How Music Works (53 page)

75 percent.” In Northern Ireland, kids have turned away from joining loyalist or paramilitary groups to play music—the effects of these programs go way

beyond music and even beyond improving overall academic achievement.33

Statistics like these really put an end to the argument questioning the

utility of learning to play music, and they make a strong case for the importance of the arts remaining part of a school curriculum.

Recent programs that nurture creativity don’t all focus exclusively on

school kids. A program called the Creators Project is funded by Intel, the

computer chip manufacturer, and
Vice
, a magazine and media company.

Intel provides funding and
Vice
decides who gets it. Their support is sometimes thrown to established artists and musicians to help them manifest or

realize a project that otherwise would have been beyond their financial and

technical means. I recently saw theatrical pieces by Bjork and Karen O that

were funded by the Creators Project. They’re also seeking out emerging and

unknown artists, and their pockets are fairly deep, their support wide-rang-

ing (with projects in China, Buenos Aires, Lyon, and around the Cern atom

smasher). Significantly, they are supporting artists and musicians who are

working on the fringes of popular culture. So while I might have wondered

earlier why Silicon Valley hasn’t shown support for the arts, here is a big

exception—and they’re not funding symphony halls or museums, they’re

funding live shows in warehouses and in other oddball venues.

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THE FUTURE

I have nothing against the music performed in opera houses or much of the

art in the spectacular new museums that have been thrown up in the last

couple of decades—in fact I like quite a lot of it. The 1 percent are certainly entitled to their tasteful shrines—it’s their money after all, and they do invite us to the party sometimes. I wonder, however, if those places and what they

represent, along with their healthy budgets, hint at some skewed priorities

that will come back to bite us in the ass before too long.

I’m not the only one who believes that future generations will view our

present arts budgets with bafflement. The slashing of state and federal bud-

gets for teaching music, dance, theater, and visual arts in grades K–12 will have a profound effect on the financial and creative future of the United States and other countries that are following our example. In California, the number of students involved in music education dropped by half between 1999 and

2004. Participation in music classes, many of which are now no longer avail-

able anyway, dropped 85 percent. The other arts have had similar fates, and

the humanities have suffered as well.

A study done by the Curb Center at Vanderbilt University (Mike Curb is,

among other things, a songwriter and record producer who dropped Frank

Zappa and the Velvets from MCA, claiming they advocated drug use!) found

that arts majors developed more creative problem-solving skills than stu-

dents from almost any other area of study. Risk taking, dealing with ambi-

guities, discovering patterns, and the use of analogy and metaphor are skills that are not just of practical use for artists and musicians. For example, 80

percent of arts students at Vanderbilt say that expressing creativity is part of their courses, while only 3 percent of biology majors and about 13 percent of engineers and business majors do. Creative problem solving is not taught in

those other disciplines, but it is an essential survival skill.34 If one believes, as I do, that creative problem solving can be learned, and is something that can be applied across all disciplines, then we’re chopping our children’s legs off if we slash the budgets for classes in the arts and humanities. There’s no way

these kids will be able to compete in the world in which they are growing up.

In his book
Musicophilia
, Oliver Sacks described an interesting experiment conducted by Japanese scientists:

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[They] recorded striking changes in the left hemisphere of children who have had only a single year of violin training, compared to children with no training… The implication of all this for early education [in the arts] is clear. Although a teaspoon of Mozart may not make a child a better mathematician, there is little doubt that regular exposure to music, and especially active participation in music, may stimulate development of many different areas of the brain—areas which have to work together to listen to or perform music. For the vast majority of students, music can be every bit as important educationally as reading or writing.35

Roger Graef, who has written about the effectiveness of arts programs in

UK prisons, believes that violence, like art, is actually a form of expression.

Prisons, he says, are therefore ideal arenas for art creation and expression. Art can serve as an outlet for the violent feelings of inmates in a way that does not harm others, and that actually enhances their lives. Making art, Graef

writes,
“
can break the cycle of violence and fear
.”
36

He claims that the remedy for violence is an agency that will defeat feel-

ings of impotence. Historically, religion has successfully done this, and the rise of fundamentalism might be viewed as a reaction to increasing feelings

of alienation and inconsequentiality around the world. Making music might

act as an antidote to those feelings too, as those cultural and music centers in the Brazilian favelas attest. In those UK prisons, the quality of the work is beside the point, as it was in Brazil. And, unlike religion, no one has ever gone to war over music.

However, grant-giving organizations often take the opposite view. Most

arts grants focus on the work, rather than on the process that the work

comes out of. The product seems to be more important than the effect its

production process has. Sadly, Graef learned that it is hard for many of the inmates he worked with to continue making art outside of prison. They

find the professional art world elitist and its “posh buildings” intimidating.

Without a support system, and with their work being judged by criteria

that are foreign to them, they lose the outlet for frustration that they had discovered.

