“What can be done? First, musical literacy should be taught in our nation’s school systems. In addition, parents should encourage their children to play an instrument because it has been proven to help in brain synapse connections, learning discipline, work ethic, and working within a team. While contact sports like football are proven brain damagers, music participation is a brain enhancer.”
Source: The Tragic Decline of Music Literacy (and Quality) | Intellectual Takeout
My take:
Speaking in terms of music instruction and literacy (the thrust of the story just posted), certainly the removal of music and art curricula from schools, and what I perceive to be a growing disinterest in the rigors of music lessons (especially when a focus on literacy comes into play), are taking a toll on general musical awareness in recent years.
There are many reasons for this decline, including increasingly limited time to practice as a result of having more recreational options; a shortening of attention spans that plague the instant-gratification generation; an obsession with video games and the like; a growing lack of appreciation on the part of parents for the cognitive benefits of music study, etc.
Technology, too, often has a way of eviscerating the very fields it’s meant to improve. The private music instruction biz, for instance, has suffered noticeably from the plethora of free video “lessons” available on YouTube. If one happens to rely on providing one-on-one private lessons to help put bread on the table, freely available YouTube vids is having the same effect as automobiles had on the buggy and farrier professions.
Of course, technology can also offer new opportunities for instruction to tech-savvy teachers. I’ve made a few instructional videos myself over the years, but the amount of work it takes to put together a well-designed instructional video is enormous, and monetizing your work is a tough sell in an environment where every other guitar player considers themselves qualified to be a teacher and puts out their videos for free.
Add to this the total lack of teacher/student interactivity in video or remote instruction, and we see that videos, teleconferencing and the like fail to compete with traditional music lessons, where a student can receive the undivided attention of the teacher. For instance, there’s no way for me to take a pencil and gently nudge a student’s fingers around on the guitar neck, tapping on target notes, etc, unless I’m sitting right there across from my student, in-person and able to react instantly to flawed execution, perform real-time duets, coach the details, etc.
Now some argue with some degree of justification that knowledge should be open-source, that it should not be as monetized as it has become (college tuitions being a prime example). While I can support this idea to a certain extent from a student’s point of view (I like learning something new for free as much as the next guy), making hard-won knowledge and expertise freely available to all, as with most such inclinations, tends to destroy a significant incentive for someone to become an expert in the first place. There are many arcane fields of study with no practical application or worthwhile marketability (Renaissance poetry, anyone) that would eventually be given up and forgotten were it not for the possibility of getting paid to teach and keep the topic alive in a world increasingly indifferent to the past.
In this sense, knowledge of, and performance expertise in, music are intellectual commodities and kinesthetic skills that, if provided completely free of charge to everyone, would eventually devalue and debase the art. While some would benefit from the freebies, many more would waste what they have learned, and overall the motivation to become a great artist declines. Yes, musicians play music out of love for the art, but if one cannot make a living in the art, eventually the art will wither and die of mediocrity.
