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. Di- Goetschius. rect application of the McHose-Jeppesen- The rumblings of music, as represented Goetschius-Prout formalizations to any in these pedagogical tracts, had their epi- music of any time or place was tenuous if center around 1870; they did not extend not wholly irrelevant, yet it was accepted far in either direction, earlier or later. as standard, professional practice. If the Their shock waves branched cautiously field of medicine held tenets parallel to back into the madrigals and motets of those of music education, physicians "ancient times;' and forward perhaps as would still be administering aspirin to far as the "ultra-moderns" like Faure, patients with polio. Debussy, Reger, Elgar, and maybe even I remember well a CMP seminar class I John Alden Carpenter. The world of taught at Eastman in the summer of 1972. music, as represented in sonic explications A large circle of the students expressed a of the educational setting, was not broad- fervent wish to introduce some of Schoen- ening; it was not interactive with the rich berg's early atonal music to their classes. and compelling real world, and it sug- So why didn't they? Because, they meekly gested no inquisitiveness about that world, admitted, they didn't know what to say past, present, or future. Its vision tun- about it. And they asked: "What do you nelled through a magnificent but con- say about a piece that isn't in a major or fined lode. minor key, that doesn't have the kind of Teachers of the 1960s developed as mu- melody you find in Mozart or Haydn, sicians and educators, depending upon that doesn't fall into an A B A form, that their individual maturities at the time, doesn't have a melody-accompaniment within the decades of 1930-1960. Yet texture (or isn't a fugue), or doesn't con- the music of Shostakovich (d. 1975), of tain the kinds of chords that can be sym- Hindemith (d. 1963), of Schoenberg bolized by Roman numerals?" (Of course, (d. 1951), of Bartok (d. 1945), or even of I told them.) Mahler (d. 1911)was little more than al- luded to in our music classrooms, much Seeking a Synthesis less performed, dissected, or made the Leadership of CMP was dominated by object of contemplation. This music was an infectious mixture of idealism, opti- not made a part of the generalizations mism, and a powerful sense of mission. that can provide knowing people with Like William Schuman's earlier Land M .tools for understanding unforeseen condi- Project at juilliard- (a more limited pro- tions of the future. And this silence about ject in scope and depth, although similar these contemporary masters was not im- in aims and techniques), the educational posed because of excessive attention facet of CMP's work was motivated by a being paid to the music of America, simple yet radical premise: Educated mu- whether jazz of indigenous musicians or sicians, whether they be composers, the European-influenced musics of Varese, historians, theorists, performers, conduc- Copland, Ives, Gershwin, Harris, or Pis- tors or educators, should be diligently ton. The silence was not imposed along and explicitly cultivated-to "reasonable

22 The Quarterly degrees"-in each of those mutually com- in a particular location to make "More plementary subdisciplines, regardless of pedal there!" an appropriate gesture. I narrow professional niches sought in life. suspect that the reader can readily im- And like the ]uilliard experiment, teachers agine the same heuristic scenario applied of broad and certain musical knowledge to a host of educational situations, from and perspective were demanded. We crescendos for tuba players to parallel openly eschewed the Romanticist ideal of fifths for theory students. the aspiring pupil, who through a mix- Related to this comingling of the whys ture of pious mimicry and patient osmo- of music-making with the whats of tradi- sis, absorbs the Artist-Teacher's accumu- tion was the project's distinctly ecumeni- lated vision. cal air. It derived from three implicit hy- What we sought, as hindsight makes potheses that, to my knowledge, were rather clear, was complementary to a con- shared by the participants. First, we be- spicuous and profound change that was lieved that the repertory of teaching taking place in postsecondary music edu- should in principle omit nothing that cation in this country just after World could contribute to sharpened under- War II: Conservatories (which trained standings and broadened perspectives. professional performers), and normal Certainly, modern musicians must be in- schools (which trained teachers), and troduced to music from outside the West- music departments (which trained musi- European concert orbit of 1700-1900, the cologists) were all essential cogs in our music of Common