A Comparison of the Basic Song Repertoire of VocalChoral and Instrumental

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EducationJournal of Research in Music

DOI: 10.2307/33454522000; 48; 5Journal of Research in Music Education

Carol A. Prickett and Madeline S. BridgesInstrumental Music Education Majors

A Comparison of the Basic Song Repertoire of Vocal/Choral and

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JRME 2000, VOLUME 48, NUMBER 1, PAGES5-9 5Following up on an earlierstudy, an audiotape of the tunes of 25 standard songs,assumed to be known by everyonewho has finished 6th grade, was playedfor 135undergraduate instrumental music education students and 79 undergraduatevocal/choral music education students. Therewas no significant differencein theability of eithergroup to identifythesongs. The meansfor bothgroups indicated thatneither had developeda strong repertoire f standard songs outside the collegeclass-room. Severalsongs that music educators have stated are very important or childrento learn could not be identifiedbyeven half thestudents in eithergroup. It is recom-mended that professorspreparing music education studentsfor theirfuture careersconsideradding activities to music education courses that build a strong song reper-toire.

Carol A. Prickett, University of AlabamaMadeline S. Bridges, Belmont University

A Comparison f t h eB a s i c S o n g Repertoire o fVocal/Choral n dInstrumental M u s i cEducation M a jo r s

The importance of developing a general repertoire of easily sungsongs among the population has long been an issue for music edu-cators in general, as well as for MENC-The National Association forMusic Education. The goals represented by the Get America Singing ...Again! publication (MENC, 1996) are simply the latest in a long lineof organizational attempts to encourage the development of a reper-

CarolA. Prickettis a professorof music education/therapy in the School of Music,Universityof Alabama,PO Box 870366, Tuscaloosa,AL,35487-0366;e-mail:[email protected] S. Bridgesis a professorof music education and directorof graduate studies in the School of Music, Belmont University, 1900 BelmontBoulevard, Nashville,TN 37212-3758;e-mail:[email protected]? 2000 by MENC-The National Associationfor MusicEducation.

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6 PRICKETT/BRIDGEStoire of commonly known, easily sung songs (Hair, 1997).In an earlier investigation (Prickett & Bridges, 1998), we exam-ined music education/therapy majors' knowledge of a general rep-ertoire of songs compared to that of elementary education majors.Experienced music education professors selected 25 songs that theyassumed would be known by anyone who had been educated in thepublic schools of the United States. All songs appear frequently instandard music texts and compilations; holiday and nursery songswere excluded. We emphasized that we were not attempting to estab-lish a canon of songs that were superior to others, but were simplytrying to assess whether college students' repertoires measured up tothe assumptions of professional music educators. Subjects completeda simple "name the tune" task. Although a statistically significant dif-ference was found between the music majors' scores and those of theelementary education majors (who were beginning a basic skills inmusic course), we concluded that the average level of knowledge forthe music students nevertheless was unacceptably low and recom-mended curricular adjustments to address building a better reper-toire.

Subsequent discussions with college professors from universitiesacross the country brought to light a common assumption: the stu-dents who enter a vocal/choral music education track bring a songrepertoire with them when they come to college, but the studentswho enter an instrumental music education track generally havemuch less experience in singing and, therefore, have poorer reper-toires. If this assumption is correct, it follows logically that if curricu-lar adjustments need to be made to compensate for a poor reper-toire, the vocal/choral students could be exempted. Having the dataat hand and wondering if this assumption is valid, we posed the fol-lowing research question: Is the basic song repertoire of vocal/choralmusic education majors significantly better than that of instrumentalmusic education majors?METHODSubjects

The responses of 214 music education majors had been collectedfor an earlier study (Prickett & Bridges, 1998). References to "a pre-vious study" or "our earlier study" throughout the rest of this articlerefer to this work. The music therapy students' scores, which hadmade up part of the data base for that study, were excluded. Of the214 music majors, 135 were in an instrumental music education cur-riculum, and 79 were in vocal/choral courses. All indicated that theirelementary education had taken place in the United States.



