Justifying the Music Curriculum

Previous blogs against the traditional music curriculum stand as stated. We need to make serious changes and we need to do so immediately. Reasons stated are based on market demand and the rapidly declining interest in classical music. To continue to teach our students in the same way we did 40 years ago is to promote that which has little to no place in modern culture.

Yet there are some reasons for maintaining at least some of what we do. It is true that knowledge and skills in music develop the "whole" person and emphasizes both right brain and left brain activities. The cognition of music allows for greater mathematical understanding, historical framework, and a form of another language. All these and more are integral to the educational process and help students understand not just themselves but other subjects as well. Music is a subject that encompasses so much education and provides a necessary balance to the objective cognition of much of academia today.

Teaching students to sing or play well is to encourage them to reach their full potential as humans. The discipline required for musical success is applicable to any field. Employers are often looking for students who have paid the price for excellence and have achieved a high level of success in some area. It is remarkable how many politicians, doctors, actors, lawyers, and bankers are musical. They diligently applied themselves to excellence and achieved musical skills that propelled them to the kind of rigorous discipline that is required for all professions. The time and effort spent to be musical paid and continues to pay compound dividends in all walks of life.

Sometimes we do things in an excellent way regardless of who is present to share in our excellence. We choose to be the best we can be partly out of our own self-respect and desire to attain the highest level we can accomplish. Our audience may be small, minimal, or apathetic toward our accomplishment, but we act on our own desires rather than external rewards of applause or affirmation. Musicians must teach themselves to reach for the intrinsic, those emotional experiences that strengthen the inner self, the psyche, the soul. All of these and more make music one of the greatest, most rewarding experiences a human can have, and they all require relentless effort to achieve a high level of music making.

As I have written in the past, music is a human need that cannot be extracted from our culture. It is here to stay. People want it, people need it, society craves it, and it is everywhere. Audience or not, music is a ubiquitous event in our lives.

But none of this solves the problem of what are the necessary skills, the processes, the developments that are necessary for students to learn in music for today's and tomorrow's world. Does the training require music theory? Yes, most definitely. Does it require Music History? Sure. Does it require applied lessons and ensemble experiences? Yes. Will it require knowledge in all music styles, technology profiency, composition, improvisation, music business? Most likely. It is time to broaden our curriculum and provide student choice in what to pursue in music, giving them the fundamental tools that will catapult them to new careers and creative ways to approach music. Time to reinvent the music curriculum for the world of tomorrow (which, frighteningly enough, may in fact be the world of today!).