Practice. American educational machine, but they This conviction was perhaps felt and were being eclipsed by a broader-based pushed most strongly in the case of type of music institution. Under the music composed in our own time, which unifying roof of new schools of music, a we fervently argued in our second hypo- synthesis of functions was subsuming thesis: The music of our own time should what had in the past been separate.f be the point of departure from which an New and powerful schools of music, individual's musical skills and values must such as those at Indiana, Illinois, Michi- extend, backward and forward in time. gan, University of Rochester, North Texas The infant begins a linguistic life with the State, Northwestern, and Southern Cali- sounds of the present. The growing child fornia+, set the model and the standards learns language from the hit-and-miss en- and experienced immediate and rapid counters of vibrant life around him. And growth. These awesome schools, usually rightfully, the adolescent musician begins more heavily populated than their more formal training with a ready-made musi- specialized counterparts, were in many cal culture. It may be a culture dominated ways amalgamations of the virtues and by Mantovani strings, or by the guitars of the foibles of those three kinds of train- the Lightcrust Doughboys, by the brass of ing institutions they attempted to forge Stan Kenton or by the tunes of Giuseppe into one. By and large, however, they pur- Verdi. Whatever, it is a mixture of sonic sued a more egalitarian student-institution immediacy that must be recognized and relationship and a more holistic approach accounted for as a meaningful point of to subject matter. departure. This egalitarian-holistic bias fit CMP predilections admirably. Whereas in the A Place for All Musics past a teacher might order, "More pedal But the catholicity of CMP policy could there!", the CMP-favored discourse would not stop with imposing only recent music make some choice additions. While it on a reluctant teaching profession. Most might well achieve the same immediate of us realized that all music, not just what end with about the same injunction, it we revere as Art music, can be a part of could also store up helpful generalizations education, and usually with immediate for application to future musical encoun- beneficent effect. Certainly the most trea- ters; it would engage teacher and student sured products of jazz and popular tradi- in dialogue, seeking just when and why tions deserve integration, and serious en- certain musical conditions might transpire counters with the musics of other cultures-

Volume I, Number 3 23 music well removed from the White-West- but by all means to some source that European circularity of the past two could undergird a sturdier conceptual centuries-could but deepen the understand- base than one confined to the Bach- ing of one's own cultural trappings. Just Brahms orbit. as the study of a foreign language can so- This enriched "personal repertory" lidify the conceptual grasp of one's native was, in our collective judgment, an im- tongue, so can the study of a "foreign provement over a sampling from a limited music" enliven receptivity and enhance cultural milieu, deep and profound meanings for one's native music. Concert though it might be. An understanding of music-or let us say "Classical Music" -is general principles is enhanced through only one of many musical subcultures; it acquaintance with ever-larger numbers of is not the sole source of musical wisdom particular instances, whether we study nor of aesthetic gratification. music or fruitflies. Thus, for the Ameri- So this was our CMP pitch: All musics can educator, Japanese gagaku or North must have a place in the learning process, Indian ragas or Javanese gamelans or as they might be directly cogent to better Byzantine chants were never imagined as understanding, to a tightened hold on the replacements (nor as serious contenders) for traditions closer to home. They were musical experience and its properties. seen as enriching potentials, as side issues This ideal of expanded teaching reper- in a larger context, as a supporting cast tory was misunderstood by some musi- rather than co-stars. And it was in this cians. On occasion it became the butt of ecumenical spirit that we viewed the edu- the charge that CMP ideas were unrealisti- cator's professional responsibility as one cally overdrawn; they could lead only to of remaining artistically alive, maintaining superficiality, to very little learned about a responsive attitude toward new musical a lot. It was an honest and understanda- artifacts as they become known, regard- ble inference, even though false. The less of whether new or reclaimed from project's goal was never to irresponsibly