Why Music Education?

Why Music Education?
Music education is taught in 94% of all elementary schools and 91% of all secondary schools in America (Elpus, 2019). It is taught to students from all backgrounds and it is specifically recognized by Congress as an essential part of a well-rounded curriculum that is required to be available for all students in schools receiving federal funds under the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act.  If music education is so ubiquitous and is a federally mandated part of a students education it must surely be important, must surely serve some purpose. Why is music education important enough to include in a public school curriculum?

In answering this question, it might serve to go back to the inception of musical instruction in the American educational system. Writing in 1837, the school committee of Boston faced this very question. In an effort to answer it and justify the first truly public pilot program for music education in America, posed a simple test of educational validity for music education (Mark, 2007).

“ There is a threefold standard , a sort of chemical test by which education itself and every branch of education may be tried. Is it intellectual? Is it moral? Is it Physical?” (Boston School Committee, 1837)

These three categories served as the framing for the value of a musical education in the public schools of Boston. Music was meant to improve intellectual capacity, establish bulwarks against immorality and improve the physical condition of the body through the exercise of “organs of the breast”. 

These reasons were convincing enough in the 1830s for Boston to engage in a pilot program which led to the first truly public music education curriculum in America. These are utilitarian arguments that pose the reasons for music education’s inclusion in the curriculum of public schools as rooted in effective skill development for other areas of study, culture, and physical development (Mark, 2007). This reasoning, used when Americans began to teach music in schools, was explicitly about extramusical goals.  One might ask, how have our justifications for music education evolved? How do we explain why we teach music in schools today, and what are the goals for doing so?

In 2014, The National Association for Music Education (NAfME) published an article on their website which aimed to answer these same questions. Blake Madden’s “Why Music Education Actually Matters” offered these helpful explanations:

  “Instead of trying to appeal to risk-averse lawmakers, bean counters, and even wealthy benefactors with Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soul-style stories of personal fulfillment through music, we could give them hard facts and good evidence to digest” (Madden-NAfME, 2014)

. What hard facts did they suggest? What framing did they choose?

“ You want higher test scores in math and science? Music education will help. You want children with higher mental faculty? Music education will help. You want to keep kids out of trouble and on-track towards college and future employment? Music education will help. “ (Madden-NAfME,  2014)

When taken together, these two pieces of advocacy seem to form a natural dialogue

 The Boston School Committee asks “Is it intellectual?”
 In 2014 NAfME Responds “You want higher test scores in math and science? Music education will help.”

“Is it Moral”

“You want to keep kids out of trouble and on-track towards college and future employment? Music education will help. “

“Is it physical?
“Research suggests that music training exercises so many different functions within the brain, that it’s kind of hard to engage with it fully and stay dumb for very long. When a musician first learns to read music, she develops a process of recognizing and decoding a complex system of symbols. The musician then translates those symbols into appropriate motor actions that use both hands, and confirms the accuracy of her actions through multisensory feedback (both sight and sound). In addition, musicians practice motor skills in the pursuit of metric precision, they exercise memory functions in the absence of written music, and create new combinations on the fly through improvisation (NAfME, 2014).

Separated by 177 years,  the  Boston School Committee and  Madden’s publication on the website of a national organization for music education advocacy, yet the underlying framing is the same. Music is essential because it has extramusical benefits to intellectual development in areas of math and science. Music is essential because its moral benefits can keep “kids out of trouble and on track towards college and future employment”. Music is essential because it develops physical motor skills and memory function, which makes it hard to “stay dumb for very long.”

If we engage with these ideas as the foundational reasons for the inclusion of music education, we must ask are these representative of the goals of a successful public school education in music? Do we consider ourselves successful if after 12 years of musical study from kindergarten to graduation a student has good memory skills, high math test scores, and a clean criminal record?

 What is the goal of music education?

The goal of music education seems to be self-evident, contained in its title: Educate Students In Music = Music Education. That simple goal, however, isn’t the goal that is so often used to justify study of music in schools. The excerpts above, from 1837 and from 2014, are both examples of advocacy by music educators for the inclusion of music education in school programs on the grounds of extramusical applications for music education.

This presents a problem when advocating for music specifically: If these associated skills aren’t unique to music education, might not some other educational domain do the same things? If that is the case, what makes music the better choice for those ends than those other things?
Setting aside physical development as a goal, which already has a dedicated educational track in Physical education, it may be worth the remaining two questions asking:

Is it Intellectual?

