So Your Kid Wants to Be a Music Major...

Perhaps you should let him. It is interesting how supportive some parents can be in terms of their kids' participation in band, orchestra or choir, right up until the point when one of them decides to pursue it as a career...

A weird thing about a lot of parents is that they beam and glow when their kids get solos in orchestra, band and choir in high school, but they freak out when the same talented kid says “I want to study music in college.”

I don’t get it. You raise a kid to have pluck and self-determination, and then when the kid says “I love playing my instrument more than anything, and I want to pursue my passion as a career,” the parent flips out.

Right now is the time of year when parents call me in a frenzy of parental angst about their children’s musical aspirations. They sound panicky on the phone. A child has decided that he or she loves music, and the parent is certain the love of music is going to send an accomplished, self-directed kid straight to Skid Row. They ask me, “Am I dooming my child to a life of poverty if I let him major in music?”

That's from a wonderful new blog post by Liz Ryan, CEO/founder of Human Workplace, and, yes, holder of a vocal performance degree. She calls her post "Let the kid study music, already," and she makes some great points about how the study of music has value that carries over to other disciplines, even if the student doesn't end up doing music full-time after graduation.

I know I mentioned it on this blog before, but a good friend of mine--a tuba-playing mortgage broker--feels that his music education degree is his ace in the hole; the discipline, time management, and multitasking skills, along with other good qualities noted by Ryan in her post, have given him the edge over many of his coworkers over the years who may not have had such a rigorous course of study.

Like any major, music isn't for everyone, but, as Ryan says, studying it doesn't necessarily doom someone to a life of poverty.

Read the whole thing.

This Blogger Speaks the Truth

Via multiple Facebook friends, I came across this post from a blogger calling herself Facetious Firecracker, entitled What Every Music Teacher Wants You to Know. I'll share a couple of the "money quotes" here:

Without music programs in schools, we risk losing part of our culture for the future. When we examine past cultures, what do we use to judge how civilized they were? Paintings, musical compositions, architecture, tools, language, and clothing. In other words – ART. In fact, we use the fine arts of past cultures to judge how much they knew about our current so-called “core subjects.”

Do you think people in the future are going to look at our standardized test scores to see how well we lived? Of course not. They’re going to study our ability to create ART.

[...]We didn’t go into teaching music because we wanted to get better at math. We want what we do to be valued for its own purpose. We want people to think it’s important to have music in schools, well, just because it is! Imagine your life without music.

Silent commercials and movies, with the exception of dialogue. Awkward silences while shopping. Silent car rides. All in all, pretty boring. We teach music because it’s like painting for your ears. It expresses emotions. It can even change your emotions.

Read the whole thing.

Why Music Matters, Beautifully Stated

There have been plenty of essays written in the past several decades about why music (and by extension, music education) is so important, and this is a great addition to the collection.  It's by Karl Paulnack, Director of the Music Division of the Boston Conservatory, and it comes from a welcome address that he gave to freshman students in 2004. (How have I gone this long without running across this address before now?)  Here's one of the money quotes, in my opinion:

[...]I have come to understand that music is not part of "arts and entertainment" as the newspaper section would have us believe. It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can't with our minds.

Read the whole thing; it's worth your time. And if you're in an area where the schools are considering cutting back on fine arts classes, please share this with the people who are pondering such an awful decision.

Music Makes You Smarter, Part 357

Evidently, I picked a good time to write yesterday's post, since, just a few hours later, someone sent a link to this story:

Those hours practicing piano scales or singing with a choral group weren't for nothing because people with a background in music tend to have a higher education and earn more, according to a new survey.

The poll by Harris Interactive, an independent research company, showed that 88 percent of people with a post-graduate education were involved in music while in school, and 83 percent of people earning $150,000 or more had a music education.

"Part of it is the discipline itself in learning music, it's a rigorous discipline, and in an ensemble situation, there's a great deal of working with others. Those types of skills stand you well in careers later in life," said John Mahlmann, of the National Association for Music Education in Reston, Virginia, which assisted in the survey.

And yes, you may feel free to remind me that I'm no fan of polls, but this one isn't telling us anything that we don't already know; it's just nice for stories like this to get attention. Music helps with other disciplines, and we have to continually remind those who control the purse strings of that fact. (Most interesting quote of the linked story: "Students who found music to be extremely or very influential to their fulfillment were those who had vocal lessons and who played in a garage band." What--no horn players? Although it's certainly possible to rehearse a jazz band in the garage...)

