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SPECIAL SECTION: ARTICLES, 
REPORTS, AND REVIEWS 
ON MUSICOLOGY AND 
MUSIC EDUCATION 

Introduction: Musical literacy and the teaching 
oj music in school) college) and university 
Austin Clarkson 

NPRAISALS OF THE RELATION BETWEEN THE MUSIC EDUCATIONAL ESTAB-J-\. LISHMENT from grade to graduate school and the culture at large should 
take at least cursory note of John Kenneth Galbraith's warning that 

education is being shaped more than we realize by the needs of modem in-
dustry. This would seem to be as true of music as of other sectors of the cul-
tural economy. Industrialists admire soaring sales, educators value the utility 
of their instruction, and the two motives tend to reinforce each other to give 
the impression that music in America is in a state of hurtling progress. A few 
months ago, Howard Taubman observed in the New York Times that LP disks, 
hi-fi, and FM have helped to make "millions musically literate." While no 
one doubts that electronic mass production of music has transformed our 
auditory environment, there are others who argue that it has instead de-
graded listening habits. But let us tum from the ambience to the questions 
raised by the phrase "musical literacy." 

According to the Oxford Universal Dictionary "literacy" is a late 19th-century 
form of the much older adjective "literate," which, since the 16th century, 
has meant liberally educated or learned. With the new form was associated 
a new meaning considerably less elevated than the first. Presumably because 
education is no longer a prerogative of the ruling classes, "literate" and 
"literacy" could now also refer to the ability merely to read and write. 

Language and music are too diverse for the notion of literacy to be trans-
ferred uncritically from one to the other. The respective modes of operation, 
logics, and cultural functions are so different as to rule out simple analogy. 
It is sufficient for the purpose of this discussion to maintain that in the primi-
tive sense literacy in a given musical tradition depends on the ability to make 
auditory discriminations among the musical sounds that constitute the utter-
ances of that tradition. Whichever the musical community (rural, urban, 
popular, elite), whatever the individual's role (composer, performer, listener, 
thinker), auditory perception is the prime condition of musical literacy. 

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Transference of the notion of literacy from language to music has encour-
aged music educators to overrate reading and writing musical script at the 
expense of developing auditory perception. Students are too often drilled in 
the notational system of a limited tradition instead of learning the aural and 
memorative capacities needed for a wider range of musics. Exaggerated 
deference to the written note underlies the Urtext fallacy (the notes are the 
music), the elaborate role notation plays in some contemporary compositions, 
and also the tendency to teach notation symbols before the sound relations 
they represent have been unmistakably perceived. Undue reliance on nota-
tion induces atrophy of the ear and disperses the function of script from musical 
description or prescription to include that of hearing-aid. If script is to play 
so large a role in literacy training, it must be explained that notation is a 
peculiarly Western invention, that drastic changes in the relation between 
musical sound and written signs have occurred and are still occurring, and 
that the script-sound relation of the 19th and early 20th centuries is no longer 
a musical sine qua non. 

The Contemporary Music Project (described under Reports) has recently 
launched a broadly-conceived and intensive program designed to improve 
"comprehensive musicianship" at the college level. Comprehensive musician-
ship is defined in the Project's brochure as "incorporating conceptual knowl-
edge with technical skills to develop the capacity to experience fully, and 
the ability to communicate the content of, a musical work." The "technical 
skills" include aural training, composition, and performance, where aural 
training is the ability to understand the structure of sound, to conceive musical 
sound from its notation, and to demonstrate the understanding of musical 
structure through musical notation, verbal report, and performance. While 
the importance of script is maintained, aural proficiency and a focus on the 
musical utterance are paramount. Let us conclude, then, that basic musical 
literacy includes aural skills that cannot be achieved by casual listening. The 
arsenal of sound reproduction devices and an expanded repertory of recorded 
music will affect real musical literacy only after auditory proficiency has 
been secured. 

If the war against literacy in language may now be regarded as nearing 
its terminal phase in America, the equivalent battle in music has scarcely 
been joined. Sceptics might insist on the absurdity of comparing language 
with music in this regard, since the cultural functions of the two systems seem 
completely distinct. They might also argue that musical literacy could never 
be widespread in as linguocentric a culture as ours. But the previous condi-
tion of music in our culture need not necessarily set the limits of its future 
role. Music may have a hitherto unsuspected importance in the cultural mix 
of the anticipated leisure society. It is already acknowledged as the prime 
means of training perception and judgment in one of man's most highly 
developed senses. Since computer technology now provides educators with 
the means of teaching large numbers of people aural skill with unprecedented 
efficiency, it may well be that the only serious deterrent to a more vital musical 
culturc is the present notion of what music's role should be. 