the past. From this, we trusted, one add all the world's music to an already could continue arriving at ever-renewed crowded evidentiary docket. Teachers syntheses of what is "true," and what were in fact urged to draw in their own might be of sufficient value to retain and teaching from sources close to them, ex- pass on to a subsequent generation. panded to the limits possible, but always The so-called "all-properties" approach deriving generalizations from a personal championed by CMP gained some in- reservoir of expertise rather than from fluential status during the late 1960s and hawked facts and truisms about unknown early 1970s, sometimes under the unfor- quantities. tunate designate "The Parametric Ap- I remember with admiration how the proach." It has remained a helpful guide gifted composer David Ward-Steinman in analysis for which Schenkerian har- would use his monumental skills at jazz monic/melodic prescriptions do not domi- improvisation, within a seminar setting, nate. It became more a part of collegiate to illustrate how procedures and tech- teaching after jan La Rue's textbook, niques from that genre could be used to Guidelines For Style Analysis, was pub- introduce or support ideas from Bach or lished in 1970. It sometimes became one Stravinsky. Teachers for whom jazz im- of those jargon phrases-whether as provisation was an integral part of their properties or parameters-whose clichf musical lives were inspired to do the status could hide a very precious truth: same; those who didn't know a riff from Any view of music furnished solely by a twelve-bar blues were urged to cultivate dissections of only harmony or melody is greater familiarity with the idiom. But ultimately impotent. Music consists of far lacking a confirmed understanding, they more determining elements, even if non- were well-advised to turn elsewhere for melodic and nonharmonic properties their broadening exemplars, to established have been ignored by speculative theory roots-perhaps Victor Herbert or Richard during the preceding centuries. In CMP Rogers or even to television commercials- we tried to stem this powerful tide.

24 The Quarterly Beyond Melody and Harmony acted with by people who at various Our antidote was to replace myopic du- times would be involved in the range of ality with a perspective and with tech- professional roles that prevail in the real niques that could better account for the music world. "Learn by Deweying" was a totality of music as kinetic process. Timbre crucial injunction for us. Musicians learn is not a word nor concept even suggested to be musical by doing musical things. in Piston's Harmony, in McHose's Con- Musicians play and sing, of course, but trapuntal Harmonic Techniques of the they can play and sing better by knowing Eighteenth Century, nor in Goetschius's well the motions that complement play- The Homophonic Forms of Musical Com- ing and singing. They compose music position. And yet that property's deter- (which meant a good deal more for CMP mining importance, in the music of Mozart than adding chords to hymn tunes). They as well as in the music of Debussy or engage in research-preferably with pri- Varese or Schoenberg, would be hard to mary sources-to answer questions about overstate. style, historical successions, performance And texture! Surely those old cubby- practice. They theorize as an approach to holes of conventional wisdom, mono- comprehending structure. They learn by phonic, homophonic and polyphonic, teaching others. could not, in their exclusivity, adequately All of this was a well-calculated reac- channel our testimonials about how tion to the wasteful tradition of artistic sound complexes relate as they move instruction as a laying-on-of-hands ritual, through time. They don't help, for exam- one in which an ineffable goodness and ple, in categorizing the ways stratification truth flow, when the connecting pipes are plays a role in Ives' Unanswered Ques- right, from teacher to student. Music edu- tion; but they leave equally inexplicable cation under CMP auspices became an similar conditions in Bach fugues (like the earnest search, not the terminal inculca- C# minor of WTC 1). We can find too tion of unarguable facts ex cathedra. It many instances of how fluctuating densi- was an open-ended process, teacher and ties of sound strata shape a work, con- student searching together, teacher (most vincing us that the hallowed harmony of the time) leading the way. The end texts of yesteryear were poor almanacs goal was musicians who could continue for predicting the weather of music. to learn, whether as pianist for the local Clearly our teaching lexicon had to be Rotary Club, as principal horn for the fattened up; otherwise we were struggling Cleveland Orchestra, as musicology pro- along trying