Should Music be Taught for Music's Sake?

Should Music be Taught for Music’s Sake?

Kathleen M. Howland, Ph.D.

Northborough resident, Regional school board member

For years, this question was the final exam in a class I taught for master’s music education students at the Boston Conservatory. Since the time I taught this class, hundreds of articles on neuroscience and music have been published. It has become a fast growing sector of neuroscience with labs all around the world studying it.

Two years ago, the great opera star and music advocate Renee Fleming met Dr. Francis Collins (director of the Genome Project and current director of the National Institutes of Health with a $39.2 billion budget) at a dinner party in Washington, DC. There were 3 Supreme Court Justices at the gathering. They had had a contentious week of debate at the court and the tension was high. An accomplished multi-instrumentalist, composer and singer, Dr. Collins got out his guitar and Ms. Fleming joined him in song. That’s when the party got started.

Because of this meeting, Ms. Fleming and Dr. Collins have combined their expertise to form a new institute called Sound Health. Their belief is that music can positively impact well-being throughout all sectors of public health. They are using the resources of the National Institutes of Health and the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts to advance this belief through research and scientific/artistic meetings.

Still, should music be utilitarian? Should it be leveraged for the good of optimal executive function development? Pattern perception abilities? Grit making? Are any other subjects responsible for promising so much? Math? Science?

I do believe with all my heart, intellect and experience that music should be taught for its sheer beauty, for its ability to bring people together in celebration and a community in grief, for its strength in offering comfort, motivation and warmth to all of our days. It should be taught as a conveyance and preservation of our culture from one generation to another. It should be taught for the broad, inclusive net it offers to children of all abilities and all disabilities. The music room is perhaps the only room in a school building that is that inclusive, except perhaps the lunch room. But the lunch room is just a large, cavernous, loud room where people of all abilities are seated, not necessarily engaged or engaging with others. The music room is different. There is a place for everybody at that table.

The earliest known artifacts of homo sapiens comes from caves in Southern France and Germany where wall paintings and bone flutes have been found. And these findings are thought to predate the development of language and agriculture. This lead us to understand that music may have been integral to our success as a species long these 40,000 years of evolutionary history. It should not be compromised in modern times. 

At least 96% of us are born with below average, average and above average musical aptitude. If it is not nurtured at birth, when it is at its highest, its wanes accordingly. Music education should not be a talentocracy. It should not just be offered for those considered talented or above average. It should be available and actually required of the 96+% of us who would get lifelong benefits for the efforts they make in childhood. Of note, the remaining 4% are amusical with congenital or acquired tone or beat deafness.

Talent is fundamentally a myth. Aptitude plus opportunity plus grit make for a great musician. And music is an ideal medium in which to teach grit because every practice sessions yields results, every week results in improvements, every rehearsal advances competency and each performance is an opportunity for pride and accomplishment. The efforts made across time are rewarded. Grit and persistence are cultivated. 

It is expected and required that children take math, science, history and english to develop skills and passions for life. In the face of all this evidence from neuroscience, it is time to put music in its rightful place as core to the curriculum and available to all. And to teach music for its aesthetic qualities, its ability to reach us emotionally and calm an anxious heart, balm an aching, grieving heart or activate us with a pumping heart to do what needs to be done. It should be taught for its ancient history - its development alongside civilizations and culture, its ability to be highly inclusive of neurodiversity, its ability to supersede disability, its ability to foster collaboration and leadership, its ability to keep one stretching and persisting in the pursuit of excellence, its ability to regulate our emotional well-being and its ability to be with us even at the last moments of this life. For all these reasons, let our community consider its investments in the arts as a reflection and commitment of what is now known through science. Let us invest deeply in what we have always known about the place that art has in our homes and hearts. And let’s consider all of these non-musical gains to be an added bonus to the beauty and power that music has and has always had in our lives.