Michael L. Mark is professor emeritus
in the music department at Towson University in Towson, Maryland.
This paper will set the stage for Vision 2020: The Housewright
Symposium on the Future of Music Education by describing the events
that were critical to MENC and to music education from the time
leading up to the Tanglewood Symposium in 1967 to the present.
The reason for reviewing past events, for studying history, is
to understand why things are as they are now and to help approach
the future in as educated a manner as possible. The distinguished
historian and former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin analyzes
the relationship between past and future by differentiating the
seers and the prophets of ancient ages. He writes that the seer
“forecast how events turn out,” while “the prophet
prescribed what men should believe, and how they should behave.”1
This distinction also holds for the Tanglewood Symposium, when
MENC emulated the prophet, not the seer.
The last thirty years have seen more change, and faster change,
than any other three decades in history. Now, only thirty-two
years after that symposium, the United States has become a different
society in many ways. American’s think differently, live
differently, behave differently, and have different expectations
of the future. This raises critically important questions: How
have these differences affected music education, and how have
they affected MENC? What if the Tanglewood Symposium hadn't occurred?
What course would MENC have taken from then to now? Before we
tackle these questions, let us examine some of the facts of the
Tanglewood Symposium.
MENC began expanding its functions dramatically in the second
half of the twentieth century, and especially since the Tanglewood
Symposium, to fulfill its ongoing mission of advancing music education
and the professional growth of its members.2
Its role has been critical because with its membership, committees,
publications, workshops, conferences, and symposia, MENC alone
has the organizational structure and credibility to guide the
profession through an era of accelerated, profound change. This
paper traced the activities that MENC has undertaken as the umbrella
organization for the music education profession. It describes
a variety of roles assumed by the organization in intellectual
leadership, curriculum, professional development, advocacy, and
professional standards.
Trends in music education and in every other discipline generally
occur in response to a particular societal need. That need is
usually expressed first in some sort of large, clearly defined
social movement, and later is often confirmed in the form of legislation
or judicial decisions. The Tanglewood Symposium is a good case
in point. It did not take place in a vacuum. It was a commanding
response to what was happening in, and to, American society at
that time. And so before looking at the symposium, let us examine
its societal backdrop to see why the Tanglewood Symposium occurred.
There were several reasons for the symposium. One of them was
plain and simple anger. Our professional leaders were angered
by the Yale Seminar on Music Education of 1963. That seminar was
supported by a large government grant to analyze school music
and to propose improvements. But the analysis and proposing were
done by musicologists, composers, and performers who knew little
or nothing about music education, and who did this without the
participation of music educators. Professional music education
leaders were exasperated by the Yale Seminar. In fact, Tanglewood
might have been called a seminar too, but its leaders chose to
call it a symposium to distance it as far as possible from the
Yale Seminar.3 The Tanglewood Symposium
allowed professionals to analyze their own venue.
Now, let’s look at the larger societal reason for the Tanglewood
Symposium. There were three momentous catalysts of the 1960s that
changed the way that Americans viewed their society – school
reform, civil rights, and technology. Together, these three characteristics
of the 1960s profoundly influenced the United States, and in doing
so, they also influenced MENC.
The first catalyst: school reform. School reform began with the
creation of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW)
in 1953. The Bureau of Education of HEW was the first attempt
of the federal government to influence the school curriculum,
which until that time had been considered the province only of
state and local governments. Earlier, the few education issues
of interest to the federal government were handled by the Federal
Security Agency. We might measure the progress of school reform
by the problem areas identified by the United States Bureau of
Education in 1954: illiteracy, the relationship between school
dropouts and juvenile delinquency, special instruction for exceptional
children, the education of children of migratory workers, and
the education of teachers. These issues are still with us, and
our continual efforts toward reform since the 1950s have not produced
satisfactory results. Reform efforts intensified when the Soviet
Union advanced beyond us in the space race by launching Sputnik
in 1957. This was a rude awakening for Americans because we had
thought that we were the most technologically advanced country
in the world. We suddenly realized that technologically, the Soviet
military was capable of threatening our security. Then, the American
public learned that our schools were failing to prepare students
well enough to meet the military technological needs of the Cold
War. The federal government responded by gradually extending its
powers to areas that had previously been the domain of state and
local governments. When the federal government took an active
role in school curriculum for the first time, we entered what
would be a continuous, ongoing, and never-ending era of school
reform. This was in the early 1960s, before MENC had firmly established
itself in the government relations arena. That function was to
evolve in response to a particularly misguided education objective
that has colored virtually every reform effort to the present.