to talk about automobiles fessor in the state university, or as music while using the conceptual frames of teacher in the local elementary school. goatherds. It seemed abundantly clear that we could not even describe what we Assessing CMP's Contributions heard if it did not readily and neatly CMP officially ceased as a project in align with our eighteenth-century vocabu- 1973, when its funding grant from the laries, if it could not yield to tonic, sub- Ford Foundation expired. Now, some two dominant, and dominant chords fraterniz- decades later, many of its basic tenets and ing within spans of symmetrically articulated some of its treasured techniques and time. Faced with a new (or very old) procedures have trickled down to become piece of music, the uninformed music part of the conventional wisdom of the teacher of 1965 might have responded pedagogical world. Compared with usual like the farmer visiting the zoo who saw practice in 1955 or 1945, the actual his first giraffe: "There ain't no such amount of music that confronts students animal!" today in music theory and history classes And last, this vastly enriched repertory, (as aural reality, not just as notes on to be viewed through a new set of cogni- paper or names and dates) is stunning. tive filters that includes grids for more Some of this wealth of access to sound- properties than just harmony and melody, ing music came about, of course, through was to be dealt with in teaching in a the unprecedented developments of music slightly different way. It was to be inter- reproduction and storage-reel-to-reel

Volume t, Number 3 25 tape, cassettes, compact disks-that have pioneering in those other areas spilled transformed that industry since the 1950s. over into it. For too many piano and vio- But CMP helped show people that tradi- lin teachers today, Prokofiev sonatas and tional teaching had relied too often and Debussy and Scriabin etudes still seem to too heavily on words and notes without represent the avant-garde. constant reference to the real thing. CMP This oversight reveals an error of gave us something worthwhile to do with strategy on the part of the project's all of those new sound-reproduction play- policy committee, an error which I things, something cogent to say about the helped to perpetuate as a committee messages they carry. CMP brought to a member from 1963 until 1973. It meant needy profession a way of dealing with overlooking or neglecting the incomparable its subject matter. power wielded by performance teachers And maybe the project's most impor- in modeling the perspective and sense of tant contribution to music education was values of young musicians. Since their its fuming and fussing and pointing ac- earliest and most vivid experiences in the cusing fingers until the classroom's musi- art (except as listeners) is in cal diet was exposed for the starvation performing-certainly not in reflective pur- fare it was. Today, institutions that pur- suit of conceptual wisdom- that aspect port to educate musicians revel in rich of the educational process is a far more repertories, in the musics of other cul- critical influence than superb courses in tures, in new music, ancient music, even junior analysis or music history can be. occasionally in forgotten music composed by the not-so-famous. Some of these Conflicting Conditions musics have unobtrusively crept into our and Ideologies consciousness via anthologies, which Its acknowledged victories aside, the were themselves a kind of publication un- ways and means of CMP did not, alas, needed, and thus unconceived, prior to sweep the civilized world. To my knowl- CMP's influence. [A case in point is edge, people from the world's centers of Charles Burkhart's anthology, first pub- culture do not on occasion give signs of lished in 1979, which begins with plain- recognition with such responses as "Why, chant and ends with a work by Bruce that came from the CMP!" as one might Saylor (b. 1946).] A monumental range of say "Why, that's a bit Freudian!" or musics is regularly tapped for teaching, "That's much too Darwinian for me!" My not just as exotic overlay nor afterthought personal disdain for the canonization of but as integral enrichment of regular anything manmade leads me to believe study. Few major schools today do not that in the long run this is for the best. have early music programs, ensembles We can nonetheless recognize two broad devoted exclusively to music of recent and powerful reasons for a less-than- vintage, classes and ensembles whose per- cosmic infiltration of eMP particulars, formance metier is music of cultures re- reasons that have nothing to do with the mote from the Christian-Hebraic orbit of force or relevancy of CMP ideas nor the our history. Through CMP urging and gui- way they were developed