Title:  The  Anatomy  of  a  Flawed  Success:  Comprehensive  Musicianship  Revisited    Author(s):  William  Thomson    Source:  Thomson,  W.  (1990,  Autumn).  The  anatomy  of  a  flawed  success:  Comprehensive  musicianship  revisited.  The  Quarterly,  1(3),  pp.  20-‐28.  (Reprinted  with  permission  in  Visions  of  Research  in  Music  Education,  16(1),  Summer,  2010).  Retrieved  from  http://www-usr.rider.edu/~vrme/    

It   is   with   pleasure   that   we   inaugurate   the   reprint   of   the   entire   seven   volumes   of   The  

Quarterly   Journal   of   Music   Teaching   and   Learning.     The   journal   began   in   1990   as   The  

Quarterly.     In   1992,  with   volume  3,   the  name   changed   to  The  Quarterly   Journal   of  Music  

Teaching  and  Learning  and  continued  until  1997.    The  journal  contained  articles  on  issues  

that  were  timely  when  they  appeared  and  are  now  important  for  their  historical  relevance.    

For   many   authors,   it   was   their   first   major   publication.     Visions   of   Research   in   Music  

Education  will  publish  facsimiles  of  each  issue  as  it  originally  appeared.    Each  article  will  be  

a  separate  pdf  file.    Jason  D.  Vodicka  has  accepted  my  invitation  to  serve  as  guest  editor  for  

the   reprint   project   and   will   compose   a   new   editorial   to   introduce   each   volume.     Chad  

Keilman  is  the  production  manager.    I  express  deepest  thanks  to  Richard  Colwell  for  granting  

VRME  permission  to  re-publish  The  Quarterly  in  online  format.    He  has  graciously  prepared  

an  introduction  to  the  reprint  series.  

 

The Anatomy of a Flawed Success:Comprehensive

Musicianship RevisitedBy William Thomson

University of Southern California

Like many of life's most cherishedactivities, the Contemporary MusicProject began with one exemplarygoal and ended with another. Begun to-ward the end of the 1950s as a means forproviding real-life experiences for youngcomposers (and at the same time thrust-ing some new music into the public schools),its final breaths in 1973 marked the expi-ration of a remarkable success story. CMPwas one of the century's most ambitiousoverhauls of the substance and proce-dures of music education. I know of noother single project in the United Statesthat more profoundly questioned thewhys and wherefores of the conventionalwisdoms invoked in developing musical-ity in lay and profession-bound students.

•• If the field of medicine heldtenets parallel to those of musiceducation} physicians would stillbe administering aspirin topatients with polio. ~

And once the questions had beenasked, CMP confidently pitched revitaliz-ing answers to a sometimes eager, some-times inattentive professional audience.Whatever its full and persisting effect onmusic training mayor may not havebeen, CMP unarguably accomplished onething: It brought a fresh heuristic perspec-tive of method and a liberating concep-tion of the musical repertoire to institu-tionalized music pedagogy. These productswere noticed and publicly examinedthroughout the world, in the Orient aswell as in Western Europe and English-speaking countries.!

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CMP could not fail to stir up healthyeducational excitement; it incorporatedwithin its operations some of the bestmusical minds of this country. It unitedthem-to the extent that such creativeand self-sufficient individuals can beunited within a common effort-into adomain of inquiry and action that wasurgently needed by a field that (althoughits own participants seemed blissfully un-aware of the danger) was on the verge ofrapid decline.

Change in the SchoolsCMP came along at a time, beginning

with the infamous 1960s, when a surpris-ing number of persons outside the profes-sional circle of education took it uponthemselves to show real concern for whatwas taking place within the schools. AnMIT mathematician tinkered seriouslywith how mathematics might better betaught in the middle schools, and aPrinceton physicist grew nosey about howempirical sciences were taught in secondaryschools. Similarly, through the machineryof CMP, composers like Sam Adler, IngolfDahl, Norman Dello Ioio, Leo Kraft, andVincent Persichetti could become excitedover how music fared in the third grade;theorists Allen Forte and Bill Mitchellmight grapple with how ideas of musicalstructure could best be transmitted toeighth grade trombone players. Historiansof the lofty accomplishments of CalvinBower and Jan La Rue might ponder waysto account for musical style to a highschool chorus. And these wise and power-ful persons joined the considerable in-tellectual and emotional confederacy ofveteran educators like Beth Landis, EuniceBoardman, Robert Werner, Louis Werson,

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and Charles Leonhard. These were theCMP people. They decided what its issuesshould be.

