Integrity in Music Education

IN THIS TIME of public concern with education the surest way to preserve music's quantitative position in the curriculum is to maintain musical quality, and the best way to maintain the status of music in the curriculum is to preserve its integrity as an art rather than to dissipate its aesthetic potentialities in order to serve non-musical goals, no matter how worthy they may be. Foster McMurray, Professor of Educational Philosophy at the University of Illinois, writes strongly on this point in the 1958 Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education on "Basic Concepts in M1usic Education." He points out that, to justify music in the curriculum because of its contribution to health, citizenship, and the like, is to conceive of music as an instrument for the realization of non-musical values; and that to take such a position recognizes nothing distinctive and unique in musical experience itself and claims for music only that it helps pupils develop other talents and learnings. He suggests that this point of view is dangerous to music education in that, by claiming a position in the curriculum on the basis of contributing to a variety of non-musical outcomes, music educators will unintentionally place music in the position of being a frill-a mere ornament on the structure of the curriculum. Let us accept the challenge of this general educator to become convinced of the values that are inherent in music and unique to it, and to maintain them in public education with intense devotion and calculating intelligence. What are these values and from what are they derived? What is it that is really unique about music?