during its dance, many teachers now in their matu- lifetime. rity were led to discover and develop The first of these reasons was continu- ways of thinking through and communi- ing change in the public perception of cating about music in ways that free the the place of music education in the spirit rather than imprison the mind. schools. After the release of the vaunted Hindsight forces us to observe that Harvard Report in 1952, and with the in- CMP attention was focused more on com- sistent scrappy urging of Admiral Hiram position, theory, and history teaching Rickover, the post-Sputnik world found than on performance teaching as such. music lumped together in the educational For this reason, its impact was less in that pecking order with shop and home eco- domain than in any other, and I find rare nomics. Perhaps, as a subject, music was evidence in solo performance teaching perceived as even slightly less important today that leads me to believe that CMP's than these subjects because it was "less

26 The Quarterly practical"; whatever the reason, as a "soft Schenker's doctrines began to be talked subject" music did not fare well in the about in superficial ways just after the competitive struggle for public support war. No translations of his considerable and educational funds. writings were available at that time, ex- The initiation of this long-lived and cept in limited batches and in indirect eventually crippling reduction of the ways.v Championed early by Allen Forte, funds channelled into arts education at all Bill Mitchell, Roger Sessions, and Felix levels of precollegiate instruction coin- Salzer in New York and by Oswald Jonas cided with the early 1960s, while CMP in Chicago, a discernable spread did not was first beginning to frame its own occur until around the early 1960s, when educational policies. It soon became clear the better-known ideas (structural levels, that the finest teachers, using the most tonicization, and the concept of the elegantly planned strategies and foolproof Urlinie) began to seep into graduate-class materials, cannot make a difference if no discussions. By 1975 I suspect that most money is made available to keep them undergraduate music theory classes were employed. It makes no difference whether in some way influenced, directly or in- CMP or Suzuki or Kodaly or Ouija boards directly, by Schenker's principal ideas prevail; if the teacher isn't there, or if the about structural unfolding. time for music is cut down to one hour a The influx of Schenkerian ideas gave week, or if the school board can't buy musicians insights they had found in no books or records, then the music program other theoretical systems. His perspective is scrapped. of an elaborated basic structure. and his The national arts education neglect, co-embodiment of contrapuntal and whose potential depth began to show it- chordal principles as shapers of the musi- self by the 1970s, and which continues to cal utterance marked an advance over the erode even remnants of programs today, 5 separation of melody and harmony that is not likely to impress the ideas, processes, had dogged (and perplexed) musical or values of music education on anybody. speculation over the ages. But these ad- In this respect, the Contemporary Music vances were not made without cost. His Project came along about ten years too theories, like Rarneau's, can tell us more late to realize what could have been its about eighteenth-century music than impact, or to provide the basis for per- about anything before or after. A clearer suasive arguments that might have saved view of the scenery was opened up, but more resources for the arts in the schools. the breadth of coverage still left much to The second reason for the attenuation be desired. of CMP influence can be traced to music Schenkerian prescriptions and "ap- departments and schools and conservato- proaches" nonetheless became canonic ries. A product of a curious conservatism, law for a growing number of professors, not to say reactionism, began to settle especially theorists and historians, as the over musical academia in the mid-1960s. decade of the 1970s rolled on. Even This conservatism was manifested most today some of our colleagues would have directly by two musical ideologies which, us impose Schenker's ideas of musical ex- although themselves mutually contradic- plication on the whole of basic instruc- tory, dampened the airy atmosphere of tion as a kind of grand pedagogical Ur- CMP's liberating gestures. One of these satz.? This would be about as beneficial ideologies was the prescriptive har- as for contemporary medical schools to monic/melodic theory of Heinrich base all anatomy instruction for surgeons Schenker; the other was the wave of seri- on the collected works of Galen, but alism and set theory that enveloped in- such proposals merit public discussion. fluential faculty members in the most Whatever posterity may hold for a progressive schools, beginning as early as Schenkerian Utopia, academia's adoption 1950. Both of these remain thoroughly of his basic premises and its consequent operative in music in higher education reversion to a tighter rein on the musical today, although both reached their apo- substance, around 1970-75, essentially gees within the decade of the 1980s. froze many persons in their tracks, frus-

