The discipline of music education at Boston University has broken a great deal of new ground since the 19th century, music education department chair Patrick Jones said Monday at the College of Fine Arts.
Jones told 28 attendees how music education, within the larger framework of the study of music, was initiated at BU and how it progressed to its current form.
The research on the history of BU’s music education, which began this year, will be in progress for the next several years, he said.
Music, he said, was taught in different colleges at BU before becoming focused into a single school.
‘There was no monopoly of one school teaching music,’ he said. ‘[But] we trace the history from there.’
The study of music began at BU in 1872 with the College of Music, founded by Eben Tourjee, he said.
‘[BU] collocated and co-financed the College of Music with the New England Conservatory,’ he said. It granted bachelor’s degree for students who finished their studies in conservatories.
‘Conservatory at that time did not offer degrees,’ he said.
The school was dissolved in 1891 when Tourjee died, he said. Jones named this period ‘College of Music 1.0.’ Among the five graduates who then obtained bachelor’s degrees, one was a woman.
‘It speaks highly of the institution and its character,’ he said.
At this stage, there was ‘no distinct program for music education’, he said.
Around the same period, the School of All Sciences-now the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences-began to offer degrees on music, including the Master of Arts degree still offered today.
From 1904 to 1928, the College of Liberal Arts, now the College of Arts and Sciences, had music programs, with John Marshall as the first music professor, he said.
In 1906, Samuel Cole was the first to teach music education at BU, and in 1925, the School of Education started giving degree courses for training supervisors in music, he said. In 1928, the study of music was centralized into a new College of Music with Marshall as its first dean, he said, calling it ‘College of Music 2.0.’
In 1954, the college was merged into the School of Fine and Applied Arts, later renamed College of Fine Arts, and has continued to operate since, he said.
BU became first in the nation to award Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Music Education in 1955, with its purpose ‘to be a professional degree instead of a research degree,’ and in 2005, it was first to offer such degree online, he said.
Diana Dansereau, an assistant professor of music education at BU who attended the presentation, said she anticipated music education at BU would grow in the near future.
‘We are at the beginning of a really promising era,’ she said. ‘The 2000s really positioned us to national and international acclaim.’
Kendall Georges, a graduate student who graduated from BU with an undergraduate degree in 1981, agreed.
‘It has evolved in a very positive way, with the highest caliber I’ve seen,’ she said.
Fran Simone, a graduate student in music education, said the evolution of music education at BU, like anything, ‘comes in phases.’
‘It is important for students of BU to know where we come from,’ she said.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
