Marriage and Music Education.
10 Nov
If more and more people want to participate in a given institution, the institution had better welcome the new energy or risk crumbling.
Preventing large emerging groups of people from participating in “marriage” will ultimately do for marriage what keeping large groups of emerging musics from participating in music education did for music education programs.
(Hint: they aren’t exactly thriving these days).
Your fundamentals of music are likely not mine. Her fundamentals of marriage are likely not his.
I ain’t sayin’ we need to throw out moral codes.
But maybe it’s time for music educators to focus once again on the songs we’re actually singing, not just the ones that seemingly confirm the theories of harmony, counterpoint, and other distilled “elements of music” promoted for all sorts of weird historical reasons by a steadily shrinking group of increasingly anachronistic people.
Lord knows it’s certainly time for the “institution of marriage” to enrich the relationships we’re actually in, rather than dismissing the ones that don’t conform to the beliefs no doubt also promoted for all sorts of weird historical reasons by a steadily shrinking group of increasingly anachronistic people.
[self-editing note: It should—but I admit probably doesn't—go without saying that many of my friends and I belong to one or both groups of the aforementioned "increasingly anachronistic people." I would never wish to exclude you, them, myself, nor anyone else from either institution.]
Tags: academia, Education, Friends, marriage, Music, musicology, theory
What’s keeping large groups of people from participating in music is music educators themselves. They are notoriously slow to adapt to new trends, new technologies and new means of reaching ever INCREASING markets of people who simply want to ‘learn music’.
Your marriage analogy is not without merit. Music educators need to divorce themselves from academia and get back to ‘playing the field’ by taking their services into the community as a for-profit endeavor.
Until we make the profession as a whole and ourselves healthy again, no one will want to date us.