Music

Should we still teach music history?

There is a lot of discussion about whether we should ever create Music History Lesson Plans for high school music, or not. Some say that music history is not worth teaching at all, and that we should instead be concentrating on composition and creative elements in the music classroom. Its all very well for a teacher with years of experience who knows all the knowledge to say that teaching about the composers is old school and no longer relevant, but they know the knowledge! They are cheating it out of the children if they don’t teach it regularly in the schools! How can children learn to compose if they don’t look at the music of the great composers? It was Mozart who remarked when hearing music of Bach ‘Now there is something one can learn from!’ If Mozart wanted to learn music history, who are we to cheat it out of our school students?