Educators are increasingly concerned with the conceptual foundations of 
fields of knowledge and are correspondingly minimizing the learning oflarge 
bodies of fact. In responding to this important development by stressing the 

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conceptual side of music, educators will need to recall that learning music, 
unlike learning mathematics or philosophy, requires the education of a sense-
organ. "Percepts and concepts interpenetrate and melt together, impregnate 
and fertilize each other. Neither, taken alone, knows reality in its complete-
ness. We need them both as we need our legs to walk." So writes vVilliam 
James. An individual's ability to conceptualize is limited by his ability to 
discriminate the relevant sensory data. A greater role for music in our culture 
depends as much on cultivating auditory perception as on teaching the 
in tellectual basis of the art and discipline of music. 

Let us consider now the one music course required in general education 
(whether in primary school, high school, or college) that deals with musical 
concepts and literature. Often called "music appreciation," it usually treats 
the properties of musical sound, the elements of structure, simple notation, 
and functions such as melody, rhythm, harmony, and instrumentation. The 
course then proceeds to the study of selected "masterpieces" ofvVestern music 
in regard to form, meaning, value, and historical context. The approach is 
evidently modelled on the "great books" notion that the liberally-educated 
person's intellect and imagination should be disciplined to understand the 
prime cultural achievements of Western man. But there is a critical difference 
between a course in, say, philosophy, on the one hand, and in music, on the 
other. The former prcsupposes that the student has a complete familiarity 
with the sign system by which the concepts of the discipline are conveyed, 
whereas the latter does not. The difference is immense. 

Let us take, for example, an individual who is attending the first lecture of 
his first course in philosophy. He can already discriminate the phonemes and 
morphemes of the English language, and he probably knows the dictionary 
meaning of a large fraction of the words used in philosophic discourse. Since 
he also understands English syntax, we could say that he is literate in English 
and preliterate in philosophy. At the very outset he is prepared to learn the 
contextual meaning of the special words employed by various philosophers 
and to acquire a fund of philosophic concepts. He is equipped to discover the 
value and significance of philosophic notions, to judge the structure of a 
philosophic discourse, and to discern how a series of philosophic constructs 
can generate a tradition. Within a year he has gained considerable familiarity 
with the medium of philosophic ideas and has become at least partly literate 
in philosophy. 

The student confronted by his first formal course in music is less fortunate. 
His perceptual skills may well extend to a fairly good apprehension of popular 
music, but his powers of musical conceptualization are probably nil. The 
vast majority has yet to learn how to discriminate the elements and con-
stellations of elements that constitute sophisticated musical utterances of 
Western high culture. Nor is he sufficiently familiar with the articulative 
norms of the various art musics to grasp the functional relations, or to judge 
the esthetic qualities, of the sonatas, symphonies, and songs he is given to 
hear. At the present efficiency of teaching musical perception and conceptual-
ization, it is too much to expect a student to achieve within a semester, or even 
a year, sufficient aural skill to understand fully more than a very few aspects 
of elaborated compositions. The low quality of auditory perception results, 
moreOV(T, in the expedient of substituting concepts which the student can 

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grasp more readily for inherently musieal eoncepts. The symbols and con-
cepts that dominate music appreciation are in general only marginally musi-
caL for they seem too orten to be drawn from literature, esthetics, psychology, 
\'isual arts. dance, and history. This predicament is surdy incompatible with 
the modem proposition that music means itself. 

The 10\\' incidence of musical literacy \\"Quld seem to contribute to the 
diflicultv music has in establishing itself as a serious discipline throughout 
academe. The degree of literacy achievable in a medium limits the diseipline, 
and hence the educational value, it can provide. If the student of music ap-
prt'ciatioll is unable to make the auditory discriminations required for an\" 
but the most elementary concepts of musical utterance, the instructor can-
not encourage the stimulating and productiye attitude of discovery learning, 
\\hereby a student starts with a musical question and seeks the musical answer 
on his own. Students cannot expect to have the satisfaction of arriving at an 
indt'pendent interpretation of a composition and of comparing it with his 
instructor's. Lacking the ability to put a musical question or discover a musical 
ans\\"('[, he is constrained to accept the rht'toric of conclusions laid down in the 
curriculum. :'\0 matter how effective the instruction or how well-founded the 
judgments, the student does not acquire the musical fluency needed to tran-
scend the curriculum. Nor is he ablt' to take the essential final step of the 
learning process-the confirmation in practice of concepts that arc to him 
as yt't hypothetical. Music appreciation without intensive devclopment of 
aural skills is less a creative intellectual inquiry into the meaning and value 
of a primary medium of human utterance than a passive and illiberal acqui-
escence in a set of marginally musical statements of fact and opinion. 