The project could not have entered theAmerican music education scene at a timeof greater need. I generalize broadly, butone need not be a cultural historian toknow that post-war music education hadfussily set up housekeeping in a comforta-ble vacuum. As a national totality, the dis-cipline lacked convincing and united pur-pose, not to mention rousing ideals.

Why should music exist in the schools?Answers were diverse at the time exceptin two critical aspects: They were pre-ponderately bromidic and they were in-variably extrinsic to the art:

"Music makes good citizens!"

"Music makes good neighbors!""The boy who blows a horn

will never blow a safe!"In short, music education, as a field of

inquiry and action, desperately sought itsgoals in the wrong places. The idea thatmusic makes sense as a human activity inand for itself was not a dominating moti-vation in the schools of the post-war world.

CMP urged that this should not be thecase. It argued that music accomplishessomething for humankind that is uniqueand irreplaceable. Its proponents arguedthat music, with other fine arts, can bethe most direct road to an individual'sability to value things in and for them-selves, a condition long touted andbroadly revered as one of the moral cor-nerstones of ]udeo-Christian life. Playingin a band or singing in a choir may makemore poised, more ethical, more logic-prone, more reverent individuals of us all;but that it might do so is somewhat be-side a more cosmic point: Music embod-ies its own intrinsic worth. We do it foritself. That was a daring perspective tolay on band directors or high school prin-cipals or school boards around 1965.

Through its Composers-in-ResidenceProgram, leaders in the project-its policycommittee and administrative staff-haddiscovered a disarming but widely con-firmed weakness in the country's schools:Pre-collegiate music faculties had been in-filtrated by many persons of little musicalknow-how and even less creative imagina-

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tion, persons weak in musical enthusi-asms themselves and thus unlikely to cul-tivate them in others. These teachers weredirect products of an educational systemthat mixed a strait-jacketed music curricu-lum with inept "methods" courses, thenpolished off the final product with a briefperiod of on-site testing called "practiceteaching." This final indoctrination oftenoccurred under the supervision of peoplewhose own training had been at least asconfining.

As a result, the discipline of music edu-cation, despite blessed pockets of inspir-ing exceptions throughout the country,had become a ghetto of empty methodol-ogy. What happens in a music class pre-sided over by one who is insufficientlyprepared is bad enough; when this iscombined with no convincing motive foraction, pure devastation was on occasionthe result. The pep bands of the worldhad as much to do with educating futuremusic lovers as steer-wrestling had to dowith developing future farmers. The gleeclubs of America were fun, but their typi-cal repertories, which extended all theway from "I'm Taking a Jet Plane" toresurrections of "Oh, What a BeautifulMorning," did little to evoke the aestheticthrill of the choral sound. Pep bands andglee clubs were fun, yes; the clinker wasthat too many people thought they con-stituted sound arts education.

Tracing Back tothe Epicenter: 1870

The many causes for this educationalgrinding-of-gears and spinning-of-wheelswould be easy to oversimplify, and Idon't wish to commit that error. My im-mediate purpose and my tangential graspof the whole problem lead me to dealonly with those causes which the Con-temporary Music Project attempted to ad-dress directly. Problems were not hard tofind in the early 1960s. As participants inthe project looked inward as well as out-ward, they traced the shortcomings ofpublic school music to disturbing condi-tions in higher education, where theschools' teachers had been educated. Thepervading music discourse that gave sub-stance to their educations was more con-fining than liberating. It was dominated-

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depending on the particular institutionunder scrutiny-by the harmony ofBach's chorale settings via the sterilecomputations of a chemist-cum-musictheorist; or the contrapuntal magic ofPalestrina and Lassus filtered through thescholarly sieve of a Danish musicologist;or perhaps even the two-centuries-oldcompositional rules-of-thumb of Jean-Phillipe Rameau as they had been refinedand elaborated by a succession of French,German, and English pedagogues, fromAndre Geldage and Hugo Riemann toEbenezer Prout, via American PercyGoetschius.

