Math for the Sake of Music

Maintaining Balance between the Three (3) Equal Branches of Education: Academics, Arts, Athletics. (this is still a draft)

The proposed cuts to the arts and athletics in the St. Paul schools greatly concerns me. So I am going to ramble off a few thoughts. I am speaking both as a St. Paul father of a 5 year old son who will be attending Kindergarten Fall 2009 and 3 year old daughter AND as a dedicated college educator who has witnessed the alarming increase of entering 1st year college students with poor study skills, the inability to articulate ideas and arguments in essay form, let alone complete sentences; their preference for passive, multiple-choice, entertainment driven lectures rather than active dialog, Every student should actively engage in education, working on the distinctions and interelations between objective and subjective realities. Cuts to any of these areas greatly limit the capacity to develop these connections. It becomes detrimental to the establishment of Intellectual Curiosity, critical thinking and problem solving. Students leave High School not prepared for active leadership roles, but for passive lives as cogs in the machine.

PROBLEMS in WORKPLACE CULTURE:Already, this has become a very serious issue in the current workplace. A noted Organization Development and Diversity consultant (i.e. one whose job it is to prevent organizations from devolving into a Dilbert / The Office style culture) has noted that many companies are FINALLY recognizing that this 20-30 year trend of tech and business school training, and the misuse of unregulated diagnostic personality tests for employment suitability, has been detrimental to workplace diversity and adaption. Many employers continually ask for employees who can think "…outside the box." but fail to put procedures in place to either encourage or recruit such talent.
As a result, it is now not uncommon to find workplaces full of talented engineers who are nevertheless unable to conduct civil interpersonal conversations, appreciate a diversity of insights, learning and working styles.
[*Is higher education now any different at encouraging and recruiting diversity in working / learning styles? How many talented students are weeded out through automated enrollment processes? How is that result reflected in the diversity of insight as it relates to our research methods? ]

MEANING of a LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION: When I began college over 20 years ago there was still the lingering view that a liberal arts degree indicated that one could readily learn and adapt because they had been exposed to a broad spectrum of issues and ways of perceiving them (transferable skills). The advice I was given was to earn a degree in something that interested me. Companies train their employees about their business within the first 6 weeks of employment. [I recall my mother finding some statistic that 56% of medical school students held baccalaureate degrees in music.]

Somewhere along the line, the idea of "...going to college in order to get a better job" changed from one of personal betterment and the broad preparedness in adapting to new situations to the current common view that one's occupation must be aligned with one's major field of study. In the current popular view, Higher Education is no longer about "education" but about specific "training."

So let me pose a question to the music educators: Is the purpose of music education to beget more musicians, musicologists, and music educators i.e. "Music for the Sake of Music?" Or is it the imperative as a music educator to help students apply and adapt skills learned to other disciplines and facets of life?

As we have all probably experienced, when our income is dependent upon capital raised by benefactors, student tuition and taxes, it is a tough sell to convince them of the intangible benefits of a liberal arts education when they demand to see an immediate pragmatic connection between the dollars they contribute and the measurable results we offer those who consume our services.

Now as this relates to selecting a school for my son (and next year, my daughter ) I found that many have ostensibly great academic programs touting their Science, Math, and Reading scores (of course multiple choice testing measures only a certain type of "intelligence" - but that's another issue for another time!) but when it comes to describing their arts programs, they relegate them to an inferior position to their "core" academics expressing the sentiment, "Music for the sake of Math."

Now traditionally (and I'm talking a 2,300 year history since the days of Plato's Academy and elaborated in Boethius (De Institutione Musica) and Martianus Capella) Music has long been considered one of the 7 Liberal Arts.
The Seven (7) liberal arts are divided into the Trivium (Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic) and the Quadrivium (Arithmetic, Geometry, Music/Harmony, Astronomy). In the Quadrivium, Arithmetic is the study of number itself; Geometry is the study of number in space; music is the study of number through time; and Astronomy is the study of number through space and time. [For a nice overview of the philosophical history of music see Wayne D. Bowman, "Philosophical Perspectives on Music." (Oxford University Press, 1998).]

Okay, so the medieval music scholar in me acknowledges that in the quadrivium, that venerated 6th Liberal Art of Music is the measure of "number through time," But isn't there more to music than this?

THINKING OUTSIDE the BOX: PERSONALLY, I am rather biased against the whole "Music for the Sake of Math." argument. I know its initial purpose was to try and convince those who don't understand the need for something which seems "frivolous" to be supported in schools, but there is a whole unexplored aspect of music and the brain and social development which goes beyond either Math or Entertainment.

Let me put it another, perhaps most pragmatic, way. Returning to the concept of being able to "Think Outside the Box", the relationship between Mathematics and Music is analogous to Computer Programming Languages and say, Ancient Greek.Computer languages, like Geometry are rather straight forward, easy to understand because there is no ambiguity in the code. Greek on the other hand (save for the straight forward process of going through the rote memorization of paradigms of declensions and conjugations) poses all of those ambiguous, culturally specific, multiple meanings where each author
seems to provide their own "deviation" of the straightforward textbook grammar and such [from our BA's we should all be familiar with the usual textual criticism issues so I needn't elaborate]

As real time workplace and life issues are not as "mechanical" as the "fact-based" and mathematical procedures stressed by our popular culture and legislators, does it not seem backward to speak of the benefit of Music only in relation to its benefit to Mathematics?

While not yet a complete educational philosophy, perhaps another way of looking into the value of the Arts and Athletics is through my adaptation of the educational practices of the ancient world; what I consider the Three A's of Education: Academics, Arts, and Athletics. In my philosophy, the trivium and quadrivium are more or less combined and expanded under the heading of Academics and concern themselves with the Objective realm. The objective encompasses, the history, laws, theory, science, philosophy, language and cultural norms of the society. When applied to music, students learn modes, scales, chords, form and structure through the instruction of music theory.
The Arts occupy the Subjective realm. This is the exercise in the development, adaptation and manipulation of the objective learning which occurs in the "self" of each student. Like all arts, music both reflects and influences the society from which it is born.
The final component is the Athletics which might more rightly be called the kinesthetic or tactile learning. The objective and subjective realms are united through tactile learning. For musicians this is achieved by applying the realms to the physical demands of their instruments and voices. Music ought to be played. -
American Football presents yet another beautiful example on how these 3 A's are understood. While the Athletic is rather obvious, The Plays exercise the Objective realm but the real active Artistry occurs when strategizing which play and option to use and more so when the coverage breaks down and the Football artists must quickly improvise a solution.