“Try it intellectually/ Music is an intellectual art. Among the seven liberal arts which the scholastic ages regarded as pertaining to humanity, music had its place. …..Memory, comparison, attention, intellectual faculties all of them, are honed by the study of its principles. It is not ornamental only. It has high intellectual affinities. It may be made to some extent an intellectual discipline” (School Committee, 1838)

“1. Musical training helps develop language and reasoning: Students who have early musical training will develop the areas of the brain related to language and reasoning. The left side of the brain is better developed with music, and songs can help imprint information on young minds.

2. A mastery of memorization: Even when performing with sheet music, student musicians are constantly using their memory to perform. The skill of memorization can serve students well in education and beyond.

3. Students learn to improve their work: Learning music promotes craftsmanship, and students learn to want to create good work instead of mediocre work. This desire can be applied to all subjects of study” (NAfME, 2014)
.

Music Education is often associated with educational benefits and intellectual growth in other areas. Indeed students in music ensembles often have higher academic scores than would be representative of the whole student body (Elpus 2019).

Much has been made of the connection between music and mathematics and the statistical correlates between music education and math achievement but correlation doesn’t provide adequate grounds for claims of a causal relationship. Meta-analysis of studies of the connections between the study of music and its effect on cognitive and academic skills shows a null effect (Sala, 2020). 

It is easy to see why the correlational link would be tempting to use for music education advocacy. When looking for good selling points, the fact that students who are active in band in high school are more likely to have higher academic achievement in other areas and better grades overall (Elpus, 2011) is a clear and potentially effective talking point. NAfME itself recommends this fact as part of “What to Know” for advocacy citing a study by The College Board and stating “On the 2012 SAT, students who participated in music scored an average of 31 points above average in reading, 23 points above average in math, and 31 points above average in writing.”(NAfME,N.D.)

Talking points, like the ones above, show  potential connections between music education and enhanced achievement. These statistics imply that music education must be valuable because it benefits other core subjects and develops transferable skills.  Advocacy based on these implications position the value of music study as dependent on its  potential beneficial effects elsewhere.  It offers as a powerful reason for the inclusion of music education its nature as an essential partner for development of other learning domains. 

While we recognize the potential power of those arguments we also recognize that correlation is not causation, it is also clear that demographic studies and meta analysis of data around participation in music education and achievement undercuts the effectiveness of these claims. Students who participate in instrumental music programs are more likely to have higher academic achievement but are also not representative of the student body as a whole. Students who participate in instrumental music are more likely to have 2 parent households. Those parents are more likely to have a college education themselves, and the students are more likely to have higher socioeconomic status, which are much stronger predictors of academic success (Elpus, 2019). Furthermore, the population of students in secondary instrumental music programs are not representative of the nation as a whole racially. Students in instrumental programs in secondary education are far more likely to be white and are less likely to be African American or Latinx. Writing in their article Who Enrolls in High School Music? A National Profile
of U.S. Students, 2009–2013,  Elpus and Abril determined that although nationally the population of white students was 52%, the membership of white students enrolled in Concert Band made up 62% of that ensemble (Elpus,2019). A higher percentage of white students and higher percentages of students with wealthier backgrounds skews the data about achievement. There may be correlation, but can one untangle these variables to prove causation?  In appealing to these kinds of narratives and engaging in the framing of Music education’s value as defined by its effects on other cognitive skills, music education advocacy groups are using the socioeconomic inequality of American society and its deleterious effects on underprivileged students to bolster its own claim to virtue.

