Peter W. Dykema - Advocacy

Advocacy

Although Dykema did not have a formal degree, he organized choirs at all the schools where he worked, included arts in his classes, and promoted music education in his faculty positions at the university level. When he taught high school English, he included a unit on arts education, and he developed one of the first music appreciation courses in the country. During his tenure at Teachers College, Columbia University, he increased music education course requirements for the master's degree and helped develop the first doctoral program in the music education department.

Dykema promoted music making and music education wherever he went. He was known as an inspiring choir leader and untiring worker, continuing to travel, write and lecture about music after he retired from his position at Teachers College in 1940. Heavily influenced by a Dutch Calvinist background that included family and church singing, Dykema advocated community music, believing that towns and cities should insure that their populations have access to musical groups, performance halls, and competent directors. He thought it was important that adults should have opportunities to study instruments as beginners, and he urged teachers to foster such a love of music that students would continue playing and singing after compulsory lessons had ended.

In 1918, he chaired a joint committee of twelve (that included John Alden Carpenter, Frederick S. Converse, Wallace Goodrich, Hollis E. Dann, among others) that prepared the "service version" of the National Anthem. Later, as a member of the National Anthem Committee in 1942, he helped prepare The Code for the National Anthem of the United States of America (www.thenationalanthemproject.org/reprise.pdf).

From 1923 to 1939, he served as chair of the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA)'s national Committee on Community Music. The reports of the committee as documented in MTNA's Volume of Proceedings from each year during that period contain in depth information on Dykema's efforts in the area of music advocacy: the promotion of Christmas carolling, community sings, music in industry, etc. He also described a collaboration between Phi Mu Alpha and Sigma Alpha Iota at the University of Wisconsin to establish a high school organization called Omicron Phi (MTNA Volume of Proceedings, 1936, p. 356). During much of this period, Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia and MTNA held national conventions simultaneously.