The rumblings of music, as representedin these pedagogical tracts, had their epi-center around 1870; they did not extendfar in either direction, earlier or later.Their shock waves branched cautiouslyback into the madrigals and motets of"ancient times;' and forward perhaps asfar as the "ultra-moderns" like Faure,Debussy, Reger, Elgar, and maybe evenJohn Alden Carpenter. The world ofmusic, as represented in sonic explicationsof the educational setting, was not broad-ening; it was not interactive with the richand compelling real world, and it sug-gested no inquisitiveness about that world,past, present, or future. Its vision tun-nelled through a magnificent but con-fined lode.

Teachers of the 1960s developed as mu-sicians and educators, depending upontheir individual maturities at the time,within the decades of 1930-1960. Yetthe music of Shostakovich (d. 1975), ofHindemith (d. 1963), of Schoenberg(d. 1951), of Bartok (d. 1945), or even ofMahler (d. 1911)was little more than al-luded to in our music classrooms, muchless performed, dissected, or made theobject of contemplation. This music wasnot made a part of the generalizationsthat can provide knowing people with

. tools for understanding unforeseen condi-tions of the future. And this silence aboutthese contemporary masters was not im-posed because of excessive attentionbeing paid to the music of America,whether jazz of indigenous musicians orthe European-influenced musics of Varese,Copland, Ives, Gershwin, Harris, or Pis-ton. The silence was not imposed along

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political nor geographical lines. The voidwas by nature indiscriminate and total.

Thus musician/teachers entered profes-sional life equipped only with a repertoryin the mind's ear that most charitablymight be called "skimpy;' and armedwith discursive and analytical techniquesforaged from harmonic ideas of the eight-eenth century (as they might apply to themusic of Bach-through-Brahms). Overall,they lacked the kind of musical insightand professional passion that inspiresremarkable learning, that spurs studentson to lifelong enthusiasms for the art. Di-rect application of the McHose-Jeppesen-Goetschius-Prout formalizations to anymusic of any time or place was tenuous ifnot wholly irrelevant, yet it was acceptedas standard, professional practice. If thefield of medicine held tenets parallel tothose of music education, physicianswould still be administering aspirin topatients with polio.

I remember well a CMP seminar class Itaught at Eastman in the summer of 1972.A large circle of the students expressed afervent wish to introduce some of Schoen-berg's early atonal music to their classes.So why didn't they? Because, they meeklyadmitted, they didn't know what to sayabout it. And they asked: "What do yousay about a piece that isn't in a major orminor key, that doesn't have the kind ofmelody you find in Mozart or Haydn,that doesn't fall into an A B A form, thatdoesn't have a melody-accompanimenttexture (or isn't a fugue), or doesn't con-tain the kinds of chords that can be sym-bolized by Roman numerals?" (Of course,I told them.)

Seeking a SynthesisLeadership of CMP was dominated by

an infectious mixture of idealism, opti-mism, and a powerful sense of mission.Like William Schuman's earlier Land MProject at juilliard- (a more limited pro-ject in scope and depth, although similarin aims and techniques), the educationalfacet of CMP's work was motivated by asimple yet radical premise: Educated mu-sicians, whether they be composers,historians, theorists, performers, conduc-tors or educators, should be diligentlyand explicitly cultivated-to "reasonable

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degrees"-in each of those mutually com-plementary subdisciplines, regardless ofnarrow professional niches sought in life.And like the ]uilliard experiment, teachersof broad and certain musical knowledgeand perspective were demanded. Weopenly eschewed the Romanticist ideal ofthe aspiring pupil, who through a mix-ture of pious mimicry and patient osmo-sis, absorbs the Artist-Teacher's accumu-lated vision.

