Making Music
Music education has been the unfortunate casualty of budget cuts in public schools across America. Even though studies have shown that participating in musical endeavors provides students with skills and experiences well beyond the music itself, including team work, discipline, personal fulfillment, and creative problem solving, these programs still remain one of the first to go when financial crises arise.
There are a variety of efforts to promote music in schools; one in particular was highlighted in Sunday’s New York Times. The Academy – a program of Carnegie Hall, the Juilliard School and the Weill Music Institute (the institute being an arm of Carnegie) – selects fellows from leading music schools to receive high-level coaching and lessons, as well as participating in concerts at Carnegie Hall and master classes, in exchange for committing to teaching at a New York public school one and a half days a week. The program remains small, with 34 fellow at the present time, and is still going through the pains with which any new program must deal. However it is an ambitious program striving to create professional musicians who will grow outside of their chosen profession and to boost music education. As described by the executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall, Clive Gillinson, “We’re looking at the life of the musician of the future, what it could be and what it will be. If we can enable musicians to become utterly fulfilled, they will end up contributing far more to society and to music.”
The article on Sunday followed one musician, Alana Vegter, a French horn player at Julliard, and her experience working with the music teacher Ms. McDevitt at Ditmas Junior High School in Brooklyn. It was a difficult year, but proved to achieve many of the goals set forth by the academy.
Ms. Vegter says she learned many lessons through her experience: “how to be more patient, how to communicate better, how important a little focus can be for attention-starved children…She acknowledged another surprising result, that ‘sharing what I love with other people sometimes is more satisfying than playing.’ After a concert, she said, the connection with the audience is broken. ‘With kids it’s sustained,’ she added. ‘It’s one thing I’m doing in the world that makes me feel like I’m making a difference.’”
Tags: music education