Many reformers lost sight of the fact that the basic skills –
reading, writing, and mathematics – are simply the tools
that open the gate to education but are not an education in themselves.
These skills have been spotlighted extensively now for four decades.
They have been a major focus of education policy development,
assessment, and funding. The emphasis on skills, rather than education,
has posed a threat both to music education and to society in general,
and since the late 1960s, MENC has dedicated much time, energy,
and money to persuading the public, policymakers, and its own
practitioners that music has a legitimate place in the education
of all children.
School reform continues to this day, but “reform” is
no longer the correct term. The work implies that after something
is reformed we go about our business in a new, enlightened manner.
It would be better just to call it “change” because
it echoes the ongoing change in society. Whatever the correct
formula might be to fix our schools, we have not found it yet.
Nor do we always take a carefully reasoned approach to reform.
Allen Britton wrote in 1958:
American music educators have demonstrated
what may be consideredan easy readiness to climb aboard any
intellectual bandwagon which happened to be near by, and to
trust it to arrive at destinations appropriate for music educators,
or worse, to adopt its destinations as their own without careful
enough scrutiny of the intellectual properties involved.4
Now, forty years later, change has become
the way of life for educators and for all Americans. In 1967,
music educators had to look to a future that was radically different
from their realities of the 1960s, especially in the relationship
between their profession and the public. Somebody had to lead
the way, and that, of course, was the Music Educators National
Conference.
The second catalyst: Civil rights. Civil rights defined the era
in which American belatedly decided to honor the constitutional
principle of equality of all Americans. The civil rights movement
of the 1960s was fueled both by idealism and the demand for fairness
on the part of many Americans. Congress had passed civil rights
legislation much earlier that the 1960s. In fact, the first civil
rights law was passed in 1866, and the second in 1875. Those laws
were generally ignored, and they were pushed aside in the 1880s
and 1890s by other statutes that we call Jim Crow laws, which
led to the doctrine of “separate but equal.” The principle
of separate but equal legally segregated white and black Americans
from each other in most areas of daily living. But the doctrine
did not provide equality to black Americans in any aspect of life.
In 1954, the Brown v. Topeka Supreme Court decision desegregated
the schools, and we saw the first truly significant step toward
equal civil rights. The decision did not integrate the schools;
it just made segregation illegal. New housing patterns, permissive
welfare laws, ineffective drug enforcement laws, and policies
that concentrated the poorest citizens in urban ghettos worked
together to prevent widespread desegregation. Finally Congress
passed a strong Civil Rights Law in 1966, this one with teeth,
and in 1968, the Supreme Courts affirmed the 1866 Civil Rights
Bill, 102 years after its original passage.
Civil rights, along with the war
in Vietnam, was the backdrop of societal change, and it set the
stage for the introduction of multicultural studies in schools.
There were other large social issues during the 1960s as well,
especially the war in Vietnam. The decade of the 1960s was turbulent.
Demonstrations and marches were common throughout the country,
in the streets and schools and on campuses, and they were often
violent. This was how many Americans demonstrated to their leaders
that they wanted change, and the leaders responded positively
with judicial decisions and powerful legislation to empower not
only black Americans, but also women, young people, and others.
The third catalyst: Technology.
Americans were very familiar with technology by 1967, but had
not yet learned to use it to their greatest advantage. Its applications
for individuals were years in the future, but most people were
aware that their lives would be more and more affected by technology.
They just did not know in what ways.
