In a country that has slowly allowed our youngest to forgo a music education, it is no wonder that our discourse has become so caustic and bitter. Music fastens us to each other, and a music education secures the earliest strings.

There are four moving parts in this moving draft: memoir, proof of inequality of access, NAfME's mistaken defense, and the parade of beauties showing that music makes us better. Improving the draft means shaping these pieces to more harmonious scale. I think the inequality of access piece can be tightened substantially. That makes room for the real subject, which is the final theme, to be developed.

My brother and I were recently talking about an undergraduate 0-level course he would like to create, called "Literature Can Save Your Life." Like your real theme here, it's a reaction to the effort to justify the humanities instrumentally, as NAfME and so many other humanities organizations now do. Your draft can be strengthened by showing your subject in relation to the broader "crisis of the humanities." You are also speaking in the tradition of democratic education theory, by asking not only how the humanities makes us better—happier, more resilient and caring—humans, but also "a better people," a stronger society. That theme must be developed, not merely sounded.

JCPenney, the Saxophone, and Advocating for Music Education

-- By CoreyWhitt - 25 Apr 2022

Wishbooks and What They Offer

I was unacquainted with the saxophone before JCPenney introduced us. Nestled somewhere between the glossed pages of scalloped valences and seersucker suits, the horn enjoyed a two-page spread in the retail giant’s holiday lookbook. Department store chains are not known to be reputable distributors of musical instruments, but dressed in a wine-red lacquer, the saxophone I saw gave me no pause.

Poring over the advertisement offered a welcome distraction in the days after my mom, sister, and I fled the domestic violence in our home. Elbows resting on the catalog’s pages, I would stretch over a concrete floor in the unfinished house for our new family of three, and gaze at the saxophone’s silhouette for hours. Even in a home of exposed studs and dry wall, the simple thought of a future with the instrument was enough to shutter the biting winter winds of Wisconsin.

JCPenney’s branded saxophone would later arrive on a brisk morning, many years after my mom had started to save what little cash remained at the end of each month. The instrument shared more properties with aluminum foil than any reputable woodwind should and sputtered like an old Mercury Marquis, but it still managed to make a sound as I took to practicing it religiously.

Amidst all of the hurt, music made sense of the world around me.

The Decay of Music Education in American Schools

The American educational landscape of today has diminished the reach of such musical experiences in student’s lives, where legislatures, boards of education, and the public have deemed it “nice but not necessary.” The decline of music education has been on a steady march for the better part of four decades, with the National Endowment for the Arts placing the number of adults, ages 18 to 24, who participated in music classes, down by over one-third – only 34 percent of individuals engaged in music coursework during their compulsory education. Today more than 1.3 million elementary school students do not receive a music education, less than one-fifth of students in eighth-grade perform in a school ensemble, and high school music opportunities are relegated to the demands of high-stakes testing regimes and Advanced Placement coursework.

The disparities yawn when comparing suburban music offerings for those in urban and rural areas, or the music education opportunities of white to non-white students. Large metropolitan districts are the least likely to supply robust music education programs, while music education advocacy is shallowest amongst rural administrators. In settings such as these, schools rely on district coffers to sustain music education programs, and find their resources already stretched thin, while affluent suburban communities draw the bulk of their funding from outside administrative channels.

What results is a commentary on which students are considered deserving of a music education. In places like New York City, where 20 percent of schools are without fine arts teachers, 42 percent of those schools are located within lower income neighborhoods. Students of color in the Detroit area are at least 30 percent less likely to receive musical training in school as compared to their white counterparts. And schools like Marshall Fundamental Secondary School in Pasadena, California are left to fund an entire music education curriculum on a shoestring budget, while the Mason High Schools (OH) of the country rent out the entirety of Lucas Oil Stadium for a single parent performance.

It seems that a music education is increasingly reserved for the few, and optional for the rest.

Supporting a Better Society

The decay in music education access severs the strands that hold a healthy democracy together by hobbling the very foundations of the human experience: to feel deeply, recognize the dignity of others, and connect with those around us.

The philosophy is not a new one. Greek philosopher Plato imagined an education system intertwined with a music curriculum, “because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the innermost soul and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with them and imparting grace.” In the view of Plato, more so than any other subject, music imagines an idealized society during the fleeting moments of performance that shape student perspectives after the last pitch sounds – our musical experiences translate to the way we navigate the world.

We are able to empathize with others around us because we have already felt their same pain in the cascades of Julie Giroux’s One Life Beautiful.

We are able to savor the long road of patience because we have already experienced the slow build of triumph in the fourth movement of Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome.

We are able to easily forgive because we have already closed our eyes and laid the day behind us in Eric Whitacre’s The Seal Lullaby.

And we can burden the darkest of times because we have already lived to see the unbridled joy that lies on the other side of the final molto ritardando in Gustav Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony.

A music education builds the footings for how see one another and live out our lives alongside them, and it extends far beyond the music classroom; to our family, strangers, sidewalks, and conversations. In a country that has slowly allowed our youngest to forgo a music education, it is no wonder that our discourse has become so caustic and bitter. Music fastens us to each other, and a music education secures the earliest strings.

NAfME? and Music Education Advocacy

Today the national music education organization, the National Association for Music Education (NAfME? ), bangs the familiar doldrums that have permitted a music education to fade from our classroom:

Music is math.

Music is reading.

Music is science.

Music improves test scores, attendance, and grade point averages.

But, while true and perhaps important, the same ineffectual advocacy strategy misses the point and perpetuates the supporting role of music education to “core” academic work. Instead, a music education is best articulated on its own terms.

Music makes us a better people.

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