Why Music Lessons
Since I began teaching over 10 years ago, this question has been devoted a significant amount of my intellectual and reflective capital. As I am a music teacher, I am stating the question with the word “music,” but this post applies to art in a broad sense.
Indeed, all professionals should be able to justify the usefulness of their profession, but perhaps no other profession is challenged so much in current American society as are art teachers or art therapists. School arts programs are notoriously among the first budget cuts, and many view STEM or art as an either-or proposition.
To the artist, the justification seems obvious when reflecting on the enrichment, clarity, and meaning that their art has brought to their lives. This lived experience, however, can be maddeningly difficult to explain concisely and convincingly to a skeptic. This may be because of the increasing difficulty of convincing anyone of anything in society’s current conversational landscape, or perhaps because the artist has decided that convincing the skeptic is not worth the time or trouble, or perhaps merely because of the sheer impossibility of describing the richness of experience with language.
At any rate, back to the question. For a long time, my answer to this question was to list off several benefits: cognitive development, refined emotional maturity, increased pattern recognition, honing of creative ability, cultivation of one’s uniqueness through an artistic medium, comfortability in public performance, social bonding, development of process and mastery, self-confidence, confidence in the effectiveness of consistent and efficient practice, problem solving, etc. I would also mention that an artistic or otherwise creative outlet is great for stress-reduction and feelings of self-worth, inspiration, enthusiasm, and excitement, and that the continued cultivation of mastery within this outlet provides one with increasing purpose and meaning.
I still agree with all of those benefits. Today, however, I believe this question is actually an answer to a more fundamental set of questions, namely: what is the “good life” and how do we live it? And on a societal level, how shall we raise our children to foster a beautiful future for not just humanity but all sentient life in our solar system?
In his 17th AMA episode, philosopher Sam Harris is asked what the ingredients are for living a good life. He cites love and curiosity as being the two foundational practices. For Harris, love is the basis for one’s ethics and prosocial engagement in the world, as well as for what it means to be a good person. Curiosity, for Harris, covers both the intellectual and spiritual realms; vast arenas of inquiry which ask similar fundamental questions about the nature of our existence and experience.
Love and curiosity are both mental states which represent an openness towards an experience in the world. This openness contrasts with a closedness, in which one strives to be separate from experience in some way. I’ll assert here that whether one’s “heart” is open or closed is of foundational importance in determining the plausibility of a good life. We are born with this openness, and many of us last through early childhood with our openness intact. Unfortunately, most of us start to lose this openness along with our innocence as we experience the tragic, unfair, and absurd nature of experience, culture, and society. Death, pain, loss, fractured or unrequited relationships, unrealized potential, mental illness, harmful thoughts about oneself, and other experiences challenge our openness, shake our childhood idealism, and often turn us into cynics (or as cynics like to call themselves: “realists”). In this realm one is constantly mad at the world, feeling cheated out of what was rightfully theirs; in this realm is the “cool nature,” the contempt for society, the complainer’s mind, greedy people who are “just playing the game,” hatred, violence. In the global and digital world of the 21st century, the smart phone provides a steady and infinite source of confirmation bias for the cynic - one needs only to open up the news or social media, both of which skew toward outrage.
But innocence and openness are not the same. And herein lies an important reason to do art: we all lose our innocence, but we needn’t lose our openness. What we find is that the “good life” is not a destination, but the path itself, and the path is one of openness toward experience, even and especially when one is shaken by one of the catastrophes of living. Though it seems in our nature not to trust after we are betrayed, not try after we fail, not dream if we see one crumble, not search after we’ve been disappointed in not finding, and not love after we are heartbroken, we simply must do so! If instead we build a fortress around our heart, as does the character in Paul Simon’s “I Am a Rock,” we interpret what the world brings to us as attacks on that fortress; our existence does in fact become “nasty, brutish, and short.”
Of course, there are many things we cannot control, and it is necessary to make the point that so many of us are predisposed by their situations to have an easier or tougher time of remaining open. Everyday, people lose spouses, parents, children, pets, friends, idols, etc; people live in communities ravaged by natural (Haiti), political (Ukraine), and ideological (Afghanistan) disasters; they live with physical pain, mental health issues, disease, hunger, disability, debt, abuse, trauma, etc. An imploration to keep their heart open will be met with various forms of “that is easy for you to say,” especially if the entreating one has not had their heart “tested” as have those they implore. However, if the message of openness were not true, then stories of people enduring tragedies of some sort and maintaining an open heart wouldn’t be so moving to us.
