Comprehensive Musicianship Revisited
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Title: The Anatomy of a Flawed Success: Comprehensive Musicianship Revisited Author(s): William Thomson Source: Thomson, W. (1990, Autumn). The anatomy of a flawed success: Comprehensive musicianship revisited. The Quarterly, 1(3), pp. 20-28. (Reprinted with permission in Visions of Research in Music Education, 16(1), Summer, 2010). Retrieved from http://www-usr.rider.edu/~vrme/ It is with pleasure that we inaugurate the reprint of the entire seven volumes of The Quarterly Journal of Music Teaching and Learning. The journal began in 1990 as The Quarterly. In 1992, with volume 3, the name changed to The Quarterly Journal of Music Teaching and Learning and continued until 1997. The journal contained articles on issues that were timely when they appeared and are now important for their historical relevance. For many authors, it was their first major publication. Visions of Research in Music Education will publish facsimiles of each issue as it originally appeared. Each article will be a separate pdf file. Jason D. Vodicka has accepted my invitation to serve as guest editor for the reprint project and will compose a new editorial to introduce each volume. Chad Keilman is the production manager. I express deepest thanks to Richard Colwell for granting VRME permission to re-publish The Quarterly in online format. He has graciously prepared an introduction to the reprint series. The Anatomy of a Flawed Success: Comprehensive Musicianship Revisited By William Thomson University of Southern California ike many of life's most cherished CMP could not fail to stir up healthy activities, the Contemporary Music educational excitement; it incorporated L Project began with one exemplary within its operations some of the best goal and ended with another. Begun to- musical minds of this country. It united ward the end of the 1950s as a means for them-to the extent that such creative providing real-life experiences for young and self-sufficient individuals can be composers (and at the same time thrust- united within a common effort-into a ing some new music into the public schools), domain of inquiry and action that was its final breaths in 1973 marked the expi- urgently needed by a field that (although ration of a remarkable success story. CMP its own participants seemed blissfully un- was one of the century's most ambitious aware of the danger) was on the verge of overhauls of the substance and proce- rapid decline. dures of music education. I know of no other single project in the United States Change in the Schools that more profoundly questioned the CMP came along at a time, beginning whys and wherefores of the conventional with the infamous 1960s, when a surpris- wisdoms invoked in developing musical- ing number of persons outside the profes- ity in lay and profession-bound students. sional circle of education took it upon themselves to show real concern for what was taking place within the schools. An •• If the field of medicine held MIT mathematician tinkered seriously tenets parallel to those of music with how mathematics might better be education} physicians would still taught in the middle schools, and a be administering aspirin to Princeton physicist grew nosey about how empirical sciences were taught in secondary patients with polio. ~ schools. Similarly, through the machinery of CMP, composers like Sam Adler, Ingolf And once the questions had been Dahl, Norman Dello Ioio, Leo Kraft, and asked, CMP confidently pitched revitaliz- Vincent Persichetti could become excited ing answers to a sometimes eager, some- over how music fared in the third grade; times inattentive professional audience. theorists Allen Forte and Bill Mitchell Whatever its full and persisting effect on might grapple with how ideas of musical music training mayor may not have structure could best be transmitted to been, CMP unarguably accomplished one eighth grade trombone players. Historians thing: It brought a fresh heuristic perspec- of the lofty accomplishments of Calvin tive of method and a liberating concep- Bower and Jan La Rue might ponder ways tion of the musical repertoire to institu- to account for musical style to a high tionalized music pedagogy. These products school chorus. And these wise and power- were noticed and publicly examined ful persons joined the considerable in- throughout the world, in the Orient as tellectual and emotional confederacy of well as in Western Europe and English- veteran educators like Beth Landis, Eunice speaking countries.! Boardman, Robert Werner, Louis Werson, 20 The Quarterly and Charles Leonhard. These were the tion, persons weak in musical enthusi- CMP people. They decided what its issues asms themselves and thus unlikely to cul- should be. tivate them in others. These teachers were The project could not have entered the direct products of an educational system American music education scene at a time that