Discount Musical instruments - By 2Kool4Skool

Pacific Symphony Orchestra survey and article on why music education is important.

Cutting School Music: A Form of Cultural Suicide

Fifty-eight members of the Pacific Symphony Orchestra in Orange County, California recently completed a first-of-its-kind questionnaire, designed to help the National Coalition for Music Education underscore the importance of public school music education to performing musicians. The members of the orchestra, and members of other symphonies completing the questionnaire, represent a wide cross-section of our nation’s orchestras. As you’ll see in reviewing the survey, public school music education is an essential foundation for preparing musicians for careers in our orchestras. Louis Spisto, Executive Director of the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, and Bruce O. Boston contributed the following article which, combined with the survey, dramatizes the negative impact of cutting school music programs from the point of view of a symphony director.

If the experience of the Pacific Symphony Orchestra (PSO) is a reliable index, what has been happening to music education in the Orange County schools (as well as around the state and, indeed, the nation) could be a recipe for cultural disaster. We simply are not laying the groundwork
for developing the next generation of top-quality musicians.

First, some local context: unfortunately it mirrors a national problem. A June 13 report in the Los Angeles Times noted that the Irvine Unified School District (IUSD) was preparing to cut about 40 teaching positions as part of the state wide budgeting strategy to cut education by $2.4 billion. 

Targeted locally were the so-called “zero period” activities, before the first official period of the day—described by school officials as largely enrichment classes beyond the normal curricula. Because music and the other arts were thus considered “frills” in IUSD (an absurd view for educators to take in view of 2,500 years of Western education), school music was among the most imperiled “extras.” The good news is that the music cuts are temporarily on hold. (In Placentia-Yorba Linda, after a heroic community advocacy effort, the wolf has also been chased from the door until next year.) But this very need for citizen heroism is the symptom of a much deeper malaise. It contains a lesson for communities around the country, where school music programs are under increasing assault as likely places for “saving” scarce dollars. Programs have already been cut in Detroit, Philadelphia, and other major cities, and smaller-town school boards consider music programs an easy target.

This trend has a direct impact on the future of the PSO, as well as on symphonies around the country; as many insist, the stakes are the future of quality music in communities across America. PSO’s concern does not arise because we were hoping for a playing contract from the IUSD, but
because a recent poll of our orchestra’s members shows conclusively that school music is an indispensable training ground in preparing the kind of musicians who will eventually grace concert halls all over Southern California and in places like Iowa, Massachusetts, and Florida as well.

Indeed, if the preliminary results of a nationwide research project on symphony orchestra musicians hold up, many American orchestras will soon be headed for leaner times when it comes to replacing members and finding new talent. Questionnaire results show that the foundation
underlying tomorrow’s brilliant professional performances is today’s high school bands and orchestras. They are the “dream catchers” that capture young people with the magic of music, swinging wide the door on the possibility for a musical career.

School music is the foundation

The impact of school music is based on solid numbers. Among PSO members, for example, a full 95 percent of the orchestra member respondents in the National Coalition for Music Education research project said that they had participated in school music programs as a child. Members had participated in such programs for an average of eight years, across the full spectrum of school music-classroom instruction (50%), concert band (40%), orchestra (76%), and choir (40%).

Of course, no professional musician ever moves into a chair in a major national or regional symphony on the basis of school-based instruction alone. That degree of attainment usually requires a college music major and/or a music-school degree, plus years of private lessons and one-on-one instruction with a tutor. It also takes years of skill development and working one’s way up through the ranks. But PSO’s members tended to view their school music programs as decisive. Significantly, fully two-thirds of the musicians said that a school music program was of “great importance” in awakening their interest in music; for 84 percent of them, the school music program was important in reinforcing an existing interest. Three out of five attributed “foundational” importance to school music programs. Of critical importance, two-thirds said that had it not been for their experience in school music, they would not have become professional musicians.

Bob Becker, the PSO’s principal violist, recalls that his school music program in Nashville, Tennessee, and the countless extra hours put in by his school conductor, John Bryant, were what really turned him toward a career in music. For him, that is what is so unsettling about the reports coming from schools across the country, beginning in the one his own daughter attends. He contrasts his school years with hers:

“My high school music teachers were in school every period, several days a week. We had a program. My daughter is lucky if she gets 30 minutes twice a week, and most of that is taken up just by tuning the instruments. The way we are focusing funding away from school music means that the dreams music awakens in a lot of kids will simply die. And the real tragedy is not just that dreams are being systematically destroyed—it’s that some kids will never even have one.”

Another PSO member, Jim Kanter, has experienced the same problem at a deeper level, further up the line. Until four years ago, Kanter had taught clarinet for 17 years at the University of California (Santa Barbara) and for 12 years at California State (Northridge). He stopped. Why? Because, he says, “I found that the quality of student I was getting has so deteriorated that I had to compromise too many standards. Declaring a music major ought to be a declaration of career intention. But they just didn’t know enough to be able to commit themselves to music. My students—in terms of their abilities—were being forced to be dishonest about their career plans, and I couldn’t tell anyone they didn’t really belong in the program.”

The contributions of school music

School music programs make a difference in more ways than just providing basic instruction in how to play a clarinet, violin or oboe. One of the most crucial differences is something that most concert-goers never see. A really good orchestra is not an elitist institution but is demographically diverse. Part of the richness of the music is provided by the richness of the backgrounds of the people playing it, and the diversity of their training. 