The problems that face those educational reformers who are tackling the 
crisis of musical literacy raise fundamental challenges to musicological 
method and research as well as to educational theory and practice. It is 
possible that an awakening interest in musical literacy may even help reverse 
the trend that in the past has separated the two professions. The reformers 
arc doing much to counter those heresies that in the past have generated so 
much musicological animus. Charles Leonhard of the University of Illinois, 
for example, attaeks the still vvidespread "instrumentalist" doctrine that 
music education contributes to the health of the student and develops whole-
some ideals of conduct, citizenship, and good work habits. He points out 
that these \'alues arc not unique to music and that many other areas of the 
curriculum arc probably better suited to conveying them. Investigations of 
cognition and concept formation undermine the pervasive notion that, be-
cause one "learns by doing," musical performance is in itself the path to 
musical understanding. \Villiam C. Hartshorn, Music Supervisor of the 
Los Angelt's City Schools, points out that just as technical skill in playing an 
instrument is not gained by reading about it, so musical understanding docs 
not come mert'ly from musical performance. The traditional assumption that 
the task of music education is to teach children the esthetic experience is 
forcefully attacked by Theodore R. Sizer, Dean of the Graduate School of 
Education, Harvard University. He writes that" 'Art' in the sense of an 
t'sthetic experience cannot be taught in any systematic or predictable way," 
and charges that most schools favor the esthetic approach but with least 
chance of success. He recommends a ruthless pruning of art education to 

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disciplines of seeing and hearing, and avoidance of "appreciation" or assess-
ment of esthetic values. Colleges are doing what the elementary schools could 
do handily; a systematic and carefully-limited course in literate perception 
could be completed, he maintains, by the sixth or seventh grade. Education 
in music and the visual arts should simply providc the tools for proceeding on 
one's own. Sizer's contention is supported indirectly by those who have in 
recent years attempted to specify how to teach the esthetic response. They 
ultimatcly confess to the complexity of the task and fall back on relaying the 
usual information about music. 

Of the music educators directly concerned with the problem of musical 
literacy, Hartshorn proposes a pedagogy based on the premise that "what 
music communicates and how it communicates are one and the same thing." 
He insists that learning concepts of tone is the first order of business in teach-
ing children music. In a paper advocating the teaching of musical concepts 
in elementary grades, Asahel Woodruff of the University of Utah warns that 
elementary school curricula that rely exclusively on "spontaneous expression" 
in music, visual art, and dance neglect the discipline essential to every artistic 
statement. He outlines a procedure for teaching concepts that progresses 
from percept to concept to testing the concept in practice. The work of some 
other music educators who have investigated problems in the teaching of 
general music are here either summarized in Reports or noticed under Dis-
sertation Reviews. 

Musicologists are gradually recognizing the importance of their part in 
the development of a literacy program. Professors Frank D'Andrea, Frederick 
Mayer, and Jack Sacher, in their respective articles, suggest what music 
educators regard as the musicologist's contribution. Professors Claude Palisca 
and Alexander Ringer show in their present articles that musicologists have 
already begun to seize the initiative in pioneering new instructional pro-
grams. Many distinguished musicologists are also variously engaged in the 
Juilliard and Contemporary Music Projects, to mention only the most ex-
tensive. This constitutes a beginning. Only an intense, concerted effort waged 
simultaneously on all fronts will succeed in overcoming the celebrated inertia 
of the educational status quo. Much new educational and musicological 
research in hearing, learning, and musical concept formation is required for 
an empirically well-founded program for musical literacy. The psychology 
of hearing and the process of musical conceptualization merit especially 
intensive study, since they are all but neglected fields. And if concept teach-
ing is to be more than a pious wish, musical terminology must be properly 
standardized, musical concepts must be developed and formulated more 
precisely, and the patterns and processes of musical utterance must be under-
stood more completely. 

A survey of recent books, manuals, and articles that outline concept teach-
ing for music educators or report on its application reveals serious deficiencies 
of formulation and organization that must be corrected before they are pro-
grammed into teaching machines. One indication of the terminological 
disorder is the loose use of the term "concept" for anything from positive 
descriptions of entities and straightforward definitions to propositional state-
ments of fact. The generalizing power of a concept is all but overlooked. (A 
concept, let us recall, is a general idea used for a class of items and necessarily 

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involves a measure of abstraction.) The manual with the greatest scope and 
potential is Music in General Education (MENC 1965). Although it sets out to 
be suggestive rather than extensive and systematic in its recommendations to 
high school teachers, it follows its predecessors in failing to take sufficient 
account of the present state of musical knowledge as embodied in contem-
porary musical and musicological thought. For instance, it echoes educa-
tional tradition by reducing rhythm to a single factor-meter. But the notion 
of rhythm now generalizes the temporality of music on many more levels 
than that. A complex of factors which vary from music to music delineates 
the temporal procession of musical events; and such concepts as harmonic 
rhythm, timbral rhythm, and registral rhythm are now available. To com-
pound the difficulty of the manual's organization, a number of factors that 
may contribute to rhythm are treated under the topic "Interpretation," an 
activity defined as the choices the performer makes in dealing with the "vari-
abies": dynamics, expression marks, instrumentation, phrasing, and tempo. 
In addition to making the unwarranted assumption that pitches and dura-
tions are fixed and the rest variable, this approach neglects to consider that 
if the composer has made choices with regard to any of these factors, they no 
longer admit variation unless the composer so indicates. The task is then to 
interpret the composer's notation in the light of our best knowledge of the 
relevant conventions of his tradition and to realize the musical values of his 
utterance as completely as possible. 