What we sought, as hindsight makesrather clear, was complementary to a con-spicuous and profound change that wastaking place in postsecondary music edu-cation in this country just after WorldWar II: Conservatories (which trainedprofessional performers), and normalschools (which trained teachers), andmusic departments (which trained musi-cologists) were all essential cogs in ourAmerican educational machine, but theywere being eclipsed by a broader-basedtype of music institution. Under theunifying roof of new schools of music, asynthesis of functions was subsumingwhat had in the past been separate.f

New and powerful schools of music,such as those at Indiana, Illinois, Michi-gan, University of Rochester, North TexasState, Northwestern, and Southern Cali-fornia+, set the model and the standardsand experienced immediate and rapidgrowth. These awesome schools, usuallymore heavily populated than their morespecialized counterparts, were in manyways amalgamations of the virtues andthe foibles of those three kinds of train-ing institutions they attempted to forgeinto one. By and large, however, they pur-sued a more egalitarian student-institutionrelationship and a more holistic approachto subject matter.

This egalitarian-holistic bias fit CMPpredilections admirably. Whereas in thepast a teacher might order, "More pedalthere!", the CMP-favored discourse wouldmake some choice additions. While itmight well achieve the same immediateend with about the same injunction, itcould also store up helpful generalizationsfor application to future musical encoun-ters; it would engage teacher and studentin dialogue, seeking just when and whycertain musical conditions might transpire

Volume I, Number 3

in a particular location to make "Morepedal there!" an appropriate gesture. Isuspect that the reader can readily im-agine the same heuristic scenario appliedto a host of educational situations, fromcrescendos for tuba players to parallelfifths for theory students.

Related to this comingling of the whysof music-making with the whats of tradi-tion was the project's distinctly ecumeni-cal air. It derived from three implicit hy-potheses that, to my knowledge, wereshared by the participants. First, we be-lieved that the repertory of teachingshould in principle omit nothing thatcould contribute to sharpened under-standings and broadened perspectives.Certainly, modern musicians must be in-troduced to music from outside the West-European concert orbit of 1700-1900, themusic of Common Practice.

This conviction was perhaps felt andpushed most strongly in the case ofmusic composed in our own time, whichwe fervently argued in our second hypo-thesis: The music of our own time shouldbe the point of departure from which anindividual's musical skills and values mustextend, backward and forward in time.The infant begins a linguistic life with thesounds of the present. The growing childlearns language from the hit-and-miss en-counters of vibrant life around him. Andrightfully, the adolescent musician beginsformal training with a ready-made musi-cal culture. It may be a culture dominatedby Mantovani strings, or by the guitars ofthe Lightcrust Doughboys, by the brass ofStan Kenton or by the tunes of GiuseppeVerdi. Whatever, it is a mixture of sonicimmediacy that must be recognized andaccounted for as a meaningful point ofdeparture.

A Place for All MusicsBut the catholicity of CMP policy could

not stop with imposing only recent musicon a reluctant teaching profession. Mostof us realized that all music, not just whatwe revere as Art music, can be a part ofeducation, and usually with immediatebeneficent effect. Certainly the most trea-sured products of jazz and popular tradi-tions deserve integration, and serious en-counters with the musics of other cultures-

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music well removed from the White-West-European circularity of the past twocenturies-could but deepen the understand-ing of one's own cultural trappings. Justas the study of a foreign language can so-lidify the conceptual grasp of one's nativetongue, so can the study of a "foreignmusic" enliven receptivity and enhancemeanings for one's native music. Concertmusic-or let us say "Classical Music" -isonly one of many musical subcultures; itis not the sole source of musical wisdomnor of aesthetic gratification.

So this was our CMP pitch: All musicsmust have a place in the learning process,as they might be directly cogent to betterunderstanding, to a tightened hold on themusical experience and its properties.

This ideal of expanded teaching reper-tory was misunderstood by some musi-cians. On occasion it became the butt ofthe charge that CMP ideas were unrealisti-cally overdrawn; they could lead only tosuperficiality, to very little learned abouta lot. It was an honest and understanda-ble inference, even though false. Theproject's goal was never to irresponsiblyadd all the world's music to an alreadycrowded evidentiary docket. Teacherswere in fact urged to draw in their ownteaching from sources close to them, ex-panded to the limits possible, but alwaysderiving generalizations from a personalreservoir of expertise rather than fromhawked facts and truisms about unknownquantities.

