ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses public music in the United States and explains how notions of reason and progress penetrated and misrepresented the curriculum history of music education. Historically, the fabrications of race in the music curriculum are responsive to the pressure of new social concerns and technologies. The music curriculum also inscribed moral limits on the virtue of over industriousness. School documents on the risks to health in repetitive factory and academic work described how these evils were overcome by lung and muscular-skeletal exercises. Music education in public schools in the United States emerged from the concerns of social degeneracy of the new republic in Boston, Massachusetts, around 1840. Whereas the music curriculum in the early 19th century focused primarily on vocal music, the early 1900s' stepwise curriculum of listening to recorded orchestral music normalized and prescribed classical music as an indication of the advanced or delayed psychological state of listeners.
