Music Education in the Americas

Abstract

IT IS A PLEASURE to be able to report a general agreement that we have in music education a true community of interest of international, as well as of significance. By common consent there has long existed a basic insistence that the great traditions of European music, transplanted to the new world, must be carried on. This is essentially a task of music education. Equally important has become the emergence of local and regional music-cultural movements throughout the Americas. Cultivation of these, too, is essentially a music education job. And now that we find these emerging movements everywhere becoming identified as national schools, music education has still a bigger job. Walled off geographically, culturally, and politically from each other as have been the various Republics of the Western Hemisphere, it is now our task by every means not further to accentuate this isolation by exaggerated cultivation of music nationalism, but rather to encourage general appreciation of a fact long recognized by scholars-the oneness of the music-community of the Americas. This oneness has existed in spite of the worst kinds of competition and conflict. Its emphasis through co6peration and friendliness in music activity will be one more strand of support for the now almost unanimous adherence to the policies of the good neighbor and hemisphere solidarity. Readers of the JOURNAL will remember that one of the first achievements of organized music exchange among the twenty-one American Republics was a trip around South America in the summer of 1941, by Louis Woodson Curtis and John W. Beattie, under the sponsorship of the Pan American Union.' Even before this event and within the first few months of its official existence, the Inter-American Music Center, which serves also as the Music Division of the Pan American Union, had begun its cooperation with the Music Educators National Conference. In the autumn of 1941 Miss Vanett Lawler, Associate Executive Secretary of the Music Educators National Conference, went to Washington as consultant to the Inter-American Music Center to advise in the organization of the Editorial Project for the publication of Latin American Music in the United States.2 For the following two years Miss Lawler divided her time equally between the Pan American Union and the MENC, developing a program of cooperation which extended, in the course of time, to various agencies of the United States Government, among which may be mentioned the Office of Education, the Library of Congress, and the Departments of the Treasury, of State, and of War and Navy. In addition, the Conference enjoyed for the first time resident representation at the headquarters of the National Education Association, of which the Conference is a department. Through these day-to-day Washington contacts, the Conference, which had already developed its internal relations upon a scale, now began to realize its