CONSERVATION IN MUSICAL EXPERIENCE’
MARILYN PFLEDERER
AND
LEE
SECHREST
Northwestern
University
A dominant theme in music education literature today
is
that the underlying
musical structure must be taught to students. This structure consists of concepts
about the basic elements of music, melody, rhythm, harmony, form and texture.
Yet little research has been conducted in the area of musical concept formation
pe7
se.
Measures have been devised to determine the child’s ability to discriminate
between pitches, intensities and durational values, and to remember musical
phrases. However, such research is primarily concerned with aural perception and
auditory recall rather than with the development
of
musical thought (Pflederer,
1966).
The research of Jean Piaget provides many insights into the development of
children’s thinking and the way in which they view the physical world. Piaget
views concept development in terms of conservation, marked by an increasing
stability of a particular concept in a changed
or
changing stimulus field. Increasing
stability leads to the invariance of the concept in the child’s thinking. Conservation
is justified by the properties of reversibility and compensation. When
a
child is
able to return to the initial state of
a
given material by an inverse operation, he
exhibits reversibility of thought and
so
affirms the conservation of that material.
In other words, instabilities and biases in perception are offset by the ability to
make inferences and to manipulate the arithmetical operations of addition, multi-
plication, division and subtraction. Piaget refers to this
as
operational thought.
A consideration of the development of musical concepts raises
a
fundamental
question
as
to the role of the intellectual processes in musical learning. In his
work Piaget deals with quasi-mathematical structures and with quasi-mathematical
invariances. Other invariances (perceptual constancies) such
as
those of color and
pitch, are found in perceptual structures.
Although I’iaget seem to make a strict line of demarcation between a percept,
and
a
concept,
it
is probably untenable and maybe impossible to set up this strict
line in a musical structure. AIusic consists of an organization of tonal relationships
within
a
temporal structure.
For
music
to
be apprehended, understood and per-
formed there are concepts pertaining to the relationships of melody, rhythm,
harmony and form that must be learned. 11usical learning begins with perception
of the sound structure; from this perception develop those relational concepts
which permit one to think about what has been heard. In a temporal structure
such as music
it
is
highly possible that conservation laws operate on
a
more concrete
level than in quasi-mathematical structures. Even in Piaget’s experiments we
often find the older child
in
particular combining the conceptual with the per-
ceptual, as when conservation of a material is
a
part of his immediate perception
of it.
Research that has been specifically concerned with the formation
of
musical
concepts is not extensive. Hitchcock
(1942)
and Jeffrey
(1958)
have found that
‘The.
research reported herein
was
slipported
by
the
Cooperative Research Program of the
(Miffice
of
Education,
Y.
S.
1)epartmerit
of
Health, Education,
md
Welfare.