The short answer is no.

The idea of the “seven liberal arts” as an organizing principal for medieval education has roots in late Roman antiquity. The seven were divided into the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). The foundation of medieval education was the trivium. Since formal education was Latin education, children first had to be taught that language; grammar was their portal into it, and the study of grammar remained basic at every level of medieval education, much as English is today in the modern American educational system. Logic (or dialectic) taught you how to argue—how to think really—and rhetoric taught you how to elegantly and persuasively organize those thoughts.

In the medieval university curriculum, “majors” led to degrees in theology (considered the “Queen of the Sciences”), philosophy, civil law, canon law, and medicine (depending on where you studied). In your university studies, you picked up a smattering of knowledge about the quadrivium in bits and pieces. So, at Cambridge you learned some arithmetic and astronomy in order to know how to calculate moveable ecclesiastical feast days, like Easter; you studied a little cosmology (the seven planets, etc.). But it’s important to remember that the quadrivium was all theoretical study. When you studied music, you did not learn to play an instrument but studied music theory (Pythagorean ideas about proportion and harmonics) until late in the Middle Ages, when some chapel singing might be required. But by the late 15th century, both Oxford and Cambridge were granting music degrees.

This is not to say that medieval students lived lives without music. There is a famous 13th-century model letter from a father to his son complaining that he is shirking his studies and wasting his time living “dissolutely and slothfully, preferring license to restraint and play to work and strumming a guitar while the others are at their studies.”

Actually, the idea that music should be a practical part of a liberal arts education has more force in the Renaissance. Several educational treatises from the period recommend learning music. One of the most famous, On Noble Manners (c. 1404) by Pier Palo Vergerio, says this:

“As to Music, the Greeks refused the title of ‘educated’ to anyone who could not sing or play. Socrates set an example to the Athenian youth by himself learning to play in his old age, urging the pursuit of music not as a sensuous indulgence, but as an aid to the inner harmony of the soul. Insofar as it is taught as a healthy recreation for the moral and spiritual nature, Music is a truly liberal art, and, both as regards its theory and its practice, should find a place in education.”

Castiglione’s influential Book of the Courtier (1528) insists that the well-groomed courtier—i.e., one of the noble attendants and advisors to a prince, sort of the next step in the evolution of the knight—says:

” Gentlemen, I must tell you that I am not satisfied with our courtier unless he is also a musician and unless as well as understanding and being able to read music he can play several instruments. For, when we think of it, during our leisure time we can find nothing more worthy or commendable to help our bodies relax and our spirits recuperate, especially at Court where, besides the way in which music helps everyone forget his troubles, many things are done to please the ladies, whose tender and gentle souls are very susceptible to harmony and sweetness. . . . Indeed, the man who does not enjoy music can be sure that there is no harmony in his soul.”

Sources: Charles Homer Haskins’ classic The Rise of the Universities is approaching 100 years old, but it’s still an excellent brief intro to medieval university education . . . and it’s available in a free e-book here. W.H. Woodward, ed., Vittorino da Feltre and other Humanist Educators (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (several translations; in Book One. Here’s a free e-book.)