The Seashore-Mursell Debate on the Psychology of Music Revisited

Abstract

The published writings of Carl Seashore (1919, [1938] 1967, and his 29 articles in the Music Educators Journal during the period 1936-1941) and James Mursell (1934, 1936, 1937, 1938a, 1938b, 1943, 1948) on the psychology of music and music education constituted a significant contribution to music education thought and practice in the mid-twentieth century. Mursell followed, reacted against, and responded to Seashore's work and, the similarities between them notwithstanding, their ideas diverged in important ways. Their differing views of the nature of musical experience provided bases for contrasting ideologies of music education. My purpose in this chapter is to unpack aspects of each view of the psychology of music, examine their similarities and differences, and assess the degree to which they may be reconciled and the implications that follow for music education. In tackling this problem set, I focus on theoretical aspects of these psychologies of music, leaving aside important empirical questions relating to the nature of the data from which they drew, particularly those regarding the reliability and validity of these data (for the Seashore Measures, see Shuter-Dyson & Gabriel 1981) and the issues relating to music education practice. My intent is to concentrate on some general, conceptually interesting, and central issues rather than to conduct a comprehensive theoretical analysis of their ideas (see Fiske 1993, 159-159, 1996, 8). In particular, I suggest that regarding Mursell as a foil to Seashore shows that the theoretical types they represent contribute to our understanding and yet are flawed in one respect or another. Falling somewhere along a continuum between two opposite types, Mursell and Seashore differ in terms of the emphases in their writings. A careful reading of their work suggests some complexity, ambivalence, contradictions, and inconsistencies in their views, all of which are indicative of ideas still incompletely worked out or conceptually fuzzy. This fuzziness is evident, for example, in their discussions of the nature of musical meaning and the role of emotion in musical experience. In order to avoid stereotyping and oversimplifying their ideas, I refer only to some of the broad tendencies I see in their writings. The advantage of this approach is in seeing the general lay of the land by sketching some principal heuristic landmarks and leaving aside a more detailed conceptual mapping to a later day.