A Personal Retrospective on the MMCP.

A Manhattanville Music Curriculum Project participant reflects on its innovative initiatives in light of current curriculum theory.

On that notable October day in 1957, the launch of the world's first space satellite startled the world, and the former Soviet Union jolted the American educational system in a way that would shape the decade of the sixties into "a time when a shocked and humbled nation embarked on a bitter orgy of pedagogical soul-searching."[1] In the early part of the decade, we reveled in the dynamism of the Kennedy administration, until the President was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Between 1963 and 1965, the nation's seams were sorely frazzled as violence against blacks and civil rights workers shattered the South, and poverty loomed in ever-widening pockets of the nation. Our country trembled in the latter part of the decade as U.S. forces moved into Vietnam to fight a war that no one quite understood. Because of their role in inculcating values and teaching ways of knowing, schools were shaken by antiwar protests, the splintering of the liberal center, the rise of the counterculture, the growth of racial separatism, and demands for relevant curricula by everyone who wished to change society.[2]

Springing from the work of Webern, Varese, Ives, and other experimentalists, the sixties produced several new musical developments. Three of the most prevalent were the expansion of serial technique; the evolution of electronic music; and the admission of chance, choice, and improvisation.[3] Many composers were working with music that enlarged the performer's role, offering choices regarding what to play, when to play it, and how much to improvise within the performance of the piece.

Cage, Brown, Wolff, Ashley, and a host of other composers invented "new" notations to meet the requirements of their experimental music. Larry Austin, composer and editor, codified many of the new notational scores in Source Magazine (which consisted of music written in the sixties). Composers, eager to explore new forms of expression, were interested in sound and structure for their own sake and experimented with unusual relationships among pitch, timbre, and duration.[4]

Simon and Garfunkel sang the "Sounds of Silence" on the campus of Columbia University. The Beatles premiered on the Ed Sullivan Show with "I Want to Hold Your Hand." From Central Park to Big Sur, "Blowin' in the Wind" by Bob Dylan became a popular refrain. Jimmy Hendrix changed the meaning of guitar as a popular venue, or is it the reverse? Writer Langston Hughes, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance, died. The Reverend Martin Luther King was assassinated.

Amid all the problems of the 1960s, schools were swept into the debate and received harsh criticism. After all, we were not the first nation to put a satellite in space! Discontent grew at all levels of schooling; something about the American educational system was askew. (John Goodlad made similar observations in 1983 in A Place Called School.[5]) Educational writings of the decade included Alexander Neill's Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing,[6] Paul Goodman's Compulsory Mis-Education,[7] and Jonathan Kozol's Death at an Early Age.[8] Black writers Nat Hentoff, in Our Children Are Dying, and James Herndon, in The Way It Spozed to Be and How to Survive in Your Native Land, struggled for the rights to educate black children.[9] In Boston, John Holt produced his first classic on How Children Fail, a commentary on why schools were not working in the best interests of students.[10]

Music programs, like other program areas in schools, were teacher-centered. Not designed to teach musical thinking by direct interaction with musical elements, teaching about music was the norm, and the consequence was learning music of a secondary kind. The launch of Sputnik had focused attention on the dearth of higher-order thinking skills, such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, in school curriculums and thus spurred major efforts to reform curriculum design and other fields of educational endeavor.

Innovation became the watchword, and some observers confidently spoke of "the revolution in the schools."[11] Hundreds of people--musicians, scientists, teachers, writers, mathematicians, and others--formed themselves into groups according to shared notions of what schools could become. Curriculum reformers hoped to replace then-current methods, characterized by teacher-led "telling" and student recitation, with curriculum packages that used "discovery," "inquiry," and inductive reasoning as their learning methodologies.

In July of 1966, twenty-five musicians gathered at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, to explore how music education might be improved in primary and secondary schools. Among these musician-educators were composers, musicologists, philosophers, college professors, and elementary, middle, and high school teachers. After the first of many meetings, the Manhattanville Music Curriculum Project (MMCP) lasted six years and was funded by the U.S. Department of Education.