And in the same batch of email was a link to a great story: Overfunded Public School Forced to Add Jazz Band:

MANALAPAN, NJ—Benjamin Harrison Middle School faculty members regretfully announced Tuesday that, despite their best efforts to prevent it, the school simply had too much state and federal funding to avoid adding a jazz ensemble to its music program.

"We did not want it to come to this," principal David DeCarlo said after introducing students to Mr. Metheny, an award-winning jazz guitarist and the new school music teacher. "The children are the ones who are going to suffer. Especially little Sammy Orlovsky, who will have to play those drums where instead of using drumsticks you tap the cymbals with tiny brushes."

The school plans to use its remaining $22.1 million budget to add a sculpture wing to the art department, triple janitors' salaries, and purchase a second computer.

I've been surprised to find out how many of my friends didn't know that The Onion is a fake news site; still, wouldn't it be great if stories like that were true?

Neither rain, nor snow....nor bullets? A Chicago-area man, upset that he was getting his mail too late, went postal on his letter carrier. (Seeing as how the postal worker was shot in the thigh, it would have been amusing if the shooter's name was Jack Bauer.)

Does the punishment fit the crime? (Overseas edition): A man in India atoned for the crime of stoning two dogs to death by marrying another dog (nope, not a typo).

No School Musician Left Behind

I found a good article in the paper yesterday about No Child Left Behind and its negative effect on arts education, and, while I couldn't find the exact story online, I did run across an even better one:

Raising school test scores in reading and math remains the biggest hurdle for No Child Left Behind, with many schools nationwide performing at less-than-acceptable levels, according to government proficiency tests.

But while districts scramble to improve on core subjects, educators say the latest subject to be left behind is arts education.

The arts community is hoping to build a partnership with the business community to make music, dance and drawing classes more of a priority in the reauthorization of the education program.

Their pitch: Art classes enhance the creative and innovative thinking that drives entrepreneurs.

I've discussed this before; there are plenty of people in the business world with a degree in music who credit the experience of earning that degree for giving them an edge that "regular" business students don't always enjoy. In one instance, a musician in the finance industry considers his music degree to be an ace in the hole:

This guy got a music degree at UNT, and, although he still performs regularly in several different areas (including a reserve military band), his day job is in the financial industry. While some might think that a non-business background would serve as a disadvantage, he considers it to be his ace in the hole. In a nutshell, he figures that the experience he had getting that degree at a rigorous school like my alma mater puts him head-and-shoulders above 90% of his coworkers, because they've never had to experience the type of grueling schedule and rigourous personal discipline demanded of the students in the music program. I think he's absolutely right.

I'm not exactly sure what my friend has seen (or not seen) in his coworkers, but I know what skills are developed during the course of getting a music degree: time management, multitasking (think of all the things required just to play a piece of music: tone, pitch, rhythm, dynamics, expression, etc.), conquering of performance anxiety, organization of thought, and so on. Few other disciplines develop all these things to such a high degree, especially at the elite, performance-oriented schools like UNT.

It's still an uphill battle to get everyone in business on board with the idea that students cannot live by math and science alone. Back to the original article:

The Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce agree that arts education would help produce more creative, well-rounded students. According to the chamber, American graduates are beginning to fall behind other countries in creative skills, which could be aided by arts classes.

But the business community isn’t ready yet to move lobbying resources from their top education priorities, which still include rigorous testing standards for NCLB. Those standards, they argue, will produce a more globally competitive workforce.

So mastering the basics must come first, they’ve told [government affairs liaison for the National Dance Education Organization Karen] Bradley. But she counters: “What they really want is to hire people who can think on their feet and have creative skills. Arts are a part of that, but they don’t get it.”

I hope more people in government do start to "get it." The arts are important. Read the whole article, and check out similar ideas here and here. I've also talked at length about the subject in this previous post.

No racket left behind: Conductor Simon Rattle was, well, ratlled recently at a recent Carnegie Hall performance. Having just spoken to the audience about the importance of keeping quiet during a particularly sensitive portion of a Mahler symphony, all was going well until, in a soft closing passage, the sound was disrupted by emergency sirens from a passing vehicle.