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Electronic Music in the Junior High School: Original Compositions by Students of the Julia R. Masterman School (1968)

From the album Creelpolation 1

In November 1967, Virginia Hagemann, a teacher at the Julia R. Masterman School in Philadelphia, received a $316 grant from the superintendent to launch a laboratory for electronic music for students in grades 6 through 9. Hagemann documented this remarkable undertaking in two articles published in the Music Educators Journal.

In the first meeting, Hagemann’s electronic music class studied the different types of scales (pentatonic, diatonic, and twelve-tone) and the distinction between semitones and quarter-tones; listened to a recording of microtonal chant sung by Tibetan monks; was introduced to the pure sine wave; and considered aesthetic concepts such as musique concrete, aleatoric techniques, silence, and graph notation. The session closed with a group listening to two electronic compositions: Lemon Drops by Kenneth Gaburo and Futility by Herbert Brün. Hagemann describes the children’s reaction:

Lemon Drops, because of its delicacy, was deliberately chosen to ease the listener gently into this new world of sound. Futility, on the other hand, was selected to test the reaction of the group to the harsher elements of electronic music. One might conjecture that the children would immediately reject the second composition as a meaningless conglomeration of noises, utterly foreign to their accepted ideas of music. The reaction to Lemon Drops was favorable, but when Futility was played, the response was somewhat akin to a standing ovation. At the unanimous request of the audience, it was repeated.

With very simple means—little more than a frequency generator and a tape recorder—the students then set out to make their own music. The studio was used as a means of democratizing artistic activity, based on the principle that all people have inherent creativity that can be tapped under the right conditions. At the same time, students were encouraged to perfect their artistic technique and apply rigorous intellectual discipline in their work. (A handful of the students used John Cage’s Silence as a kind of class text.) As demonstrated in the short pieces in this recording, the children had no trouble getting a grasp on the basic techniques of electronic composition, and were quite comfortable with a musical idiom that most adults of the time still refused to accept. The project stands as an inspiring model for experimental, project-based music education.

March 18, 2011, 5:16pm