First Class, First Class

In December of 2009 a colleague and I in the Abreu Fellows program at NEC were asked to speak before the institution’s Board of Trustees, to describe our experiences at the Conservatory to date and place our involvement in the Fellowship within a more personal context. I posted the text of that very brief address here, but the more interesting part of the event was the question posed by a trustee immediately thereafter: “How do you intend to leverage the brand of the Fellowship?”

I can’t recall what I said now, perhaps because it wasn’t worth remembering: there’s an inverse ratio between the quality of a question and the ease with which it is answered. What I should have said is: “At this moment the only brand is the name association with Maestro Abreu. It is up to us, the first class, to establish the substantive brand through our actions, and build it into something which holds powerful meaning and recognition within the music industry.”

L’esprit de l’escalier: hindsight is always 20/20, and I’ve had two and a half years to come up with that. The association with Maestro Abreu, even if only titular (the second class never had an opportunity to meet with him) has been extremely valuable to me, but has never been enough on its own. The fellowship program in its first year had yet to establish a clear identity, a function mostly of its compressed start-up window, so I have always relied on my analyses and reflections of my experiences working within Venezuela and in similar organizations around the world, paired with extensive research, for the opinions I express, rather than promulgating uninformed romantic conjectures. That, plus “Abreu”, is the brand I’ve tried to build.

But that beautiful title of Abreu Fellow is no more. As part of the renewal of NEC’s relationship with the FundaBol, the title has now been changed to “Sistema Fellow,” thus trading a very known and highly respected quantity for an entity that is largely (if not by definition) undefined. I don’t entirely disagree with this decision. The original name was expressly discouraged by the Maestro himself under the very reasonable rationale he could not be seen actively supporting an eponymous program. (His request was overruled by the now-departed program management.) But he did support it in his own subtle way, and he continues to support its graduates, including me, to an extent that I find extraordinarily humbling.

A more limited edition than originally planned

As for the program itself, its substantive brand has emerged as “capable núcleo managers.” Although this is disavowed by NEC, there is a very clear instructional emphasis on organizational development in the American not-for-profit environment, with the time spent in Venezuela significantly reduced. The program evolution is perhaps a natural response to the most pressing challenges in the US, and NEC has found excellent faculty, so no criticism should be inferred. NEC has historically quantified and communicated the relative success of the fellowship by the placement of its graduates in middle or upper-management positions in organizations in the US – by which standard I am the most unsuccessful Fellow of all, I now realize – so this is a logical correlative to that measure.

With the fourth group of fellows recently announced, there remains but one more class for which to apply. I’m often asked by prospective applicants to describe my experience within the program, but its evolution, or very public growing pains, means that I can only offer an outdated perspective. My general advice to applicants is twofold. 1) It is not an “aspirational” program: being enamoured of the concepts and wanting to be involved is insufficient. The past and current classes have established a clear commitment through a representational body of work prior to applying. 2) Be certain it’s what you want. Ensure your objectives align with the program thrust, and be aware that there is still widespread industry fear and mistrust of the idea of social action through music. Some view a commitment to Sistema as heresy in a profession of deeply embedded orthodoxy. A brand can be a dangerous thing, sometimes.

Most importantly, it’s only a name. Outstanding work has been done from Adelaide to Zurich by musicians, amateur and professional, who have no such title, only a deep and abiding passion for changing the world through their craft. Not being selected for the Fellowship is no value judgment on anyone’s capacity: I admire greatly those who are trying – not just succeeding – without the advantages the title confers. I’m proud of the achievements of my fellow Fellows, but the inevitable conclusion of the Abreu Fellows program (as I’m certain it will always be known) should mark the start of a new era, not the end.

 

Pierre de Fermat, Pythagoras of Samos, and Jose Antonio of Venezuela

I’ve devised something I call the “Culpability-Responsibility-Accountability Progression.” Yes, that’s right, CRAP. It’s a product of my observations upon the function – or dysfunction – of corporate structure. Here’s how it works. If a person within an organizational structure makes a mistake, he’s culpable. The person who signs off on the mistake (usually the direct superior) is responsible. And that’s where it should end: by the time you get to discussions of accountability there’s nothing meaningful left within the process, just a public relations exercise undertaken to mollify stakeholders. By the time you get to discussions of accountability, you’re at the end of the progression. You’ve got CRAP.

