Teen-Age Music Preferences

PRESUMING that it would be helpful for music teachers to know the musical idioms which young people prefer, this study, made during the 195556 school year, had the following purposes: ( 1 ) to develop a device for sampling music preferences; (2) to discover what teen-age preferences are and how they vary at different ages; (3) to determine if teen-agers of different socio-economic status develop diSerent music preferences; and (4) to verify or contradict results of music preference surveys using other methods of measurement.l A Music Preference Inventory was developed for the investigation. This consisted of a recording of fifty musical excerpts, none more than thirty seconds in length. The exerpts were chosen so as to fall into three main categories as follows: twenty popular itemsa twenty classical itemsa and ten traditional items. Tables 2, 3, and 4 give the titles of the selections in each category. The fifty items were chosen from nominations by more than six hundred teenagers with the assistance of judgments by music educators and some thirty junior college music majors. As it was assumed that familiarity and preference would correlate positively, an effort was made to use the best known themes as the examples. Subjects