the largest project ever attempted to develop and implement a multi-art teacher education and K–12 program that was put into ongoing practice in several school systems.¹⁴ My work was guided by a long-standing curriculum goal that has always seemed deeply compelling to me—to achieve a truly comprehensive, balanced, and sequential program of study at every level and in every aspect of our music education program. Despite that well-known goal, our profession gravitated toward a variety of influential curriculum concepts and practices that largely ignored the aspirations that goal embodied.

Some of those concepts, and the practices associated with them, have been effective and attractive in a variety of ways. However, few have achieved what we now recognize as being required for genuine comprehensiveness, balance, and developmental growth. That calls for a curriculum encompassing all the musics of our multimusical culture, all the diverse ways these musics are learned, full representation of all the roles in music available outside schools (but poorly represented, if represented at all, inside them), and addressing all our students’ diverse musical enthusiasms and involvements, rather than the limited, uniform options we make available for them to learn. While we still have a long way to go to achieve that ideal, I believe we are becoming more ready to make progress toward it as the breadth of learnings the content standards stipulate becomes more fully understood and implemented, and as the breadth of values needing to be encompassed, as represented by the broadening of philosophical, political, social, and musical beliefs we have cultivated in recent years, becomes better internalized.

What Shall We Become?
Over the past half century, our programs in the schools have remained remarkably static. In general music we have not yet succeeded in conceptualizing a curriculum that is genuinely comprehensive and that includes all the musics in our culture (as that culture has flourished and diversified) and all the ways to be musical. We have concentrated our classroom teaching efforts not on achieving an equitable balance among all the many musical opportunities available to and cherished by our populace, but on the few that music educators favor. Our approaches to sequential learning have tended to be constrained by systems of instruction having little to do with how people actually engage with music outside school. And our elective offerings have been largely restricted to the single dimension of performance in the ways we define it, essential as that dimension surely is.

We have demonstrated admirable expertise in what we have offered, and we can and should be proud of our many achievements. We also, however, need to recognize that the gap between our often-stated ideals and our actual program offerings has become—perhaps has always been—too wide to be sustainable, accounting, at least in large part, for our tenuous position in education in the past and the present.

We can—indeed we must—preserve and protect our historical strengths while expanding our vision and our programs dramatically. Our values have always been a mixture of the promotional and the musical, with, sometimes, an uncomfortable if not embarrassing emphasis on the former. Now, in the face of significant expansion in our understanding of music’s values and its diverse nature, we must learn to represent music to our students in more inclusive ways. I believe we can be philosophically diverse as to the values our subject offers while preserving a unifying identity—if, that is, we adopt an open, synergistic posture about our values rather than a protectiveness of turf that relies more on contentiousness than correspondence. To the degree we seek common ground among divergent beliefs while also cherishing differences that do not require us to be in conflict with one another, we can hope to achieve the democratic ideal of unity within plurality. Achieving that ideal is essential for us as a profession and for our country—and our world—if humane values are to survive.

In light of over a half century of grappling with such issues, I am led to a mixed position as to our prospects for the future. In many ways, of course, that future is not in our control. But in at least some ways it will be what we choose to make it, and our obligation is to choose wisely. For me, a wise course would be to strive for comprehensiveness, both theoretical and practical, by balancing preservation with innovation. Our current strengths are our devotion to our subject, bolstered by an increasing wealth of evidence as to its profound contributions to human welfare and our expertise in offering and managing the programs we now have. Those strengths deserve our continuing dedication.

Our weakness lies in being far less inclusive of musics and musical roles than the culture we exist to serve. We are severely out of touch with the musical realities of our culture, and that seriously constrains the contributions we should be making, keeping us from realizing our full potential. If we are to significantly expand our offerings, we will have to gain expertise in new and different dimensions of music and education. That presents a major challenge that encompasses teaching practice, teacher education, research, assessment, and many other issues surrounding successful education in music just as it does in all other subjects.

I have little doubt that we are as able to be successful in all the endeavors awaiting our achievement as we have been in those we have already achieved. Our readiness and willingness to change remain in doubt, however. Inertia is such a powerful force that it can overcome imagination. The broad understandings of the profession have grown and changed a great deal in the past fifty years, as have I. But the gap between present aspirations and our continuing, limited practices is so great that we are forced to justify our largely static programs more with relentless, fervent persuasion—what we call “advocacy”—than with being relevant to our culture, which is, after all, the only secure basis for being as valued as we deserve.

Having grown from a young activist a half century ago to a no-longer-young activist now, I find that the battles of relevancy still need to be fought. Half a century is too long for us to have evaded the reforms we must undertake if we are to become an essential component in and foundation for the musical world that thrives all around us. Sticking with the status quo as much as we have does little to ensure our survival, let alone centrality, and both are conditions I deeply desire for the field that has so occupied my life. I look forward to making a more satisfied appraisal of our importance in education, reflecting our indispensable contributions to our culture, in my next fifty-year overview.