That’s the second harsh assessment in as many blogs entries, but it’s important to understand why funding agencies are so data driven, so obsessed with finding “proof” of impact. The word accountability has been simply been confused with responsibility, namely, the legitimate, genuine obligation of an agency to disburse funds in the manner most consistent with its mission. Accountability is simply a way of diverting or managing the disposition of blame if there’s a problem or disagreement with a decision, and numbers, preferably impenetrable in their presentation, make a lovely smokescreen with which to obfuscate.

Unfortunately, as a result of this institutionalized numbers obsession it’s very easy for those involved in advocacy for music education to fall into the trap of believing there’s a data-based silver bullet, the one study/evaluation/document that will put to rest all disagreements now and forever, the final proof before which all objections will fall, with which all funding will be restored.

Like Fermat’s Last Theorem, such an ideal proof might actually be out there, but the concept of proof is as problematic as that of accountability. Our current efforts to prove the viability of social action through music are simply an extension of the premise that music is, in some shape or form, “good for you”, a hypothesis that has been extensively tested in the past with uniform results. By uniform, I mean that the researchers agreed there was a benefit, other researchers disagreed as to the study methodology or validity, and few if any funding decisions were changed. We keep accumulating more and more data in this area in an attempt to prove the same point, while fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of proof.

Don’t fetch your ruler.

Accumulation of data is nothing more than an attempt at an empirical proof. This would be akin to Pythagoras of Samos attempting to justify his theorem by measuring every single right triangle imaginable – an exercise, and as such, a “proof” bound to fail. Such a collation of data would only prove that those right triangles measured aligned with his postulation, that at best one might assume other right triangles would exhibit the same relationships in terms of dimensions of sides, but still leaving an infinite number of right triangles still unmeasured, and thus the extent possibility of one triangle that did not conform.

Empirical proofs aren’t proofs at all, ultimately. They always leave room for doubt or disagreement, and this is why if there is “one proof to end them all,” it won’t be a collection of data. Numbers are useful for agencies to satisfy their organizational need for accountability (and everything that word implies) as well as their responsibility, and can actually be invaluable in guiding program development internally, but that’s generally where it ends. Remember the three rules for data: 1)be modest in your promises 2)be ruthless in your assessment 3) be realistic in your expectations.

Pythagoras proved his hypothesis via logical proposition, creating an argument unbounded by measurements that established the universal applicability of his theorem. We may not have a logical proposition as yet that accomplishes the same, but much like Fermat’s Last Theorem (now proven), the social power of music is something we hold to be good and true. And in many ways, this is greater proof than any study, the fact that so many people have chosen to dedicate their lives to it, so many across the globe stand in solidarity with Maestro Abreu, accepted his argument not because he has a study to support his premise, but because the idea itself has worth inherent to make it almost axiomatic.

 

Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen” in performance in Johannesburg

The way Edward Arian tells it in his book Bach, Beethoven and Bureaucracy, the first time the Philadelphia Orchestra played an education concert the symphony musicians nearly filed a grievance. It wasn’t the job of artists to entertain children or enrich their lives: music was a serious aesthetic experience reserved only for adults. Preferably wealthy Caucasian adults, I would assume, although that was never made explicit.

Times haven’t changed much. Many orchestras still import busloads of children once a year for shows explaining the profound and poignant difference between “high” and “low”, or for those of more advanced age and intellect, “soft” and “loud”, and then consider their civil obligations duly discharged and return confidently to their funders proudly boasting of the their commitment to outreach.”Playing for poor kids”, or in more fashionable parlance, “access to excellence” is cheap and easy, requiring relatively little money and even less thought.

CityMusic’s production of Brundibar

That’s an extreme, hyperbolic assessment, obviously, representative of a slim majority at best. Many organizations have recognized the superficial, self-serving nature of this kind of outreach and have responded by investing significant time and thought into their performances to give them multiple layers of social relevance. Two beautiful recent examples come to mind, both from the world of opera. Just last week in Ohio, the professional chamber orchestra (and first el Sistema program founder in the area) CityMusic Cleveland presented eight performances of Hans Krása’s Brundibár. The work isn’t well known, but is of enormous significance for its historic context. Written immediately before the outbreak of World War II, Brundibár was given its first performance in 1944 by the children of the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp in occupied Czechoslovakia. Although the subject matter, relating the struggle and ultimate triumph of two children over a malicious street performer, is unexceptional, CityMusic turned the performances into a platform from which they launched a comprehensive strategy of social engagement through music. In partnership with a major Jewish museum, anti-bullying organizations, and a number of other significant cultural institutions in Ohio, CityMusic used the performances to focus attention on the consequences of all forms of religious or racial hatred and intolerance, with an emphasis on relevant contemporary issues such as genocide. For a chamber orchestra, this production was a bold, visionary venture, but one that will have lasting social and artistic impact. Accordingly, the production integrated el Sistema-like principals with the involvement of a large number of youth from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Cape Festival’s production of “The Fairy Queen”