Education advisor Sir Ken Robinson points out that every educational sys-

tem on the planet was designed to meet the needs of nineteenth-century

industrialization. The idea, as Tom Zé implied, was to “manufacture” good

workers. What the world needs now are more creative thinkers and doers,

296 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

more of Zé’s defective humanoids. But the educational system hasn’t evolved

to do that. As Robinson
writes:

I’ve lost track of the number of brilliant people I’ve met, in all fields, who didn’t do well at school. Some did, of course, but others only really succeeded, and found their real talents in the process, once they’d recovered from their education. This is largely because the current systems of public education were never designed to develop everyone’s talents. They were intended to promote certain types of ability in the interests of the industrial economies they served.37

Canadian composer and music teacher R. Murray Schafer originated the

concept of the soundscape. The soundscape, as he defines it, can be thought

of as our sonic surroundings and involves the study of how that acoustic environment gives us a sense of place. A soundscape that is out of whack, he says, makes us feel impotent. The soundscape of a bureaucratic office building’s

lobby tends to make you feel small and insignificant. Schafer’s pedagogy begins with trying create awareness, to help students hear their sonic environment: What was the last sound you heard before I clapped my hands?

What was the highest sound you heard in the past ten minutes? What was the

loudest?

How many airplanes have you heard today?

What was the most interesting sound you heard this morning?

Make a collection of disappearing or lost sounds, sounds that formed part of the sonic environment but can no longer be heard today.

Schafer writes, “For a child of five, art is life and life is art. Experience is a kaleidoscopic and synesthetic experience, but once the child is in school

they get separated—art becomes art and life becomes life.” He proposes a

radical solution: that we abolish all study of the arts in a child’s first years at school. This seems counterintuitive to me—isn’t that precisely when we’re

supposed to encourage children’s creativity? “In their place,” he suggests, “we substitute subjects that encourage sensitivity and expression.” He says that the focus should not be on anything specific, but on general awareness of the world around us. This might be admirable, but it seems unlikely that it would be adopted widely.38

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Funding future creativity is a worthy investment. The dead guys won’t

write more symphonies. And the output of a creative generation doesn’t

confine itself to concert houses; it permeates all aspects of a city’s life. Creativity is a renewable resource that businesses can and do tap into. By this I don’t mean that businesses are looking for painters and composers, but

that the habit of creative problem-solving translates to any activity we find ourselves engaged in. If the talent and skills are not there, if they’re not nurtured, then businesses will be forced to look elsewhere. The arts are

good for the economy, and their presence makes for more interesting liv-

ing as well. Cutting those school arts budgets makes economic recovery

harder, not easier. It will leave us with a generation that isn’t as used to thinking creatively or in collaboration with others. In the long run there is a greater value for humanity in empowering folks to make and create than

there is in teaching them the canon of great works. Nothing against those

great works, but maybe they have been prioritized out of proportion to their lasting value. I have discovered many of them at various points in my life,

and yes, they have had a profound impact. In my opinion, though, it’s more

important that someone learn to make music, draw, photograph, write, or

create in any form, regardless of the quality, than it is for them to under-

stand and appreciate Picasso, Warhol, or Bill Shakespeare—to say nothing

of opera as it is today.

There are some classical works that I do genuinely enjoy, but I never got

Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven—and I don’t feel any worse for it. There’s plenty left to love and enjoy. I have gradually come to appreciate a wide variety of music didn’t have to be forced on me. I resent the implication that I’m less of a musician and a worse person for not appreciating certain works. Sometimes the newest thing on the block is indeed five hundred years old, and

sometimes the way forward is through the past—but not always! We cer-

tainly don’t have to stay back there. By encouraging the creativity of ama-

teurs, rather than telling them that they should passively accept the creativity of designated masters, we help build a social and cultural network that will have profound repercussions.

I know it’s not exactly the same as learning the skills involved in mount-

ing a multidisciplinary work like opera, but I would say: show someone three chords on the guitar, show them how to program beats, how to play a keyboard, and if you don’t expect virtuosity right away, you might get something 298 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

moving and affecting. You as a listener, or as a creator, might be touched in a way that is every bit as deep as you would be by something that demands a

more complicated skill set. Everyone knows you can make a song with almost

nothing, with really limited skills. The beginner can enjoy that, it’s a source of instant positive feedback, and they don’t feel inadequate because they’re not Mozart. I wish I’d learned to play a keyboard, but I gravitated to where my interests (and abilities) took me. I didn’t take guitar lessons. Over time (a lot of time) I learned a lot more chords and I began to be able to “hear” harmonies and tonal relationships. And, of course, I learned a lot more grooves over the years, and how to instinctively feel and enjoy them. I
learned
these things; I wasn’t born knowing them. But even at first, playing only a few notes, I

found I could express something, or at least have fun using my extremely

limited means and abilities. When I made something, even something crude,

I would momentarily discredit and ignore the nagging feeling that said that if I couldn’t match the classical or high-quality model then I was somehow less of an artist. My gut was telling me that what I was doing was just fine.

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c h a p t e r t e n

Harmonia

Mundi

“You are the music, while the music lasts.”

—
T.S. Eliot

c h a p t e r t e n

Harmonia

Mundi

“You are the music, while the music lasts.”

—
T.S. Eliot

So far, we’ve covered how music is distributed, how it’s affected by

architecture, and a lot more, but why do we need music? Does it

even matter? Where did it come from?

Far from being merely entertainment, music, I would argue,

is a part of what makes us human. Its practical value is maybe a

little harder to pin down, at least in our present way of thinking, than mathematics or medicine, but many would agree that a life without music, for a

hearing person, is a life significantly diminished.

Everything started with a sound. “In the beginning was the Word,” the