When Pete Seeger, musician, activist and humanist, died in January, it gave me pause for thought about what I had learned in 1963 from Pete about the importance of music.
As a wannabe jazz guitar player and a confirmed musical snob, I had little interest in folk music or any kind of music except cool “modern” jazz.
Shakespeare was still the prince of imaginative and expressive thought, but Miles Davis was the king.
At the urging of a girl I was trying to impress, I went to hear an American folkie she’d heard about.
It was Pete Seeger, and he gave a solo recital that changed my understanding of the “what” and the “why” of music forever.
Pete introduced a song “by a new young songwriter that some of us are beginning to notice,” and sang, accompanied only by his growling unsophisticated 12-string guitar, Bob Dylan’s Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.
As a student majoring in literature, I couldn’t believe the power of this unadorned performance and what the song meant when Pete sang it.
When Pete sang Goodnight Irene and invited us to sing the chorus with him, we sang from our hearts and I began to understand that music was not just something that other people did, but an important part of all of us.
In many cultures, music is deeply embedded in the experience of daily life, yet our culture, reflected in our system of education, tends to regard it as a kind of add-on to how we live. Music is classed as entertainment, rather than part of who we are.
Music in schools, especially secondary schools, is an elective, a supplementary choice rather than an integral part of our history, our literature, even our mathematics.
That’s too bad, because there is an emerging body of research about the effect music has on brain development and learning, well beyond music itself.
Researchers in Hamilton, Ohio, documented that students participating in a strings program scored higher on the reading, mathematics and citizenship portions of the Ohio Proficiency Test than their non-music peers.
In 2001, a national report, “Profile of College Bound [high school] Seniors,” found that the SAT scores of students who took part in music instruction surpassed students with no music training.
There are many plausible alternative explanations. Children willing to practise an instrument daily might also persevere longer than their peers on problem solving. Greater ability to memorize historical facts or spelling-bee words may be facilitated by retention of rhythms, melodies and chord progressions.
Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly, better known for his musical notes used as hand signals that communicated between earthlings and extra-terrestrial beings in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, expressed strong philosophical convictions about music that have more recently been supported by empirical research.
Kodaly criticized the idea of an educational framework that emphasizes mental and physical development while neglecting musical development. This, he proposed, would result in the development of a two-dimensional society, saying: “There is no complete man without music.”
Edwin E. Gordon of the University of South Carolina, an influential researcher, teacher, author, editor and lecturer in the field of music education, agrees. He proposed that music-learning theory definitely provokes higher-level thinking — never a bad thing when it comes to learning.
Even so, other experts disagree about whether learning to play an instrument and taking music lessons positively affects overall academic performance.
What researchers, in this case researchers at Harvard’s Laboratory for Developmental Studies, do agree about is that music education should be an integral part of children’s lives, not just for the musical knowledge, skills and appreciation it imparts, but for the cultural knowledge it conveys and, above all, the joy it brings.
Maybe that’s what music’s legacy for the ages should be: not just something entertainers do, but a joyful, life-enriching, brain-expanding, participatory experience.
At least, that’s what I learned from Pete Seeger in 1963.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
