This study examined mainstreaming in music via a survey of a sample of Arizona music educators. Among the respondents (n - 107), the vast majority are or have been responsible for teaching students with disabilities, although most have received little or no training in special education. Emotionally/behaviorally disordered students are perceived as the most difficult to mainstream, and physically handicapped and speech-impaired students the least difficult. Among disabled students, "learning disabled" was the category most frequently encountered.

In most schools, mainstreaming is the only music placement option, and regular music faculty members are the sold providers of music instruction for special learners. Musical ability to rarely the primary reason for mainstreaming students, few respondents have access to special education consultants or adequate time to individualize programs, and most respondents rarely or never participate in placement decisions. The respondents' goals for special learners in music center on student participation and classroom management, with little demarcation between musical and nonmusical goals or objectives. We concluded that effective mainstreaming in music, as implied by the Education for Handicapped Children Act of 1975 and recommended by the Music Educators National Conference, does not exist in Arizona.

Carl E. Seashore's tests of musical aptitude, originally published in 1919, were a logical outgrowth of first, centuries of research and thinking on sensory discrimination and specification, and second, applications to psychological research of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. These two fields came together when English anthropologist Francis Galton (1822-1911) devised tests of sensory perception to test individual mental capacity in the 1870s and 1880s.

Galton, who modeled his tests on those devised previously by physicists, included measures of musical perception his test batteries. He believed that individual differences are quantifiable and that discrete measures of sensory acuity, including musical discrimination, would provide at least an indirect measure of intelligence. Galton influenced American psychologist James Cattell (1860-1944), who in turn influenced Seashore. Because Seashore, like all experimental psychologists of his day, was a sensory psychologist, he produced tests that were criticized from the beginning for being sensory and atomistic. Nevertheless, Seashore's work fired the imaginations and profoundly influenced the work of the first generation of American music education researchers.

Thaddeus L. Bolton, a graduate student in psychology at Massachusett's Clark University who received a Ph.D. in 1895, appears to have written the first doctoral thesis on a topic closely related to music education. The thesis, titled "Rhythm," predated by a few weeks a music education dissertation written by John J. Dawson, a graduate student of education at New York University. Bolton's dissertation describes an experimental study of the reactions of thirty subjects to sounds occurring at different speeds and intensities and with different durations and patterns of accentuation. Bolton's work on rhythm, which appears to have been among the earliest in music by an experimental psychologist, influenced Iowa music supervisor Philip C. Hayden, who applied some of Bolton's finding to his teaching. Hayden's desire to share his applications with others led, in large part, to the first meeting (19907) of what became the Music Supervisors National Conference.

The main purposes of this study were to test music majors' abilities to harmonize notated melodies and recorded melodies with chord symbols, and to perform harmonic accompaniments to recorded melodies; measure the effectiveness of a harmonic audiation and performance training program; and measure the predictive power of eight independent variables on harmonic audiation and performance skills. Six subtests were administered in a pre-post design to 45 instrumental music education majors, 22 of whom received training via the taped training program in the interim. The results suggested that the training program was effective in improving subjects' abilities to harmonize simple melodic patterns; that melodic echo-playing ability was highly correlated with and predictive of harmonic audiation and performance; that keyboard study had particularly weak relationships with harmonic audiation and performance; and that subjects were much better able to represent harmony implied by notated melodies than to represent or perform harmony implied by taped melodies.