Don't Throw Out the Baby with the Bath Music

Everyone should take piano lessons.  It should be a mainstay of early education to teach the ability to read music, and to master at an early age the hand-eye coordination necessary to translate notes to the keyboard.  Today, as self-righteous budget blasters target music programs in public schools, I’ve heard the all-too-familiar justifications that Spanish language and computer keyboarding are apt substitutes for the skills that music education builds.  Furthermore,  some argue that by making such substitutions we are trading up to a more appropriate portfolio of capabilities for this millennium. 

Hogwash.  Studying music is a multivariate skill that develops higher analytical power.  It is particularly well suited to a young brain, where the product of the activity is something pleasing and useful to a child.  Compare the relative utility through a child's eyes of learning to play a song to, say, solving for X. Creating music is self-reinforcing; a song will delight a child and thus drive repetition.   In addition, music making is an independent activity that does not always require an adult to adjudicate right or wrong.  Not so for X.

For the naysayers and math nerds among you, consider what you must accomplish when you “read” music.  Reading is actually a misnomer; deciphering a code is more accurate.  Each note is a puzzle all its own.  The “ball” carries a time value on its face (filled or open; stemmed, flagged or dotted.)  The placement of the ball on a given line, or in a space between two lines, determines its pitch.  The tonal context of an entire construct of balls on lines is governed by the clef.  A piano player learns that a G note placed on one clef's staff is a B under the watch of another clef.   For those who think computer keyboarding class teaches comparable skills, imagine if the spoken word ‘ploy’ is p-l-o-y when typed with the right hand, but q-s-w-r with the left.  Or consider if a word had different meanings and pronunciations when typed on the top vs. the bottom of the page.  Or imagine that you had to type multiple words at precisely the same time using the same fingers.

I am not arguing that music provides a shortcut to instant genius.   We should be careful, however, not to allow the way adults consume music later in life to influence miopic views of music education.  To many, music is associated with luxury goods--pure entertainment that the unenlightened think our civilization can live without.  Some consider "the arts"--drama, poetry, sculpture, music--as nice to have so long as they do not have to pay for them.  While music education will lead to more music and musicians, it also provides an easily accessible and age appropriate way to introduce problem solving, modeling, and even engineering to school-aged children.   And to be clear, I am not referring to accelerated instrumental method-based training where children are taught to emulate performance behavior through repetition.  I am talking about old fashioned, theory-driven music lessons that include sight-reading, scales, key signatures, counting, and rhythm.
 
I admit, teaching Spanish is important, as it is the primary language of over 35 million Americans.  And I hesitate to think how long it would take me to write my posts if I hadn’t learned to type in high school.   But why does it have to be an either/or situation?   If we sacrifice something as enriching and stimulating as music education, I fear the next generation will become something less than note-worthy.