College music: A work in progress?

New England Journal of Higher Education, The, Summer 1998 by Freeman, Robert

College-level music education began to blossom in New England during the closing decades of the 19th century. True, the Harvard Music Association had been formed in Boston during the 1830s by a group of Harvard alumni who believed that the music of Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart was worthy of study and performance, even if the authorities responsible for the development of curriculum at Harvard College did not yet agree. And a Harvard graduate from the Class of 1843, Alexander Wheelock Thayer became so interested in the music of Beethoven that he dedicated his life to the study of the composer's biography-an endeavor furthered by President Lincoln who, shortly before his assassination, appointed Thayer American consul to Trieste as a way of facilitating Thayer's continuing Beethoven studies.

But Harvard and Yale did not establish their first professorships in music until 1875 and 1894, respectively Among other important dates, both the New England Conservatory and Oberlin were founded in 1867, and the University of Michigan in 1880. Juilliard, Eastman and Curtis were all founded with private money in the early 1920s. At Princeton, however, the first full-time music appointment did not come until the mid1930s, and by the end of World War II, music was still taught there as part of a Department of Art, Archaeology and Music!

Also after World War II, the MIT Corporation commissioned a study to understand better why young scientists and engineers in those days seemed more attracted to Harvard than to MIT. The study concluded that MIT might address the problem by expanding its curricular offerings to economics, philosophy, linguistics, political science and, among other things, music. (John Harbison and I left Princeton in 1968 in order to become assistant professors at MIT, where Harbison, one of America's most eminent composers, is now Institute Professor of Music.)

By the 1950s and '60s, music schools and departments sprang up in colleges and universities all over America. And music has achieved a great deal in the United States during the past century, partly as the result of the encouragement of a great many American higher education institutions. More than 12,000 degrees in music are awarded annually by U.S. colleges and universities. With encouragement from the academic world, virtually every repertory is available on compact disc. And performing arts centers have been built during the past 25 years in great numbers across the country.

Flat note

Despite all this, there are threatening rips in music's canvas. Though it is beginning to make a comeback, music has not been taught in most of America's urban school systems for a quarter century. During the past half century, very few new works of music have become part of the standard repertorya canon which appears more and more restricted. While record stores and radio stations pump out lots of music of which Plato would have taken a very dim view, the number of classical CDs made and sold has declined precipitously in the past decade, as has the number of metropolitan newspapers employing music critics and the annual sale of acoustic instruments all over the world.

Furthermore, every collegiate music faculty member of my acquaintance has complained for a generation now of annual declines in the test results of aural skills among admitted students-not a happy phenomenon to contemplate in a nation whose future depends upon a thoughtful electorate. And though no serious longitudinal studies have been done that I know of, the audience for classical music over the past quarter century has appeared to be getting markedly older. How long that phenomenon has been going on and to what degree that process was retarded by the immigration of younger refugees from the Nazis during the 1930s and '40s and from the collapse of Communism in the 1990s, has not yet been fully explored.

Finally, in a nation where the arts were supported almost entirely by private money through the early 1960s, the very existence of the National Endowment for the Arts has been under strenuous political attack from the right for more than a decade. Even at a time when the richest nation in the world has a balanced budget, the fact that we spend less than a half dollar per capita in federal support for the arts continues to be a major target for political attacks-a sure sign that those who care about art have not found an effective way to organize.

There will always be music in America; the question confronting schools and departments of music concerns what kinds of music will survive pressure to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The following courses of action could enhance the nation's musical life.

View music as a whole on campus. The late

Roger Sessions postulated a single way of thinking about music. In Sessions' view, those who experience music most keenly are the composers, for it is they who conceive it in the first place. But Sessions added that while there will always be college faculty who think of performance as a species of clerical activity, a sensitive performer will conceive the music with an acuity approaching that of the composer. And while I have known university administrators who see the role of the listener as a very passive one, it was Sessions' dream-and mine-that the musical instruction provided in American colleges and universities would make American listeners more active participants in the creative process. (These days, this task can be facilitated through computer technology in the instruction of elementary composition.) Put another way, composition, performance and listening should be thought of not as discrete entities separated from other intellectual disciplines through narrowly focused academic organizations, but as parts of the same process.