C. Tayloe Harding, Jr.
Elsewhere in this edition of the Newsletter, Past-President Robert Werner has authored an article entitled "A Time to Review Standards." In it he indicates that CMS has appointed a task force to formulate a recommendation to the National Association of Schools of Music (NASM) in the form of specific written input that reflects the thoughts and feelings of the Society's membership. As one of our profession's most seasoned and knowledgeable experts on graduate standards in music as articulated by NASM member institutions, Bob Werner has agreed to chair the CMS Task Force on the Review of Graduate Standards and represent our society's well-informed and well-practiced experience with the training of graduate students in music.
I wish to echo this call to all members of the College Music Society, those aligned with NASM member-schools and those not, to please take advantage of this unique occasion to provide input to the process of reviewing our traditional expectations of tomorrow's leaders of music professions in our nation and beyond. We have a distinctive opportunity to participate as presenters in a larger discourse that provides a comprehensive shape to our most advanced training of musicians in our country at this time. lt is critical that we CMS members arm the Task Force with as many useful ideas and as much helpful feedback as we can. I urge you to visit the websites he has indicated and to provide comment as you see fit.
Most of us who do teach graduate students self-assess our methods and our individual interpretations and practices with standards in our own studios, rehearsal halls, and classrooms every day. As the article suggests, there is no greater contribution made to the purposeful teaching of such students than this type of personal, sensitive review by current graduate faculty. But it is through this task force that we graduate faculty get a chance, otherwise rare, to make the results of our self-assessment known to wider constituencies in an effort to affect real change. We should take advantage of this chance.
A great many members of the professoriate in music feel as though some degree of re-examination of our standards for graduate study is necessary. This is not because we think we are not doing a good job training future professional musicians and music faculty. lt is because as society changes so must our professoriate, and periodic review provides this chance. Methods and standards we practice must change as our world does too. Negotiating society's dramatic changes requires a firm, booted foot in sustaining what is best about the traditional while also exploring the new with the other foot bare.
In recent years, the rapid advancement of digital technology has been a societal change that has demanded the attention of the higher education superstructure in music. In an effort to cope with the technological changes in expectation of what our newest music teachers in the U.S. could do with tomorrow's students, music units in colleges and universities adapted standards, methods, and curricula so that graduate and undergraduate students in music could not only meet new expectations themselves, but could also be more highly trained as teachers of future students. And we changed standards without disrupting what we know works best for developing other musical skills and knowledge. The standards' review process worked as it should in that case.
Today's societal changes are at once both more profound and more subjective than something as obvious as advances in technology and the tools with which we live. Today's undergraduates, and many of our current graduate students, will accept careers in music unknown to us in the past. Many more will choose vocations not unknown to us but certainly not adequately addressed in direct instructional experiences we gave them while students at our institutions. As the music professoriate endeavors to establish bodies of content knowledge that we can use to educate our students for these new careers in a way that can be assessed and standardized, there is one truism that guides this effort: it is in the evolution of graduate standards for teaching and learning in music that our profession has the greatest chance to make the adaptations necessary for providing sufficient education in the expectations of music careers of tomorrow for our students today.
In short, training graduate students in music is the most significant place we can start to change the impact music in higher education has on the landscape of living in and through music in America. I hope that you will join in this review and share your ideas with the CMS Task Force on the Review of Craduate Standards in either of the wavs described in the article.