Libby Larsen is one of the country's most prolific and performed living composers. She has created a Grammy Award-winning catalogue of more than 200 works spanning many genres, from intimate vocal and chamber music to orchestral and choral scores. Larsen, 53, is completing a year-long appointment as the first holder of the Library of Congress's Harissios Papamarkou Chair in Education and Technology at the John W. Kluge Center in Washington. Larsen spoke with staff writer Valerie Strauss about music education and why she thinks it faces "a crisis in relevancy" in the United States. Following are excerpts.

Q: What has surprised you in your research?

A: I have always been interested in how we teach teachers to teach music in our schools. That is the crux of the matter. . . . When I looked back in history, I found some amazing things. I studied why we teach rhythm the way we teach it, and I learned that basically we haven't changed the way we teach rhythm since we developed a system for teaching in Colonial New England. 

How do we teach it?

When we start to teach what we call rhythm, we tell students to begin with a whole note, and the whole note has four equal beats. And those equal beats can be divided precisely into half notes, 4 quarter notes, 8 sixteenth notes, 16 thirty-second notes, and in fact what we are really teaching is precise duple subdivision of beat. Which makes perfect sense. It is brilliant and an elegant way for preparing young musicians to sing and play in what we call four-four time. 

So what's wrong with it?

It was developed by misplaced Europeans who brought their music with them and developed methodologies based in the simple parameters of that music. At the same time, America and especially African America, as part of our culture, was developing a different music and making huge contributions, particularly in jazz and gospel. But the music itself, the pitch, the repertoire, the rhythm, the instruments, the ensemble, the culture surrounding it, have only recently begun to be explored as teachable. That's the problem. We have a musical education system that was developed out of a displaced European sensibility that was brilliant, but we have a culture now in which the music is ever so much more complicated and diverse in the world. The music education system has a crisis in relevancy.

Is this about cultural diversity?

Not really. It is about how we teach the elements of music to our young students in a way that allows them to carry them into a world they recognize. We have a system that has grown up around a particular repertoire that is a really small percentage of the music that is in our world. And this affects music education at every level.

Can you provide an example of this relevancy crisis?

At the University of New Mexico over the past couple years, there has been a deep question in the music department as to whether or not the ensemble, the chorus, the band is necessary. In music education, that is usually unthinkable. We formed our education on the ensemble experience . . . The university sits smack in the middle of three cultures: Hispanic, Indian and Anglo. Some of the music of those cultures can be taught through the traditional educational system -- the Anglo in particular -- [and] some can only be touched upon. But the music education system as it has evolved really doesn't contain an ensemble relevant to its student population. So the faculty and administration have been really brilliant in the way they are discussing where they want to go with their ensembles.

Ensembles are central to music education from grade school on up. Every school has a band, a chorus. Shouldn't they?

The ensemble experience is a wonderful way to learn and teach and explore music. . . . But it is itself in crisis, a crisis of relevancy to the musical world in which we live. . . . We need to look very carefully at what is band. What is it? Does that mean a specific group of instruments that play a specific repertoire in a specific way? At the moment that is the answer. They play the same songs, and they go to competitions, and they are graded on their progress, and it's become focused on that. It's frighteningly formulaic, and the students in many, many bands work on two or three pieces a year so they can do well in band competition. That's not music, that's competition. While you learn some things about music, you aren't learning very much about music. I know I'll get into trouble saying that.

How differently could or should they be organized?

Our culture has this incredibly broad notion of what an ensemble can be. But still and all, in schools, we have band, orchestra and chorus, and none of them include the electric guitar, the defining instrument of American culture. . . . Music educators will say we put those in our jazz band, and they have a historical reason for that, the fact that the electric guitar did develop through the black combo. But that's just not the point when a student comes to the band director and says, "I play electric guitar," and he says, "How about the tuba?" 

What should we be doing differently?

In our teaching colleges, where we are teaching teachers to teach, we need to take the bull by the horns and look with a crystal-clear eye at the relevancy of the methodologies that we are teaching. We need to overhaul the way we teach beat and rhythm to everybody, at the basic level, at every age. We need to teach kids to read music as soon as we possibly can, and I mean when they are 6 years old, to read it and write it. 

Should they learn about a broader range of composers?

That's another example of what I am talking about. Today, every second-grader is taught that Beethoven was the greatest composer ever. There are historical reasons for why we call the music of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Handel, Mendelsohn "classical music" and consider it the best. . . . It evolved such that every other kind of music, including the music of black America, was considered nationality expressed in music. What is important about this now is that this approach remains. We teach the core curriculum, which we consider to be Bach, Beethoven, etc. We teach from Bach out, basically. We don't have to. 

What else should schools do? 

We need to have practicing musicians visit schools all the time, to perform and to teach the kids a song or whatever the tradition that person is in. I think we have to have students writing music in whatever style they want. There is no way to teach a composer in the world how to compose. But there are plenty of wonderful ways to excite the creative logic that is part of the human brain. Music is about exploring the creative logic of the brain, and right now we aren't doing that in our schools in general. We don't value the creative logic. We need to have students just play more, building their own instruments, inventing their own notations -- and not just in pockets of schools, but everywhere.