Music Education and Diversity

The Legacy of European Music

For nearly a century, music educators focused their efforts on singing, notational literacy, and music appreciation. Standard works by European composers comprised the repertoire of musical study in elementary and secondary schools, and composed works for school-age singers and instrumentalists were decidedly European and European American in flavor. With the development of phonograph records and players, listening lessons offered homage to the master composers, too. Although group violin lessons and school orchestras were gradually coming into being, instrumental music study was rare in schools until the end of World War I, when bandsmen from the battlefields in France and Germany were hired as music teachers in American schools to work with young wind, brass, and percussion musicians in concert and marching bands. Church choirs and touring orchestras were also influencing the organization in schools of glee clubs, mixed choirs, and instrumental ensembles. An increasing number of secondary schools were staffed by specialist teachers in choral and instrumental music.

Forbidden “Folk” Music

Despite the distinctively original expressive forms of some American communities, Western art music forms continued to prevail as principal curricular content in school music classes well into the 20th century. Folk music, including the expressions of African Americans, Native Americans, and Latin Americans, was generally viewed by teachers as “primitive” expressive practices that were ill suited for curricular inclusion. Indeed, the designation of “folk music” inferred, often inaccurately, a minimalist or simplified expression when compared to the sophistication of art music. A performance by the Fisk Jubilee Singers at a convention of the Music Supervisors National Conference in 1922 was an impressive first encounter for many of the power and sophistication of their choral music, after which spirituals began to surface on the concert programs of school choirs. Other African American popular music forms, including blues, ragtime, and jazz, did not fare so well, however, and were forbidden in the curriculum. Because this music was associated with saloons and bawdy houses, educators were concerned that the music itself was cheap, vulgar, and immoral and thus potentially ruinous to young people. The wild rhythms of the Jazz Age were excluded from the schools, and in the 1920s neither the Charleston nor the “shimmies” was permitted on school grounds. Even in the 1950s, when jazz was finally allowed into some schools as an extracurricular club activity in which students met after school to rehearse for the school dances at which they would perform, it was referred to as “dance band” music rather than as jazz.

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