I remember with admiration how thegifted composer David Ward-Steinmanwould use his monumental skills at jazzimprovisation, within a seminar setting,to illustrate how procedures and tech-niques from that genre could be used tointroduce or support ideas from Bach orStravinsky. Teachers for whom jazz im-provisation was an integral part of theirmusical lives were inspired to do thesame; those who didn't know a riff froma twelve-bar blues were urged to cultivategreater familiarity with the idiom. Butlacking a confirmed understanding, theywere well-advised to turn elsewhere fortheir broadening exemplars, to establishedroots-perhaps Victor Herbert or RichardRogers or even to television commercials-

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but by all means to some source thatcould undergird a sturdier conceptualbase than one confined to the Bach-Brahms orbit.

This enriched "personal repertory"was, in our collective judgment, an im-provement over a sampling from a limitedcultural milieu, deep and profoundthough it might be. An understanding ofgeneral principles is enhanced throughacquaintance with ever-larger numbers ofparticular instances, whether we studymusic or fruitflies. Thus, for the Ameri-can educator, Japanese gagaku or NorthIndian ragas or Javanese gamelans orByzantine chants were never imagined asreplacements (nor as serious contenders)for traditions closer to home. They wereseen as enriching potentials, as side issuesin a larger context, as a supporting castrather than co-stars. And it was in thisecumenical spirit that we viewed the edu-cator's professional responsibility as oneof remaining artistically alive, maintaininga responsive attitude toward new musicalartifacts as they become known, regard-less of whether new or reclaimed fromthe past. From this, we trusted, onecould continue arriving at ever-renewedsyntheses of what is "true," and whatmight be of sufficient value to retain andpass on to a subsequent generation.

The so-called "all-properties" approachchampioned by CMP gained some in-fluential status during the late 1960s andearly 1970s, sometimes under the unfor-tunate designate "The Parametric Ap-proach." It has remained a helpful guidein analysis for which Schenkerian har-monic/melodic prescriptions do not domi-nate. It became more a part of collegiateteaching after jan La Rue's textbook,Guidelines For Style Analysis, was pub-lished in 1970. It sometimes became oneof those jargon phrases-whether asproperties or parameters-whose clichfstatus could hide a very precious truth:Any view of music furnished solely bydissections of only harmony or melody isultimately impotent. Music consists of farmore determining elements, even if non-melodic and nonharmonic propertieshave been ignored by speculative theoryduring the preceding centuries. In CMPwe tried to stem this powerful tide.

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Beyond Melody and HarmonyOur antidote was to replace myopic du-

ality with a perspective and with tech-niques that could better account for thetotality of music as kinetic process. Timbreis not a word nor concept even suggestedin Piston's Harmony, in McHose's Con-trapuntal Harmonic Techniques of theEighteenth Century, nor in Goetschius'sThe Homophonic Forms of Musical Com-position. And yet that property's deter-mining importance, in the music of Mozartas well as in the music of Debussy orVarese or Schoenberg, would be hard tooverstate.

And texture! Surely those old cubby-holes of conventional wisdom, mono-phonic, homophonic and polyphonic,could not, in their exclusivity, adequatelychannel our testimonials about howsound complexes relate as they movethrough time. They don't help, for exam-ple, in categorizing the ways stratificationplays a role in Ives' Unanswered Ques-tion; but they leave equally inexplicablesimilar conditions in Bach fugues (like theC# minor of WTC 1). We can find toomany instances of how fluctuating densi-ties of sound strata shape a work, con-vincing us that the hallowed harmonytexts of yesteryear were poor almanacsfor predicting the weather of music.

Clearly our teaching lexicon had to befattened up; otherwise we were strugglingalong trying to talk about automobileswhile using the conceptual frames ofgoatherds. It seemed abundantly clearthat we could not even describe what weheard if it did not readily and neatlyalign with our eighteenth-century vocabu-laries, if it could not yield to tonic, sub-dominant, and dominant chords fraterniz-ing within spans of symmetrically articulatedtime. Faced with a new (or very old)piece of music, the uninformed musicteacher of 1965 might have respondedlike the farmer visiting the zoo who sawhis first giraffe: "There ain't no suchanimal!"

