Current Musicology 102 (Spring 2018)
© 2019 Sewell. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the 
Creative Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (CC BY-NC-ND).

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Editor’s Note

This special issue of Current Musicology brings together a number of schol-
ars at various stages of their careers to reflect on issues of music pedagogy. 
The result encompasses a broad array of topics addressing different kinds 
of student. At the same time, this volume is the second to exhibit Current 
Musicology’s new format, where the lead article is a scholarly literature  
review on a musical topic. The new format, in time, is planned to replace 
the annual special issue, and each editor will work closely with the author of 
the lead article to offer a critical perspective on some relevant and ongoing 
issue or area of musicological interest—in short, on Current Musicology.

The present issue’s lead article, “From Idea to Institution: The 
Development and Dissemination of the Orff-Schulwerk from Germany to 
the United States,” by Emily Spitz, ties in with the theme. Spitz’s review 
covers the canonical milestones of the Orff-Schulwerk literature, from its 
inception at the Güntherschule in Munich (1924–1944) to its present day 
practice in the United States as part of elementary music education. Her 
focus is thus largely on the K–5 level, and her demonstrations of how to 
animate the literature she discusses in these classrooms (Spitz 2019, 14–17 
and 21–24) offer an important bridge between the Schulwerk materials as 
developed by Orff and his collaborators, on the one hand, and present-day 
practitioners, on the other. 

Since the students Spitz has in mind are children, the following  
articles are ordered by ascending graduations: pre-school is followed 
by high school, college, and beyond. Almost all the articles are paired, a  
junior scholar with a senior scholar, to create these groupings; the heavier 
research articles at the beginning and end of the volume are balanced with 
lighter “reflections” in the middle. Spitz’s lead article is thus followed by 
Gayle Wald, writing on the pedagogical work of Ella Jenkins; Jenkins’ 
work forms what Wald calls “an important archive of multiculturalism’s 
radical pre-history” (Wald 2019, 46–47), especially in Jenkins’ use of a 
technique that gave its name to her dubut record with Folkways, Call-and-
Response Rhythmic Group Singing (1957). Gavin Lee—the only author not 
paired—provides “Reflections on Three Pedagogical Scenes in Chinese 
Music History.” He writes about high-school aged students in China in 
the context of two quite different constructions of pedagogy: the “Western 



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Current Musicology

liberal notion of pedagogy, as embodied in Abraham Maslow’s concept 
of self-actualization,” and Homi K. Bhabha’s metaphor employment of  
“pedagogy” as a means of state control, manifested in classrooms through 
what is “widely known among Chinese students as xinao, or ‘brainwashing’” 
(Lee 2019, 70). Asher Tobin Chodos and Walter Frisch both address the 
college level. Chodos’s “Reflections on Teaching Music 17: Hip Hop” offers 
a personal and critical window into teaching music outside of the canon of 
Western Art Music, while Frisch’s “On Teaching the History of Nineteenth-
Century Music” (adapted from his chapter in The Norton Guide to Teaching 
Music History) relfects on the challenges of teaching this repertoire, and in 
doing so seeks to remind us of its merits. Finally, Callum Blackmore’s and 
Martin Ennis’s students are mature composers. Blackmore writes about the 
role of the subdominant in the pedagogy of Henri-Montan Berton, and ex-
amines how the special role played by this harmony in nineteenth-century 
French treatises is reflected in Berton’s compositional practice. Ennis’s 
piece is dedicated to the late Robert Pascall; he tackles the myth of Brahms’s  
autodidacticism, setting the historical record straight with a subtle balance 
of primary sources, representing conflicting accounts of Brahms’s musical 
past, and musical analysis, focused on the role of the gavotte in Brahms’s 
music.

Ian Sewell