Two MMCP intentions emerged. The first intention was to identify the general principles by which students could garner a sense of the substance and methods of making music without prematurely steeping them in the narrowing pursuits of skill development. School music programs during the fifties and sixties had been dominated by skill and performance orientations, with only a few concerns raised about how learners could find personal meaning through critical thinking and problem solving within the context of musical materials. The second intention was to provide a curriculum framework that remained stable, though always responsive to both the changing nature of music and to the society in which that music exists.

In 1960, cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner, a moving force in curriculum reform to this day, wrote Process of Education in which he introduced the concept of the "spiral curriculum," hypothesizing that "any subject could be taught in some intellectually honest form at any stage of development."[12] For Bruner, the particular discipline's structure or the underlying principles (for example, pitch, rhythm, form, dynamics, and timbre in music) dictated the nature of that curriculum. According to Bruner, teaching specific topics or skills without direct interaction with context shortchanges learning for at least three reasons: (1) Such teaching makes it exceedingly difficult for students to generalize from what they have learned to what they will encounter later. (2) Learning that has fallen short of a grasp of general principles has little reward in terms of intellectual excitement. (3) Any knowledge that students have acquired without contextual meaning is knowledge likely to be forgotten.[13]

The MMCP embraced Bruner's curricular ideas and sought to extend the meaning of music education at all levels of the school continuum. MMCP challenged many of the assumptions music educators held about the art of music. It also challenged the many ways in which these assumptions are translated into the practice of music education.

The MMCP centered upon a spiral curriculum based on the parameters of pitch, duration, volume, timbre, and form--those inherent characteristics that, by intention, become music. Learners derive meaning by engaging in behaviors distinctively associated with musicians. Musicians compose, improvise, interpret, perform, analyze, conduct, and listen with critical awareness. In developing a curriculum framework, these musical processes became the means for interacting with music in the classroom. These musical processes also argued for a different ambiance for students and teachers working together in classrooms, an ambiance most teachers were not prepared to deal with (perhaps as a result of their preparation to become music educators).

During the sixties, the philosophy of music education as aesthetic education was beginning to bloom as a result of the influential writings of Abraham Schwadron and Bennett Reimer, as well as through research from government-sponsored labs such as the Central Midwestern Regional Educational Laboratory (CEMREL).[14] The MMCP wholeheartedly embraced the philosophy that music exists as a form of aesthetic expression, as a process that involves the continuous interaction between a person, his or her musical environment, and the continuity of experience. This process requires that the person call upon meanings abstracted from previous musical experiences to enlighten and guide the formation of musical plans and purposes in the act of resolving a musical problem.

In 1934, John Dewey characterized the act of aesthetic expression as a type of experience that involves the whole human being.[15] In the aesthetic expression of music, our capacity to feel meets with our ability to think critically and reflectively, clothing our inner emotions with musical meaning.

Another characteristic of the aesthetic expression of music involves the use of musical materials (timbre, dynamics, pitch, duration, and form) as the medium through which to order, clarify, and elaborate constructed understandings. Most aspects of our experience in music--cognitive, emotional, past, present, subjective, and objective--all come together in the process of aesthetic expression and are transformed in their interaction. The MMCP built upon this philosophy of aesthetic expression by providing plentiful opportunities for students to work with the medium. Through these opportunities, students are encouraged to explore ideas and feelings that give direction to their musical explorations.

The most important knowledge students can gain from their music schooling experiences is that which empowers them to be musical thinkers. Central to the educative process are critical thinking, constructivism, creativity, and the ability to conceive phenomena through musical expression. The MMCP was committed to music education that facilitated students' use, refinement, and elaboration of these higher-order thinking skills.[16]

Critical thinking and constructivism. Critical thinking is a dynamic psychological process that involves the framing and solving of problems.[17] Viewed as a cycle, problem solving begins with being critical in that one does not immediately accept and enact the first possible musical solution to a musical dilemma. Rather, one assesses a variety of musical solutions thoughtfully and then chooses the most appropriate response. This response is then transformed into a musical aim that leads to purposeful action and reflection.

