Lehrman American Studies Center

In my last post, I called for national standards of the American educational system but allowing multiple avenues available for children to reach those standards. This seems to make the most sense given the unique history of the United States, especially how public education arose in response to mass immigration during the nineteenth-century, and the federal structure of our government. The call for national standards, which would include an academic and extra-curricular (or service) component, would provide a common training in citizenship for everyone, something that is critically required as our society become more pluralistic and diverse.

Of what should these national standards consist? Let me propose that music should be one of the core components of these national standards. Now at first music may seem a strange subject to start with – wouldn’t mathematics, science, or rhetoric be a more suitable choice to begin? The utilitarian features of these disciplines are self-evident: everyone needs to read, write, and count to function in society, while science is especially prized because we need scientists to manipulate nature for our greater material comfort and national defense. But what does music provide other than the amusement of smiles and well-wishes? What value does music have in and of itself?

Before I begin any further, in the spirit of full disclosure, I should let the reader note that I have a tin ear for music, although I enjoy it immensely, particularly baroque and bebop. My wife, who is a classical pianist by training and profession, has practically given up teaching me music, in spite of having six years of piano lessons when I was a child. Simply put, it seems that I am innately unmusical. Thus, I approach the subject of music not as an expert but, like most Americans, someone who enjoys listening to it but with a very limited understanding of its structure and design, e.g., cord, melody, rhythm.

In the Politics, Aristotle lists music as one of the four things that children customarily learn (the other three are gymnastics, letters, and drawing) and belongs to the sweetest of things of nature for them to learn. It not only provides a type of pleasure when we are at rest but music habituates the soul accordingly to the mode performed, e.g., Phrygian harmonies makes people inspired, Mixed Lydian produces a state of grief and apprehension. It renders the character of the soul a certain quality, as Aristotle states, and thus it should be left to the state to make sure that music’s imprint upon our children’s souls is good and proper instead of disorderly and vulgar.

But I would like to add something that Aristotle has neglected to mention about music: it also precedes rhetoric and mathematics in a child’s pedagogy. Children response to and, in a limited sense, understand music before they can read, write, and count. In other words, music is a child’s first encounter with thought. One of the reasons I suspect that music has been disregarded by most school districts – usually music is the first to be axed in school budget cuts – is that we see music through the lens of an emotional or irrational romanticism instead of conceiving it as a mode of thought like mathematics or rhetoric. This is not to deny the emotional potency of music, but we should recognize its intellectual characteristics, too (I won’t even elaborate upon the relationship between music and other disciplines, such as music and mathematics in the West or music and language in the East, as these topics have been thoroughly explored elsewhere). It falls upon us to determine what type of thought we want our children to first encounter, and that first mode of thought is usually music, whether we recognize it or not.

But what should these national standards be for music, and how is it related to citizenship? I’ll address these questions, as well as my minor disagreements with Allan Bloom’s assessment of contemporary music, in my next post.

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