National Music Research Articles

The Italian Avant-Garde and National Tradition

Musical nationalism is sometimes looked on as a transient phenomenon, characteristic of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and closely associated with political nationalism. But such a view is only a half-truth: national characteristics have had a way of turning up in the music of most ages, and we find them not only in periods of militant political nationalism and parochialism, but also, often to a striking degree, at times when frontiers seemed to imply no cultural barriers. Medieval civilization was international to an extent that would have been inconceivable in the nineteenth century; yet there is no mistaking the quintessential italianità of, say, Landini. The Italian and English madrigal schools of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries could be regarded as closely-related phases of one great cultural flowering; yet one need not look at the words to assign madrigals by Marenzio and Weelkes, or Gastoldi and Morley, to their respective countries.

Music Education and National Goals

Music Education and National Goals

Musically Gifted Children Learn More ln lEss Time At the Interlochen Arts Academy and the National Music Camp

Musically Gifted Children Learn More ln lEss Time At the Interlochen Arts Academy and the National Music Camp

Tradition and Responsibility

IN 1931, Arnold Scha5nberg wrote a pamphlet which he called National Music. For many years his music, along with that of Bart6k, Hindemith, and Stravinsky, had been attacked in conservative German music periodicals like the Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung and the Zeitschrift fiir Musik. As nationalism and political anti-Semitism became ever more dominant forces in German life, the nature of the attacks changed. no longer sufficed to call Scha5nberg a heartless calculating machine or even a psychopath. Now conservatism was equated with national virtue, and thus Schanberg's music represented nothing less than treason against the German heritage. SchaSnberg's pamphlet begins: It is strange that no one has yet observed that my music, grown as it is on German soil and entirely free of foreign influences, constitutes an art sprung wholly out of the traditions of German music, one which effectively opposes the quest for domination on the part of Romance and Slavic schools. The general failure to notice this is due more to the laziness and the arrogance of my critics than to the actual difficulty of my scores. The facts themselves are obvious. National Music as a whole makes

Ford Foundation Composers' Project in Music Education

Music educators everywhere share the satisfaction of the Board of Directors of the Music Educators National Conference in this announcement of a new enterprise of the Ford Foundation Program in Humanities and the Arts, recently released by the National Music Council.

The Need for Research in the History of American Music

IF WE JUDGE from the amount of music consumed in the United States each day, we shall suppose that ours is the most musical nation on earth. Music comes with the air we breathe, in season and out of seasoxl, to inspire the alert consciousness and to dull the senses of those to whom it is palliative rather than challenge. We have brought this about owing to our genius in matters technical whereby rivers of sound are made to reach flood proportions. NYhile taking credit for harnessing music of the spheres to every dashboard and bedside table, we also face the charge that one of the most precious gifts of communication conferred on men has developed, through our urgency, all the potentialities of a dire threat to man's peace of mind. We sell in the marketplace that which is to be sought in solitude on the mountaintop; we uphold as a shining example of mass production that which accompanies the prayer of contemplation. Hitherto rare moments of inspired communication now lighten the load of household duties and chase away the blues. Arrayed beside these questionable influences are substantial temples of unexcelled grace wherein the muse is attended with consistent devotion and men's lives are made purer and holier. There is ample reason to look upon the progress of music in America as one of the most remarkable examples of cultural growth and maturity the world has ever known. To what extent do these virtues and faults derive from, and contribute to qualities which we consider indigexlously American in idea and practice? Every well-recognized type of music, whether it satisfies our personal taste or not is indigenous to our culture, and each type, whether we approve or not, will be of concern to scholars in 2 ,058 A.D. when they appraise the merits of civilization in these United States of America. At present, however, we are distressingly uninformed regarding important and revealing changes of taste which took place among us prior to the twentieth century. Nor have we conclusive means of analysis today, except as business associations promulgate them for their own special uses. Glancing at our library shelves we find a sort of pseudo-literature written from the standpoint of someone's roseate, inaccurate memory with results too often giving the impression that America was discovered in 1892 and first settled about 1914. A recent list of books on American civilization selected for information libraries abroad includes several admirable works on literature and the visual arts, but none on music, the implication being either that we have no musical tradition or that-as this paper intends to prove it is insufficiently documented and, therefore, incorrectly interpreted. If we draw on reputable historians whose textbooks are used almost exclusively to instruct young people in our colleges and universities we shall learn but little about music in America.