Notes
1. Bennett Reimer, “The College Course in Supplementary Instruments,” Music Educators Journal 46, no. 6 (1956): 42, 44.
2. Bennett Reimer, “Teaching the Beginning Instrumentalist: A Guiding Philosophy,” Virginia Music Educators Association Notes VIII, no. 4 (1956): 10–11.
3. Consortium of National Arts Edu-cation Associations, National Standards for Arts Education (Reston, VA: MENC, 1994).
4. Bennett Reimer, ed., Performing With Understanding: The Challenge of the National Standards for Music Education (Reston, VA: MENC, 2000).
5. Bennett Reimer, “What Is Perform-ing With Understanding?” and “An Agenda for Teaching Performing With Understanding,” in Performing With Understanding: The Challenge of the National Standards for Music Education (Reston, VA: MENC, 2000).
6. Bennett Reimer, “What Music Cannot Do,” Music Educators Journal 46, no. 1 (1959): 40, 42, 45.
7. For example, Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953); John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch, and Co., 1934); and Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956).
8. As in Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999) and Bennett Reimer, “New Brain Research on Emotion and Feeling,” Arts Education Policy Review 106, no. 2 (2004): 21–27.
9. Bennett Reimer, “Facing the Risks of the Mozart Effect,” Music Educators Journal 81, no. 1 (1999): 37–43.
10. My book A Philosophy of Music Education (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970) was the first of its kind. Chapters on philosophy of music education had appeared in Nelson B. Henry, ed., Basic Concepts in Music Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) and Charles Leonhard and Robert W. House, Foundations and Principles of Music Education (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959). Abraham Schwadron’s Aesthetics: Dimensions for Music Education (Washington, DC: MENC, 1967) presented an important explanation of how aesthetics can assist in the formulation of a music education philosophy. These and other earlier writings, such as by James Mursell, did not yet constitute a full book presenting a particular philosophical position.
11. So important was the change in our professional foundation from unity to diversity that my third edition of A Philosophy of Music Education: Advancing the Vision, (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003) had to be a new book retaining only some scattered material (some 10 percent) of the previous editions. In it, I address the breadth of issues now facing us as to whether and how we can survive as a coherent yet multivoiced profession.
12. Bennett Reimer, Development and Trial in a Junior and Senior High School of a Two-Year Curriculum in General Music. United States Office of Education Project H-116 (ERIC Document Reproduction Service, 1967).
13. Bennett Reimer, Silver Burdett Music (Morristown, NJ: Silver Burdett Company, 1974, 1976, 1981, 1985). Coauthored with Elizabeth Crook and David Walker (grades 1–6), and with Mary Hoffman and Al McNeil (grades 7, 8).
14. Bennett Reimer, “Education for Aesthetic Awareness: The Cleveland Area Project for the Arts in the Schools,” Music Educators Journal 64, no. 6 (1978):
66–69. n

Sidebars

1907–2007: The Past is Prelude – MENC Begins Its Second Century

In 1957, MENC’s golden anniversary, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the first human-made satellite to orbit Earth. MENC’s director of publications responded by asking, “What are we going to do to continue to merit the place of music in the educational program as it will be revised to meet the conditions and needs of the new age?”¹

This query, though prompted by a momentous event, was not unlike many other questions raised in the pages of Music Educators Journal during the fiftieth-anniversary year.² Those pages were filled with articles that simultaneously celebrated the organizational achievements of MENC, lauded the development of music education in the United States, and cautioned readers against complacency during the next fifty years. Those five decades have now passed, yet many questions raised in 1957 still resonate today, among them:

• What is music education?
• Where are we now—in the sense of quality, as well as quantity?
• What are our critical needs?
• What should be our goals?
• What are the nature and significance of musical growth?
• What is the needed research in music education?
• Is music in the schools justifiable if it is based on fun?
• Have we emphasized enough in the schools the creative process?
• Are we concerned about the exceptionally talented student?
• Do the school [officials] of today respond more readily to the music education program than they did twenty-five years ago?
• Is the training of teachers for general music classes also not the most difficult and crucial part of the teacher education program?
• Why do many students like music very much but at the same time do not like music they receive in the schools?
• Do we sometimes “drag our heels” due to too many traditions?
• Have we changed life for young people?³

Each article in the Centennial Series (see sidebar on p. 60) is offered in the spirit of the conversations that marked 1957’s golden anniversary. Bennett Reimer’s first MEJ article was published a little over fifty years ago, and the series begins with an overview of how his writings have reflected the changing music education field during that time. Other articles in the series will explore the leadership roles of women in MENC, the gradual evolution from teacher-centered to student-centered music instruction, and how MENC is situated within music education across the globe. The series will conclude with an analysis of issues confronting the field as music educators prepare to enter a second century of service to the United States and the world.

The MEJ Editorial Board of 1957 must have anticipated that their commemorative articles would shape the profession for years to come. The current MEJ Editorial Committee hopes that the Centennial Series will similarly prove to have been as influential when MENC celebrates its bicentennial in 2107.

Patrick K. Freer, guest editor
Head, Music Education Division
Georgia State University, Atlanta

Notes for “The Past Is Prelude”
1. William B. McBride, “Before Sputnik—and After,” Music Educators Journal 44, no. 3 (January 1958): 19.
2. Vanett Lawler, “50 Years (1907–1957): Look to the Future,” Music Educators Journal 43, no. 5 (April–May 1957): 33–38.
3. Compiled from “Preparing for the Years Ahead: A Report to the Membership of the Music Educators National Conference,” Music Educators Journal 44, no. 3 (January 1958): 20–23.

Questions about the Future of Music Education

1. Can we protect, cherish, and strengthen the excellence of our performance programs while developing parallel opportunities in all the other ways that the standards delineate and that our culture provides for people to engage with music?
2. Will we persevere and thrive because of, or in spite of, a more heterogeneous posture relating to our values and their implications for what and how we teach? Will our center as a profession hold? Or will we splinter into factions that can weaken or even destroy our identity?
3. Is our profession able, in the face of increasingly inclusive positions about its goals and therefore a more complex and more diversified set of ambitions, to pursue a vision sufficiently broad to encompass them all? If able, is it ready and willing?