And last, this vastly enriched repertory,to be viewed through a new set of cogni-tive filters that includes grids for moreproperties than just harmony and melody,was to be dealt with in teaching in aslightly different way. It was to be inter-

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acted with by people who at varioustimes would be involved in the range ofprofessional roles that prevail in the realmusic world. "Learn by Deweying" was acrucial injunction for us. Musicians learnto be musical by doing musical things.Musicians play and sing, of course, butthey can play and sing better by knowingwell the motions that complement play-ing and singing. They compose music(which meant a good deal more for CMPthan adding chords to hymn tunes). Theyengage in research-preferably with pri-mary sources-to answer questions aboutstyle, historical successions, performancepractice. They theorize as an approach tocomprehending structure. They learn byteaching others.

All of this was a well-calculated reac-tion to the wasteful tradition of artisticinstruction as a laying-on-of-hands ritual,one in which an ineffable goodness andtruth flow, when the connecting pipes areright, from teacher to student. Music edu-cation under CMP auspices became anearnest search, not the terminal inculca-tion of unarguable facts ex cathedra. Itwas an open-ended process, teacher andstudent searching together, teacher (mostof the time) leading the way. The endgoal was musicians who could continueto learn, whether as pianist for the localRotary Club, as principal horn for theCleveland Orchestra, as musicology pro-fessor in the state university, or as musicteacher in the local elementary school.

Assessing CMP's ContributionsCMP officially ceased as a project in

1973, when its funding grant from theFord Foundation expired. Now, some twodecades later, many of its basic tenets andsome of its treasured techniques andprocedures have trickled down to becomepart of the conventional wisdom of thepedagogical world. Compared with usualpractice in 1955 or 1945, the actualamount of music that confronts studentstoday in music theory and history classes(as aural reality, not just as notes onpaper or names and dates) is stunning.Some of this wealth of access to sound-ing music came about, of course, throughthe unprecedented developments of musicreproduction and storage-reel-to-reel

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tape, cassettes, compact disks-that havetransformed that industry since the 1950s.But CMP helped show people that tradi-tional teaching had relied too often andtoo heavily on words and notes withoutconstant reference to the real thing. CMPgave us something worthwhile to do withall of those new sound-reproduction play-things, something cogent to say about themessages they carry. CMP brought to aneedy profession a way of dealing withits subject matter.

And maybe the project's most impor-tant contribution to music education wasits fuming and fussing and pointing ac-cusing fingers until the classroom's musi-cal diet was exposed for the starvationfare it was. Today, institutions that pur-port to educate musicians revel in richrepertories, in the musics of other cul-tures, in new music, ancient music, evenoccasionally in forgotten music composedby the not-so-famous. Some of thesemusics have unobtrusively crept into ourconsciousness via anthologies, whichwere themselves a kind of publication un-needed, and thus unconceived, prior toCMP's influence. [A case in point isCharles Burkhart's anthology, first pub-lished in 1979, which begins with plain-chant and ends with a work by BruceSaylor (b. 1946).] A monumental range ofmusics is regularly tapped for teaching,not just as exotic overlay nor afterthoughtbut as integral enrichment of regularstudy. Few major schools today do nothave early music programs, ensemblesdevoted exclusively to music of recentvintage, classes and ensembles whose per-formance metier is music of cultures re-mote from the Christian-Hebraic orbit ofour history. Through CMP urging and gui-dance, many teachers now in their matu-rity were led to discover and developways of thinking through and communi-cating about music in ways that free thespirit rather than imprison the mind.

Hindsight forces us to observe thatCMP attention was focused more on com-position, theory, and history teachingthan on performance teaching as such.For this reason, its impact was less in thatdomain than in any other, and I find rareevidence in solo performance teachingtoday that leads me to believe that CMP's

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pioneering in those other areas spilledover into it. For too many piano and vio-lin teachers today, Prokofiev sonatas andDebussy and Scriabin etudes still seem torepresent the avant-garde.

This oversight reveals an error ofstrategy on the part of the project'spolicy committee, an error which Ihelped to perpetuate as a committeemember from 1963 until 1973. It meantoverlooking or neglecting the incomparablepower wielded by performance teachersin modeling the perspective and sense ofvalues of young musicians. Since theirearliest and most vivid experiences in theart (except as listeners) is inperforming-certainly not in reflective pur-suit of conceptual wisdom- that aspectof the educational process is a far morecritical influence than superb courses injunior analysis or music history can be.

