It’s nowhere near the 21st day of March yet Die Älte Mensch has been making his presence felt in my life in the most interesting of ways. When that happens my mind immediately moves to the topic of Arts Education.
Just a little while ago one of my Crackbook……… uhh………. Facebook friends got into her car after a long day of playing ugly music. Let me quote her:
As I got back into my car after the cacophany of “modernism”, I heard a Bach fugue on the radio. It was like a deep, cleansing purification for my ears and heart. What a wonderful moment.
Old Man Bach has that tendency. His music is fundamental to everything that we do, so much so that I like to call him The Great Codifier. Before Bach there was certainly a lot of wonderful music, but after Bach Western music suddenly made sense. There could be no Mozart without Bach. No Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, etc. without Bach. He distilled all that had gone before him and showed the world how we were going to approach music for the next 300 years.
This was brought forcefully home to me one Saturday while helping my youngest practice his ‘Cello. Riley started early last year so he’s been playing for a little while but he is still only 6 1/2 years old. I’ve heard enough of “The Happy Farmer” and related ditties to last me a lifetime and now he’s working on back-to-back menuets by the Old Man. The 2nd one is that famous one in C major that you all know – da da da de da da Dah..Dah..Dah – you know the one. It was an amazing moment of revelation for me because suddenly my youngest looked and sounded like a musician. Prior to the Bach, Riley had been learning how to play the ‘Cello. Now he was learning how to play music. The difference was palpable and immediately obvious to me and I can’t help but notice that the impetus for this change was Bach.
This led to a whole line of thought centered around music education, or the lack thereof in many curriculums in our secondary school systems and I’d like to throw out an idea: music education without an intensive study of an instrument, no matter how well intended, is generally a waste of time.
The Casual Classics movement is essentially doomed to failure because it does not give the audience an immediate, physical relationship with music. Ditto for most Symphony for Kids or Education concerts. Trying to instill a love and understanding of music without an intensive work structure focused on learning an instrument essentially reduces the chance of that person, that child, ever really becoming interested in classical music to just above Sarah Palin’s chance of winning the Nobel prize in literature.
The key for classical music is to completely redefine our approach to music education. When my parents were growing up it was commonplace for youngsters to learn an instrument, usually the piano, and some form of music education was de rigueur in scholastic systems. These days not so much, yet the wisdom of the old Greeks still rings true – Give me a child until they are five and that child is mine for life.
This was all driven home (so to speak) to me over the weekend when I found myself arrogantly sauntering into a batting cage during my eldest’s birthday party. This isn’t my first time doing this, and I have been blessed with a frightening hand to eye level of co-ordination. So when I had my choice of batting cages I naturally took the one which sported the fastest pitch – some 65 mph. Hell, Major Leaguers regularly catch up to 95 mph pitches, so how hard could 65 mph be?
A lifetime of sports, 4 years of karate, and almost two decades of dodging the usual sharp objects mentally (or physically) hurled at a conductor did not prepare me for how fast that damn ball went flying past me. I don’t think the psychology of the situation was helped by the fact that I was crowding the plate a little. What I do know is that I took a step back and proceeded to use every piece of sports and music training at my disposal – timing, co-ordination, pitch analysis, the whole nine yards kicks in. For the record, when the ball hits the barrel of the bat it’s a beautiful thing (a precious few instances). When it hits closer to the hands it hurts like all hell (much more common). And if I had been brought up doing this that 65 mph fastball would have looked like an easy slow pitch session.
I now have a much, much higher respect for anyone who can catch up to a MLB fastball, and I will no longer curse quite so loudly when my Cubs can’t get it together…. again. It’s a LOT harder then it looks. Anyone who has had the chance to play Bach as an amateur will have a lot higher chance of being interested in hearing it played by a professional because they will at least have an inkling of how difficult it is to play this music well. But they will also have a physical connection, they will be able to relate through movement. It is now concrete.
There’s a lot more to mine here but perhaps it should be the subject of future posts: How to redefine music education.
Great comments Bill — As someone who regularly runs around doing kids shows in the schools, I couldn’t agree more that actually learning the skill is ultimately the only way to really get what it’s all about. We have been to some schools where students are required to learn an instrument, and one where they specified a string instrument. It makes a difference. We also find that the Pied Piper was not so amazing — it was the music that did the job for him. When Carrie hits a tuning note on the oboe, the rowdiest of classes falls dead silent in rapt attention waiting to see where we’re going with this. When they actually see real human beings making real sounds and music come out of inanimate hunks of wood with strings, reeds, and keys, there’s a light that goes on inside that’s connected with the idea, “Hey, if I learned and practiced, that’s something cool (i.e “meaningful and valuable”) that I could do!” Kids are born being ready to sing and dance as a huge part of how they interact with the world and communicate. When our education systems fail to capitalize on this (or worse, marginalizes or eliminates this possibility), we end up with human beings crippled by the amputation of this amazing core aptitude.
This is a viewpoint I have had for a while: a part of the reason to teach music to almost everyone, even those who have no interest or talent to be professional performers, is to cultivate the next generation of informed listeners. That’s where a lot of your Season Ticket buyers come from. They are the supporters of chamber music and help provide the environment in the home for cultivating the NEXT generation.
Bill in Dallas
Despite the universally lamented demise of music education and as much as I’m zealot about the manifold gifts of devotion to a instrument, IMO it’s possible to deeply enter the musical world without actually being a player.
Yes, most programs provide only lip service to true musical literacy. And that argument can easily be extended to the performing and visual arts in general.
Our students and audiences can go deeper, much deeper, with a full immersion in the arts. That’s a lot of listening, a good dose of reading, classroom learning and inspiration from performing artists who reach into the community with this message:
Art belongs in our everyday lives. It is a living, breathing thing that can transform the world anew each day.
Yes, pick up an artist’s brush, or try scratching out a few notes with a violin and bow. Get a sense of what that’s like. But the magic of Monet, the breadth of Brahms is a gift for every soul on the planet willing to accept it.
My experience is that only a small minority of children and their parents are willing to fully commit to the structured study of a musical instrument. Still, the gift of music belongs to everyone.