Volume I, Number 3 27 trating attempts to widen the perspective, monials to educational wisdom, which to face up to a larger reality that exceeds perhaps take their cue from the Holly- tertial chords hovering within the celes- wood film principle that Every Success tial balance of I IV V harmonies. The Must Have Its Sequel. waxing of Schenkerian procedures ineluc- For obvious reasons, emphasis on note tably accompanied the waning of CMP's structures imposed by adoption of this One World. new duality, Schenkerian harmonic Coincidentally and synchronically with theory and the set theory of the spread of this new-old perspective dodecaphony, inevitably led to a condi- came the advent into academic discourse tion of repertorial anorexia quite as of set theory, initially developed as the damaging as that which existed before explanatory concepts and illuminating CMP. With the marked decline of serial vocabulary of serial music. Too few of us music among young composers today, the pause to marvel at how inherently con- strength of set theory as a conceptual tradictory are Schenker's harmonic reduc- tool can be expected to fade correspond- tionism and the set-theoretic elaborated ingly to a lesser role in the total educa- by Milton Babbitt (from Schoenberg's tional stream. But until that happens, and more intuitively derived axioms). That until Schenker's theories are viewed more they began to be folded together into the soberly as enlightening but less than cos- educations of musicians, by many of the mically prophetic, the CMP legacy will same people at about the same time, sug- necessarily remain modest and, to a large gests only that we still sometimes fail to extent, covert. proceed cautiously when confronted with As in all else, timing turns out to be implausible bedfellows. everything. 0 Be that as it may, the simultaneous in- stallations of Schenker and Serialism un- wittingly solved the problem of how mu- Notes sical people can meaningfully conceive of l. I fondly remember the thrill CMP regulars felt and discourse about the totality of music- when we first received copies of Japanese transla- or so it seemed. Indeed, it was simple: tions of some of our CMP-induced articles. The arti- Heinrich Schenker showed us how to talk cles were fortunately printed in English as well as Japanese; otherwise we would not have known about tonal music (tonal music com- what they were. posed, that is, from J. S. Bach through J. 2. Vincent Persichetti, who was a central figure in Brahms), and Professor Babbitt taught us the Land M program, was a member of the CMP how to talk about serial and dodecaphonic Policy Committee and taught in some of our seminars. music. 3. Certainly there were schools where all three Thus these unidentical twins, the pre- educational functions had occurred for years. The eminent conceptual systems of 1960- shift after the war was mainly one of student drawing-power and prominence in the professions. 1980, gave birth to a new taxonomy of 4. Prior to the ease and speed of jet travel, artist- music itself. It became evident that now teachers were confined to conservatory faculties, there are two musics: One is Tonal, and which were invariably in large metropolitan centers. the other is Post-Tonal. (Nomenclature can An active concert artist like Janos Starker could not have lived in Bloomington, Indiana (and maintained give an inkling of rough chronology, even a concert career) before 1955. if it does little to characterize musical 5. For a recent informative survey of this continu- substances.) Evidence of this turn of ing decline, see James Hanshumaker's "Forging In- strumental Programs for an Urban Society," Music events is easy to find today in the bulle- Educators Journal, November 1989, pages 34-37. tins of most progressive music depart- 6. Explanatory exhortations of Schenker's ideas ments and conservatories. Courses like appeared in America as early as 1935 (Roger Ses- Tonal Analysis and Post-Tonal Analysis, sions, Modern Music 12, May-June, 1935, 170-178). 7. A recent plea is that of professors Riggins and Tonal Counterpoint and Post-Tonal Coun- Proctor in the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy terpoint limn the pages of those testi- 3, 1989, 1-24.

28 The Quarterly