The National Music Camp

There are many music camps throughout the United States. This article by Norma Lee Browning, although National Music Camp and its founder, Joseph E. Maddy, honors the purpose and spirit of all such enterprises. The summer music camp movement has spread across the country. Music study, recreation and outdoor life afford an ideal combination, especially attractive to those who are serious about their music studies. It can almost be said that wherever vou live there is in the area a music camp or similar institution which offers opportunity to high school students for summer music study. Mr. Maddy does not claim to have originated the music camp idea. But he and his co-workers, T. P. Giddings, C. M. Tremaine, and others who contributed hard work or hard money or both, had the imagination and confidence to spell out the idea in action. However, Mr. Maddy likes to give credit for the actual birth of the National Music Camp to the members of the National High School Orchestra, which had its second appearance' early in 1927 at the Dallas convention of the Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association-now called the American Association of School Administrators. (The National High School Orchestra was first organized by Mr. Maddy for the biennial national convention of the MENC at Detroit in 1926.) The students had a wonderful experience at Dallas in five days jammed with rehearsing, section coaching, and practicing alone and in groups between times-ending with a performance for a great audience of administrators, than which there is none more appreciative or responsive. Caine the tim1efor packing up to go home. Of course, nobody wanted to go home. It was sort of sad. The end had come so soon! Mr. Maddy dispelled the nostalgic gloom when he asked the group if they would like to get together again at a summer camp to practice, study and rehearse for a week or several weeks instead of a few days. You know the answer. C.V.B.

John Rowe Parker and the Euterpeiad

In an inspiring essay which he read to the Music Teachers' National Association in 1916,1 0. G. Sonneck warned scholars who were to come after him of the loose and careless methods traditionally employed by historians of American music. After many listings of error and suggestions for study, Sonneck closed his address by saying, . . . the subjects available are just as numerous as are States and cities (musical or not) or individuals who in their day or way contributed their share (or not) in winning for our country the position which it holds in the world of music today. The endless variety of subjects will keep pace with our growth as a musical nation and with the endless variety of tastes and preferences of investigators, whether the subject chosen taxes their power of research for a week, a month, a year or ten years. Ample work for all of us lies on the surface or deep beneath the surface.

Some impressions concerning recent developments in music libraries in colleges and universities

The organization of music librarians as a professional group dates back 1931 when the Music Library Association was founded. It now has a membership of more than 1000 individual institutional members. The purposes of the Music Library Association are to promote the establishment, growth and use of music libraries and collections of music and musical literature in the United States and Canada; initiate and encourage studies aiming improve the organization, administration and contents of such libraries and in pursuance of these aims co-operate with other organizations in related fields. The Music Library Association is affiliated with the American Library Association and the American Musicological Society. It is a member of the National Music Council and the Council of the National Library Association and publishes an extremely useful and scholarly journal under the title Notes. Various studies reveal that the trend of establishing Music Libraries in the departments of our universities and colleges has been largely an activity of the last decade. This trend partially fills a need for making available an adequate collection of research and reference materials for the graduate student. The brief study described in the following paragraphs was undertaken during September, 1948, in an effort make a comparison of more recently established music libraries in certain representative colleges and universities. It was conducted for the purpose of contributing the comprehensive planning for the development of the Music Library of George Peabody College for Teachers. The method of investigation for this study involved a four-week tour of the libraries mentioned in Table I given with this report, followed by questionnaires verify and supplement information obtained on the visit.

