Music Staff Research Articles

Rate-contingent guitar rental to decelerate stereotyped head/face-touching of an adult male psychiatric patient

The music therapy staff of a large state mental hospital used rate-contingent guitar-rental plus feedback to decelerate head/face-touching of a 40-year-old male schizophrenic. The subject earned tokens during guitar lessons for decreasing rates of the target behavior. He could exchange these tokens for the use of a guitar for a specified time period on the ward where he lived. The program successfully reduced the rate of head/face-touching to criterion after 21 sessions. After 2.5 years, the rate was still below baseline, with generalization to other music therapy activities and to the ward.

Current Practices in the Evaluation of Student Teachers in Music

nTUDENT TEACH1NG iS one of the most important parts of the curriculum leading toward certification in music education. A questionnaire survey was conducted to determine to what extent the college supervisor, the cooperating teacher, and the student teacher himself participate in student teacher evaluation. In the fall of 1967, questionnaires were mailed to 504 universities and four-year colleges sponsoring student chapters of the Music Educators National Conference and offering degrees in music education. The 375 questionnaires returned and utilized in the study represented 74 percent of the sample population.l To aid in analyzing the data, a FORTRAN program was developed that made use of the IBM 1620 data processing computer. Cards were punched with the necessary information from each questionnaire and processed through the computer, which gave a tally of checked responses. Table 1 shows the classification of the responding institutions in terms of financial support, type, and undergraduate enrollment. The highest number of responses (49 percent) came from public supported institutions. Liberal arts colleges received the highest representation (45 percent), followed by universities (42 percent). The undergraduate enrollment in the majority of institutions was over one thousand. Music educators recognize the importance of the active participation of music staff members in the evaluation of student music teachers. Table 2 shows that the music school or department has complete responsibility for supervision in almost half of the institutions canvassed. In an additionaI one-fifth of the colleges and universities, music staff either share or assist in the supervision of student music teachers. In 78 percent of the reporting institutions, at least one full-time college music faculty member is assigned duties as a supervisor of student teachers. The authority of this individual may vary ffom complete responsibility to that of an advisor to another department. Table 3 shows the number of music faculty with supervision duties, the average number

The Art of Tonal Thinking

T HE TOPIC of this paper has interested the writer intermittently for many years, and his interest in it has been responsible for more than twenty years of research and inventive effort to find means for facilitating accurate tonal thinking and the fluent expression of musical thought. This problem is as old as the phenomenon we call music. The ancient Greeks, including such intellectual giants as Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), Aristoxenus of Tarentum (4th Century B.C.), and Pythagoras (582487 B.C.), who invented the Monochord with frets to indicate pitch, sought solutions to this perplexing problem. Aristoxenus developed the Greek modes-Lydian, Dorian, Phrygian, Hypophrygian, Aeolian, etc. The tones of the modes were named after the seven strings of the lyre, from the highest, Hypate, to the middle or fourth string, Mesa, to the lowest or seventh string, Nete. To these basic names were added the prefix Para, meaning next to. Imagine trying to sing a foursyllable word like Paranete to a melodic succession in sixteenth-note rhythm, as in our song Dixie. Guido d'Arezzo (born c.990 A.D.), a choirmaster of the eleventh century, invented the music staff. Guido had the same difficulty then that we have today in training singers to think, read, and write in terms of tonal relations. Accordingly, he had his pupils practice singing while playing the tones on Pythagoras' Monochordused as a tonal space-frame. Guido, finding the polysyllabic Greek names of Aristoxenus unsingable, invented monosyllabic singing names, ut re mi fa so la, derived from the initial words of the lines of the Hymn to St. John. Here, as we all know, was the source of the British Tonic-Sol-Fa system, developed and promoted by John Curwen. This, in turn, was the source of the American Movable Do system. Carl Eitz, a German scientist and colleague of Wilhelm von Humbolt and of Hermann von Helmholz, developed an absolute system of arbitrary names which he called Tone-words. These consisted of monosyllabic phonetics for each of the tones and their chromatic inflections of sharps and flats, double sharps and double flats-some thirty-five different tonal phonetics with an initial consonant and the euphonious vowels a, e, i, o, u. The Eitz system has had wide use in Germany. It seems doubtful, however, that it could ever be adopted in our country because, unfortunately, the Eitz names have no connotation with our staff-notational system, with our pitch names, nor with the German pitch names. In France, the number system is used. It is known as the Galin-Paris-Cheve System-a method of teaching part-singing and part-reading with number 1 for do, 2 for re, 3 for mi, etc., and a zero for silence. The numerals are used only as graphic symbols, while the singing names are the sol-fa syllables with do the fixed pitch. Hence: the Fixed Do system. Even though the system was advocated by the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau and the composer Hector Berlioz, it is difficult to see how it can help singers to think and sing precise intervals when the phonogram do-mi-so may represent a major triad, a minor, an augmented, or a diminished triad! The number system does not seem practical. Perhaps it is impractical because its authors were not practicing music teachers; Pierre Galin was a doctor, Aime Paris, a lawyer, and Emile Cheve another doctor.

THE MUSICAL INFORMATION SERVICES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM

One afternoon, about twelve years ago, the telephone rang, and a strange voice said: ‘Hold on! I'm going to put on a gramophone record near the 'phone and I want you to listen and tell me what the tunes are: it's a potpourri of Johann Strauss waltzes.’ I fear I wasn't able to identify many of the tunes, and I only mention the episode as having been one of my earliest and certainly my most vividly remembered introduction to a practical aspect of the subject of this paper. Thirty years ago, these services as we know them today hardly existed. In any library, information services must depend very largely on catalogues and the way in which they have been compiled: so I propose to base most of my remarks on an outline of the growth of the British Museum's catalogues that bear on music, and to link this with an account of the kind of information we are asked for, and to show how we have tried to build up our knowledge in general and the catalogues in particular to meet this demand. I shall not say anything about the kind of information that can be provided simply by consulting Grove and other standard works of musical reference. I also want to try to show how ‘information’, widely interpreted in a well‐balanced national collection of music, could bring it to life in a novel way with immense possibilities. Finally, by way of introduction, I must emphasize that I am concerned solely with the Music Room, which forms a division of the Department of Printed Books. Information regarding the large collection of manuscript music which is in the Department of Manuscripts is the concern solely of that Department. But I may mention here that the Music Room does contain a good deal of manuscript material which forms an inseparable part of special collections such as the Queen's Music Library, the Hirsch Library, and the Library of the Madrigal Society. For information about these manuscripts the Music Room staff are responsible.