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This chapter explores Mahler's relationship to Viennese modernism in the context of the tensions (social, political, economic, philosophical) of Viennese modernity. It examines Mahler's relationship to Klimt and the Secession, to the new philosophy of language in Mauthner and Wittgenstein, to the music of Strauss and the idea of programaticism, and to the music of the Schoenberg school. The cultural and aesthetic manifestations of modernism are, however, considered against the backdrop of the competing political voices in fin de siècle Vienna, voices heard running through Mahler's music. The symphonies of Mahler are often taken as powerful statements of the idea of German musical culture, as enshrined in symphonic music, but this is constantly questioned by the presence of “other” voices, preeminently associated with the idea of Jewishness. The divisions in contemporary reception of Mahler's music draw out this tension.

This chapter traces key events in the history of radio broadcasting and new music festivals up to 1954, when John Cage first visited Germany and performed with pianist David Tudor at the Donaueschingen festival and in Cologne. It explains that within a few years after the war, West German radio broadcasting became free of political or commercial sponsorship and took control of all aspects of their music programming. It also describes how radio in West Germany encouraged the development of an autonomous contemporary music development during the post-war years.

This chapter introduces the Los Angeles Federal Music Project (FMP), which partially solved the unemployment problem of musicians in Los Angeles during the Great Depression, first describing the pre-FMP music programs in Los Angeles, which were strongly influenced by the musicians' union. It then studies the national leadership of the Federal Music and Theatre projects, in order to further understand their local implementation and the issues that these projects raised. Next, the chapter looks at the administration and organization of the FMP and the WPA Music Projects, describing the FMP's 1936 production of La Traviata, and finally introduces the “Society of Native American Composers.”

This chapter presents selected accounts of how music can conjure up images, notions, of various sorts. These images can be of people, events, situations, or settings that have been associated with a certain piece of music. They are thus images with a background in the person's earlier experiences. There are also images that seem to be new creations, products of the imagination, which in some way have been prompted by music. But these, too, may be assumed to have been influenced by different factors related to the person or the particular situation. Exactly how this is so can be hard to analyse, but now and then some clues are to be found in the accounts. In some instances, the music has been so-called programme music, that is, the composer has described what the music is intended to represent, for example, a particular person, event, or situation. The question is whether a listener without any knowledge of the programme can apprehend what the composer wanted to describe. This is usually not especially successful, but occasionally the impression the listener gains may be close to what is intended. ‘Images’ refer here primarily to visual notions. But the accounts also contain several examples of notions within other senses, such as hearing and smell.

Given abundant evidence from the previous chapters to support the value of composition within school music programs and teacher education training programs, this chapter presents a charge to music teacher-educators to embrace composition's potential within their own programs. The chapter discusses what is required to integrate composition into music teacher training programs and suggests ways in which the profession can pull together to advance composition's role in music education. A vision of a future where composition is a major aspect of school music programs concludes the chapter and the book.

Creating a successfully inclusive music learning environment is not about “tweaking” what we already do, but requires a fundamental revision of the goals of instruction and the methods employed in reaching them, particularly in light of national surveys and assessments that show low percentages for adult music participation, students’ participation in ensembles, and students’ music achievement. Many indicators showing the status of music education are even lower for schools with high poverty concentrations. Given these facts and limited instructional time, teachers must make hard decisions about what skills and knowledge are meaningful for students’ musical lives in and beyond school, and teach students to apply learned skills and knowledge in a variety of music environments. Principles of transfer support the idea of designing music programs based on a principle of transition. Steps guide teachers through the process, and examples are given of adult goals and related activities.

All children can develop musically when a meaningful program is designed to be accessible, equitable, and flexible; instructional practices are effective; individual adaptations are used only as needed; and progress is assessed frequently—in other words, when a universal approach is used. Such an approach is grounded in principles of universal design in architecture, in the design of buildings, public spaces, and products. A universal approach moves away from the view of students in separate groups and toward a view of students as being on a continuum of all learners. Universal strategies are designed based not on group membership (disability, learning needs, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, or language) but on students’ individual strengths and needs and the requirements of activities and tasks. A model is presented relative to four broad ideas: creating a quality music program and a culture of inclusion, gathering information, planning and implementing strategies, and thinking ahead.

