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What Can Music Give — Your
Thoughts?
by Barb Tilsen
Over the past few years, The Children's Music Network (CMN)
has been exploring relevant questions about the impact of music
in children's lives. The connecting threads in these
conversations raise important themes that we invite you to
explore in this first edition of e-PIO!. This editorial
space will be a place to hear what you think in answer to these
questions. In the coming months, we'll post people's responses. Please
share your thoughts! We invite members of CMN and non-members as
well to contribute.
Pete Seeger has spoken in our CMN conferences about how
"We used to be a singing nation." Children grew up in
homes whose living rooms had upright pianos, at schools where
they regularly sang in classrooms, and in lively community
celebrations where people made music together. The role that
songs played in the development of community and in the
promotion of positive social skills was profound. Bob Blue has
noted that in almost every other culture, singing, dancing, and
playing instruments is part of work, family, school, and
recreation. What happened here? In the last fifty years, our
society has moved away from music-making that is interwoven
throughout community life. Television, movies and recordings
have all served to erode a once-central tradition of communal
singing. Some of the conversations at our gatherings and on our
CMN member e-mail list have been devoted to this trend in our
culture toward passive listeners rather than active singers and
the impact of new technologies and the corporate music scene.
Through the CMN e-mail list and especially in Steven Schuch's
great article "Reflections on the Nature of Arts and
Education" which appears here in e-PIO!, we have had
dialogues about the character of our educational system and the
positive impact the arts in general and music in particular have
on learning. We've voiced serious concerns about the cutbacks in
our schools, the impact that the predominance of testing and the
No Child Left Behind policy have had on children and on the arts
in the schools. We've talked about what children need to be
learning now in this coming age of world violence and scarcity,
with more and more of our world resources at stake, exploited by
corporate powers. At one of our CMN conferences a few years ago,
folklorist Bess Lomax Hawes spoke eloquently about how children
learn songs that they hold inside in their own "song
bag." These songs are there ready as a balm and as a tool
for dealing with powerful and emotional moments when children
need them later on.
These reflections lead to other important questions. What is
music uniquely able to give children that helps equip them to
face the future? What does it give us as a community? What are
we losing as a nation when we stop singing together? What skills
and what ways of thinking and problem-solving are at stake? How
can we help children prepare and learn skills about cooperation
and sharing, problem-solving as a group, thinking with the
collective good in mind? What can music contribute more readily
and effectively than anything else?
Please send your thoughts to office@cmnonline.org.
We will select all or parts of responses received and post them
in this current issue of e-PIO!
Back
to e-PIO! 2004
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