Music Education – Buddy, can you spare a dime? (I)

If a person eats only swill, then the only judgment he can make is what kind of swill he likes. If a person only hears the music that’s played on the radio, she is only exposed to that small portion of a much greater musical spectrum, and can only make judgments based on that small universe of music she hears.

Now, the record business, especially the major companies, counts on this. In a way, radio stations have done the business a favour by limiting the amount and kinds of music they’ll play. As much as the record companies bitch and moan about limited playlists, it allows them to limit the kinds of music they try to bring to market. And as radio’s musical content grows more uniformly banal, the gravitas of the artists on the radio – the same artists who will receive the marketing dollars from the record companies – continues to diminish.

Sure, the major companies continue to pay lip service to their marginal divisions. All of them have a classical department and a jazz department, but they never count on them for sales, and consequently the budget behind the entire jazz and classical divisions of most major record companies might equal the money put behind one highly touted pop recording. That’s good business but it’s bad music.

Avril Lavigne and Kanye West, while fine pop performers, do not represent the apex of musical creativity. But because of the limited exposure to other sounds, an entire generation has come up thinking they do. Very few have heard of the likes Karlheinz Stockhausen or Ronnie Gilbert or Sonny Rollins.

Where does one gain such exposure? Well, like sex, you can learn it at home, you can learn it on the street, you can learn about it from friends, or you can learn it in the classroom. However, unlike sex, there’s no guarantee that anyone will necessarily learn anything about music at all.

Sadly, government money to schools has started trickling down, as opposed to flowing. You can’t spend the same dollar twice, and the U.S. dollar has other places to go. To fund the once-more-expanding military-industrial complex (now there’s a phrase redolent of nostalgia and terror), funding for nearly every human service in the federal budget, including music education, has plummeted, though the Bush administration prefers to call it “modest reductions in the rate of growth.” Compound this with a reduction in arts funding nearly to the point of nonexistence, and the prospect for cultural deprivation lurks around the corner. And as the Residents used to say in one of their posters, “Ignorance of your culture is not considered cool.”

The loss of music education deprives students of other benefits as well. One music commentator recounts; when I was a substitute science teacher in a Bronx grade school, I would bring in my guitar and explain the mathematics and physics of how strings work. Because the guitar is fretted based on mathematics and physics, this is fairly easy and allowed me to introduce concepts like fractions and how sound travels through the air in a way that stuck with the kids. “Music is a specialised science which deals with the quality of sound, acoustics, and timbre,” said educator William H. Yoh.

Extensive training is given to the aural discrimination between like pitches and those that are different… . Although it is a simplified form of arithmetic, counting in groups of two, three, four, and higher are used consistently in all music repertoire. When teaching the values of rhythmic notation, we develop and reinforce the concepts of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.