Allen P. Britton: The Father of Us All

Abstract

Music education today owes a debt to Allen Britton for the professional research structures he helped put in place nearly fifty years ago. The Special Research Interest Groups (SRIGs, as they are known) of the Music Educators National Conference (MENC) are an outgrowth of the founding of the Journal of Research in Music Education (JRME), Allen Britton's ground-breaking forum for the dissemination of research on music teaching and learning. Other research periodicals such as the Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, Southeastern Journal of Research in Music Education, Journal of Music Teacher Education, Update, and a host of state and regional journals have come into being over the last fifty years in support of or in reaction to the success of the Journal of Research in Music Education. Allen Britton's JRME succeeded in becoming the central publishing arm of the music education research community because he set into motion a chain of events that gave identity and self-definition to the members of that community. To understand that chain of events, one must go back to the 1940s, before the JRME was established. In his 1948 dissertation on the history of the MENC, John Molnar notes that, in the early days of MENC, the mission of the organization's National Research Council of Music Education (NRC) was to gather data for MENC officials who then used the information to develop policy. According to Molnar, in 1937 the research council, which had been renamed the Music Education Research Council (MERC), petitioned the MENC to have this function altered to reflect a growing interest in research not centered on the needs of the organization.1 Such an action, i.e., that an agency might redefine itself in light of emerging