The Manhattanville Music Curriculum Program and the Fabrication of the Other

Abstract

The Manhattanville Music Curriculum Program was an expansive Cold War-era effort to reimagine the purpose and practice of music education. Despite its scale and continued influence, Manhattanville has been largely overlooked. Specifically, the distinct epistemology through which Manhattanville was constructed—shaping both the program and its contemporary impacts—has received little consideration from music education scholars. In response, I developed a historical epistemology that demonstrates how Manhattanville’s research and curriculum as embodied in the program’s documentary report were constructed in part through post-war psychology and administration techniques, distributing notions of difference and governance in the process. Through the program’s report, I trace how Manhattanville utilized these epistemic practices as it reenvisioned music education in relation to sociohistorical desires, fears, and modes of administering through sound and sensation, eventually testing these ideas in “inner city” schools. These notions were crucial and overlooked elements of Manhattanville that allow insights into the epistemology of Cold War music education reforms and their resonances in twenty-first-century thought and practice.