The divergence between what is proper for the layman and essential for the professional is a problem for both scholar and musician. Many a university music curriculum still bears traces of such divergence, and the history of university music in the United States could easily be covered from this point of view. What is involved here as elsewhere is the shift from a frankly amateurish--in the best sense--approach, however enlightened in premise, to one based on a serious and eventually professional outlook. The transformation has been anything but facile. The situation is still in process. In the older curriculum, courses were offered in harmony and counterpoint, to be sure, and sometimes also in fugue, instrumentation, and composition proper. It was scarcely envisaged, however, that the student would aim at serious accomplishment in such courses, and those who taught them for the most part had learned to accept the conditions prevailing in our music life, conditions which gave scant encouragement to those nourishing illusory ambitions. The instruction given aimed, therefore, at theoretical knowledge of traditional concepts; as has been pointed out, there was little inclination to examine either the premises or to delve into the ultimate effects of traditional theory. The demands of the general curriculum in fact would make it difficult genuinely to attack the problems of adequate technical training. The student was obliged to be satisfied to learn “rules” or “principles” without adequate opportunity, through continual practice, to master them; and since our music life at the time was what it was, he had no opportunity to become aware of what genuine mastery involved. The result is quite obvious: either he gave up the idea of serious achievement, or he resigned himself, often painfully no doubt, to the necessity of lowering his sights.