As recently as a century or so ago, if you wanted to hear music, you had better play or sing for yourself. If you wanted to hear more than that, you’d better have friends. If you wanted to hear an opera or symphony any time you wanted to, you’d better be a king.
Today, of course, all we need to do is plug in the radio or stereo. One hundred, 200 musicians at our command, any time of the day or night. In the car, at the gym, in the supermarket, anywhere we go, even places we don’t want music. We can listen to musicians who aren’t even alive anymore, from Patsy Cline to Elvis Presley to Maria Callas.
I have begun to wonder if our easy access to music has made it too easy for us to take music for granted.
Example: School districts feeling the pinch tend to cut music classes first, according to many experts. The reasoning apparently goes like this: Music seems like a frivolity when you compare it to chemistry labs; instruments cost a lot of money (either to the school or to the parents); and, after all, why do you think they call it an “elective”?
Well, this happens to be a subject I know something about. You see, I took music classes in public schools—the Houston Independent School District in Texas. Even then, I was no musical prodigy.1 They put me in the rhythm band and gave me a wood block to play. I wore it on a cord around my neck and hit it with a little stick.
6Other children might have been expected to hit each other with the little stick. Not me. (Well, not often.) I was extremely respectful of my instrument. Scholars believe the wood block was invented before music. And if you needed proof of that, you had only to listen to the way I played.
About the best you could say for my performance was this: I very seldom played off-key.
I was also—don’t ask how or why—assistant conductor of the Alexander Hamilton Elementary School band. To this day I can still conduct about three songs, just in case I’m at the concert hall one night and there’s an emergency and somebody shouts: “Is there a conductor in the house?”
In all honesty, those little music classes didn’t turn me into a musician—you’d need a magician to do that. But those classes did give me an appreciation of music.
- Music is difficult. It requires work and thought and sweat and inspiration. I haven’t taken it for granted since.
- Music is exciting. It is truly thrilling to be sitting in a group of musicians when you are all playing (more or less) the same piece of music. You are part of a great, powerful, vibrant entity.2 And nothing beats the feeling you get when you’ve practiced a difficult section over and over, and finally get it right (Yes, even on the wood block.)
And you think you’re excited when you get that song right. Imagine how your mother feels. You can see it in her face: relief and pride. Big pride.
- Music is important. It says things your heart can’t say any other way, and in a language everyone speaks. Music crosses borders, turns smiles to frowns, and vice versa.
These observations are shared with a hope: that, when schools cut back on music classes, they really think about what they’re doing—and don’t take music for granted.
- 1 prodigy: person with exceptional talents
- 2 entity: something that exists as a particular and separate unit
”Silencing the Sound of Music” by Dan Rather from San Diego Union–Tribune March 20, 1998, copyright © 1998 by Dan Rather. Reprinted with special permission of King Features Syndicate.