The MMCP valued the processes of critical and reflective thought. In this view, knowing is a process of active construction and not just the passive acquisition of information and facts. This is not to say that facts and information are meaningless, but that their meaning is derived from their utility in the process of solving musical problems. Individuals do not construct musical knowledge of their world in isolation from one another. Rather, all knowledge and the process of its construction are assumed to be both an active and a social process.[18] Students learn first through interactions with others before internalizing these shared social meanings into their own personal musical knowledge. This learning is a dynamic and reciprocal process. In explaining their ideas to one another, students are forced to reflect and at times revise their previous understandings of music. Subscribing to the belief that knowing is social action, students are encouraged to be active constructors of their musical understanding.[19] Through critical, reflective, and creative musical experiences, students involved in an MMCP curriculum have opportunities to question, critique, collaborate, communicate, and make sense of the world.

Creative thinking and the ability to conceive phenomena. The creative-thinking process was the essence of the MMCP. Beginning with appropriate purposeful explorations, creativity results in the production of novel constructions. "This novelty grows out of the unique qualities of the individual in his/her interactions with the [musical] materials of experience."[20] Creativity is not simply a discrete intellectual exercise but is infused with emotion, requiring intrinsic motivation on the part of the individual. In the MMCP, teachers and students participated in an environment of unconditional positive regard, where they were encouraged to construct their own solutions to problems in music and, in so doing, express their own perspectives, feelings, and understandings to others.

A founding tenet of the MMCP was that the purpose of the classroom is to ensure that students become personally involved with and gain an understanding of music as an outcome of their active involvement.[21] In the spirit of humanist psychologist Carl Rogers, the teacher must be as unimposing as possible and resist the impulse to inflict expertise on the student, serving rather as a guide, a creator of musical problems, a resource person, a stimulator for creative thinking, and an astute musician capable of responding to complex musical ideas, all while remaining sensitive to the creative insight of the students. "It is not the teacher's prerogative to impose judgments but rather to cultivate them. [The teacher's] function is to stimulate not dominate, to encourage not control, to question far more than answer. Discovery may be guided but never dictated."[22]

Successful MMCP teachers knew that creativity cannot be inflicted on students. This would be detrimental to the classroom atmosphere and students' personal esteem. It would also thwart efforts to exercise the imagination and to develop a healthy relationship with music. The creative classroom functions optimally when the teacher, as well as each student, is involved in creative discovery, forming a community of musical inquirers. Understanding the creative process, the excitement of intellectual exploration, and sensitivity to the insights and problems of the students are characteristics that MMCP teachers revered. These kinds of characteristics are strongest when teachers have confidence in their own musical judgments and are willing to invite students to share in the decision making.

The role of the MMCP teacher was multifaceted. The teacher had to be a good musician and a good pedagogue. To know music alone was not enough. To know pedagogy alone was not enough. There needed to be an integration of music and pedagogy within the psyches of teachers who aspired to emulate the MMCP model. Today, this integration can best be effected in teacher preparation programs. But as Lieberman notes, "What everyone appears to want for students--a wide array of learning opportunities that engage students in experiencing, creating, and solving real problems, using their own experiences, and working with others--is for some reason denied to teachers when they are the learners."[23] Lieberman asserts that "the ways teachers learn may be more like the ways students learn than we have previously recognized. Learning theorists and organizational theorists inform us that 'most people learn best through active involvement and through thinking about and becoming articulate about what they have learned."'[24] This advice may be well taken in today's preparation of music teachers in light of the comprehensive National Standards for Music Education.

Two major documents, MMCP Synthesis and MMCP Interaction, emerged from the work of the Manhattanville Music Curriculum Project.[25] These should not be viewed as static methodologies for teaching music, but rather constructivist guidelines for engaging students in the substance and methods for making music. These guidelines lend equal weight to production as well as performing and listening. Creating, performing, listening, analyzing, and evaluating are mutually supportive behaviors. When a student creates and performs, that student subsequently listens with a "new" pair of ears, not only to his or her own music, but also to the music that others have produced. Critical thinking about music is an outcome of these equally weighted behaviors because of the personal investment that students make as they are engaged in them.

