The Enemies of Music Education

 I haven't come up with any conspiracy theories lately, have I? No, I didn't think so. But I'm leaning in that direction. Here is the situation: from many discussions we have had here it seems clear that the best solution to the problems of classical music in terms of widening the prospective audience, comes down to improved music education. So why is it so difficult to improve music education, not for the gifted elite who are pretty well-served, but for the ordinary amateur player or listener?

Some things that we have observed is that the use of music examples in music notation have been nearly completely banned from all materials in general circulation. You find them in professional music journals and books for music professionals and in little niches like this blog, but in general publications they simply never appear. Music education programs in public schools have been a target for a long time as music has consistently been classified as inessential.

But I just found a new phenomenon: what is preventing the expansion of high quality music education online? Well Rich Beato has a rant that points out one of the major problems: you can't use any copyright material as an example without losing two thirds of your revenue or being simply banned. Let's let him explain:

That's pretty dire. In music courses at university we are constantly using musical examples to illustrate all manner of musical ideas. In a music course, if you were talking about the mixolydian mode you would hand out a sheet illustrating it, maybe write out the scale on the blackboard and possibly play a musical example--maybe even from a pop song like "She Said She Said." And you would never get into trouble with the copyright holder. Professors often assemble whole anthologies of materials with excerpts from books, papers and copyright scores--all approved by the copyright holders--to use in teaching. This has been the long-standing practice. But the situation now is that, on YouTube at least, copyrights are enforced with a vicious intensity as Rick illustrates.

So you are not going to be able to do any educating it that way. But how about what I do? I use embedded YouTube clips all the time, don't I? Yes, and with the exception of my own compositions and recordings, they are all posted by others so there is no revenue involved. Also, most of my own clips are not actually on YouTube at all. I have avoided setting up my own YouTube channel because, frankly, the revenues seem so miniscule as to be not worth the trouble.

Is there some kind of conspiracy to prevent the education of the populace in music? Maybe not, but there are certainly a nasty set of situations and incentives that seem to serve the same purpose. And one of the key ones is simple greed. As Rick says, I have no problem either with the pop stars making a lot of money. That's their thing. But I don't see why exceptions cannot be carved out, as they were traditionally done in academia, to at least allow people to teach this stuff using musical examples without the "bogus" consequences Rick mentions.

Here is where I would put a musical example. But not today!