Music Education in America's Public Normal Schools Celebratory and Troubled Beginnings of Music Teacher Education

This book provides a history of music education and music participation in America's public normal schools (1839-1960). The collected chapters capture the beginning of music education and music engagement in many of the 213 public universities that started as normal schools. Each institution had its own identity, curricular policies, networks of stakeholders, music education coursework and collaborative-performing opportunities. The 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.