期刊名称：Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education
印刷版ISSN：1545-4517
出版年度：2009
卷号：8
期号：1
出版社：Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, MayDay Group
摘要：Perhaps nowhere is community involvement in the life of a United States school more
established and seemingly successful than in the area of sports and athletics. From Friday
night football in high schools to Saturday night in colleges all across the U.S.A., local
communities take note of their area schools and universities, albeit not necessarily for the
reasons envisioned and hoped for by those who call for greater community involvement in
matters concerning formal schooling in the arts. School music programs, too, benefit from
the public visibility provided by school athletics because of crowd-entertaining performances
during “half-time.” Such ready-made publicity causes many a music educator to
acknowledge the entertainment value of music as a necessary tool by which to justify the
place of serious music study in the curriculum.
As a performance art, music clearly needs an audience, and school ensemble directors
typically draw on both the wider school population and the greater geo-political community as
audiences for concerts. Community outreach thus is part and parcel of school music as a field
of study that entertains at the same time that it exhibits characteristics attributed to other
academic subjects—foremost among them, a sequential structure of content organization and
the requirement of graded, demonstrable learning gains. This duality in function of school
music—entertainment value on the one hand and academic knowledge on the other—gives it
a unique position in the
