Welcome to Music In Our Schools Month

This March marks 30 years of Music In Our Schools Month (MIOSM). In 1973, the celebration began as a single statewide celebration. It grew to a day, then a week, then in 1985, it became a month-long celebration of school music. According to the National Association for Music Education's (NAfME) website, "the purpose of MIOSM is to raise awareness of the importance of music education for all children - and to remind citizens that schools is where all children should have access to music."

To begin our month of MIOSM blog posts, I'd like to share excerpts of Karl Paulnack's 2004 welcome speech to the freshman class of the Boston Conservatory. You can find the full text here: https://www.bostonconservatory.edu/music/karl-paulnack-welcome-address.

One of the first cultures to articulate how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you: the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. 

Paulnack goes on to share two examples of music's hidden power. One example is French composer Olivier Messiaen's piece Quartet for the End of Time, which he wrote in 1940 while imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp in Nazi Germany.

...in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning."

Paulnack's next example is from his personal experience of living in Manhattan in September of 2001. The morning after the terrorist attacks, he sat down at his piano to practice as he normally did, but couldn't bring himself to do it. He wasn't sure if he ever wanted to play again - in the gravity of the situation, it seemed "silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless."

And then I observed how we got through the day. At least in my neighborhood, we didn't shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn't play cards to pass the time, we didn't watch TV, we didn't shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, on the very evening of September 11th, was singing. People sang. People sang around firehouses, people sang "We Shall Overcome." Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on.

From those two experiences, Paulnack shared what they helped him understand.

...music is not part of "arts and entertainment" as the newspaper section would have us believe. It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pastime. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can't with our minds. 

Paulnack goes on with a couple more example pieces, including Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings and Aaron Copland's Sonata. He shares beautiful stories of heart-wrenching music. Finally, he tells the parents of the music students what he'll tell their children.

You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a musician isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used cars. I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government, a military force, or a corporation. ... If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives. 

As a music educator, my goal for my students is to help them enjoy and appreciate music, no matter where they end up in life. I want them to have something to turn to when they have no words, when they want to express themselves, when they want to make or partake in something beautiful.