ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the period under discussion. This will set the scene for the subsequent historical case studies.
During 1998 and 1999 there was a furious debate about the perceived threat to the teaching of music in schools. It was chronicled by The Times Educational Supplement (TES), which also sponsored a fighting campaign ‘Music for the Millennium’. This crisis prompted me to chart historically the continuities and discontinuities in the teaching of music in schools in order to understand more clearly the shifting alliances and struggles which have characterised the process of music ‘becoming a subject’ (see Goodson, 1994). Through reading the TES columns relating to the debate concerning ‘Music for the Millennium’, I identified three main questions that I wanted to pursue historically with the intention of discerning some underlying patterns: how have the aims and justifications for the teaching of music changed and developed? What have been the principal innovations in the music curriculum over the years? How have music teachers responded to these innovations in their teaching? In order to trace these issues I read a selection of music education professional journals at four 25-year intervals, commencing in 19231924, until 1998-1999. Such journals might be taken to be representative of music teachers’ reading. They included the School Music Review ( 1923-1925), Music Teacher (1923-1924, 1948-1949, 1973-1974, 1998-1999), Music in Education (1947-1950,1973-1974), and The Times Educational Supplement (1998-1999).