Conflicting Conditionsand Ideologies

Its acknowledged victories aside, theways and means of CMP did not, alas,sweep the civilized world. To my knowl-edge, people from the world's centers ofculture do not on occasion give signs ofrecognition with such responses as "Why,that came from the CMP!" as one mightsay "Why, that's a bit Freudian!" or"That's much too Darwinian for me!" Mypersonal disdain for the canonization ofanything manmade leads me to believethat in the long run this is for the best.We can nonetheless recognize two broadand powerful reasons for a less-than-cosmic infiltration of eMP particulars,reasons that have nothing to do with theforce or relevancy of CMP ideas nor theway they were developed during itslifetime.

The first of these reasons was continu-ing change in the public perception ofthe place of music education in theschools. After the release of the vauntedHarvard Report in 1952, and with the in-sistent scrappy urging of Admiral HiramRickover, the post-Sputnik world foundmusic lumped together in the educationalpecking order with shop and home eco-nomics. Perhaps, as a subject, music wasperceived as even slightly less importantthan these subjects because it was "less

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practical"; whatever the reason, as a "softsubject" music did not fare well in thecompetitive struggle for public supportand educational funds.

The initiation of this long-lived andeventually crippling reduction of thefunds channelled into arts education at alllevels of precollegiate instruction coin-cided with the early 1960s, while CMPwas first beginning to frame its owneducational policies. It soon became clearthat the finest teachers, using the mostelegantly planned strategies and foolproofmaterials, cannot make a difference if nomoney is made available to keep thememployed. It makes no difference whetherCMP or Suzuki or Kodaly or Ouija boardsprevail; if the teacher isn't there, or if thetime for music is cut down to one hour aweek, or if the school board can't buybooks or records, then the music programis scrapped.

The national arts education neglect,whose potential depth began to show it-self by the 1970s, and which continues toerode even remnants of programs today, 5is not likely to impress the ideas, processes,or values of music education on anybody.In this respect, the Contemporary MusicProject came along about ten years toolate to realize what could have been itsimpact, or to provide the basis for per-suasive arguments that might have savedmore resources for the arts in the schools.

The second reason for the attenuationof CMP influence can be traced to musicdepartments and schools and conservato-ries. A product of a curious conservatism,not to say reactionism, began to settleover musical academia in the mid-1960s.This conservatism was manifested mostdirectly by two musical ideologies which,although themselves mutually contradic-tory, dampened the airy atmosphere ofCMP's liberating gestures. One of theseideologies was the prescriptive har-monic/melodic theory of HeinrichSchenker; the other was the wave of seri-alism and set theory that enveloped in-fluential faculty members in the mostprogressive schools, beginning as early as1950. Both of these remain thoroughlyoperative in music in higher educationtoday, although both reached their apo-gees within the decade of the 1980s.

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Schenker's doctrines began to be talkedabout in superficial ways just after thewar. No translations of his considerablewritings were available at that time, ex-cept in limited batches and in indirectways.v Championed early by Allen Forte,Bill Mitchell, Roger Sessions, and FelixSalzer in New York and by Oswald Jonasin Chicago, a discernable spread did notoccur until around the early 1960s, whenthe better-known ideas (structural levels,tonicization, and the concept of theUrlinie) began to seep into graduate-classdiscussions. By 1975 I suspect that mostundergraduate music theory classes werein some way influenced, directly or in-directly, by Schenker's principal ideasabout structural unfolding.

The influx of Schenkerian ideas gavemusicians insights they had found in noother theoretical systems. His perspectiveof an elaborated basic structure. and hisco-embodiment of contrapuntal andchordal principles as shapers of the musi-cal utterance marked an advance over theseparation of melody and harmony thathad dogged (and perplexed) musicalspeculation over the ages. But these ad-vances were not made without cost. Histheories, like Rarneau's, can tell us moreabout eighteenth-century music thanabout anything before or after. A clearerview of the scenery was opened up, butthe breadth of coverage still left much tobe desired.

Schenkerian prescriptions and "ap-proaches" nonetheless became canoniclaw for a growing number of professors,especially theorists and historians, as thedecade of the 1970s rolled on. Eventoday some of our colleagues would haveus impose Schenker's ideas of musical ex-plication on the whole of basic instruc-tion as a kind of grand pedagogical Ur-satz.? This would be about as beneficialas for contemporary medical schools tobase all anatomy instruction for surgeonson the collected works of Galen, butsuch proposals merit public discussion.

