Music Education in America’s Public Normal Schools

This book provides a history of music education (1839-1960), capturing the beginning of music participation and engagement in many of the public universities that started as normal schools.

The normal schools of the 19th and 20th centuries each had their own identity, curricular policies, networks of stakeholders, music education coursework, and collaborative-performing opportunities. The contributing authors argue that arts education, specifically music, was part of the curriculum in the first public normal schools in America, which provided rich democratic arts experiences to its teacher-education students. Their embodied music experiences would live on to impact music teaching and learning curriculum not only in the k-12 schools where they taught, but nearly two centuries of music education in the colleges and universities from which they stem.