Editorial: What is music education for?

Abstract

One of the privileges of being an academic is being able to attend international conferences. Now that the world is returning to some sort of normality following COVID and lockdowns, these are increasingly happening in-person. What this means is that it is not just in the presentations that we get to meet and talk to people from countries other than our own, but especially in the coffee breaks and food opportunities that are vital aspects of such gatherings. What can be a common feeling at these events is to talk to people whose everyday lived experiences of music education can be so far from our own as to be almost unrecognisable. Take the case of the USA and the UK. In the USA, as far as we can understand it, the music education system at what they call ‘high school’ is predicated on what Butler and Wright (2020, p. 100) referred to as the ‘ : : : triumvirate of wind band, choir, and orchestra, the omniscient conductor/pedagogue, and the associated Western Art music repertoire’. This is a long way away from the English National Curriculum (DfE [Department for Education], 2013), founded as it is on the three main musical components of composing, performing and listening, and taken by all children (in schools that are obliged to follow the National Curriculum) up until the age of 14 years old. From talking to American academic colleagues, it would seem to be the case that success in US terms is often measured by how many trophies the performing ensemble can display in the trophy cabinet. In England, success in music education is not measured by collections of silverware but by how well pupils do in public examinations. Comparing the USA and UK in this way is not meant to be judgemental, it is done simply to show very obvious and possibly surface-level differences. Similar comments could probably be made about any two given music education systems the world over. But what happens when you start do dig a little deeper, and ask difficult questions about what music education is for in various different jurisdictions? We know that learning to play an instrument and/or sing is a major component of music education internationally, but scratch this surface and ask another question – ‘why’? This becomes much harder to answer. When we add what we might term generalist classroom music education into this mix, the issue is compound further still. This gives rise to the very important question ‘why are children learning music?’ In England currently, there are national funding debates taking place concerning elite musical performing ensembles, as the fundholder, Arts Council England (ACE), is faced with the inevitable problem of not having enough money to go round. Consequently, ACE is having to make difficult redistributive monetary decisions, which those faced with a reduction in their central funding obviously see as being cuts. Likewise, the national broadcaster, the BBC, encountering the same problems, is considering scrapping its centrally funded choir, one of the few such professional outfits in the country. Such decisions are met with cries of concern in the media, and people then move, almost in a single bound, to talking about the role that music education has to play in this. Listening to some of the arguments put forward it might be thought that the whole purpose of music education is to provide an audience for existing (mostly western classical, it seems) ensembles to sell more tickets, or to put ‘bums on seats’, as is said in the vernacular. This seems problematic. Is the purpose of physical education and sport in schools to provide an audience for major and minor sporting fixtures, is that the main reason why children and young people study the subject in school? What about active participation? This could be seen to be another example of where vested interests cannot see beyond their own immediacy of