Third-Stream Music Education

A Card Table for the Superintendent

March 14th, 2009

A colleague at a nearby international school sent out a request for assistance composing a proposal to purchase a piano. He works at a for-profit school, where the goal of upper administration is to cut costs and maximize profits. His school and its sister campuses, in a half-dozen countries, are known for their shiny new buildings and their flashy marketing brochures but a lack of deep commitment to student learning. His predicament, however, is not unique to for-profit schools. Certainly every music, art and drama teacher in North America can empathize with the predicament. This month in California, faculty and parents are writing similar letters, but instead of purchasing pianos are clamoring just to keep their teachers.

Here is the meager advice I was able to give him. The first paragraph is for his written proposal. The second paragraph is not intended to be written in the formal proposal!

Because for your accompanying and for students who are pianists in their own right, the weighted touch and dynamic sensitivity of an acoustic piano is impossible to duplicate through electronic means, no matter how sophisticated. Because your curriculum standard–which have been approved by the higher ups–specify that students must learn to identify, describe and produce good tone quality. Because there are properties of sound, such as sympathetic vibration and ‘beats’ during the tuning process, that cannot be replicated with synthesized sounds, no matter how sophisticated.

Because if you want students to make music, then let’s make music; they bought the P.E. department real basketballs and baskets, not plastic balls and plastic children’s hoops from the Wal-mart toy section. When your boss and your boss’s boss sit at folding card tables instead of proper office furniture and build their budget spreadsheets on electric typewriters rather than computers, then you’ll be happy to just go ahead and save the money for that electric piano.

Entry Filed under: Aleatory