[Dixielandjazz] Quality Music Education? Schools Could Learn From the Past

[Steve Barbone]

Not specifically OKOM, but an interesting thought on what might be done to
teach music again in the schools. NYC is trying to fund music education.

Anyone out there on School Boards, or knowing people on school boards, might
be able to move music teaching in this direction. Note the highlighted
paragraphs about how it was done 40 or more years ago.

That is how I started playing clarinet on a metal one borrowed from the
school before I bought my own.

One disagreement I have about the premise (performances are not the way to
spend arts money) is that I believe performances by jazz groups in schools
are VALUABLE. So do some of the parents in our nearby school districts. All
of our performances at elementary and middle schools are now funded by
concerned PTO's. (Parent-Teacher Organizations)

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

To Provide Quality Music Education Now, Schools Could Learn From the Past

NY Times - By ALLAN KOZINN - December 25, 2007

School¹s out for the holidays, and it¹s probably the last thing on anyone¹s
mind. But in the marginalized world of music education, a good deal of
serious thinking needs to be done. Now that Charles Dickens¹s Christmas
ghosts have made their rounds for the year, perhaps they might be enlisted
to provide perspective and encourage some soul-searching.

The crisis of the moment has partly to do with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg¹s
announcement last summer that New York City schools would be required to
teach the arts, and that principals would be rated annually on their
success, much as they are in other subjects. In theory this could put some
muscle behind the adventurous curriculum (or blueprint, as it is called)
that the city¹s Department of Education and a panel of arts consultants drew
up in 2004: a kindergarten-through-12th-grade program that envisions choral
and instrumental performance, the fostering of musical literacy and the
consideration of the role music plays in communities and the world at large.
The music proposed for this course was admirably boundary-free, cutting a
swath from Beethoven and Puccini through folk songs, spirituals, jazz and
pop. 

The problem is that the 2004 blueprint is recommended rather than required.
Given the paucity of music teachers in the system ‹ there was one music
teacher for every 1,200 students in 2006, Education Department officials
have said ‹ schools that could execute it in all its glory were few. Exactly
how (and how quickly) that can change is unclear.

Mr. Bloomberg has also decreed that the $67.5 million earmarked annually for
Project Arts, a financing program started in 1997 by Mayor Rudolph W.
Giuliani, will go directly to the schools. The fear is that it will be
absorbed by programs other than those for arts education.

That¹s what arts organizations are worrying about publicly. But the fact is
that Project Arts and grant programs like it have become a dependable gravy
train for these groups. In the absence of the teachers and the budgets
necessary to offer comprehensive and coherent arts courses, the schools,
encouraged and financed by such programs, have formed partnerships with
performing groups, charging the ensembles with the task of creating arts
programs for children.

Typically that means a few performances for each participating school,
dressed up with classroom preparation sessions and specially created
handouts. They often include discussions with musicians, who are not usually
members of the ³partner ensembles² but young ³teaching artists.² They are
paid fees equal to, and sometimes considerably more than, a classroom
teacher¹s hourly wage (but a fraction of what a unionized orchestra member
would receive). 

Sometimes the ensembles offer regular repertory; sometimes composers are
commissioned to write dippy children¹s pieces, in the mistaken belief that
children don¹t know when they¹re being condescended to.

All involved in these programs understand that they give schoolchildren
little more than an inkling of what music and performance are about. If
challenged, they say that it¹s a start, and that something is better than
nothing. 

But a decade later we are still at the same starting line, and the
organizations have grown complacent. Or worse. Not incidentally, the grant
money that drives these programs finds its way directly to the arts groups,
and it¹s easy to see the inefficiency at work. Although most ensembles and
concert halls have long had education directors, now they have expanded
departments that oversee the writing of grant proposals, preparation of
classroom materials and coordination with the schools.

Often halls are rented, musicians are hired and transported, and everything
from ushers to piano tuners (and movers) are paid for, all using cash that
the city¹s Department of Education should be spending on full-time music
teachers and instruments. Seen that way, these programs actually deprive
students of a musical education rather than help to provide one.

The music world pats itself on the back for these flybys and produces lots
of high-minded talk about creating future audiences and about how the arts
make children better math and science students. Recently a musician whose
ensemble performs in schools told a radio interviewer that she and her
colleagues ³sometimes even let the kids touch the instruments.²

STEVE'S NOTE: SEE THE BELOW PARAGRAPHS - WHY DID WE ALLOW THAT TO CHANGE?

Cue the Ghost of Music Education Past. If you look at how music was taught
in public schools 40 years ago ‹ and for decades before that ‹ you¹ll see
exactly what¹s needed now. Back then it was simple: Music was part of the
curriculum, like math, science and social studies. Kindergartners and first
graders began with singing, note-reading and rhythm-beating, and as the
course continued through high school, it touched on the history of music and
how it works ‹ much as the 2004 blueprint does, except that schools offering
this curriculum were the rule, not the exception.

Even more crucial, if you wanted to play an instrument, lessons were free,
and the school would lend you an instrument until you felt sufficiently
committed to buy your own. As interesting as the class work could be
(depending on the teacher), the real business of getting to know how music
works took place in instrument lessons, and, after a couple of years, the
orchestra or band, which gave students a taste of performing music rather
than absorbing it passively. Annual trips to the New York Philharmonic and
classroom visits by musicians were part of the program as well, but they
supplemented the curriculum. Today, too often, they are the curriculum.

The idea wasn¹t to promote classical music as such. That was the dominant
material, but I remember rock records being discussed in class as well,
though not much jazz. Nor was the goal necessarily to create future
musicians. But once you had an instrument under your fingers, or sang in the
choir, and performed for an audience, music of every kind became more real,
more exciting.
 

It is striking, and peculiar, that the two organizations doing the most to
revive teaching instruments come not from the classical music world ‹ which,
you would think, has a clear and pressing interest in doing so ‹ but from
the heart of popular culture. VH1, which trades in rock and hip-hop videos
and news of Britney Spears, has spent $40 million over the last decade
buying instruments for schools across the country. And in 1996 the film
composer Michael Kamen started the Mr. Holland¹s Opus Foundation with a
similar mission. 

Some classical music institutions are doing valuable work as well. The
Lincoln Center Institute and the Metropolitan Opera Guild, for example, run
programs devoted to giving classroom teachers the skills to teach the arts
and fostering innovative ways of approaching the subject. And ancillary
projects like the New York Youth Symphony and the Sphinx Organization, a
Michigan group that draws black and Hispanic students into classical music,
offer training and experience beyond what even the most arts-conscious
schools can provide.

But organizations that simply cobble play-for-the-children programs and
siphon off the cash had better wake up. Enlightened self-interest may have
persuaded them that their programs are useful, but if they were to be
honest, the education directors of all the city¹s major musical institutions
would forswear financing that should rightly go to the music programs in the
schools. 

In return they would ideally be allowed to keep an eye on the schools and
ensure that the money really is spent on arts training. And if they were
smart, they¹d band together as a consortium and meet with the city¹s
Department of Education and organizations like VH1 Save the Music and Sphinx
to find ways to bring some energy to programs that for too long have been
dead as a doornail.