Its members actually shouldn’t always be graduates of elite music schools. An orchestra also has to be an interesting place to work, where there are lots of different kinds of people from a potpourri of backgrounds. Those criteria are emphatically affirmed by PSO’s brilliant young conductor, Carl St. Clair. Himself a product of the school music programs of Yoakum and Hochheim, Texas, St. Clair started playing the piano at six and the cornet in the fifth grade. By the time he got to high school, he was so involved in school music that he did the unthinkable in Texas: He gave up his position as starting quarterback on the football team to concentrate on making the Texas State All-School Band, which he did.

For him, school music programs provided something educationally distinctive. St. Clair says today, “Playing music means playing together. You have to cooperate. If I did good work in algebra, it didn’t help anyone in the class but me, but good work in an orchestra helps everyone in the orchestra. Whenever I audition someone for the PSO today, I can almost always tell if they have a school music background. Of course, they have to qualify first on the quality of their playing. But when they’ve been knocked around in the rough and tumble of a strong musical peer group, enough to take the sharp edges off, that helps make an orchestra work.”

St. Clair’s insight about the ways school music programs feed into other kinds of learning is corroborated by what the PSO musicians under his baton reported on the survey. Three out of five, for example, reported that school music was of “great importance in helping them develop a self-concept as a musical person.” Half reported their school music experience was significant in developing three critical goals of all education: self-esteem, self-discipline, and self-confidence. Nearly eight out of ten reported that school music was either “important” or “of great importance” in developing their ability to function productively as a member of a group. These are not just requirements for playing in an orchestra—they are life lessons. At the most practical level, those lessons can become habits. As one PSO violinist was quoted by a fellow orchestra member, “I learned in junior high school to wait and listen for the oboe’s A to tune my violin. It’s a valuable discipline.”

Beyond these contributions, school music programs provide an additional advantage to a young person’s education that short-sighted school budget slashers miss. In the words of Jim Kanter, “Music is not something you can simply add on to a school curriculum, like a course in woodworking. Music is natural to human beings. It’s metabolic. The case for school music programs has to be made at that level, too.”

The real question

As more data from more symphony orchestras around the country come in, a clearer picture will develop. But the “advance reviews” are already in, and they show that school music programs are related organically to the future of good music in this country. Cutting them will do to the country’s culture just what cutting back on high school mathematics would do to the future of engineering, or what reducing elementary biology instructions would do to health care. We would still have both, but we would have less of it, and what we had would be of lower quality. To be good, orchestras need more, not fewer players to choose from. And that means early preparation. 

But the issue goes well beyond what orchestras need. It goes to the heart of what education is about for every child. Perhaps Jim Kanter puts it best. Asked what he would tell a parent who asks, “Why should my child learn to play an instrument?” Kanter responds, “Because there
are so few things in life that give a child an opportunity to see the connection between effort and success. This is the goal of all education, and music teaches it best.” What Kanter did not say, but is equally true, is that what happens at the individual level also happens at the level of the culture. School music programs are the effort we must make to enliven the nation’s spirit. Not just for the sake of our great orchestras, but for the sake of all of us.

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Pacific Symphony Orchestra, Orange County, California
Survey Results
(58 members surveyed)

1)    Did you participate in a public school music program as a child?   

Yes—95%
No—5%

2)    In what grades did you participate?        

K-6—78%
7-9—83%
10-12—86%

3)    How many (total) years of public school music instruction did you receive?

8 (average)

4)    In which of the following did you participate?

Regular classroom instruction—50%
Music appreciation program—38%
Orchestra—76%
Ensemble (i.e., jazz band, string quartet)—57%
Concert Band—40%
Marching Band—36%
Choir—40%
Participation in four or more of the above activities—47%

5)    How would you characterize the importance of your public school music instruction in the following categories:

5a)    Awakening your interest in music
    No importance—3%
    Limited importance—7%
    Some importance—21%
    Great importance—66%
    No response—3%
5b)    Reinforcing an existing interest in music
    No importance—5%
    Limited importance—7%
    Some importance—24%
    Great importance—60%
    No response—3%
5c)    Providing a “foundational” music education you could build on in later years
    No importance—7%
    Limited importance—9%
    Some importance—22%
    Great importance—59%
    No response—3%
5d)    Developing a self-concept as a “musical person”
    No importance—7%
    Limited importance—12%
    Some importance—19%
    Great importance—59%
    No response—3%
5e)    Keeping you interested in school
    No importance—16%
    Limited importance—21%
    Some importance—19%
    Great importance—38%
    No response—7%
5f)    Building your self-esteem
    No importance—3%
    Limited importance—12%
    Some importance—36%
    Great importance—48%
    No response—5%
5g)    Developing self-discipline
    No importance—12%
    Limited importance—7%
    Some importance—28%
    Great Importance—48%
    No response—5%
5h)    Developing self-confidence
    No importance—5%
    Limited importance—7%
    Some importance—33%
    Great importance—50%
    No response—5%
5i)    Developing the ability to function productively as a member of a group
    No importance—7%
    Limited importance—9%
    Some importance—22%
    Great importance—57%
    No response—5%
5j)    Enhancing other areas of study, e.g.. gaining a better understanding of other cultures through their music, or reinforcing instruction in math
    No importance—19%
    Limited importance—12%
    Some importance—29%
    Great importance—31%
    No response—9%

6)    How long have you been a professional musician?

0-5 years—12%
6-10 years—12%
11-15 years—5%
16-20 years—24%
21-25 years—21%
25 + years—26%
No response—2%

7)    If you had not participated in school music programs, would you be a professional musician today?

Yes—19%
No—66%
Don’t know—10%
No response—5%


Based on an original Special Report by NAMM