One answer to the conundrum of confounding variables was to undertake a meta-analysis of studies to investigate the links between musical training and academic skill. Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet published just such a work with their “Cognitive and academic benefits of music training with children: A multilevel meta-analysis” in 2020. The meta-analysis included more than 50 studies and concluded that “Interestingly, music training is ineffective regardless of the type of outcome measure (e.g., verbal, non-verbal, speed-related, etc.), participants’ age, and duration of training. Furthermore, we note that, beyond meta-analysis of experimental studies, a considerable amount of cross-sectional evidence indicates that engagement in music has no impact on people’s non-music cognitive skills or academic achievement. We conclude that researchers’ optimism about the benefits of music training is empirically unjustified and stems from misinterpretation of the empirical data and, possibly, confirmation bias.” (Sala, 2020)

If the function of the study of music is to foster general cognitive skills and engage in development of transferable understanding, Sala and Gobet’s meta-analysis is troubling. It shows that there is little actual evidence of this taking place. The Demographic work of Elpus and Abril brings an uncomfortable light onto the purported achievement benefits by showing them as more likely the product of socioeconomic status and race than involvement in curricular music. If the only skills one learns in music classes are musical, and the only intellect stimulated is the musical, then does the study of music pass the 18th century chemical test? Does its advocacy pass the 21st century ethics test?

Is It Moral (and Cultural) ?

What does it mean to be moral? Rather than try to tease out the nature of morality here, let's define the term for our discussion with a simple definition.

Morality is defined by the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy as “used descriptively to refer to certain codes of conduct put forward by a society or a group (such as a religion), or accepted by an individual for her own behavior, or to normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational people.” (Gert & Gert,2020). 

These two definitions put us on a forking path. Is the morality we’re examining a culturally constructed code of conduct or is it an inherent personal code of conduct common to all rational people? Is the morality that music is supposed to be fostering a self realized morality that springs forth from within, or is it a morality that is imposed from without?
In the early 1800s there was little doubt of the nature of academic morality and what the aim of moral education should be. “ What a task…To bring the sense-meaning of facilitating the virtuous and wise disposition of the mind into the blood and veins, before the hot desires for sensual pleasures have so infected the blood and veins to make wisdom impossible” ( Pestalozzi, 1801).

The above quote comes from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a Swiss pedagogue and founder of the incredibly influential pestalozzian method for education which forms the basis for much of American public education in the 1800s (Mark,2007). It is taken from his 1801 epistolary book “how Gertrude teaches her children”. Pestalozzi was making his aims explicit, the aim of education was to bring into the learner the ethos/ sense-meaning of “virtuous” disposition--as defined by the dominant culture of the day--and to place it there before the “hot desires for sensual pleasures” have tainted the moral character of the student.

Here Pestalozzi is making a moral and cultural appeal for the utility of his educational method. While he draws this utilitarian comparison, he also asserts that the school or educator is the arbiter of which values and morals should be learned, so as to safeguard the students from corruption of “sensual pleasures”. In placing the school in the role of teaching a socially constructed morality,  Pestalozzi is engaging in a conscious shaping of his society and attempting to reproduce and preserve what he views as its virtues and eliminate what he views as its faults.

Pestalozzi is drawing explicitly the connection from a system of education to what John Dewey  would more than a 100 years later call a “culture in transmission”:

 “Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication. (Dewey,1935)

This society of transmission describes the process in which the continuation of a cultural group depends on its continued transmission of cultural norms and goods from older members to the young through a system of education leading to a cultural continuity (Dewey,1916). This culture in transmission, whatever culture that may be, is defined in the ways in which culture is preserved or altered in the transmission from older members to younger members (Dewey,1916).

This places education in a central and important place as a formally recognized mechanism of that transmission. Pestalozzi was very conscious of this in his aim to deny the grip of the sensual pleasures upon his students. This is why he impressed that importance. Morality is culturally constructed, education is a central mechanism for the perpetuation of that culture through transmission therefore “what is taught?”and “why is it taught?” are very important questions.

These are essential questions about the nature of the society.

What does a society deem Intellectual? Moral? Physical? Why is music an essential element of this mechanism of transmission? And if this transmission is the goal, one may ask; in music education what culture is being transmitted? What societal norms are being reproduced and continued?

What culture does music education as an institution preserve and serve in its role as cultural guardian? Is it the cultures of its communities? Of its nation? Of its members? Or is it the culture of “Music Education” itself?

Within public schools in the United States of America, especially at the secondary level, music education is based largely on a classical European view of the nature of music that values hierarchy and complacency as essential elements of its musical practices. In teaching music as a kind of summoning of a composers true intent through an ensemble performance ritual and educational system to enable that, we show that the system to be carrying the classist and antidemocratic values of its original societal context (Allsup, 2013; Schippers,2010)

Western art music, which forms the basis of music education in America, has a heavy emphasis on notational literacy which is needed to perform its cultural canon of great works. While there are elements of the tradition that use an aural approach, it is there to catch the details. (Allsup, 2013). This emphasis is indicative of a closed form of music education. The learner is in a deficit position, the teacher is the expert and the music is entirely finished and viewed as almost a platonic ideal. Success of the musician is measured by the degree to which the performer can accurately demonstrate the will of the composer by demonstrating mastery of the traditional codes of music (Allsup, 2013).