Besides, the alternative view of closing one’s heart so as to not experience pain or loss is merely to deny the reality of existence. It can be said that loss is the inevitable punctuation mark of meaningful relationships, and when one has something to lose, the moment it is lost is painful, because we wished for it to continue. In understanding this reality, the cliché “it is better to have loved and lost” is no longer a cliché, but a profoundly liberating conclusion. Indeed, my mother passing away while I was age nine was likely less world-shattering than losing her at age 16 would have been, but does that mean that I should prefer to have lost her as early as I did? Would it have been better still to lose her at age two? The ending of the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind illustrates this conclusion beautifully, with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet deciding to start their relationship over again, choosing the inexplicable spark they experience toward each other over their incompatibilities and the knowledge that they will not last.
Ultimately, this openness pushes one forward; love and curiosity are great motivators. Indeed, many emotions are motivating, but some - like fear, anger, or spite - motivate in a way that is harmful for the physical body and might have disastrous personal, local, or global outcomes. When one is motivated to do something because of the love of the doing, rather than the fear of not having done, a good relationship forms between the doer and the activity. This relationship between the doer and the activity must surely be of foundational importance in determining whether the activity itself is enjoyed, and whether it continues to be done in the future. This might be the most important insight a teacher can have in determining their approach. When we play the game of “or else” or of deadlines with young minds, we might be choosing the battle over the war, so to speak.
The opening and motivating nature of love and curiosity is my starting point as a music teacher. From the first lesson, I guide my students into the experience of making music - an experience which is without concepts, language, or intellectual abstraction. A beat must first be felt, a foot tapped, keys played. Music must be listened to as an event. This is the way to cultivate the initial curiosity and enthusiasm of the student. Concepts come later (as Francis Clark put it, “feeling, sign, name”). You see, a music student encounters all three of those domains along their journey. There is one experiential, but two conceptual: the notation we use, and the language we use to talk about them. Students get confused, frustrated, and ultimately bored when the teacher talks about the symbols for which the student has no experiential understanding. Ironically, when we don’t have this experiential understanding, we say that we have “no concept of” it; this just further demonstrates the conceptual/linguistic bias of a species evolved to be elite at pattern recognition (or broadly, at differentiation).
"So when do the symbols and concepts get introduced then?" one might ask. The answer is simple: when the student wants to know them. The execution, however, of introducing the symbol or concepts in a right moment (as opposed to “THE” right moment) is a realm which indicates the overall effectiveness of the teacher. I have students who have preferred to stay off of the page and author much of their musical journey with improvisation, composition, and learning by ear. I also have students who are most comfortable in defined objectives and expectations, and who like the consistency of the method books. It is simply true that you can make life-shaping progress in both realms, as many professional pop and jazz musicians can’t read notation, and many professional classical musicians can’t play without it. Students are also humans, and thus can be wildly unpredictable. They might be interested in improvising in June and then in a Mozart minuet in July, might be in a good mood one week and a sour one the next (based on events not at all pertaining to the lesson), and might be inspired to push themselves today and ready to take it easy tomorrow.
Here we begin to see the near impossibility of sweeping success for classroom teachers. Leaving aside the absurdity that students are now to do all of their work on a device that contains Netflix and Instagram, how do you cultivate a love for your subject out of 30+ individuals at the same time? The standard as of now is fear-based learning - something which is essentially imposed on teachers before they even begin given the standardized curricula of our education system. Additionally, classes are organized by age as opposed to skill level, and teachers must often choose between boring the more capable students or leaving the struggling students in the dust. Despite the fact that these subjects are inherently interesting, it is now a miracle, a feel-good story, when teachers are able to cultivate love for their subject from a large percentage of their students. Those that succeed at this feat are perhaps amongst the most important people in society today; sadly, we don’t incentivize enough of our talent pool to choose teaching when we underpay teachers the way we do. Incidentally, private art lessons, if done well, can offer a customized experience that larger classrooms cannot - one that finds the sweet spot between boring and overwhelming.
