In selecting a headline for this entry, I opted for the Lebrechtian approach: lead with a salacious statement intended solely to generate clicks, with no regard for the truth, let alone any form of nuance.
At least I’m honest about it.
Don’t fault me for my hyperbole. My statement is no more an exaggeration than the false hype over the benefits of music, it just sits on the other end of the spectrum. We can agree that music “works.” It just depends on what it meant by “music” of course, and what is meant by “works.” And in those devilish details lie both the truth and nuance that are absent from the header as much from the common rhetoric and practice of music education.
There’s a study circulating in the APA journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (thank you to Geoff Baker for alerting me and others to its publication) which purports to show that El Sistema-style/inspired music interventions at three separate US-based programs had no discernable impact on participating children in terms of their executive functioning, their self-perception or even in their affinity for school itself. That the programs wished to remain anonymous in the published document is unsurprising; identification would likely cause a serious loss of public confidence.
There’s little scope to question the science or method behind the study: the article appears comprehensively researched, well-written and persuasive. (Peer review is not infallible, but it represents a measure of quality control and oversight both of ethics and investigative methodology in scientific journals.) There is one detail in the description of process that could be either trivial or significant: some ambiguity within the text on which party, the researchers or the programs, was responsible for selecting the outcomes to be measured. The opacity here might well be a shield. The study outcomes are only a condemnation of the programs if the programs were claiming to deliver the specific benefit, in the same way research pronouncing that acetaminophen (Tylenol) is not an effective anti-malarial is no criticism, if the manufacturer only marketed the drug for headache relief.
But it’s not too difficult for those with a knowledge of this sector to make educated guesses as to which programs were studied, on the basis of geography and other descriptors within the text. Some of those programs do make claims about their impact on executive functioning and self-perception, if not explicitly in scientific terms, then in the stock, saccharine self-validating rhetoric endemic to music. One program, under an extremely pretentious, scientific-sounding agency name, even publishes a guidance document that is as light on real substance and heavy on dressing as one might expect a self-justifying word salad to be.
And this, more so than the rare (and frankly, laudable) published study that acknowledges the null hypothesis (the absence of any measurable effect) is the real problem: Sistema programs; non-Sistema music education programs; youth orchestras and choirs; bands; and professional orchestras, all with budgets from the hundreds to the millions of dollars, all clinging to exaggerated, misrepresented or even outright false claims of social and/or cognitive benefits to justify their continued existence. Proclaiming the benefits of music as universal and unconditional is akin to the blanket statement that radiation cures disease. And radiation does cure disease – in very precise applications, under clinical, highly measured and targeted dosages, and only for very specific forms of illness. But apply the logic and PR spin of the music industry to medicine, and you’d come to the conclusion that those living in the shadow of Chernobyl Reactor No. 4 should be the healthiest people on earth.
They’re not, for the record.
This isn’t a Sistema problem. It’s not a US problem. It is a global professional and educational music sector problem, and the study authors highlight it inadvertently in a very read-worthy preamble dissecting deficiencies in prior much-trumpeted studies of the extrinsic benefits of music making. Blind adherence to tradition, blind belief in the merits of music, has precluded the exploration of the actual mechanics of socio-musical action. The industry approach instead has been to take a page from the Orwellian publicity playbook and rechristen its activities in diametric opposition to their actual functions: a conductor demanding obedience on the podium is now “team building and collaboration”; delivering written music on the page in conformity with instructions and the remainder of the ensemble is relabelled “learning creativity and passion.” Even the study authors fall into this trap to a degree, in a brief but revealing suggestion that Executive Functioning in music is analagous to submission and orthodoxy. Is it a hidden curriculum if they’re not even bothering to hide it anymore?
Music works. Tylenol works. Radiation works. But just as Tylenol is not an antimalarial and radiation is not a panacea, there are boundaries to what music can accomplish, dependent heavily on how it is delivered. But until the sector is willing to challenge longstanding assumptions as to its own merits and to accept the very real possibility its current interventions have little to no impact, nothing will change.
Jonathan Andrew Govias 