On the other side of the world – quite literally – South Africa’s Cape Festival presented Henry Purcell’s baroque “semi-opera” the Fairy Queen in both Cape Town and Johannesburg in late March. Cape Festival chose the very risky course of using this production to tackle difficult issues of sexuality, primarily the hate crime of corrective rape which in recent years has emerged as a serious national issue. The combination of youth and sexuality as topics is invariable controversial if not explosive, but Cape Festival deftly navigated these artistic and social waters with great care and aplomb. Like CityMusic, Cape Festival brought many young singers and instrumentalists into the experience of a professional opera production while communicating a poignant social message.

I wish I could have attended both of these. The manner in which we engage with art often divorces it entirely from its social origins: orchestra and opera companies deliver performances in great temples before catatonic worshipers, popular music concerts are presented at exorbitant – nay, elitist ticket prices in massive stadia that reinforce social isolation, rather than reducing it. CityMusic and Cape Festival offered both artists and audiences a rare opportunity to reclaim long-forgotten roots, if but for an evening.

 

There’s a wonderful scene in the award-winning movie The King’s Speech in which Geoffrey Rush’s character, in an effort to treat the future monarch’s stutter, points out to him that his impediment disappears the moment he starts singing. This wasn’t just a pleasant piece of celluloid fiction, but a very common, well-documented effect in clinical speech therapy. Researchers often speak of how the act of singing engages a neural “back door” to communication, thus avoiding the mental obstacles on the more conventional speech pathway that cause a stammer.

The use of music to influence the emotional, mental and physical health of an individual goes back to at least the ancient Greeks, easily predating Congreve’s famous but oft-misquoted line about music’s charms in relation to the soothing of savage breasts. And if music can thus influence one person, why could it not transform a community as well? That’s the simple underlying premise of el Sistema: that society, a large, complex, and ultimately indefinable organism, can be healed or helped through music. And although Sistema and music therapy are not entirely analogous, there’s a very natural, organic overlap between the two. We see this common ground in the vocabulary Sistema-inspired programs use to describe their activities and their impact, and how it often emphasizes the development of the individual as much as the community. As paradoxical as it sounds, social change has to start by changing the attitudes and perceptions of the person first.

Firth and Rush in "The King's Speech"

I didn’t know anything about music therapy when I was asked to write the article published in the current print edition of the Canadian Association of Music Therapists magazine Ensemble (not to be confused with the more recent e-flyer of American Sistema programs), which CAMT has very graciously allowed me to make available online in full for the broadest possible access. Having done some research before writing the piece, I now know little more than nothing, but enough to have a deep respect for the profession and to see the intrinsic connection between what music therapists do for the person and what Sistema does for society. I also see a very fertile ground for discussion and collaboration within and far beyond the sphere of special needs students. There are mutual lessons for Sistema practitioners and music therapists, just as there are for Sistema practitioners and educators, social policy makers, symphony orchestras, child development specialists and psychologists.

The idea behind the article was to introduce two sides of the same coin – no, two facets of the same jewel to each other, and I’ve been very gratified by the reception of the piece particularly by those not involved with either music therapy or el Sistema – it appears in bridging to each other I also bridged to those outside both communities as well, while penning the first article on special needs music education in Venezuela. This was probably good luck more than good management; as I’m fond of saying, even a snoutless pig can find the occasional truffle. Although never was an analogy more apt in my case, it might be more applicable to state that this article might serve as a “back door” to both fields and the very rich and thought-provoking ideas they have to share.

Then again, while I understand the rationale for the term “back door,” I must confess I don’t care much for it. In King George VI’s pre-WWII society, the “back door” was the servants’ entry, the portal for entities of a lower order. It’s no republican sentiment that the King should be compelled to sing to make himself understood – rather, one might say it’s the natural order of things.

