Article Critique Assessment – Assignment 4
MUS640
Lisa Ratigan
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

The Manhattanville Music Curriculum Program:
1966-1970
Kyung-Suk Moon
Gongju National University of Education, Republic of Korea
Jere T. Humphreys
Arizona State University
Source: Journal of Historical Research in Music Education, Vol. 31, No. 2 (April 2010), PP. 75-98

Kyung-Suk Moon received a D.M.A. in 2004 from Arizona State University. (Jere T. Humphrey’s – D.M.A. advisor at Arizona State University) Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea. Gongju National University of Education, Republic of Korea.

Jere T. Humphreys holds a B. M. in music education from the University of Mississippi, a M.M in clarinet performance from Florida State …show more content…
This was the largest federal grant before or since, and brought together experts to put new and innovative ideas into practice.

This program was directed by Ronald B. Thomas who was a faculty member at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart in Purchase, New York. The goals of this program were “(1) to prepare a curriculum guide and related materials designed for the primary through the high school years all using discovery approaches;” (2) “to develop a meaningful sequence of basic musical concepts in terms of the children’s understanding;” and (3) “to closely unify philosophies and directions of all areas and levels of music learning through the development of a spiral-type curriculum.1

The different phases of this program are described in depth beginning with Phase one in 1966 with extensive experimentation. During this phase, they created five week long workshops, which lead to 2100 students in 19 teacher’s classrooms being used in this …show more content…
Scott-Kassner “stated that too few people bought into MMCP compared to other approaches available at the time, such as Orff and Kodaly. She believes that teachers may have been frightened because they would have had to make radical changes in order to adopt the program.”6

The strengths of this program, and why I chose this article are the fact that so many people were involved and the depth in which they delved to create an excellent curriculum. However, the complexity and cost of this program are the main weaknesses. The funding for this program yearly was approximately $200,000, bringing the total cost close to $800,000 over the four years from