Art is the free and playful exploration of a sensory medium. This play is intrinsically enjoyable in that our experience of this sensory medium becomes nuanced, deeper, more profound - we make discoveries and our world expands with creative possibilities. Patterns of sound (or color with a visual artist; taste with a culinary artist) become tools of self-discovery and self-expression. We begin to connect our art with language, concepts, and communication. We self-actualize by merging our art with our ideals and values, producing activism, self-portraits, commentaries, dialogues, comparisons, references, etc. Our time spent doing art becomes increasingly a sacred activity, as essential as breathing. Art provides us with lasting value and connects us to ourselves, our loved ones, our humanity, our planet, our universe. As Steven Nachmanovich writes in his book The Art of Is, “We draw, write, paint, and sing our way to clarity, into connections with other people, into workings with nature.” In other words, “I am he, as you are he, as you are me, and we are all together."
As art has the capability to expand experience, heal, communicate, and express, it becomes painfully clear when one’s life is devoid of such a fundamental joyspring. But just what are the symptoms of being artistically-malnourished? In 1966, Ronald Reagan justified chopping down forests of sequoias by saying “if you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.” Any artist hearing this sort of rhetoric will recognize a lack of depth or richness in the experience of the speaker. Someone who identifies with the “Reagan experience” is one who hasn’t spent much time in the forest, and hasn’t given trees much thought. If you have seen one cloud have you seen them all? If you’ve heard one guitarist, have you heard them all? Smelled one rose? Tasted one wine? Felt one hug? Language, or concepts, simplify and characterize experience such that we can communicate and relate to one another; it is obviously of fundamental importance for the function of society, but it comes at the terrible price of hiding the nuance, truth, and beauty of detail; the word “flower” stops one from noticing the minute patterns on a rose petal.
To be an artist is to appreciate this detail, to realize not only that seeing one redwood isn’t seeing them all, but that seeing one redwood isn’t the same as seeing the same redwood ten minutes from now! That you could look at clouds your whole life and would never see the same cloud twice. When one listens to the song “Here Comes the Sun” once, is it then pointless to listen a second time? I can promise you that the 500th time is different from the first, second, and 499th time, and they are all experiences I would do again. Perhaps the 12th time I listened, I was just five years old and on a swing set. Maybe the 242nd listen I was walking down a sidewalk in the midst of a downpour and feeling alone, looking to cultivate some internal sunshine. Perhaps the 357th time I listened to it, I was sitting in a window seat on an airplane and the sunlight was reflecting through the window above the clouds, and I experienced a moment of bliss, of total comfort. At various times in my life I have listened to the song as a child, a songwriter, and music student, a Beatles lover, an exerciser, a sad soul, a dancer, a presenter, a reminiscer, a participant, etc. Surely, there are some people who have long-standing relationships with trees as I do with songs.
Have you ever had a Reagan attitude toward interactions with other humans? How similar is seeing your spouse or child today vs yesterday? I know I have caught myself in this place before. It is not entirely surprising that many relationships grow stale in time; we forget each interaction with another human being is a brand new experience that can be inspiring, deflating, beautiful, ugly, warm, cool, engaging, apathetic, loving, disdainful. We can be open toward the person(s) with whom we are sharing physical (or digital) space, or closed. A cultivated artist will ultimately recognize each interaction as an opportunity to embody one’s ideals. This is why Mr. Rogers referred to his show as a “daily expression of care.”
Thus, the need for art lessons is not about breeding the next set of professional musicians, but rather, to help the next generation of humans - politicians, lawyers, nurses, supervisors, scientists, engineers, police officers, advisors, therapists, clerks, laborers, servers, associates, administrators, marketers, etc - develop an experiential understanding of the human condition.
And here I present my conclusion for "why music lessons." Artistic play, or exploration, allows us to experientially enrich our existence, and ultimately reveal to us the newness and possibility of the present moment - its inherent playfulness - such that we can orient our consciousness (or mindset, or worldview if you prefer) to be open, playful, and improvisatory. Art separates living from the inevitably hollow descriptions of living. Indeed, if the descriptions weren’t hollow, convincing one to do art would hardly be necessary.