 

Hard at rest in Acarigua

Back in my youth orchestra days, the highlight of our weekly rehearsal was often the break, that joyous moment when we were finally released from our chairs and could abscond to the local shopping mall, in search of discount doughnuts from a bakery looking to clear the shelves right before closing time. The only people who stuck around to practice were the anti-social misfits who would otherwise awkwardly wander the corridors of the university in solitude, reading the overflowing bulletin boards with feigned interest, or the super-keeners who wanted to show off to the conductor. At least, that was the perception.

A bit of time off isn’t a bad thing, of course, but a break should be received as welcome respite, not parole from an eternity pent in durance vile. But there’s a third option I’ve seen, most recently in Venezuela, and of which I was reminded very recently by Chris Nicholls, the infectiously enthusiastic visionary behind Sistema Australia. I was working late one evening when he sent me an online instant message saying: “I’ve got something I really wanted to share with you! We’ve had something really interesting happen at our program – the children have started practicing during their breaks!”

Chris had every reason to be excited: a development of this nature is really something of a breakthrough in terms of the children’s relationship to both the program and to music. At the most immediate level, it means that the children are enjoying the process enough to want more, which is itself an endorsement of Sistema Australia’s approach. But it also implies something else much more significant: that the children are starting to understand they can actually develop mastery over their instrument if they choose. It means they’re discovering the inherent rewards of playing, the intrinsic motivation that will carry them for the rest of their musical lives.

It’s hard to get to this point, in case you thought otherwise, and for a young program to get there so quickly is quite remarkable and rare. I’ve written previously on how difficult it can be to cross this particular threshold, but also how important it is as well. It’s not just a confidence builder, it’s the development of self-efficacy, the understanding that through self-application we can surmount challenges even if we’ve never encountered them before. This is a critical cognitive attribute and life skill.

So as a follow up to his instant message, Chris asked: “What do you think?” My response:”Make your break longer.”

No, seriously. Maria Montessori first identified the importance of unstructured play time about a century ago, time in which students can explore or engage with their environment entirely on their own terms. This is the framework in which they can satisfy their own curiosity, when they’ll expand their technique while they discover the neat tricks or sounds they can create with their instruments, and find out just how capable they are of growing on their own. They may do it through practicing their parts, they may do it together, they may do it through fooling around, but which it is becomes largely unimportant. This is actually a break:

That said, they also need some time away, to refresh and reset mentally and physically, so there has to be an allocation for that too. As a conductor I’ve noticed significantly diminished returns in rehearsals towards the end, which is why if it’s up to me, I’ll schedule a good break around the 2/3rds point (not the halfway mark), and keep the remainder of the rehearsal after much lighter. If I’ve done my job as a conductor, the musicians will still feel motivated to try to work out a few kinks before resting their minds and bodies, instead of trying in vain to fill holes with doughnuts.

 

Detail from the cover of Early Music, April 2012

In early March I was in the Bay area, working with two young orchestras. I was there to conduct, but the administration had thoughtfully allocated ten minutes to each group for questions. The younger of the groups absolutely jumped at the chance, asking me a range of questions from where I lived, to which sports I played, why I was there to work with them, to why I had sweaty armpits. (I did, I admit it – I had one of those nervous “flop sweats” for no apparent reason.) After the equivalent of an orchestral waterboarding from 12 year olds, I was expecting no less than the rack from the older group. The armpit question didn’t come up, thankfully, since I’d had the sense to put on my suit jacket again, but then again, the older orchestra hardly asked any questions at all. It was as though all their natural curiosity had been suppressed by their self-consciousness: further proof, if any were needed, of the many disadvantages to “growing up.”

There was one question in particular I was certain would be asked, but wasn’t. I had led a sight-reading session of Mozart Symphony No. 39 in E-flat, and I started by telling them that their edition had a misprint in every single part in the first bar of the slow introduction: that the marking for Common Time should in fact be Cut Time (search for KV 543), which meant that I would begin by conducting the slow introduction in…

If you said “in two,” you’re incorrect. It would be in four. I invited them to ask why during the Q&A, and no one brought it up, much to my surprise. Long story short: without a metronome, composers before Beethoven were forced to rely on conventions, Italian terminology, carefully signposted tempo relationships, or all of the above in order to communicate to a performer what pulse to take. If you look at the first movement of the symphony, (or the overture to Magic Flute, or Don Giovanni, or many other examples) Mozart used the symbol for Cut Time for slow introductions, but then didn’t change the time signature when the faster sections start. In other words, the intention communicated is that the pulse shouldn’t change, and that there should be a straightforward tempo relationship between the two sections. In all cases cited above, the use of Cut Time for slow sections tells the interpreter that the pulse should lie with the larger note value that might be considered, rather than the smaller. For all three examples, the starting pulse should be the quarter, rather than the eighth, later transferring to the half note for the allegro for the overtures, or the dotted half in Symphony No. 39.