This chapter argues that overtly political themes never dominated Federal One productions. Yet, some of the beliefs espoused by the 1930s Left took root and found appeal among subsequent generations of Americans. Much as pre-World War I bohemians saw many of their ideas absorbed into the mass culture of the 1920s, so did the goals and convictions of the 1930s Left enter mainstream social movements of the post-World War II period. These causes found inspiration to varying degrees in musical expression, as well as particular elements of the radical political activism of the 1930s. Though notably less contentious than other WPA cultural productions, the Federal Music programs in the regional West should also be viewed as harbingers of these later social developments.

This chapter focuses on London composer Nicola Sampieri and his “Concert upon an Entire New Plan,” given at the Hanover Square Rooms and elsewhere from 1798. Sampieri’s “New Plan” employed “numerous and beautiful transparencies” to present natural scenes, both mundane and meteorological, with music composed expressly to represent these natural phenomena. Sampieri’s compositions for the fortepiano encouraged listeners to experience correspondences between what they saw and heard. Lockhart argues that Sampieri’s endeavors reflected renewed scientific interest in the analogy between tones and colors, as in the famed experiments of Thomas Young, which demonstrated that light and sound behaved according to a single principle of wave-based movement. Sampieri’s “Concert on a New Plan” provides a link between the pictorial entertainments of eighteenth-century London, and the familiar natural and cosmological imagery of nineteenth-century symphonic program music, such as Mendelssohn’s The Hebrides. Lockhart re-balances the long-held notion of ca. 1798 London as visual-centric, attesting instead to a broad interest in engaging the eyes and the ears together, and an investment in analogical thinking both within art and within science.

On October 16, 1933, Arnold Schoenberg wrote to Alban Berg in which he issued his most substantial statement on Jewish politics. He outlined a plan to organize assistance for the German Jews and talked about Zionism and democracy as part of his “A Four-Point Program for Jewry,” completed in 1938. This chapter looks at Schoenberg's emigration from Germany to the United States, where he spent time in Boston and New York before settling in Los Angeles, focusing on the period 1933–1943. It also looks at his views on program music, tonality and atonality, modernism, conservatism in the arts, the Fourth String Quartet, Op. 37, sacred music and tradition, World War II, and composers and music history. In addition, the chapter includes a letter to Hanns Eisler dated August 20, 1934, regarding a proposed music institute in Russia, and another letter to Bruno Walter dated December 23, 1943, in response to the former's request for permission to make a substantial cut in the string sextet Transfigured Night.

At the time Ives began the Concord, program music (music that implicitly referred to or musical described historical or literary narratives) was still somewhat controversial. The prologue of Essays Before a Sonata takes up the topic of program music and reveals Ives’s erudite understanding of its previous history. It also reveals his indebtedness to a minor English Hegelian philosopher named Henry Sturt, who has never before been covered in the Ives literature.

The chapter delineates the hopelessness of seeking a one-to-one correspondence between the music and the story line. One could take the program (i.e., the plot or story) of a given work and apply it just as easily to another. In the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century the assumption about program music was that music could do what words can do. But even in vocal music, as it need scarcely be pointed out, however much the composer strives after it, there is no identity between the feeling and content of combined words and music. Analysis at its best is a very useful tool for understanding what a composer has accomplished and to apprehend in all its fullness what we otherwise take in through direct nonverbal aesthetic experience. Another thing of importance is that generally interesting knowledge and knowledge that is distinctly relevant to hearing must be differentiated. The desire for knowledge is universal and musicologists spend their time in pursuit of it but when technical matters of this nature are spelled out, it must sound formidable to nonmusicians who find their Beethoven wonderful without knowledge of why.

