Search

Materials to assist instruction have a long history in music education. Charles H. Congdon was the director of music education in St. Paul, Minnesota, from 1885 to 1898. He ceased classroom teaching and began his own music publishing company around 1900. He remained active in music education and was one of the charter members of MENC. Congdon is best known for the six songbooks in The Congdon Music Readers series. To assist the classroom teacher, he devised a series of large song scrolls to accompany his textbooks. He later developed a system to store and display these scrolls, and designed the first chromatic pitch pipe for school use. Congdon's texts, scrolls, scroll holders, storage cabinets, and pitch pipes all led the way for the commercialization of music materials today.

The more affluent homemakers of America in the 1920s were middle- to upper-class women who attended concerts and lectures, owned and listened to the radio, and had time to read the popular magazines of the day. Three of these magazines are still published today: Better Homes and Gardens, The Ladies' Home Journal, and Child Life. From their inception, Better Homes and Gardens and The Ladies' Home Journal contained tips for home decor, child raising, gardening, food preparation, and crafts. Child Life contained stories, plays and poetry, crafts, and puzzles intended for children approximately eight to eleven years of age. Women who were concerned that their children were reading quality magazines subscribed to Child Life for their families, and often read the stories aloud to their younger children. In the 1920s these magazines regularly carried articles about music and music appreciation. Anne Shaw Faulkner Oberndorfer (hereafter referred to as "Faulkner") wrote most of them. Anne Shaw Faulkner Oberndorfer Born in Chicago in 1877, Anne Shaw Faulkner spent her entire life living and working in her home city. Her father was a partner in Wells and Faulkner, a "well-known wholesale grocery house" in Chicago. (1) The family lived in Hyde Park, where her father was a village trustee and an elder in the Presbyterian Church. (2) Although the family was not "old money," they were fairly well off and much of the information about Anne Faulkner's activities can be found in the society pages of the Chicago newspapers. Faulkner attended the Chicago Conservatory of Music and the Caruthers Normal School of Music. (3) She was on staff and taught music history at the Columbia Conservatory, and gave lectures for the University of Chicago. (4) However, most of her teaching was in the form of public lectures, frequently on topics drawn from music history. From 1897 to at least 1935, she gave pre-concert lectures the day before Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) concerts. (5) These were first hosted in private homes, later held in the Fine Arts Building, and finally given in the Marshall Fields department store's Wedgewood Room downtown, under the aegis of the Women's Committee of the CSO. (6) In 1913 Faulkner married Marx E. Oberndorfer, a concert pianist who was her long time friend and musical collaborator. He had frequently accompanied her lectures with examples at the piano, and the two continued to work in this manner following their marriage. (7) Together they offered piano lessons and music appreciation classes "especially for the adult beginner," and even hosted a cruise to Europe for a grand opera tour with accompanying lectures. (8) Although Faulkner was a member of the Music Supervisors National Conference (MSNC; now MENC: The National Association for Music Education), she apparently never taught in the public schools. She did, however, give several papers on music appreciation at MSNC national conventions. (9) She also presented her music appreciation lecture-recitals on the radio (WMAQ Chicago), often on such topics as musical geography and the opera. (10) Ann Shaw Faulkner Oberndorfer was a prolific writer. (11) She authored a music appreciation text, What We Hear In Music, which was published in thirteen editions over thirty years. (12) As the national chair of the Music Division for the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC) from 1920 to 1926, she wrote for the GFWC newsletter, gave conference presentations, and wrote yearly reports. (13) She also wrote the program notes for the first Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) Children's Concerts, and over fifty articles published in such magazines as The Ladies Home Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, and Child Life. Faulkner in Historical Context Chicago was an exciting, artistic place during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. One could attend performances of chamber music or theater, the CSO, or the opera. …

With all the music that is available for instrumental performance in the schools, the music of Thailand is under-represented. Yet Thailand has a rich instrumental tradition. This article focuses on the possibilities of adapting the Thai mahori and krüang sai ensembles to the western instrumentation available in school music programs. There is a brief explanation of Thai music: melody, tuning system, and notation. Suggestions are offered for approximating an authentic Thai sound using western instruments by retuning Orff instruments to the Thai tuning system, adjusting the intonation on recorders to emulate the Thai klui, and adapting the violin and viola to substitute for the Thai saw duongand saw oo. There are examples included of arrangements for two Thai children's songs scored for Orff instruments and recorder.