3/4 Time signature and Alla Breve - what was Bach thinking?

At some point, some well-intentioned editor decided that Mozart MUST have made a mistake and then “corrected” these slow intros to Common Time in the old editions, with the result that numerous interpreters consider the Adagios to mean “in EIGHT,” the relationship to the Allegros is erased, and painfully slow tempos abound. If you’d like further evidence, take a look at the score for the Alto aria “Es ist vollbracht” in Bach’s St. John Passion. After a molto adagio introduction in Common Time, the following section in 3/ 4 is marked “Alla Breve” (Caution, large file. Check out pages 73-74.) Don’t look in the new Bärenreiter, because another well-intentioned editor decided that it must have been a mistake as well – clearly a 3/4 can’t be “in two.” This is Bach using the same technique to indicate a tempo relationship, in which the pulse lies first with the eighth, then the quarter in the 3/4.

As a conductor I care a great deal about things like this, because composers cared a great deal about things like this. Brahms in particular was more interested in the tempos of performances executed under the direction of others than audience reactions, and notated his scores with extreme care in an attempt to clarify the problem – and the solutions – for others.

The article I wrote for the current edition of Early Music runs along the same, but slightly more complex lines. Is it possible that there’s a unifying theory of tempo for a ten movement work? I say there is, and I dedicated the article to Maestro José Antonio Abreu – not because the article has a shred of a connection to el Sistema, but because the solution I propose would make an economist smile.

 

Kiddlywinks performs on March 31st.

I heard a new expression for the first time in Ottawa last week, and then again just 48 hours later at the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge: “To drink the Kool-aid.” Its meaning, as I inferred in context, was akin to “intellectual intoxication” – to grow so infatuated with an idea as to lose sight of all perspective, to buy into propaganda, to be unreasonably passionate. Both times I heard the phrase it was used in reference to some of the el Sistema advocacy and rhetoric out there, specifically the clichés and glurge that are repeated so often.

I’m actually quite sympathetic to the pedlars of this brand of fanaticism. Sometimes it does seem to substitute for actual thought or insight, but more often, if you know what el Sistema is (and that’s quite a big if), and particularly if you’ve witnessed its impact either in Venezuelan or closer to home, it’s extremely difficult not to believe completely and utterly in the power of the idea on primarily an emotional rather than rational level. This conviction is an outgrowth of an identified psychological phenomenon called moral elevation, the suffusion of warmth and righteousness we feel just by witnessing or even hearing about an act motivated by pure altruism. Unfortunately, just like the power of music itself, this is something best experienced rather than described. If you haven’t witnessed el Sistema in action, if you haven’t “drunk the Kool-Aid,” what it does can be near impossible to comprehend, particularly on the emotional level.

I’ve had plenty of the Kool-Aid, thank you, but I’ve also worked closely with a variety of political stakeholders, policy-makers, and public and private granting agencies, and I can say with confidence that even if they love the idea, their internal and external accountability requires them to examine proposals strictly from a rational perspective. Unduly emotional or passionate language, while communicating sincerity, can actually put their backs up quite quickly. Yes, they’ll agree music is a good thing, but they still won’t write the cheque.

That’s the nature of advocacy: not changing what people say, but what people do. The image of the bureaucrat gleefully snatching violins out of the hands of infants is an absolute myth. Treating public officials, or those who just don’t get it, with scorn and derision for the decisions they make invites a similar degree of disrespect and disregard in return. Good advocacy requires good listening long before good speaking, to identify and understand the concerns or the objections and respond to them in sensitive but concrete ways.

If there were a theme from the conference in Ottawa, it would have been the balancing that essential passion with real pragmatism, and the Friday and Saturday panels reflected that in particular. Richard Hallam’s presentation in particular reinforced the fact that if our arguments for music education in any form are not being heeded, it is not the fault of the ears on which they fall, but rather the mouths from which they come. As Chris Nicholls of Sistema Australia astutely pointed out in his comment on this entry, if Sistema is described as “music education,” policy makers automatically view it in the context of an overtaxed educational budget allocation. If you speak of it only in terms of its cognitive benefits (music makes you smarter) then you invite the risk of some other activity emerging which fulfills that function more cost-effectively. Similarly, if valued only in terms of cash return on investment, the savvy investor, be it an individual or government, will immediately withdraw funding the moment a program with a higher rate of return should materialize. And judging music only by its instrumental value – its practical function or impact – denies it its incredibly rich and entirely unique intrinsic value.

