Transforming Music Education

1. Setting the Stage

1 Setting the Stage We live at a time of profound change. This reality fundamentally affects our understanding of the world and human relationships, the way we live, our beliefs and values, and our relationships with others. Now, more than ever before, we see ourselves as inhabitants of planet Earth, living in a fragile world that we can sustain or destroy. We have more information about the world and the people and things in it than before. Still, tribalism, warfare, and fear and mistrust of different others are as strong as ever. The technology at our disposal has revolutionized human life, yet along with devices that potentially improve the quality of life, there remain the modern-day electronic “sweatshops,” continuing divisions between rich and poor, and other symptoms of dehumanization and greed. Even though the mass media make human want and suffering patently clear to us, poverty and violence continue to afflict city and countryside alike. Unprecedented and massive population movements have contributed to cultural diversity and richness on the one hand and racism, cultural imperialism, fear, and anger on the other. A global economy fostered by international trade, investment, and monetary policy offers many possibilities to relieve human suffering and enhance living standards, and yet colliding with nationalistic, ethnic, and hedonistic aspirations creates political problems, racial hatred, political unrest, and economic exploitation. As a result, we face enormous challenges and differing realities than in the past. Music provides a window on some of these important cultural and societal changes. Technological developments in computing, sound recording, and synthesis have changed the face of musical composition, performance, and listening.1 Sight has become as important as sound in music making, particularly in such genres as film, video, and rock music. The keyboard and computer provide important means of synthesizing sound, composing music, and preparing scores. Technological advances have permitted diverse live and recorded music listening experiences ranging from the solitary PX017A_01_1-18 17/10/02 15:43 Page 1 2 Transforming Music Education listener to mass audiences of thousands or even millions of people. Popular mediated musics, or those propagated for and by the media, have become truly international, as have Eastern and Western classical musics. Even traditional or vernacular musics that historically were practiced within relatively small geographical areas are performed and heard internationally, especially through their links with popular culture. At the same time, groups fear that their traditional cultures are in danger of disappearing under the influence of popular music. Inventions provide the means to democratize music and to compose, perform, record, and distribute it widely, yet they ghettoize musical publics and fragment musical tastes. Live music is threatened where musicians cannot make a livelihood or the public does not attend and support live performances. And materialism fostered through concerted advertising by multinational corporations creates an environment in which spiritual and artistic values are downplayed in favor of a widespread desire for economic security and material well-being. International marketing of music and artists makes some music widely available. At the same time, it silences others who cannot obtain venture capital and afford to distribute their music extensively. And it undermines and devalues amateur participation in music making by subjecting it to comparison with exacting professional and commercial standards.2 Such a world could not have been envisioned in the early nineteenth century , when publicly supported schools were established and when music was among the first subjects introduced into general education throughout the Western world. True, mounting industrialization, urbanization, and international trade—forces that were to mushroom in the twentieth and into the twenty-first century—were already evident. Immigrants were swelling the populations of larger cities and towns throughout the world, and scientific and technological discoveries were changing the face of industry and daily life. Still, in the West, Western culture was considered the cornerstone of education, and educational ends were more or less agreed upon. Cultural uniformity was accepted without question, and the dissenting voices of women and minorities were more or less silent. Notions of the good, the true, and the beautiful could be described with relative surety, and the philosophical ideas of such writers as August Comte and Herbert Spencer reinforced a widespread belief that Western civilization represented the epitome of societal development thus far and that human progress would continue.3 It is not surprising that in the United States the uncertainty, ambivalence, and fear engendered by mounting “multiplicities and pluralities” should have resulted in a drift to conservatism over the past decades...