Music Educators Journal

“Music, A Fine Art,” was the theme of the. Northwest Division Conference. Serious music education has always held uppermost and pursued the values and import of music, a fine art. With the additional stimulation of today's increased attention to this view, the Northwest Conference devoted four days to asking questions generated by the theme and to searching for answers.

What is aesthetic education and how can it be realized through music? Does our instruction adapt to individual aesthetic endowment and recognize the effects of different kinds of art on students of various ages and types? Do we respect and transmit our musical heritage? Is it a part of the humanities in education? Do we follow the school's and community's attitude toward aesthetics or do we lead?

A keynote address which opened and inspired our minds was the opening address by James L. Jarrett. We are pleased to share his thoughts with you.

—FRANK L. D'ANDREA, president, MENC Northwest Division.

Listening is a personal matter, especially when you are carried to the world of the imagination through music.

As PART of the course work in one of our music education classes, “Music Education in the Junior High School,” students are required to read articles in the current issues of the MusIC EDUCATORS JOURNAL. When the recent February-March issue appeared, the article, “The General Music Program” by Robert W. John, greatly stimulated and challenged the students’ thinking. At the suggestion of a class member, it was agreed to write a group report which would be a consensus of opinion of the class regarding the ideas presented by Mr. John. In the following days the class was organized into committees which did research and reading concerning various ideas and areas presented in the article, then they presented their findings to the class so that they could be discussed. The following article is a result of this team effort.

As a teacher of music education, I feel indebted to Mr. John for providing a springboard which enabled me to help the students synthesize and solidify their conception of the purpose and function of the general music class in the modern curriculum. Many times students are considered to be the uninitiated group that understand little of the intricacies of their chosen professional field. It is desired by this teacher that the impact of thinking students in music education may produce many positive results in future organization and planning of general music classes.

WHILE THE STUDY of technical media—radio, television, and recordings—is not offered in Germany on anything like the same scale as classical artistic study, the need has been filled in the Artistic Educational Center in Remscheid, Germany, where I am in charge of the technical studio. A generous experimental field has been opened up, but it is still not permissible to teach artistic-technical integration at a professional level. Thus, my contribution points to a controversial topic of higher school policy within the German-speaking area.

This article is not intended, however, to report conditions prevailing in my country. I prefer to present a concept which shows how we in Germany would like to see academic practice and teaching of technical media.