Dr. William R. Lee, professor and Program Coordinator in Music Education, recently presented “American Social Ideology and Participation in School Ensembles, 1900 to 1940” at the University of Sheffield in Great Britain. The conference was sponsored by the University of Sheffield Department of Music and The Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research of Great Britain.
Lee shared the session with Dr. Gordon Cox, senior lecturer in music education at the University of Reading, Institute of Education, and others. Lee’s goal is to begin to facilitate an academic exchange program between institutions in Great Britain and UTC.
While he was in Sheffield Lee attended a special session devoted to presentations by British graduate students in music psychology.
“This was a great opportunity, especially to see how music research is approached outside the United States. I was glad to see the cross-disciplinary nature of many of the projects and the concern on the part of researchers for music instruction in the community as well as in the schools,” Lee said. “Research in the United States in music psychology has tended to approach music from a narrower perspective, often with a perceptual skew. In Britain musicians and psychologists are still sitting in the same room and the larger experience of music remains a topic of concern,” he said.
Lee has toured in Europe with UTC ensembles in 2003 and 2005 and spoke at the University of Reading in 2006.
He presented a paper June 1st at the Music Educators National Conference-sponsored Keokuk II Symposium in Iowa that examined the historical bases of music education in the United States. His paper there was about the contributions of Tennessean Philander P. Claxton. Claxton was Head of the U.S. Government Bureau of Education under Woodrow Wilson and a pioneering advocate of music in the public schools in the early years of the twentieth century.
Lee serves on several editorial boards and has been on the board of the Journal of Research in Music Education.
