Thoughts on Music Education

Here is an excerpt from a USA Today interview with  Robert Freeman which prompted this response.

"I'm going to be 80 this summer — I'm going to retire to do some other kinds of things like promote the ideas in the book," said Freeman, who was director of University of Rochester's Eastman School for 24 years before he left in 1996 to become president of the New England Conservatory and then dean of the University of Texas at Austin's College of Fine Arts. He remains at UT Austin today as a professor.

Question: What do I face when I step out the door into the job market?
Answer: When you're in school, you're hoping to be the principal oboe. Then you get out of school and it turns out there are 500 candidates for the job, 100 of whom are perfectly well qualified.

Q.: What are the origins of this labor market problem?
A.: One is that we keep increasing the number of music schools and thus annual music graduates. Well over 30,000 a year. Orchestras are going in the other direction. We're graduating too many, too narrowly trained musicians.

Largely what it comes down to is you can't make productivity gains in the performing arts. It still takes 85 players to play a Beethoven symphony and you don't get anywhere trying to play it twice as fast with half as many players. At the same time, the musicians need to be paid more. You can't put the New York Philharmonic into Yankee Stadium — acoustically it doesn't work.

One response to Freeman comes from Robert Fitzpatrick, Dean of the Curtis from 1986-2009. Here's a quote:

Perhaps the greatest aberration of all was the creation of the Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) in order to perpetuate and extend the educational model. This would allow students to get tenured university positions in performance so that they could teach future B.Mus, M.Mus, and DMA candidates who would then seek positions to create more performers and teachers for non-existent orchestra positions, and dwindling opportunities in primary and secondary arts education in the USA.

What Freeman calls a 'Viscous Cycle' I'd call a Pyramid scheme. The educational model in the US trains a large number of music performance majors for a career they are unlikely to have. It's as if the NCAA athletes trained to join the NBA, and when they didn't make it into the NBA (since only about 1% do) decided to return to college to recruit and train more students into the NCAA who will try to make it into the NBA. It's an untenable business model. 

Unfortunately, the study of music, like basketball, is a important in the development of kids -- even if's just for fun (especially if it's just for fun!). We need a small number of elite performers but a a large number of teachers and while the market clearly values performers over teachers, that doesn't mean that we can't, as a society emphasize teaching. It's well documented that kids and society benefit through participation in sports and the arts; money spent on teachers and coaches isn't wasted. 

This music performance Pyramid scheme is unfair to students for several reasons:

1. Students apply to Music Schools their junior year of high school when they're 16-17

2. Private schools cost up to $50k a year in tuition
3. They'll be competing for jobs along with hundreds of other highly-trained musicians
4. How many of these points are fully appreciated by a 16 year old?

College students who plan to major in poetry or play on the basketball team don't expect to make a living doing that after they graduate. How is it that classically-trained musicians have such different expectations? I think the music performance Pyramid scheme is a part of the problem. Refocusing on music education, perhaps, is the solution.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/04/14/music-industry-jobs/25787067/

http://slippedisc.com/2015/04/robert-fitzpatrick-a-vicious-cycle-exists-in-american-musical-higher-education/
https://my.sfcm.edu/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=3ffdb386-df3b-49ef-9a17-9f5c7fcc21fa&groupId=134904&filename=null
https://www.ncaa.org/sites/default/files/Probability-of-going-pro-methodology_Update2013.pdf