mixed a strait-jacketed music curricu- of greater need. I generalize broadly, but lum with inept "methods" courses, then one need not be a cultural historian to polished off the final product with a brief know that post-war music education had period of on-site testing called "practice fussily set up housekeeping in a comforta- teaching." This final indoctrination often ble vacuum. As a national totality, the dis- occurred under the supervision of people cipline lacked convincing and united pur- whose own training had been at least as pose, not to mention rousing ideals. confining. Why should music exist in the schools? As a result, the discipline of music edu- Answers were diverse at the time except cation, despite blessed pockets of inspir- in two critical aspects: They were pre- ing exceptions throughout the country, ponderately bromidic and they were in- had become a ghetto of empty methodol- variably extrinsic to the art: ogy. What happens in a music class pre- "Music makes good citizens!" sided over by one who is insufficiently prepared is bad enough; when this is "Music makes good neighbors!" combined with no convincing motive for "The boy who blows a horn action, pure devastation was on occasion will never blow a safe!" the result. The pep bands of the world In short, music education, as a field of had as much to do with educating future inquiry and action, desperately sought its music lovers as steer-wrestling had to do goals in the wrong places. The idea that with developing future farmers. The glee music makes sense as a human activity in clubs of America were fun, but their typi- and for itself was not a dominating moti- cal repertories, which extended all the vation in the schools of the post-war world. way from "I'm Taking a Jet Plane" to CMP urged that this should not be the resurrections of "Oh, What a Beautiful case. It argued that music accomplishes Morning," did little to evoke the aesthetic something for humankind that is unique thrill of the choral sound. Pep bands and and irreplaceable. Its proponents argued glee clubs were fun, yes; the clinker was that music, with other fine arts, can be that too many people thought they con- the most direct road to an individual's stituted sound arts education. ability to value things in and for them- selves, a condition long touted and Tracing Back to broadly revered as one of the moral cor- the Epicenter: 1870 nerstones of ]udeo-Christian life. Playing The many causes for this educational in a band or singing in a choir may make grinding-of-gears and spinning-of-wheels more poised, more ethical, more logic- would be easy to oversimplify, and I prone, more reverent individuals of us all; don't wish to commit that error. My im- but that it might do so is somewhat be- mediate purpose and my tangential grasp side a more cosmic point: Music embod- of the whole problem lead me to deal ies its own intrinsic worth. We do it for only with those causes which the Con- itself. That was a daring perspective to temporary Music Project attempted to ad- lay on band directors or high school prin- dress directly. Problems were not hard to cipals or school boards around 1965. find in the early 1960s. As participants in Through its Composers-in-Residence the project looked inward as well as out- Program, leaders in the project-its policy ward, they traced the shortcomings of committee and administrative staff-had public school music to disturbing condi- discovered a disarming but widely con- tions in higher education, where the firmed weakness in the country's schools: schools' teachers had been educated. The Pre-collegiate music faculties had been in- pervading music discourse that gave sub- filtrated by many persons of little musical stance to their educations was more con- know-how and even less creative imagina- fining than liberating. It was dominated- Volume I, Number 3 21 depending on the particular institution political nor geographical lines. The void under scrutiny-by the harmony of was by nature indiscriminate and total. Bach's chorale settings via the sterile Thus musician/teachers entered profes- computations of a chemist-cum-music sional life equipped only with a repertory theorist; or the contrapuntal magic of in the mind's ear that most charitably Palestrina and Lassus filtered through the might be called "skimpy;' and armed scholarly sieve of a Danish musicologist; with discursive and analytical techniques or perhaps even the two-centuries-old foraged from harmonic ideas of the eight- compositional rules-of-thumb of Jean- eenth century (as they might apply to the Phillipe Rameau as they had been refined music of Bach-through-Brahms). Overall, and elaborated by a succession of French, they lacked the kind of musical insight German, and English pedagogues, from and professional passion that inspires Andre Geldage and Hugo Riemann to remarkable learning, that spurs students Ebenezer Prout, via American Percy on to lifelong enthusiasms for the art.