The section of the manual titled "Form and Design in Music" demon-
strates how sparsely the multi-levelled complexity of musical structure is 
conveyable to the musically pre literate. As in the majority of such texts, 
"form" is here reduced to the repetition schemes of motives, themes, and 
their transformations in closed forms of the common practice period. The 
harmonic-tonal structure of a Beethoven symphony movement selected for 
intensive treatment is not mentioned (pace Schenker) and melody is treated 
as a static array of pitches (pace Kurth). Nevertheless, Music in General Educa-
tion contains far better information and more complete coverage than its 
predecessors and is clearly a new departure which deserves to be supported 
and supplemented by constructive musicological thought. 

There are many ways in which musicologists can contribute to the achieve-
ment of an effective and comprehensive program for musical literacy and 
yet serve the interests of musicology as well. One realm which remains rela-
tively uncharted, and which has not been indicated elsewhere in this issue, 
is musical structure. The pre-emptive task of recovering the historical sources 
and contexts of Western music and the desire for a total, positive history of 
music have consigned structural research and contextual analysis to lower 
priorities. The present need for more complete formulations of compositions 
as complex systems may stimulate musicologists to test the hypothesis that 
musical structure is in some critical respects altogether different from other 
classes of structure, and the corollary that dynamic and auditory (in addition 
to static and visual) paradigms are required for its explanation. Intensive 
research in the forms of musical utterance may reveal genetic structures as 
powerful as, say, Buckminster Fuller's discovery of the tetrahedron in the 
structure of the physical world. Musicological method would be enriched 
and the discipline's contribution to knowledge enhanced in the degree that 

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musicologists discover and explain the uniqueness of musical structure as a 
multi-levelled interrelationship of temporal functions. New theories would 
have to account for the perhaps unexampled multivalence of the elements 
and modules of musical structure, such that a single sound or sound-complex 
may function as an event simultaneously in some or all of the processes gen-
crated by the several variable properties of musical signals. 

An empirically-founded program for musical literacy should be pursued 
with all possible energy. Delay at this juncture could prove costly. Although 
many educators are properly sceptical of the rush to introduce automated 
teaching systems before the programs have been properly tested, electronic 
technology is offering a seductive battery of hardware. The race is already 
on. Only the utmost vigilance will prevent the conceptual equivalent of the 
school marm from being sealed into, and indefinitely reproduced by, the 
gleaming machines. Industry is not disposed to wait while the wheels of 
research grind slowly on. \Vith federal funds flooding education at an in-
creasing rate, Wall Street now regards education as "the growth industry to 
watch." The scent of profits has excited the giants of publishing and elec-
tronics into mergers that will influence every branch of education. While the 
spectacle of corporate courtship rites enacted on so grand a scale merits the 
highest admiration, the imaginable consequences give one pause. With the 
education market estimated as having a billion dollar potential, stakes rise, 
pressures mount to buy and sell, and to cut risks manufacturers design systems 
for prompt and wide acceptance. It is not beyond reason to imagine the new 
combines buying into educational systems as the television industry has 
bought into professional sports. Education as "show biz" would not be far 
behind. 

Unless the most responsible and imaginative professionals work creatively 
together to prepare the needed software, music education may soon be sad-
dled with expensive but misbegotten programs that might do the cause of 
musical literacy more harm than good. One solution to the urgent problem 
might be an agency whose sole function is to plan an intensive campaign of 
research and development directed to achieving a program for musical 
literacy adaptable to the various educational levels. The professional societies, 
governmental agencies, and private foundations concerned with music in-
struction might appoint and fund a directorate of qualified individuals charged 
with assimilating the results of research accomplished, with stimulating new 
research where needed, with adjudicating the merits of proposed programs, 
and with commissioning the writing and testing of new programs that meet 
the most exacting standards of current musical and educational knowledge. 
For a powerful attack to develop, music educators in public schools, con-
servatories, and colleges will need to draw closer together. To adequately 
equip performers, composers, listeners, and thinkers as music perceivers, their 
programs will have to be more closely coordinated. The restoration of music 
to its ancient place of honor in liberal education and in the culture at large 
will be a hollow triumph so long as it is assumed that the musically preliterate 
can understand music . 

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