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Research. MENC
has been deeply involved in research for some time by 1967 through
its publications and a variety of research projects and events.
The Music Education Research Council (MERC) established the
Society for Research in Music Education (SRME) in 1960 to encourage
and advance research in music education. MERC eventually oversaw
the Journal of Research in Music Education, which had been founded
in 1953, and later it assumed responsibility for Update: Applications
of Research in Music Education. MERC found a way to involve
many more music educators in its research program with the creation
of the Special Research Interest Groups (SRIGs) at the 1978
MENC national convention. Now there are thirteen SRIG’s.12
Each publishes a newsletter and meets at MENC national conventions.
MENC and
Schirmer Books cosponsored the publication of the Handbook of
Research on Music Teaching and Learning,13
edited by Richard Colwell, in 1992. The Handbook is a definitive
guide, a vade mecum, to the music education research resources,
methodologies, issues, and controversies, and is one of the
most significant events in the history of music education research.
It contains original essays by fifty-five American, Australian,
British, and Canadian scholars.
Research findings have also been
disseminated at a variety of MENC-related symposia since the
late 1970s. MENC cosponsored the three-part Ann Arbor Symposium
from 1978 to 1980 to explore the relationship between research
in behavioral psychology and in music education psychology.
That symposium appears to have been a model for numerous future
symposia sponsored by MENC and its SRIGs, and by universities.
Their subjects have included the relationship between music
education and social anthropology, philosophy of music education,
general research, general music, early childhood education,
conducting, history, social psychology, and others.
Philosophy.
One of the most critical needs of the
music education profession at mid-century was for a central
unifying philosophy. MENC had played a key role in 1954 when
it began the process of professional philosophical introspection
by appointing its Commission on Basic Concepts, which represented
music education, psychology, sociology, and philosophy. The
commission’s report was published as the 1958 yearbook
of the National Society for the Study of Education, entitled
Basic Concepts in Music Education.14
This landmark work, along with another book, Foundations and
Principles of Music Education (1959) by Charles Leonhard and
Robert House,15 provided the framework
for the development of an aesthetic philosophy of music education.
The two books and other writings of the 1950s and 1960s encouraged
music educators to teach music for its own value, rather than
for its extramusical, or ancillary, benefits. The movement leading
to the philosophy of aesthetic education reached maturity with
the publication of Bennett Reimer’s book, A Philosophy
of Music Education.16 This book
immediately became the primary work of the music education philosophical
literature. The first of the eight points of the Tanglewood
Declaration was consonant with this philosophical position.
It stated: “Music serves best when its integrity as an
art is maintained.” MENC expanded its involvement in music
education philosophy when it approved a new SRIG in Philosophy
in 1992. Since then, philosophy has received a good deal of
attention at MENC professional meetings.
Psychology.
The profession has also seen major developments
in psychology since the Tanglewood Symposium. Since the 1970s,
many psychologists and music education researchers have focused
their efforts on musical perception, cognition, and other specialized
interests. More recently, researchers have concentrated on the
theories of multiple intelligence’s of such psychologists
as Howard Gardner, Philip Phoenix, Elliot Eisner, and Paul Hirst.
Howard Gardner points out the “one evident factor in the
rethinking of intelligence is the perspective introduced by
scholars who are not psychologists.”17
That statement is clearly true in music education, where scholars
have complemented the work of psychologists by examining the
relationship between theories of intelligence and music education.
MENC has supported these interests in its publications and through
several of its SRIGs, including those that focus on affective
response to music, creativity, learning and development, philosophy,
measurement and evaluation, and perception.
New trends
in general music. During the 1950’s and 1960’s, two
European music curricula spread rapidly throughout the United
States. The Orff and Kodály methods were welcomed in
American schools partly because they incorporated techniques
that were consonant with conceptual learning principles, which
was a central part of school reform at that time. MENC had helped
disseminate conceptual education in music with its 1967 publication
of The Study of Music in the Elementary School: A Conceptual
Approach, edited by Charles Gary. Both the Kodály and
Orff approaches developed in the United States independently
of MENC, but MENC was partly responsible for their success because
their practitioners presented them frequently at its conferences
and in its publications. Later, both the Orff and Kodály
organizations became MENC allied organizations.
The most ambitious MENC program
to address curricular issues during the 1960s was the Contemporary
Music Project (CMP), which was funded by the Ford Foundation
and MENC. CMP’s innovative curriculum developments were
presented in many seminars, workshops, and published materials.
A critically important aspect of the program’s success
was that it demonstrated MENC’s ability to organize, implement,
and complete a nationwide high-budget curriculum development
program. This might well have given the organization the experience
and confidence to undertake new large-scale programs in the
future.
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