The unit for Research into Applied Musical Perception (RAMP) was set up in the Music Department of Huddersfield Polytechnic in October 1985. Led by Professor George Pratt, then newly appointed as Head of Department, it was supported generously by the Polytechnic which made available a full-time Research Assistant post, filled by Michael Henson. Dr John Sloboda of Keele University, musical psychologist and author of ‘The Musical Mind’, agreed to be an Associate of the Unit and to co-supervise the first postgraduate students registered for research degrees.

The Unit spent a year enquiring of other institutions about their attitudes to teaching musical perception, and trying out a first-year course which this article describes.

Percy A. Scholes' (1877–1958) defence of music appreciation remains one of the most clearly articulated among the twentieth-century approaches to school music. His published work is eminently readable, spiced with wit, and attractive to non-musicians. Scholes has gone beyond philosophical argument to practical strategy, as his published work attests. Nevertheless, his ideas ought not either be accepted at face value or ‘written off’ as a ‘failure’ without careful examination of them.1

This paper attempts to reconstruct Scholes' ideas about music appreciation evidenced in his published work; to examine his assumptions about the rationale, objectives, instructional methods and curriculum for music appreciation; and to suggest implications of this analysis for future research and practice.

The arts pose some particular problems in the field of assessment. In the study reported here, we examined some of the problems performance presents to assessors especially in the context of the GCSE examination, and with reference to the model for assessment given in the APU Report on Aesthetic Development.

A small-scale experiment was devised with the aim of investigating the reliability and different perceptions of judges of musical performances. As well as assessment by professional musicians, we investigated self assessment and assessment by peer-group members. There was a generally high measure of agreement between judges, both in terms of their individual comments and the rank order they each devised. This suggests that there were some objective criteria at work in their assessments. Self-assessments proved very realistic, although those of the peer-group were slightly less so.