Arts education in higher education

The pattern of declining arts education from Kindergarten through college in U.S.A. educational settings is easily documented and has had a clear outcome - indifference to the arts in many people's lives. The pattern in many other countries around the world is very different. Arts education, and particularly music, in many Asian countries is still a prominent part of family life and children's learning discipline, poise, and a variety of other things. The outcome in other countries is that concert halls and art galleries are publicly supported and attendance is still abundant and multi-generational.

Music, in particular, has proven to be related to a variety of gains in cognitive functioning over the lifespan. Sherman and Plies in their "Every Brain Needs Music" assert that musician's brains function differently than non-musicians, with highly developed integration and a language that surpasses that of human verbalization as we know it. This potential is what Nietzsche wrote that "Without music, life would be a mistake." Indeed, the glories of the human voice result in so many benefits to those who sing and those who listen.

Steve Mintz' essay on the decline of the arts in the U.S.A. raises the specter that perhaps we (meaning Americans) are becoming Philistines who "deprecate the arts, who favor kitsch over more demanding art forms and who fail, to a disturbing degree, to patronize the arts and artists." Mintz notes The Music Man subtext of people yearning for something beyond their mundane existence as evidence of the need to support the arts. In another essay, Mintz commented, "At a moment when so many of our students are suffering from anxiety and stress, let's also recognize that engagement with the arts is an invaluable way to process anxiety and trauma and confront fears, insecurities and conflicts." Art - visual, music, literature, architecture - all aspire to something greater, whether it is social change or simply the lifting up of the human spirit. This view of the elevation of the human spirit through arts drove the Medici family of Florence during the Renaissance and, more recently, drove the Rockefeller family in the 20th century to collect and protect the greatest art treasures we have today.

An irony at a time when fear of world war has been sparked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and when popular culture now crossed the line with a live telecast of an assault by Will Smith against Chris Rock, is that one piece of music is being used in many places to celebrate brotherhood and striving for a better world - Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. And it's prescient that this masterpiece was composed almost 200 years ago at this very time with its first performance on May 7, 1824, in Vienna. Beethoven was iconoclastic to say the least and that's why his music is often viewed as difficult for mere mortals to understand. However, the 9th, the first time a chorus would be introduced in symphonic form, is unarguable and easily understood - "Joy! Joy! Brothers, you should run your race. Like a hero going to victory."

We need aspiration and lifting up and there's no better way than through the arts. Enough sad from a lifetime avocational musician.