Music education in America emerged in the early eighteenth century out of a desire to ensure that church goers could sing the weekly hymns in tune. In 1721, John Tufts, a minister, penned the first textbook for musical education entitled An Introduction to the Singing of Psalm Tunes. Tufts’s pedagogical technique relied primarily on rote learning, omitting the reading of music until a student’s singing abilities had improved.

In the same year that Tufts’s publication emerged, Reverend Thomas Walter published The Ground and Rules of Music Explained, which, while also focusing on preparing students to sing religious music, took a note-based approach by teaching students the rudiments of note reading from the onset. The “note versus rote” controversy in music education continued well into the mid-nineteenth century. With no curriculum to guide them, singing school teachers focused on either the rote or note method with little consistency.

The author discusses Walter’s pedagogical technique in order to

A) suggest that rote learning is superior to note learning
B) present a contrast with Tufts’s educational technique
C) argue that rote learning improves a student’s singing ability
D) show the origin of Tufts’s educational techniques
E) show that rote learning was inconsistently practiced



Select the sentence in the passage that best describes the endurance of the tension between pedagogical techniques.