Introduction In educational research today there is certainly more acceptance of both qualitative and quantitative methods than ever before. In 1990 these were known as the "humanistic" and "social-scientific" methods. The paradigms behind these two methodologies are diametrically opposed. Where the humanist seeks to document unique experiences, the social scientist is problem oriented, looking for uniformity of behaviors across a population in order to predict the solution to the problem. The humanist tends to prefer small-scale, individualized interpretation to the social scientist's documentation of variations from the norm of a population of individuals. The humanist writes in a flowing, narrative style, while the social scientist uses the structure and language of an experimental report. These same polarities occur in music education research. Although the first publications of Journal of Research in Music Education were heavily historical, research in music education developed primarily through the methodologies of the social sciences. Today researchers have breached the quantitative world of "The Effect of __ on __," and opted for the direct observation and narrative writing style of qualitative methods. There are even a few working in that middle ground who employ both methodologies for a more balanced view of the research problem. Some researchers even recommend methods from other disciplines to help better understand what happens in music education classrooms. (1) Like the historical disciplines of other subjects, historical studies in music education have always been predominantly a qualitative field. Indeed, most of the literature about historical music education research solidly defends the humanistic approach. George Heller and Bruce Wilson emphasized the need for the narrative form. (2) They stated that music education history does not seek to isolate causes but "to explain complex relationships." (3) However, there are various way to try to "explain complex relationships" and qualitative methods are only one of them. While not many in number, there are quantitative research articles in music education history. (4) This change in methodology parallels the research of historians across the country. To help understand the methodological possibilities, this research paper compares the approaches described in Charles Tilly's article "How (and What) are Historians Doing?" (5) with applications in historical music education research. Some of the examples Tilly cited do not have exact parallels in music education research. In those cases, I found studies that employed a similar approach, or otherwise fit into Tilly's categorical descriptions. To further develop this comparison, I also describe various methodologies for historical research (immersion/saturation, oral history, content analysis, collective biography, and the use of genealogical and government sources) and apply them to music education research, as ways to document music education history--to look back in time. Approaches to Historical Investigation In 1990 Charles Tilly described various types of investigative modes available to the historical researcher, each of which represented a valid, but alternative, view of history. To help clarify his ideas of alternative histories, he divided research into four areas or quadrants, one for each approach to uncovering history. These are: small-scale, humanistic; large-scale, humanistic; large-scale, social-scientific; and small-scale, social-scientific. (6) To better understand these quadrants, Figure 1 is a comparison of research in historical music education with the examples in Tilly's article. Tilly first addressed the small-scale, humanistic approach, represented by Carlo Ginsberg's The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. (7) This is essentially a study of one man, a miller named Dominco Scandella, in one place and time, an Italian village of the sixteenth century. …

Since the early part of the twentieth century, there have been selected colleges in the United States dedicated to the training of future leaders for labor unions. Four of the most prominent are Work Peoples' College, Duluth, Minnesota; Brookwood College, Katonah, New York; Commonwealth College, Mena, Arkansas; and Highlander College, Monteagle, Tennessee. Education at these colleges, including music education, ran counter to the educational establishment of their time. Issues of labor versus management, traditional versus nontraditional education, and structured (formal) curricula versus practical (informal) curricula are all in evidence. All four institutions had songbooks. An examination of archival copies of these songbooks, within the context of the curricula of the schools and the labor movement in the United States, shows that nearly all the songs were parodies set to the folk and popular tunes of the day. These songs provided a means through which to teach union solidarity and labor concepts. Music education at these colleges was generally done on an informal basis. Students developed their skills as lyricists, song leaders, and performers through sing-alongs and the use of music in drama. Nontraditional though this was, the practical music training the students experienced in these labor colleges produced powerful results in their unions.

In 1967, secretary-general of ISME Egon Kraus challenged music educators to become multicultural in their perspective, a challenge spurred on by the Tanglewood Symposium. Music educators in the United States have long been interested in the musics of other cultures. Often they have learned about these musics and how to implement them in the classroom through the pages of the Music Educators Journal (MEJ). The MEJ has covered multicultural perspectives in music through its articles, special issues, book reviews, and reports from MENC conferences and symposia. A study of the MEJ from 1967 to 1992 revealed the growth of multicultural music education. During the 1970s, a greater depth of interest in, and knowledge about, world musics developed. Throughout the 1980s, this initial interest grew steadily into a need for methods and materials for the implementation of multicultural music studies in the classroom, as did the need for teacher training in these musics. A formal declaration of commitment to multicultural music education was adopted at the MENC Multicultural Symposium in 1990, leading to a broad world perspective for music education. The three MEJ special focus issues on multicultural music education epitomized each of these growth areas.