At Tanglewood II, Educators Re-tune Music Education

William McManus has a pretty good idea of what your music education experience was like. “You learned to sing,” says McManus, a College of Fine Arts associate professor and chair of the music education department. “Then maybe you played the recorder, maybe you learned a little history and did some listening. And then in middle school, the program moved toward performance.”

McManus, along with a group of leading music educators from around the world, has some serious questions about whether this is the best way to teach children about music. To talk it over, they are holding a weeklong forum at Williams College called Tanglewood II: Charting the Future — a Symposium on Music Learning for the 21st Century, modeled after the original 1967 Tanglewood Symposium. Led by Boston University, Tanglewood I helped shape music education worldwide, resulting in extensive rethinking of how and why music is taught in schools. It is credited with introducing jazz, pop, and music from other cultures into the classroom.

Tanglewood II has brought together 32 international symposium members and leading speakers from various disciplines, along with eight CFA doctoral candidates in music education and selected observers. For three days, from June 25 to 27, the group is listening to experts from various fields, among them poet Robert Pinsky, a College of Arts and Sciences professor and three-time U.S. poet laureate, author Morris Berman, and cognitive scientist David Huron. Event leaders from eight presymposium events, hosted at universities across the country, are giving overviews of the topics they explored, from music and democracy to the psychology of the music listener. Following the three days of presentations and panels, those attending will discuss what they’ve heard and exchange ideas for the next two days. Sponsored by Boston University and hosted by the school of music, Tanglewood II is intended to be the beginning of a long and fruitful dialogue about the future of music education.

BU Today talked recently with William McManus about Tanglewood II and where music education is headed.

BU Today: Why is music education so important?
McManus: If kids don’t study music in schools, they may never learn about it. Those of us who are in the field believe in the education of music for the development of the whole person. We believe you have to really understand the art of music in order to grasp meaning from it. Development of the arts, I think, is how you can really measure the success of a culture, not the development of technology or weapons.

Is there something happening within the field of music education that makes coming together important now?
The original Tanglewood addressed music in American society, and we felt there was a need now to look at music more globally. Not too much has been done in this area, and too often music educators bring in their own people to talk to each other. The people we are bringing in we haven’t heard from before. These are not music educators talking to music educators. These are sociologists and cognitive scientists and conductors and composers talking to us about the future of society and culture. That hasn’t really happened since the original symposium.

Why is it important now to look at music from a more global perspective?
Because the world is becoming more flat, as they say. The way music is taught in Europe is not the way music is taught in the United States or Africa or Asia. And I think we can learn a tremendous amount from each other, but we don’t spend enough time communicating.

Can you give an example of what you mean?
In the United States, music education at the high school level, for the most part, is thought of as bands, orchestras, and choruses. In other words, performing groups. And to follow it one step further, a lot of the motivation behind performance is to participate in music competitions. Of course, one of the problems with that, for many people, is their involvement in music ends when they leave high school. And it’s questionable how much they’ve really learned about music as a result of playing in a marching band for a couple of years. In Europe, they focus on developing the student’s listening skills or understanding of the history of music — more like music appreciation.

What is happening to music education now?
When the composer Libby Larsen, who is a well-respected composer and on our symposium, spoke to the National Association for Music Education about four years ago, she told us, “If you people don’t reexamine what you’re doing and change what you’re doing, you’re going to find yourselves completely irrelevant in public schools, because the world of music has gone by you.” Kids today are all involved with music, they make their own CDs, they make their own music, but they may not participate in music programs in schools. We’re looking at the relevance of music education: what is the place of music in schools? What kind of music should we teach? What kind of experience should we provide for the kids? Why, in high schools across the United States, do only 10 to 12 percent of students participate or have any music education whatsoever?

Is the percentage of high school participation in music education higher in, say, Europe?
We don’t know. We don’t have those kinds of numbers.

How are public school budget crunches today affecting music education?
With the wave of conservatism since the Reagan administration and California’s Proposition 13 in the late 1970s, which led to property tax restrictions, it’s much harder now for schools to get money. As a result of those restrictions, programs like music, art, and sports have been cut. It’s a constant battle for those of us who are involved with music education here in the States to keep music in the schools.

What about a pay-to-play approach to music education?
We are seeing that more and more. It’s really passing on the responsibility of society to the individual parent. You know, we’re the new kids on the block, so to speak, because there was no music education prior to 1837 or 1838. If you go back to the Colonial period, the primary purpose of school was English and mathematics, and later on science became part of it. But you never found the arts, music, dance, and theater in schools. And so there’s always a question of what should music education really look like, what is the role of music in society, and does it really have an important role in schools?

Join in the online discussion about the future of music education at the Tanglewood II roundtable.

Nicole Laskowski can be reached at nicolel@bu.edu.