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JRME 7Selection of Songs

The stimulus tape was described in our earlier study. It consistedof 25 songs that (1) could be justified by experience and otherresearch as being basic to music education repertoire, (2) would beassumed by a professor to be known by music students, and thereforewould not be taught or reviewed in an education course, (3) are notChristmas or preschool songs, and (4) appear in standard collectionsof songs. The list of songs, in the order presented, appears in Prickettand Bridges (1998).Presentation

The stimulus audio cassette tape contained each of the 25 songs,played one time on an electronic keyboard. The tape informed lis-teners that we were interested in knowing which folk songs theyknew. Each session took 22 minutes.RESULTS

There was no significant difference between the performance ofthe vocal choral music education majors (M = 15.2, SD = 4.07) andthat of the instrumental music education majors (M = 15.8, SD =3.35), t (212) = 1.05, p = .30. The lowest score for vocal/choral majorswas 5 (n = 1), and the highest was 21 (n = 2). Instrumentalists' scoresranged from a low of 4 (n = 1) to a high of 21 (n = 5). The songswhich were not correctly identified by at least 50% of each groupappear in Table 1. "Red River Valley," "Down in the Valley," "TingaLayo," and "Shalom Chaverim" received surprisingly low scores,despite their appearance in numerous standard song compilations.

We used the same rationale for considering an answer correct or aviable alternative as in our previous study. Answers that containedmaterial from the first line of the song or alternative titles found inwidely disseminated song collections were accepted. Less specificidentifications such as "the New Year's song" for "Auld Lang Syne" or"America" for "America the Beautiful" were not marked as correct.Twenty songs (80% of the list) were correctly identified by at least50% of the vocal/choral students; eighteen songs (72% of the list)were named by at least 50% of the instrumental majors. However, themeans indicate that vocal/choral students could, on average, identi-fy only 61% of songs presumed to be known by all, whereas theinstrumental majors, on average, could identify 63% of them.DISCUSSION

We posed the research question: Is the basic song repertoire of



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8 PRICKETI/BRIDGESTable1SongsNotIdentifiedbyat LeastHalf ofEachGroup

Song PercentIdentifyingCorrectlyVocal/choral majors (n= 79): "RedRiverValley" 26.7"Down n theValley" 21.7"ShalomChaverim" 3.3

"TingaLayo" 1.7

Instrumental majors (n= 135): "PollyWollyDoodle" 45.9"OhShenandoah" 26.7"RedRiverValley" 20.7"ShalomChaverim" 5.9"Down n theValley" 4.4"TingaLayo 0.0

vocal/choral music education majors significantly better than that ofinstrumental music education majors? Based on the data collectedfrom programs all around the country, the answer to our question isa rather definitive "no." One of the reasons that we do research is totest our hypotheses (or dearly cherished biases) to see if they arevalid. Many college professors who deal with music education majorsmay find the results of this study a bit surprising, as did we. In lightof these results, the case can be made that instrumental music edu-cation majors have just as large a song repertoire as do vocal/choralstudents.

On the other hand, one may interpret these data as saying that allmusic education majors appear to have weak repertoires, no matterwhat their performance background, when compared with a reper-toire list representative of experienced practitioners' expectationsand basal materials' contents. If this task represented a sample of thesong recognition of the undergraduate population, college profes-sors who are trying to prepare future teachers to be able to encour-age community singing of a commonly held song repertoire willneed to take this lack of knowledge into consideration when design-ing courses. Activities to build this repertoire (indeed, beyond thelevel of tune recognition to that of being able to sing the tune andwords) would appear to merit inclusion in college course work.



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JRME 9REFERENCES

Hair, H. I. (1997). Purpose statements and song categoriesof selectedcommunitysongbooks. Paper presented at the Twelfth National Symposium on Re-search in Music Behavior, Minneapolis, MN.Music Educators National Conference (MENC). (1996). Get America Sing-ing... Again! Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard.Prickett, C. A., & Bridges, M. S. (1998). Familiarity with basic song reper-toire: Music education/therapy majors versus elementary educationmajors. Journal of Research n Music Education, 46, 461-468.

Submitted November 8, 1999; accepted January 27, 2000.


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A Comparison of the Basic Song Repertoire of VocalChoral and Instrumental