The study examined the effectiveness of music instruction on basic music skill acquisition and generalization to free time recreational pursuits of three groups (preschool, elementary, and secondary) of moderately and severely handicapped students. Instruction was provided to handicapped students with mixed etiologies (mentally retarded, deaf-blind, deaf-retarded, emotionally disturbed, autistic) and a comparison group of nonhandicapped 4 to 6 year olds in five areas: rhythm, melody, keyboard, ensemble, and harmony. Although handicapped Ss did not achieve the same magnitude of results as the comparison group, it was concluded that the handicapped population could learn many of the music skills. To determine if the children were using the taught music skills at home, a questionnaire to measure generalization was administered. Although generalization results could not be tied to the times when the child entered instruction, 33% of the students for whom questionnaires were completed showed good transfer to other settings. Appended material includes the curriculum used in the study, an assessment tool, a music questionnaire, and multiple baseline plots for each subset of the curriculum. (CL)