ion, one can take advantage of the brain's penchant for automatically making sense out of streams of sensory experience. In other words, hearing and producing music by singing should produce a great deal of procedural learning, building additional and more complex schemas to form a broader and deeper basis for the automatic processing and interpretation of more complex aspects of sensory experience. That is, enhancing learning by performance.
In Dowling's words, "It is via the automatic procedures we develop that in a very fundamental way we perceive and understand the world. With music, this can be done quite effectively, I think, by engaging all students actively in perhaps simply having them sing rather than talk about music.
-- N. M. Weinberger
(1) There are many accounts of this and similar findings on brain
and memory. For a highly readable book, now slightly outdated
but still very informative, see Squire, L. (1987). Memory and
Brain,. New York: Oxford University Press.
(2) Dowling, W. J. (1993). Procedural and Declarative Knowledge
in Music Cognition and Education, in Tighe, T. J. and Dowling,
W. J. (eds.), Psychology and Music: The Understanding of Melody
and Rhythm, Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
Purists and Utilitarians
The following opinions about music. are based on the reports
of scientific studies. This does not mean that the opinions of
the editor carry the same importance as the results of such studies
themselves. They are simply opinions, intended to provoke thought
and sometimes perhaps even argument, but ultimately to energize
and enlarge action on music
Recently, I was astonished to learn that many music educators
are either disinterested in or even quite negative about certain
areas of music research. In particular, some leading figures
disdain research on the relationships between music and other
aspects of human behavior. For example, they appear to be quite
unhappy about studies that investigate the potential beneficial
effects of music education on child development and cognition.
[See for example "Music and Cognitive Achievement in Children",
MRN, Fall 1994, I (2) and "The Nonmusical Outcomes
of Music Education", MRN, Fall 1995, II (2)]. Why
should anyone object to studies which support the hypothesis that
music education improves listening skills, reading ability, reasoning,
The reason given to me is that such findings can be used to promote
music education! This seems bizarre, given that the promotion
of music education is a goal of music educators. As the author
of the articles listed above, I clearly am not opposed to such
research; far from it, I welcome such studies.
But, this particular anti-research attitude is, I think, quite
logical within a given frame of reference. As I understand it,
the argument goes something like this.
"Music should be studied for its own sake, not because of
its effects on other aspects of education. Studies that seek
such effects undermine this foundational premise. They reduce
music education to an adjunct of non-arts subjects that are alleged
to be more important. Music and arts education thus become a
means to an end rather than an end in themselves. It is bad enough
that music and arts education are under continual attack, reduced
support and the like. But rendering music as a sort of skill that
is valued for its possible facilitation of mathematics is really
No doubt an advocate of this position could write a better explanation
but I hope that I have captured the essential point. Since I
am going to argue against this position, I would like to think
that I am not setting up a straw argument just so I can easily
knock it down.
For shorthand, I will refer to the anti-research position as the "Musical Purist Position", while advocates of "music effects" research will be "Music Utilitarians". These are meant as descriptive, not pejorative, labels. An imaginary dialogue between the groups might go something like this.
MP: We all need to educate relevant decision-makers (school boards, etc.) about the importance of music education as a fundamenta