The musical agency rests not with the performer, who is in large part reduced to instrumentality rather than creative artistry through their relationship with the text. Their role is in realizing the intent of the composer as dictated through the notational codes of western art music. This decentering of the agency of the performer in western art music’s closed form. (Allsup,2013)

This decentering of the musician and antidemocratic performance practice of the classical era is not reflective of the actual musical context of the student in their own enculturated musical life.  These practices aren’t even present in many musical traditions outside of western art music where transmission of music is a process of listening and learning rather than consulting a definitive record of music in the form of a piece of written music (Campbell, 2018).

John Dewey defines the goals of education as being able to create in students the experience and skills to contribute to society as full members of that society. Students should be educated not only in a series of facts, sequentially organized, but rather should be empowered by an education full of authentic learning experiences to come into control of their own learning and contribute to their own society (Dewey,1935). One moral function of education for Dewey is making sure that the educational experiences of the student are related and applicable to their future lives as citizens of a society.

“How many found what they did learn so foreign to the situations of life outside the school as to give them no power of control of the latter” (Dewey,1935)

Music education works against students by creating a closed form reproductionist model based on 16th and 17th century ideas and aesthetics inherited from Europe and meant, not to empower the members of the country in the present, but to perpetuate an outdated and unappealing tradition. Educators do this while insisting that this approach is still relevant in the face of evidence that as band and chorus educators our secondary enrollment combined doesn’t top 25% (Elpus, 2019).

If the cultural context of the greater culture/cultures isn’t being transmitted through music education, what culture is?

The culture of music education and classical music performance are being imposed through reproductionist models of antidemocratic aesthetic and educational practices. The culture that musicians learn about in their music ensemble classes is not their culture through music; rather it is the culture of the musical ensembles themselves. Music education often serves to legitimize one very white and Eurocentric musical tradition while rejecting all others, is it any wonder that minority voices are so rare inside the profession?

If we are reproducing the models for classical education then we are also reproducing the contexts and values of those systems.

Who is doing the work of transmitting culture through music?

The demographics of music educators might be useful here as an indicator of whose culture and society are being transmitted. Music teachers in American schools are overwhelmingly white. 81.9% of music teachers are white which is significantly higher than the 66% of adults in America that identify as white (Elpus,2015).

That white people are overrepresented in the community of professional music educators is significant but unsurprising when demographics of music students in secondary schools are also considered. Students in Secondary school music programs--who represent a pool of potential music educators--tend to be significantly whiter, significantly higher achieving and from homes with significantly higher Socioeconomic status (Elpus,2019).

While the racial breakdown of music educators does not necessarily mean that their teaching is biased, one might ask: If the culture of music education is not inherently biased, why are so many music educators white?

There is an obvious conflict here. If a largely homogenous pool of educators are teaching a diverse multicultural population of students based on a reproductionist Eurocentric model, how does that group of educators arrive at a definition of appropriate music education? Again, what is the goal?

I turn again to Huib Schippers, who puts this question eloquently: “If we take the purpose of contemporary music education ins schools to be preparing children to ‘construct’ themselves as ‘musical citizens’ rather than molding them into competent consumers and representatives of a specific idiom, what forms of music education are appropriate for children in a multicultural society?” (Schippers, 2010 pp.106)

Here again, authenticity of experience is central. The role of education generally should be to enable students to come into their adulthood with the tools needed to understand and navigate their complex and multicultural context.

I wonder if the goal of music education is truly the same. Is our goal for music education to produce instrumentalists to realize the musical intent of a distant long dead composer in ensembles that were codified in the 17th and 18th century? Does this empower the student to truly make musical decisions, to understand the mechanics of music broadly, and fully participate in their own musical culture?

“[Teachers] must not become the stereotypical ‘professional educator who confuses method with music’ ….  In any teaching situation they are required to take position conscious with regard to the cultural setting they are in, sensitive to the choices open to them with regard to tradition, context and authenticity, and choose their approach to teaching accordingly” (Schippers, 2010 pp.107).

