Testing Students’ Developmental Musical Abilities using Edwin E. Gordon’s Test

Abstract

Musical abilities represent a complex musical and psychological phenomenon that is explained in various ways in relevant literature. With his research, the American psychologist and music educator Edwin E. Gordon made an exceptional contribution to understanding the complexity of the structure of musical abilities. The design and development of nine tests aimed to test the developmental and stabilized musical abilities of people of all age groups make Gordon one the most prominent names in the field of music education. In designing the Theory of Music Learning, Gordon directed his musical and psychological knowledge on developmental and stabilized musical abilities at creating a contemporary paradigm of humanistic music pedagogy, thus advocating the provision of musical education for all children through the process of individualization. In our region, a subjective method of testing musical abilities is practiced, which has several shortcomings. With the aim of introducing the possibility of group testing of musical abilities, which would include a wider population of students and thus enable faster and more comprehensive detection of musically gifted students, the present study was conducted to test students’ musical abilities and present the Intermediate Measures of Music Audiation, a standardized test for testing musical abilities by Edwin E. Gordon.