The purpose of this study was to examine sex and geographic representation in two well-known books on the history of American music education: History of Public School Music in the United States by Edward Bailey Birge (1937/1966) and A History of American Music Education by Michael L. Mark and Charles L. Gary (1992). The number of different individuals mentioned, total number of mentions, and number of lines devoted to each individual were categorized by sex and geographical region. Photographic evidence was examined in a like manner. The authors of both books, published 55 years apart, provided statistically significant inequitable representation with regard to sex and region of the country. On the other hand, the two books are remarkably similar with regard to the variables examined. The researcher posits the "top-down" approach to historiography as the main reason for the inequitable representations.

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.