If the population of music educators is taken from the subset of the population that was successful in the context of traditional American scholastic music programs, then one might wonder how easy it will be to become a teacher who is culturally conscious, sensitive to the choices they make and can make informed choices.

“Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication” (Dewey,1935).

The culture of music education exists in communication with itself and by transmission of its norms. These norms serve to divorce music education from its cultural context, drive massive underrepresentation of minorities among music education professionals, and reinforce antidemocratic teaching practices through the embrace of closed forms as models for successful music education.

If the only folks who are teaching music come from a culture of music that is entirely enclosed within a western Eurocentric methodology viewpoint, then the culture of the music that is taught becomes further and further separated from the musical experience of the students in the room, the skills needed to participate in the musical culture of the student, and colonizes the understanding of “real music” to read out that definition popular and traditional forms as not worthy of study and creation.

How does that devaluing of culture and context convey a moral education?

Why Music Education? Because Music Matters

If music education isn’t going to be justified by extramusical goals then the only other option is to look at musical goals. What is music, why is it important, and why does it’s study matter? Looking back to Dewey, what kinds of authentic experiences does it offer that allow a student to more ably engage in their own societies and cultures? How does it deepen understanding? In what ways does and understanding of music constitute an essential societal skill, worthy of inclusion in the mechanism of transmission that public schools serve as? 

Music is an essential part of the ways that societies maintain their culture and traditions, music carries cultural knowledge, history, and legends. Developing understanding of these cultural elements is essential to understanding the context of life in a multicultural society and transmitting them demands a culturally literate and responsive approach to music education.  (Schippers, 2010)  Dewey insisted that successful education is a kind of authentic experience that empowers students with the knowledge they need to act in the world the inhabit, successful music education, built of authentic experiences with music, is an essential part of building needed cultural skills by creating  a bridge to both a deeper understanding of the cultures of others and in developing skills for deeper understanding and agency in students own cultures (Campbell,2018) . 

This approach maybe more demanding, and require a broader set of skills than are currently accounted for in the western art music tradition alone and an expansion of the paradigm of music education in America may be a solution.

Bennet Reimer wrote in favor of such an expansion 50 years ago in his book “ A Philosophy of Music Education: Advancing the Vision”. Reimer writes :

“1.) Music education should offer artistic creating opportunities including but going beyond those readily available in culture. Each such opportunity provides its particular way to bring musical meaning Ito existence. Improvement in creating - in musicianship- is a basic goal of music education. 

2.)Music education should offer responding opportunities including but going beyond what the culture typically provides. In as many was as can be devised, refinement in ability to gain musical meaning as responding particularly provides them ins a primary aim of music education

3) The music experienced in both musicianship and listenership opportunities should include but go beyond the generally available musics students are involved with in their cultures. Each particular music provide its characteristic musical meanings. Expansion of students repertoire of musical meanings is a foundational obligation of music education.  (emphasis original)”

Reimer added emphasis in his proscriptions here about going beyond the musical experiences readily available in culture but one might argue that the emphasis should be on including the musics readily available in culture. Music education already offers pathways to music that is outside the enculturated norms of its societal contexts in America

As we become an increasingly connected society the model of music education in American schools becomes increasingly divorced from utility and relevance but its focus on education in musics outside its cultural context is still overemphasized. Musical ensemble participation is still almost completely Band, Orchestra, and Choral in most secondary schools in America (Elpus,2019) while access to culturally diverse forms of music has never in history been more easily accessible.  Music education continues forward in a myopic model while a plurality of music explodes around it. How does engagement in American music education prepare a student for authentic musical experiences in their own life? Does focusing on traditional European classical music with give students a better ability to understand, create, and participate in their own musical cultures or those of others?

Music education that embraces all music as worthy of study honors the enculturated understandings of music (that are present even before students reach school age (Campbell,2018) and brings into the center of musical expression the agency of the student provides a way forward that highlights the things that music does uniquely and builds connections to the experience of music in culture and in life outside the school building.