In this chapter I use Chinese music departments in the PRC and Taiwan as case studies, exploring how the process of institutionalization has reshaped traditional music in the region and how Chinese music programs have developed responses to growing concerns about their relevance to the surrounding community. More Chinese music programs now seek to develop curricula that incorporate the practices of oral/aural tradition from local musical communities. In an effort to make traditional music more accessible to a wider audience, some institutions attempt to increase their appeal through interdisciplinary collaborations and outreach events as well. I argue that collaborations between institutions and communities will become indispensable to Chinese music programs to help ensure an appropriate representation of local music genres and its relevance to local audiences.

This chapter provides an overall chronology of Arnold Schoenberg's life and works, along with a recollection of his childhood and musical education. It also looks at his early years in Vienna and Berlin through the First String Quartet, Op. 7. The rest of the chapter describes Schoenberg's résumé around the year 1944, his home life and musicality among his relatives, his early musical life and friendships, and his beginnings as a composer. It also considers documents dating to 1891–1906 containing Schoenberg's views on essence and appearance, the Bible and the modern world, socialism and aesthetics, nature and stylization, program music, concert life, Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony, and the First String Quartet, Op. 7.

This chapter offers suggestions for actions based on the new mindset presented in the previous chapter. School teachers and administrators should maintain an open mind to support innovative approaches that allow mixed grade and intergenerational music activities. A variety of music programs should be offered within and outside of educational institutions. Music educators should make every effort to connect musical experiences to lives outside of the classrooms, beyond the school schedule and beyond the schooling years. Support and encouragement of family members are crucial in a lifetime of musical experiences. For senior citizens’ service providers, regular musical participation opportunities in various musical styles should be available for the long term, as well as musical activities that help to connect with senior citizens’ inner selves, others, and their past, present, and future lives. Music education for life is advocated.

This chapter discusses how deaf students have the capacity to perceive musical sounds and are able to perform and respond to music. Alice-Ann Darrow states that music is more aurally accessible than conversational speech; listening to music can help increase one's musical understanding, enjoyment, and aesthetic sensitivity. The chapter also introduces the instrumental music program as a way of helping deaf students decide what instrument they wish to study, while providing suggestions to help music teachers facilitating a positive musical experience for their students; these instruments include keyboards, percussions, brass, and string instruments. The latter part of the chapter discusses the deaf students' involvement in the choral music program.

This chapter describes the status of the Underground Musicians and Artists Association (UGMAA) and Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (PAPA) during the 1980s. It explains that the 1980s were an especially difficult time for many residents of South Central Los Angeles and African Americans were three times more likely than whites to fall below the poverty line. The effect of the UGMAA and the Arkestra were the loss of Construction Education and Training Authority (CETA) funding, the Shop, nonprofit status, and the Immanuel United Church of Christ (IUCC). The economic devastation and elimination of arts and music programs within the schools and throughout the city also curtailed the Arkestra's audience and potential recruits.

This chapter explores the ways in which a selection of European pedagogues and institutions involved in folk, traditional, world music, and popular music education navigate a world of music pedagogy that has been historically dominated by the Western classical tradition. More specifically, it interrogates how pedagogues draw on, adapt, or depart from Western classical pedagogy to manage “canonicity” in music education and to negotiate the needs and expectations of local musical communities. The research, informed by interviews conducted with individuals at eight European music departments, suggests that pedagogical ideologies that are self-reflexive and flexible are easily tailored to suit specific educational goals. Further, collaborative dialogue between higher education and extra-institutional practitioners ensures that perceived disconnects between higher education and community are mitigated.

The identification of absolute music with a specific repertory grew stronger still in 1855 with the first appearance—and almost immediate acceptance—of Franz Liszt’s neologism to describe works of purely instrumental music that were not absolute: program music. Liszt distinguished between the “specifically musical composer” who places value only on “using material” and the composer driven by an overarching poetic image or narrative. He dismisses the first of these as a “formalist,” a “mere musician” who is “capable of nothing better or cleverer than to use, propagate, arrange, and occasionally develop that which has already been achieved by others.” Liszt’s terminological counterpart to absolute music sharpened the conceptual binary that would prevail over the next half century.