A child or an adult may forever perceive a bass drum as an instrument pounded in time at the end of a parade. But if the student investigates the bass drum as a depiction of tensions felt by men and women in war, the perception of the bass drum's potential has increased in scope. Then, if the bass drum is used to describe the barrenness of lands destroyed by fire, the vocabulary of the bass drum is further extended. If the two exploratory adventures with the bass drum are then cast in contrasting tempi and meters, yet another dimension of the bass drum develops to include timbral and rhythmic considerations.

To open minds and thereby provide the substance and enthusiasm for continued personal discovery and growth is a major challenge for musician educators, along with teachers of other subject areas. If students listen and perform musical monuments only from the past, they develop a curatorial view of music, apotheosizing the past without regard for the present. If students engage only in social and functional music, this too will limit their perceptions of the worth of music. If they develop a view of music as a continuing art and a way of knowing, they have gained the substance and enthusiasm for continued personal discovery and growth that will enable them to deal with the ever-changing nature of music and of society throughout their lives. These were the educational beliefs espoused by the documents, materials, and leaders of the MMCP in the 1960s, and these ideas still hold value for music educators today.

According to the National Standards for Arts Education, "Every course in music, including performance courses, should provide instruction in creating, performing, listening to, and analyzing music, in addition to focusing on its specific content. As a result of developing these capabilities, students can arrive at their own knowledge, beliefs, and values for making personal and artistic decisions. In other terms, they can arrive at a broad-based, well-grounded understanding of the nature, value, and meaning of the arts as a part of their own humanity."[26]

A retrospective look at the MMCP reveals that its initiatives are as clearly consistent with current curriculum theory as they were innovative in the sixties. Yet, some pervasive questions still exist: How do we think more expansively about how we facilitate students' learning, whether they be students preparing to teach or students in public schools? When initiating teachers to use creative strategies in the classroom, how do we get them beyond their reluctance and fears? What do teachers need to construct new knowledge? Until we have some approximation of consensus regarding systemic change, comprehensive music curriculums such as the MMCP will continue to exist in the minority of classrooms across the country. Brava and bravo to all of you who have made the leap! You will find yourself at home in this new millennium.

1. Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade: American Education 1945-80 (New York: Basic Books/Harper Colophon Books, 1983), 228.

• 2. Ibid., 234.
• 3. Elliot Schwartz and Barney Childs, eds., Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1967), xv.
• 4. Ibid., xvii.
• 5. John I. Goodlad, A Place Called School (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983).
• 6. Alexander S. Neill, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (New York: Hart Publishing, 1960).
• 7. Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-Education and the Community of Scholars (New York: Vintage Books, 1964).
• 8. Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967).
• 9. Nat Hentoff, Our Children Are Dying (New York: Viking Press, 1966); James Herndon, The Way It Spozed to Be (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968); and James Herndon, How to Survive in Your Native Land (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971).
• 10. John Holt, How Children Fail (New York: Pitman, 1964). 11. Ravitch, 233.
• 12. Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), 33.
• 13. Ibid., 31.
• 14. For a description of the development of aesthetic education in music during the 1960s, see Michael L. Mark, Contemporary Music Education, 3rd ed. (New York: Schirmer, 1996).
• 15. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Milton, Balch and Co., 1934).
• 16. Alan Lesgold, "Problem Solving," The Psychology of Human Thought, ed. Robert Sternberg (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. 1991), 188-214. 17. Dewey, Art as Experience.
• 18. Lev S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).
• 19. Donald A. Schon, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
• 20. Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 349.
• 21. Ronald Thomas, MMCP Synthesis (Bardonia, NY: Media Materials, 1971). 22. Ibid., 23.
• 23. Ann Lieberman, "Practices That Support Teacher Development: Transforming Conceptions of Professional Learning," Phi Delta Kappan 77 (September 1995): 592.
• 24. Ibid.
• 25. Thomas, MMCP Synthesis, and Cole Biasini and Lenore Pogonowski, MMCP Interaction (Bellingham, WA: Americole, Inc., 1979).
• 26. Consortium of National Arts Education Associations, National Standards for Arts Education: What Every Young American Should Know and Be Able to Do in the Arts (Reston, VA: MENC, 1994): 42.