What Good is Music Education?
What good is music education anyway? Are we merely straightening the pictures on the walls of a burning house? The world around us is filled with pain from sexual abuse, from AIDS, from illiteracy, from social injustice, from racism, from sexism, from wars and rumors of wars, from alcoholism, and from the brief thrill and long hell of drugs. And music education students, what are they doing? They are learning to spell diminished seventh chords, to conduct compound meter, and to hear tritones. What good is music education anyway?
Music education is one of God’s powerful weapons for opposing Satan’s guerilla warfare against God’s good creation. God created a good world. We read about it in Genesis 1. After he created human beings he rested. Creation was not finished! Far from it! God had created stones but no sculpture like Pieta. God had created mineral ore but no bridge like the Mackinac. God had created human hands, arms, and fingers, but no violins, organs, trumpets, or recorders. God first you made you and me in his image. Then God turned over to ongoing job of creation to us, his image-bearers. “Here it is,” God tells us, “ a world filled with marvelous potential. Continue the job I started. Among other areas, explore the possibilities of sound.”
God’s actual words are found in Genesis 1 and run more like this, “Have dominion over the earth and subdue it.” Genesis 2 gives us a brief glimpse of the cultural activity that obeys this command. Adam and Eve begin to explore the options available to them. This idealized cultural activity lasts only briefly in the Genesis account, however, for in the next chapter we read how Adam and Eve choose the separation of selfishness over the perfect communion of obedience.
The effects of the fall into sin become an agenda for Christian music teachers, but we must be careful to steer a middle course in our response to the fall. On the one hand we must avoid a starry-eyed idealism that pastes empty-headed smiles on its face and simply “has a good time with music”. We must be realistic about the pain and alienation in this world if we wish to be successful both as Christians and as music teachers.
We also must avoid the extreme, however, that sees this world as overrun by Satan so that Christians have no choice but to escape to the lifeboats in preparation for Christ’s eventual rescue. This latter viewpoint seeks flight rather than fight, retreat rather than renewal--an extremely limiting viewpoint for the Christian music teacher.
I prefer to see creation as a multi-stranded cable that originally had all of its currents running toward God and his glory, but whose currents have been reversed by the fall so that they now tend to run toward human gratification instead. The fall did not ruin any of these strands, but it tarnished all of them. For example, television has not been completely ruined by the fall. Neither have sex nor literature not film nor music. But human sinfulness tends to send the current running the wrong way in each of these potentially good areas of God’s creation. Our job as Christian music teachers is to help reverse the current, to plan and implement music activities that seek God’s glory rather than human pleasure only. That does not mean that we are limited to using worship music, for an exclusive use of that music can isolate us from the human pain that surrounds us.
What good is music education? Music education can help to renew creation. Our communities, however, typically place few, if any, expectations on music to help in living up to Matthew 25 where Jesus identifies with the sick, the naked, the imprisoned, and the hungry. That music does not appear in this passage does not excuse us. Jesus just as well could have said:
“I was bored by the trance-like passivity of television, and you helped me discover beauty hidden within me by teaching me to play the guitar.”
Or, “I was depressed by the colorless existence of cracked gray walls, and you brought joy and color to my life by teaching me to sing and bringing me to choir.”
Or, “I was cringing behind my triple-locked doors and you took me to a concert where the choir reminded me that ‘the kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of
our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever’.”
Or, “I was crippled by the trauma of sexual abuse so that I lost all confidence in myself, but you came and gave me weekly piano lessons and helped me gradually to believe in myself and to climb out of my misery.”
If we in the community of musicians admit at all that music can be used for healing, we tend to assign the task to music therapists and informal volunteers and then send them off to their institutions or hurting communities where we will not need to be further concerned by the suffering people they serve. Meanwhile we turn our attention to those with interest and skill in music and, in many ways, ignore the others.
We need a different guiding image. I believe that every human being can enjoy satisfaction and accomplishment in music. Few of us have had musical experiences to support my contention, but that lack shows only that music education has too seldom made healing a high priority. It is not that we have tried hard and failed. We simply have not seen human healing as our job, even though it is a job that we can do very well. Let me tell you about some areas of musical pain that need healing.
Very few black instrumentalists enjoy positions in symphony orchestras throughout the nation. The Detroit Symphony, for example, was taken to court for the racial imbalance in the ensemble, and a similar court case halted the spring music festival in Ann Arbor. Formal music education simply has failed to meet the needs of African-American students, many of whom come from an oral music culture. We have not been successful in helping them to excel in the visual orientation required for classical performance on instruments nor even often through singing.
A similar injustice pervades our choice of music for classical performances. Music by black composers is too little known and too little chosen. A national organization, the Black Music Caucus, has been formed to address the problem, but its progress has been minimal, for true reform must come from the inside and not be imposed from the outside. One small candle to fight this darkness has been lit in this community, and certain Calvin students have been involved.
Another area that illustrates the need for renewing creation concerns sexism. Occasionally this perversion of creational norms runs against male teachers, as, for example, the stereotypical expectation that elementary school music teachers should be females. Most often, however, the prejudice runs against women. How much music do you know that was written by women composers? Such music is rare, but not as rare as a male-dominated music culture might lead us to believe. Another national group has been formed to counter this biased imbalance.
Women also typically lose out in securing music teaching positions at the high school and college level, in becoming symphony orchestra members, and especially in becoming symphony orchestra conductors. Women fare better in choirs, but that may be caused as much be the difficulty of recruiting and training unchanged male voices as by better attitudes toward females.
Still other musical activities are closed to those whose music development proceeds more slowly than the accepted norm. Far too many music activities cater to the talented and ignore the rest. What musical opportunities did your high school offer to students who could not meet the audition requirements for choir, band, or orchestra?
All human beings need music in their lives. The deaf children at Shawnee Park take off their shoes so that they can feel the beat through a vibrating floor. My Down’s-Syndrome sister-in-law loves music, but sings lower than the rest of us. Must she and others be left out of music education, or shall we serve them also? Does helping a ten percent singer improve to twenty percent count for less in God’s kingdom than helping a ninety percent instrumentalist to improve to ninety-two?
I do not wish to paint a picture that suggests that every music teacher ought to prepare only to serve on the cutting edge of social need. I do wish to suggest, however, that all of us keep room in our professional plans for the people who suffer musically.
How much and what we do for these people will vary from one case to the next.
A good image is the musical body of Christ. Building on the descriptions in Paul’s epistles, we can think of any group of musicians as a multi-faceted musical body with various members— eyes that sparkle with the beauty of music, ears that listen carefully and make adjustments, arms that conduct, fingers that play, larynxes that sing, hearts that beat with Christ’s love and ache for hurting people, backbones that stand tall among Satan’s attacks on God’s creation, knees that bend in fervent prayer, and little toes that simply give balance and support. Like wood chips, alone, we give little heat or light, but together, we can set the world on fire!
Dale Topp
Calvin College Music Department