Clearly it’s not an either/or proposition, but both/and, if not all of the above. I’ve said this before, but good advocacy requires different vocabularies for different constituencies. It also needs good listening, to know which vocabulary is required, and any approach that focuses on one avenue at the expense of all others is inviting disaster. Then again, I’m reminded of Dr. Abreu’s “Kool-Aid” approach to advocacy: putting the children front and centre, serving up a metaphorical pitcher and inviting all to drink. Moral elevation is a powerful force: the politician on the panel in Ottawa placed his unwavering support for OrKidstra in the context of a visit to Colombia where the children played the Canadian national anthem for him. Kool-Aid, breaking down mental walls too…

Have a drink.

In October of last year I was having a beer with Steve Payne, Executive Director of Youth Orchestra San Antonio, when he made a very interesting point. “In Venezuela,” he said, “gatherings are always around the children, first and foremost. Teachers getting to talk shop is just a fringe benefit.” And he was right, of course. The Venezuelans don’t do “conferences,” they do seminarios, their word for “high intensity short-term music camps.” Making music is a central part of the experience. It’s not about the teachers, it’s about the kids and the music.

And Ottawa was really about the kids and the music, from start to finish. On Thursday, when Carleton University conferred a Doctor Honoris Causa on Maestro Abreu, the ceremony included performances from a contingent of children from the Leading Note Foundation. On Friday, the members of the visiting Simón Bolívar String Quartet spent close to two hours coaching chamber music ensembles at the University of Ottawa, then following a short break, two hours at the dress rehearsal with the children of Orkidstra in preparation for the big performance.

Why is my daughter on the screen behind me? Don't you wish you'd been there now?

Saturday morning and early afternoon was devoted to the symposium. I forbear to comment on the relative merits or success of my contribution, but I started the morning with an exploration of the reason Sistema pedagogically is so in tune with our brains, and why social transformation can only be effected through music, rather than other arts or sport…or knitting. Noemi Weis followed with a screening of her film Teaching the Life of Music, a documentary on Sistema that should be on the media shelf of every organization of similar mission in North America. Although it focuses largely on Canadian programs, and notwithstanding the excellent narrative structure and content, the film is less than an hour and thus is extremely suitable for advocacy events, or public screenings and discussion sessions.

OrKidstra co-founders Tina Fedeski and Margaret Tobolowska finished the morning with a presentation of their extremely fine work in Ottawa, and recruited the audience into executing the “Leading Notes,” ten rhythmic reminders of the children’s social and musical responsibilities. After the break, Richard Hallam outlined the combination of political will, relentless effort, circumstance – and at times, plain dumb luck – that helped propel music education to the fore in Britain. This was followed by one of the most functional and pragmatic panels I’ve heard, moderated by Mr. Hallam, in which representatives from the school boards and the local Member of the Legislative Assemble of Ontario Yasir Naqvi candidly discussed the situation concerning music education within the public school system. Mr. Naqvi stuck to the party line concerning the prioritization of literacy and numeracy, but did not respond to my question as to why of the two symbol systems universally adopted (neither of which is the Roman alphabet) only one was apparently important.

And then, of course, there was the performance, in which the Simón Bolívar String Quartet joined forces with the children of Orkidstra in a magnificent celebration of youth and music. The concert was extraordinary not just for the mixed program, which included baroque, romantic, folk, Canadian indigenous and Canadian contemporary music, but for the extraordinary standard of playing and the commitment of all the musicians, inspired by the incredible physicality of the Venezuelans.

There would be another performance of the SBSQ alone the following day, presented by the Ottawa Chamber Music Society, but I would be on a flight back to Boston. I console myself by saying that I saw the more important event.

 

March might have come in like a lamb, after the mildest winter Boston (my place of residence) has seen in decades, but it’s going out like a lion thanks to the Leading Note Foundation Symposium on Social Change through Music in Ottawa this weekend.

