The Quarter Note Companion is a comprehensive instrumental music curriculum for first-year students. Our curriculum differs from the traditional method books because it solves the main problem with ensemble education: instrumental music students are rarely required to do higher-level thinking. The guiding research behind the curriculum is Bloom’s Taxonomy, which is an educational theory that divides educational tasks into six different levels based on complexity. A lower-level task requires less mastery of a subject, whereas a higher-level task requires complete mastery. The six levels are (from lowest to highest): Remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. 

Instrumental music teachers spend most of their time teaching “apply” and “remember” tasks and the top three tasks are rarely taught. By not asking students to analyze, evaluate, and create, we are not requiring students to do any higher-level thinking. This creates students that are merely capable of applying remembered fingerings and notation symbols. The Quarter Note Companion Method Book series reinforces all levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy and specifically targets analyzing, evaluating, and creating tasks.