 |
 |
 |
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
Friday September 27, 2002
THE QUESTION:
So. When is enough enough? When an undergrad student doesn't progress for two years, has little knowledge of theory or history, can't buzz, can't match pitch....
Should this person be a music major?
Should this person get a music ed degree?
Or is the job of the department to spend the energy and time to make up for this person's lack of ability, talent, dedication, and just move them through?
******************
MY ANSWER:
On one hand, our esteemed university-level instructors are, in essence, putting their names on the line, certifying that someone who has passed their under-graduate and graduate level instruction is a professional-quality player.
And yet it is really inarguable that a person can receive quality instruction for a period of years and suddenly ratchet up several notches, thereby proving that while there was no tangible or visible progress during the period of instruction, that something was indeed *moving* and making progress on a deep level.
So it seems to all come down to a fundamental question: should a university be in the business of educating people, or should it be in the business of certifying that people can do something.
It is difficult to argue against the idea that a college diploma is a certification; symphonies and other professional org.'s use the presence of a Master's degree to, if nothing else, weed people out from being invited to auditions. Therefore it must be said that pro symphonies see a college degree as a certification of some sort (even if they are really just "copping out" by setting what we know is an artificial criterion).
But there must be a place in this world for folks who have no wish to be a professional trombonist, who wish to pay to receive the world-class instruction suite that is (ostensibly) offered at universities.
So here's my really big problem with the state of affairs of today's university music programs: universities insisting that people taking music classes and lessons MUST MAKE PROGRESS TOWARDS A DEGREE or else they're *OUT*.
I can understand an institution's unwillingness to grant graduate performance degrees to less-than-professional-quality students. But I can see no reason to shut out the type of student who simply wish to spend their good money to pursue music as an open-ended life-enhancing avocation.
There's no reason to take music and fine arts and apply the goal-oriented mentality of the modern material world to it. Music is much bigger than that, and I ALWAYS tell students that music and art and literature are, in the long run, much more significant to living a good life than whatever it is they happen to be making money doing.
I don't know if I can diagnose how we live in a world whose popular interest in music and theatre largely consists of bad hip hop and sporting events, but you can bet that the role universities have in driving the cultural standard-bearers in art, literature and music is not to narrow that gap. Much as these "churches of reason", having dictated the teacher-centric age-segregated doctrine of contemporary education, have created the sham known today as "public schools".
(sorry I'm so dark, but this all touches a nerve which was exposed many years ago when eighteen-year-old Joe Jackson showed up on the doorstep of North Texas State University wanting nothing more than to take lab band, improvisation, jazz arranging and small group but some fat slug school of music dean forced him to take legit theory, legit sight-singing & ear training, and musical acoustics (!), thus our hero flunked out due to a violent lack of interest.)
©2003, Joe Jackson. All rights reserved.