Music Education in the Americas

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

Simplification of Musical Notation

A MODERN writer has declared that the orthodox musical notation is “in some of its elements, foolishly illogical and unnecessarily complicated” (W. II. Anderson, in “The Musical Companion”, Gollancz, p. 27), and in recent correspondence in NATURE, concluding with the present issue, correspondents have suggested simplifications. Many attempts have been made to do this in the past, but have failed to gain permanence. One of the most widely advertised, which appeared some thirty years ago, was known as Naunton′s National Music System, a fundamental element of which was a simplified notation without clefs, sharps or flats. The score consisted of horizontal lines drawn from the black notes of a keyboard shown vertically on the left. Thus, black lines corresponded to black keys and white spaces to white keys. The main object of this notation was to enable the average person to become a proficient pianoforte player from a score, the precise object sought by Lord Brabazon in the original letter of the correspondence published in NATURE of May 16.

Music Education in Negro Schools and Colleges

There is a modern educational trend in the college and high school curriculums of fitting students for life-the life-related program, as some call it. At Fort Valley State College an attempt is being made to construct a curriculum to meet the problem in new and rapidly changing conditions so that it will maintain and increase its usefulness. This study was undertaken for the purpose of making a critical evaluation and comprehensive appraisal of the present status of music education in the Negro rural school, the high school, and the college for furnishing an intelligent background upon which one might build an efficient music curriculum suited to the Negro's present condition and needs for cultural development. In 1928 the United States Government made a study in order that we may know where we stand in secondary education. The Bureau of the Budget gave $225,000 to be expended over a three-year period. The study of music was made by Annie E. Pierce, Associate in Music at the University of Iowa. The investigation followed the usual procedure, that is, she used inquiry forms and later made personal visits to the schools. As this was a national survey, no reference was made to Negro schools, and no directed effort made toward the presentation of the deplorable status of music in the Negro schools in the South. If school and community interests are to be coordinated and solidified through cooperative undertakings of musical organizations as observed by Miss Pierce is to become a reality, and music is to continue to play an increasingly important part in the life of this country, we will become a musical nation only in the proportion that our individual citizens become musical; so that means some attention must be given to some type of music in every school in the United States.

National Music Week—May 7-13

National Music Week—May 7-13

IRISH NATIONAL MUSIC

IRISH NATIONAL MUSIC Get access JAMES TRAVIS JAMES TRAVIS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Musical Quarterly, Volume XXIV, Issue 4, October 1938, Pages 451–480, https://doi.org/10.1093/mq/XXIV.4.451 Published: 01 October 1938

Are We a Musical Nation?

Are We a Musical Nation?

Music Teachers' National Association

Music Teachers' National Association

Music Teachers' National Association

Music Teachers' National Association

Music Teachers' National Association

Music Teachers' National Association

Music Teachers' National Association

Music Teachers' National Association

Music in the Woods of Michigan and Maine: A Review of the National and Eastern Music Camps

the Dallas meeting of the Department of Superintendence, one of the important parts of the program was the appearance of the National High School Orchestra. Tentative plans were discussed for the formation of a summer music camp which would extend the activities so well begun in the National High School Orchestra. A tentative announcement was made that the camp would be located somewhere in Maine. The final selection, however, rested upon Interlochen, Michigan, and there the National High School Orchestra and Band Camp, now known as the National Music Camp, was opened in the summer of 1928. Plans were made by another group in the east for establishing a camp in Maine in 1930, but the actual opening did not take place until 1931. The National Camp has, therefore, had five seasons, and the Eastern, two seasons. There are marked differences in the ownership and management of the two camps, although in their educational policies both camps are controlled by men who are closely associated with the actual music in the schools. The National Camp management and ownership rests with the same type of people. The Eastern camp has been financed by a group of public spirited Maine business men. The Na-