If you haven’t registered, there’s still time. Information is available through the website above, and the full Symposium agenda is now available, as well as the official press release describing the weekend’s events. I have the pleasure and privilege of leading off on Saturday morning, and having been up until 7am the last two days writing my talk, and being assured of doing the same for the next three days refining and rehearsing it, I can say with some certainty that I’ll be doing something quite different. Those who have heard past keynotes know that I’ve taken the approach of deconstructing el Sistema, or framing it in the context of what I call the “Western European Pedagogical Tradition,” unkindly abbreviated as WEPT. On Saturday morning I’m going to attempt to assemble Sistema in the broader context of all education. This isn’t quite the academic equivalent of ten somersets undertaken on solid ground, but having been some days in preparation, a splendid time is guaranteed for all.

Or double your money back.

You are invited to join me and several other social-minded music people for dinner on Friday evening. I don’t know where and when just yet, but we convened similarly in Montréal after the Symposium in November, and it was really a very pleasant way to connect and have long, wandering conversations for which symposia breaks are entirely inadequate. Use the Connect form to get in touch if you’d like to join us. It might be 2 people, 3, it might be 10.

The Hendersons will all be there
Late of Pablo Fanque’s Fair, what a scene…

See you in Ottawa!

 

"Their names are ignorance and want." And they are siblings.

No one summed it up better than former Harvard President Derek Bok, when he said “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” The Alliance for Excellent Education projected the lost earnings of the students who dropped out of the Class of 2011 at $154 billion (thousand million) over their lifetimes. As stunning as that figure is, it represents only the direct cost to the non-graduates, not the costs to society in lost taxation dollars or the social assistance many of these individuals will require later in life. As it turns out, ignorance is very expensive, and for everyone.

It’s with this understanding that government invests in education. The deferred economic benefit created by an educated future generation doesn’t hurt, but the immediate advantage is the wealth and economic activity generated by parents able to return to work earlier, thanks to what is essentially socially-directed subsidized babysitting. (Ivan Illich’s assessment of education as a “false utility,” in terms of a direct employment engine, fails to account for this latter financial effect.) The same mindset drives state investment in post-secondary education too: the return is larger and is effected sooner.

So generally speaking, it’s never been a question of whether to invest, but how much. In the 1960s, the British government commissioned the economist Lionel Robbins to look closely at higher education in the nation and examine a host of issues, including funding. In his Robbins Report, a document that would become the basis of the post-secondary system in the UK today, Robbins recommended that the government continue to subsidize it, but in light of his estimation of inevitable cost increases, that students contribute up to 20% of the expense.

Don't ignore economists.

Robbins miscalculated. He anticipated fairly linear growth in the cost of education, but it was his student, William Baumol, who quantified the scope of the problem while looking in to the economics of the performing arts. Working on behalf of the National Endowment for the Arts in the late 60s, Baumol and his colleague Bowen realized that in any industry in which growth in productivity is minimal to negligible, costs would invariably increase faster than revenue. The classic example of this is a performance of a Beethoven string quartet: it takes just as long to play now (probably longer) than it did at the premiere, yet wages have gone up substantially in the intervening two centuries. (For a more detailed discussion of this, see my early series “Taking Beethoven to the Bank” here.) This problem, alternately called “income gap” or “cost disease,” can also be summarized as “contact with any human specialist is going to get more and more expensive,” hence ATMs, automated check in at airports, self check-out at the grocery store… and increased class size in schools. The three industries most susceptible to cost disease are the performing arts, health care (go figure), and education.

And the numbers bear this out. Total per-capita spending in the US on education in 1910 was $137.98, as corrected for inflation (barely $6 in actual spending). In 2012 that number is approximately $5,000, perhaps even $10,000, according to some sources.

Which leads to the ugly truth about educational finance. No one of any intelligence would argue against government funding for education – including music, but costs are increasing relentlessly and the purse is getting thinner and has competing demands upon it. Policy makers are faced with extremely difficult choices, and until education is viewed as the acquisition of multiple literacies for life-long learning rather than the timely regurgitation of factoids for standardized testing, music can’t compete in the educational sphere. We already have plenty of data stating that music is “good for you” (I’ve said that before)or that it increases test scores, but more time or more incentive money on math and reading increases test scores too. The “baseline advocacy argument” of Sistema’s intervention effect is just as easily an argument for the expansion of the school day – unless Sistema were something so different from school both structurally, philosophically and functionally -as it is in Venezuela- that reasonable comparison could not be made.