Contemporary Music and the Music Educator

Abstract

contemporary music? This was the one question heard most often during the summer of 1964 at the MENC Contemporary Music Project seminar at Tanglewood, Massachusetts. After four weeks in what seemed to be a new world for most of us, we seminarians began to realize the importance of contemporary music and the magnitude of the task of making this music understandable even to the talented students in our classes, to say nothing of the general public. Teachers may dismiss contemporary music by saying, Oh, that modern stuff; it's not for me. But if we do, we are denying our role as educators in the field of music.