Music is part of an intra-cultural and transcultural dialogue that stretches back to the first human songs, its part of the fabric of our societies, it carries meaning and messages, it grounds our traditions. Rather than recreating a model of music education that decentralizes the agency of the learner and divorces the music from the context of modern culture while stretching to find justifications for its validity through connections to math skills, memory, or moral education music educators should seek to create a vibrant and responsive music education.

A music education that is relevant and responsive, A music education that will allow students to engage with, decode and understand, and create their own contributions to their own musical cultures and develop understanding and appreciation for the musical cultures of others  is not only better suited to developing authentic and applicable musical skills but also allows for advocacy of music education from a position of inherent and unique value.  

Advocacy for a music education that relies on the existing structures leaves itself open to critique and devaluation from a population that passes through the program and leaves with a perceived lack of benefit, a central problem outlined by Dewey in 1935 writing on the subject of educational experiences  “How many found what they did learn so foreign to the situations of life outside the school as to give them no power of control of the latter”. How can one effectively advocate to a population that one has systemically deprived of agency and who have learned Dewey’s lesson? 

The population that are the parents of current students and are also the taxpayers who are paying the bills for the school program as part of local property taxes. If music education and educators seek to continue as an essential part of education communication of value to these populations is essential. Appeals to authority in the form of legislation do little to communicate value instead they impose a duty from above rather than elicit emergent support from a community. Appeals to extra-musical benefits offer no special reasons for continuation of musical study that could not be met by other means leaving music educators to answer questions of their relative utility and justify their continued engagement on terms that are non-musical and aren’t connected uniquely to music education and expression. 

In trying to answer “Why music education?” The answer seems to be because music matters . How you seek to quantify the value is where the differences in philosophy and practice become apparent. Is American Music Education ready to address its legacy, relevance, and its place in reproducing and reification of its own cultural norms as “real music”? Is the value music brings to a student really its intellectually transferrable skills, its moral training , and its role in physical development or is it time for a more inclusive, reflective and critical practice of music education and advocacy?

References

Allsup, R. E. (2013). The Compositional Turn in Music education: From Closed Forms to Open Texts. In Composing Our Future. Edited by Kaschub and Smith New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Pp67

Campbell, P. S. (2018). Music, education, and diversity: Bridging cultures and communities. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Pp89-90

Dewey, J. (1999). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of Education. Free Press. 

Dewey, J. (1935). Experience and education. (2015) New York: Free Press.

Elpus, K., & Abril, C. R. (2019). Who enrolls in high school music? A national profile of U.S. students, 2009–2013. Journal of Research in Music Education, 67(3), 323–338. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022429419862837 

Elpus, K. (2015). Music teacher licensure candidates in the United States. Journal of Research in Music Education, 63(3), 314–335. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022429415602470 

Gert, Bernard and Joshua Gert, "The Definition of Morality", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/morality-definition/>.

Madden, Blake- Why music education actually matters. NAfME. (2017, October 18). Retrieved October 12, 2021, from http://nafme.org/why-music-education-actually-matters/.

Mark, M. L., & Gary, C. L. (2007). A history of American Music Education. Rowman & Littlefield. Pp 160-161

National Association for Music Education. (2014, July 21). Important benefits of music in our schools. NAfME. Retrieved October 15, 2021, from https://nafme.org/important-benefits-of-music-in-our-schools/?fbclid=IwAR1l2U8UrWPyEvJyMvZpWf7fBJZpX9QXHHQKNPQ0KcRK0xg-keIDPsVkbYY. 

National Association For Music Education. (n.d.). Music Education and academic achievement. NAfME. Retrieved October 15, 2021, from https://nafme.org/advocacy/what-to-know/music-education-and-academic-achievement/.

Pestalozzi, J. H., Holland, L. E., Turner, F. C., & Cooke, E. (1801). How gertrude teaches her children: An attempt to help mothers to teach their own children and an account of the method. Forgotten Books, 2012. 

Reimer, B. (2003).  A Philosophy of Music Education Advancing the Vision (3rd edition). Prentice Hall. 

Sala, G., Gobet, F. Cognitive and academic benefits of music training with children: A multilevel meta-analysis. Mem Cogn 48, 1429–1441 (2020). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-020-01060-2

Accessed 10/15/2021

Schippers, H. (2010). Facing the music: Shaping music education from a global perspective. New York: Oxford University Press.

School Committee, 1838. “report” Boston Musical Gazette: devoted to the science of music December 5, 12