Let the band play on
Y’know, you just can’t hum a quadratic equation…
That’s something local school boards might want to keep in mind.
Yes, it’s coming on to spring, and school districts are taking a long hard look at their balance sheets and, thanks in large part to penurious state legislators, find themselves coming up short. Since it apparently is asking too much of us beleaguered adults to adequately fund our children’s future, the folks we’ve charged with making our kids smarter and more successful than we are have no choice to pinch the pennies, stretch the nickels and not do things that ought to be done.
Like teaching the kids to sing, dance and play the fiddle.
Important stuff. At least as life is measured out.
A frill, some folks call it … music, that is. Something that can be dispensed with in favor of more important things, more serious things, things that show up in the standardized test booklets that have become the be-all and end-all of what our kids are supposed to come away with after a baker’s dozen years in the custody of the state department of education. Stuff like science, math, technology, marketable skills. Stuff they’ll need to get into a good college. Stuff they’ll need for a lifetime.
Then again, isn’t Julliard a good college?
And when’s the last time you factored a polynomial?
Think about it, until Sudoku came along, who exactly did math for fun?
And how many radio stations program the Periodic Table?
So how is it that something that helps make a life pleasurable and worthwhile can be dismissed as a frill?
But pretty much every time public schools need to turn some red ink into black, music is high on the list of things that the kids can do without.
Curiously enough, an arguably smart guy like Plato wouldn’t agree. When he wrote The Republic and came up with what would pretty much become the framework for western schooling, he put music right in there with grammar, arithmetic and geometry as fundamental to an educated individual. And if you give it a little though, the old guy was on to something.
Art and music is what people do that set us apart from the bovines, magpies, and all other sorts of critters that move about and take nourishment. After all, it wasn’t a beetle that gave us Sergeant Pepper.
Yeah, music is a lot more than a pretty tune. Heck, anybody who’s ever wandered into a karaoke bar knows, it’s a lot harder than it might look.
It’s easy not to notice that here in an age when for most of us playing music means touching a switch on the radio. Music comes at us unbidden from the produce aisle and an open elevator door. It’s easy to forget that someone has to make that music before we can listen to it.
A friend of mine described it as “a whole new language,” and it truly is. A language that speaks to joy and longing, tranquility and exuberant excitement without the use of a single word. It speaks across cultures and generations – we still jig along to a tune that was old in the 12th century and has the power to get a stoic old Norwegian to sing out ‘I love you, yeah, yeah, yeah” out there in front of God and everybody.
Learning that language is no easy feat, and the skills it requires go far beyond the melody. It takes the discipline to practice, a willingness to take and follow direction, close attention to detail, extraordinary small muscle mastery and coordination, and the ability to work in concert with a roomful of others to master a complex cooperative task – there will never be a football play so intricate as the Golberg Variations.
And there are greater lessons to be learned. Considering our disputatious civic debate, how might the experience of joining with others, each on a different line, sounding a different note to create the resounding finale of Beethoven’s 9th soften attitudes toward those who hear a different drummer and sing a different tune?
We might beware of budgeting our kids out of experiences that are hardly possible to duplicate. No school I know fields a marching math team. Maybe there could be, should be, but until the Stars and Stripes Forever is scored for calculator and slide rule … its not likely to happen.
Until then, let the band play on.