Whatever posterity may hold for aSchenkerian Utopia, academia's adoptionof his basic premises and its consequentreversion to a tighter rein on the musicalsubstance, around 1970-75, essentiallyfroze many persons in their tracks, frus-

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trating attempts to widen the perspective,to face up to a larger reality that exceedstertial chords hovering within the celes-tial balance of I IV V harmonies. Thewaxing of Schenkerian procedures ineluc-tably accompanied the waning of CMP'sOne World.

Coincidentally and synchronically withthe spread of this new-old perspectivecame the advent into academic discourseof set theory, initially developed as theexplanatory concepts and illuminatingvocabulary of serial music. Too few of uspause to marvel at how inherently con-tradictory are Schenker's harmonic reduc-tionism and the set-theoretic elaboratedby Milton Babbitt (from Schoenberg'smore intuitively derived axioms). Thatthey began to be folded together into theeducations of musicians, by many of thesame people at about the same time, sug-gests only that we still sometimes fail toproceed cautiously when confronted withimplausible bedfellows.

Be that as it may, the simultaneous in-stallations of Schenker and Serialism un-wittingly solved the problem of how mu-sical people can meaningfully conceive ofand discourse about the totality of music-or so it seemed. Indeed, it was simple:Heinrich Schenker showed us how to talkabout tonal music (tonal music com-posed, that is, from J. S. Bach through J.Brahms), and Professor Babbitt taught ushow to talk about serial and dodecaphonicmusic.

Thus these unidentical twins, the pre-eminent conceptual systems of 1960-1980, gave birth to a new taxonomy ofmusic itself. It became evident that nowthere are two musics: One is Tonal, andthe other is Post-Tonal. (Nomenclature cangive an inkling of rough chronology, evenif it does little to characterize musicalsubstances.) Evidence of this turn ofevents is easy to find today in the bulle-tins of most progressive music depart-ments and conservatories. Courses likeTonal Analysis and Post-Tonal Analysis,Tonal Counterpoint and Post-Tonal Coun-terpoint limn the pages of those testi-

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monials to educational wisdom, whichperhaps take their cue from the Holly-wood film principle that Every SuccessMust Have Its Sequel.

For obvious reasons, emphasis on notestructures imposed by adoption of thisnew duality, Schenkerian harmonictheory and the set theory ofdodecaphony, inevitably led to a condi-tion of repertorial anorexia quite asdamaging as that which existed beforeCMP. With the marked decline of serialmusic among young composers today, thestrength of set theory as a conceptualtool can be expected to fade correspond-ingly to a lesser role in the total educa-tional stream. But until that happens, anduntil Schenker's theories are viewed moresoberly as enlightening but less than cos-mically prophetic, the CMP legacy willnecessarily remain modest and, to a largeextent, covert.

As in all else, timing turns out to beeverything. 0

Notesl. I fondly remember the thrill CMP regulars felt

when we first received copies of Japanese transla-tions of some of our CMP-induced articles. The arti-cles were fortunately printed in English as well asJapanese; otherwise we would not have knownwhat they were.

2. Vincent Persichetti, who was a central figure inthe Land M program, was a member of the CMPPolicy Committee and taught in some of ourseminars.

3. Certainly there were schools where all threeeducational functions had occurred for years. Theshift after the war was mainly one of studentdrawing-power and prominence in the professions.

4. Prior to the ease and speed of jet travel, artist-teachers were confined to conservatory faculties,which were invariably in large metropolitan centers.An active concert artist like Janos Starker could nothave lived in Bloomington, Indiana (and maintaineda concert career) before 1955.

5. For a recent informative survey of this continu-ing decline, see James Hanshumaker's "Forging In-strumental Programs for an Urban Society," MusicEducators Journal, November 1989, pages 34-37.

6. Explanatory exhortations of Schenker's ideasappeared in America as early as 1935 (Roger Ses-sions, Modern Music 12, May-June, 1935, 170-178).

7. A recent plea is that of professors Riggins andProctor in the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy3, 1989, 1-24.

The Quarterly