Keynote Speech: Creative Arts Conference 2022
Good morning everyone. I’m so happy to be here virtually all the way from the UK! Thank you to Rustenberg Girls’ Junior School, Schoolscape and the Western Cape Education Department for inviting me to speak today.
Music educators like ourselves are obviously heavily invested in the idea that music is a vital component of every child’s education. We know that it can improve wellbeing, social and emotional skills, and encourage academic progress. The most zealous of us even suggest that children could be taught nothing but music and still come out at the other end ready for life in the real world.
However, for all that is said about ‘the power of music’, during a global pandemic of nightmarish proportions, music was powerless to save us. There were millions of deaths, the global economy tanked, unemployment skyrocketed, and a mental health crisis developed, and music did absolutely nothing to prevent any of that.
As educators, indeed as humans, none of us would make the choice to give a hungry child a violin lesson rather than a food parcel. In an ideal world we would never be faced with this decision, but thanks to the pandemic, education like all other sectors has been in survival mode, and music has not factored in the life-saving decisions that schools had to make every day during the peak of the crisis.
The point that I am getting at is that for all that we - myself included - as musicians and teachers bang on about the essential purpose of music, about the vital importance of music entitlement for all children, we do perhaps need to take a reality check. In a global pandemic, priorities shift and we have to acknowledge that words like ‘essential’ quite rightly return to their dictionary definitions.
I’m not saying that there wasn’t a place for music in our pandemic response. For keeping spirits up, for fighting boredom in lockdown, for stimulating our brains, for building a sense of community, for helping us focus on something positive for a change, for giving us some sense of normality, music was an important tool. But given the choice between an oboe and the vaccine, I’ll take the vaccine thank you very much!
As we leave the pandemic behind, we enter a healing and recovery phase. And this is where music absolutely comes into its own. Now that we are less about imminent threat to life, and more about catching up on what we’ve lost, music returns to its place as an essential component of our education, and indeed our health system. We know that there is a mental health crisis - particularly amongst young people - that if not caused by has certainly been exacerbated by the pandemic, and we also know that music is a powerful complementary therapy to encourage mental wellness.
First and foremost, music-making activities give young people an opportunity to express their feelings. Due to school closures and social distancing measures, many of our young people are feeling isolated, lonely, and some are presenting with anxiety disorder and depression. Activities such as song-writing allow our young people to safely express their feelings through an artificial barrier - instead of it being ‘this is how I feel’ it becomes ‘this is a song about how someone might feel’ - making it easier to offload and deal with these feelings.
Music gives us opportunities for quiet reflection. Maybe we aren’t ready to share our feelings just yet, maybe we don’t know what our feelings are, but listening to music can give us the space to just sit, and think, and be, with no pressure from the outside world. For those with anxiety, the calming power of music cannot be understated.
Participating in music is a ‘flow activity’. This type of activity is one where you become so absorbed in what you’re doing that the outside world practically ceases to exist. Psychologists and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy practitioners have long championed the benefits of flow activities for mental wellbeing and happiness, and in a world of constant interruptions, giving your full attention to a musical activity can provide this state of flow.
What our young people, and indeed all of us have lacked over the course of the pandemic, is human interaction. This has made them feel lonely and isolated, but has also impacted their social and communication skills! Music provides a fantastic opportunity for interaction, and in particular in the case of extra-curricular activities and community groups, interaction across age ranges, allowing our young people to rebuild their communication skills and connect with likeminded others. It can give them somewhere to belong, and a community to be part of, ensuring that they have somewhere to turn if they ever feel lonely or isolated again.
And finally, unfortunately for those of us who prefer donuts to running, physical activity is crucial for our mental wellness. Music and movement activities can provide an opportunity to engage in physical activity for those children who might self-identify as ‘unsporty’ and give a much needed boost to their mental wellbeing.
Recovery from the pandemic is not all about mental health, there is academic recovery to consider also. This may well be why many countries are now focusing more on ‘core’ subjects and skills, and in some cases music is being squeezed out of the curriculum. This is a completely understandable decision, you can see exactly where it is coming from, but it is not necessarily the right way to help our young people catch-up on what they have missed!
Music has been shown to support the development of critical evaluation skills, thinking, reasoning and decision-making skills, and to have an impact on the imagination, how children explore the world around them, and express themselves. In an age of automation, where computers are being used to replace humans in every possible job function, our young people will need these skills to make them employable. Why focus only on learning methods and facts and figures needed for job functions that computers have already mastered? After all, as yet computers are not able to think creatively! And long may that remain the case or the future will start to look extremely frightening!
There are many studies that have ‘proven’ a link between music and academic achievement, although it is only responsible of me to state that there are an almost equal number of studies stating the opposite! Whether music is directly responsible for improved performance in subjects like maths and languages or not, what is clear is that any music lesson could be used to support maths or literacy learning, so we don’t have to cancel music for more maths or language lessons! After all, musicians count the beat, the western staff notation system of rhythmic notation is based on fractions, and when we are singing we almost always use words!
Collaboration is a vital skill for the workplace, and participation in group musical activities can give children the opportunity to develop their leadership and team-working skills through learning to communicate with and be understanding of one another. The focus in music is almost always on working as a team, any ensemble, even a soloist and accompanist, will fall apart without team working and communication, so the study of this subject provides important soft skills for future success.
As we discovered earlier, music can be a great support for mental wellness, but it can also help us develop the social, emotional and spiritual skills to perhaps lessen the risk of developing mental health issues in the first place. Exploring music, particularly through listening, helps us to develop our understanding of the world around us, feeding into our personal morals and philosophy, and helping us to control and recognise emotions which in turn will help us to form secure relationships. This gives our young people a strong foundation to be able to deal with everything that life throws at them.
So music can support development in various ways, and this will be helpful as schools try to help pupils catch up with the skills and knowledge lost to the disruption of the last few years. But fundamentally, music is also an important subject in its own right, one which was quite difficult to keep going during the pandemic due to challenges such as safety regulations for in-person learning, and technological challenges for online learning. If we are trying to catch up on what we have lost then music should surely be one of the subjects at the front of the queue?!
As we have seen today, music has value to support a whole range of other academic subjects, and to support mental wellness, however I would now urge a word of caution. The more we justify music in terms of what it can do to support other subjects, the more we relegate it to a subsidiary function. We lose the importance of music in its own right – and this is a dangerous situation to be in! If music is just there to support the development of other skills, then pretty soon (maybe even already!) those in charge will be asking ‘well why don’t we just deal with those skills directly’ instead of indirectly through music, and music will disappear from our schools completely.
In the UK, there has recently been a strong backlash against advocating for music through highlighting its external benefits for this very reason. Even our schools inspectorate, Ofsted, has stated that studying music helps you get better at music, and that in itself is a good enough reason to study it, regardless of any other perceived benefits. We need to remember that music was one of the first subjects to be included in education, that it was (and still is) highly prized as an accomplishment for the great and the good in society. Music is an essential part of humanity – all of us have music inside of us, which is deeply connected to our feelings, emotions, and sense of self. We should study music because it teaches us what it is to be human.
As educators, we are always learning, and therefore even the pandemic has provided food for thought. We know now that however important music is in ordinary times, there will be times when it has to take a back seat over more pressing priorities. The key is to make sure that music only makes way in times of dire need, and that it is the first thing to come back, at the earliest opportunity. We may have learned to live without it for a while, but our lives were all the poorer for it. The enrichment music can bring to our mental, physical and educational wellbeing is worth fighting for.
If you want to continue this discussion with me on twitter, you can find me @DrLizStafford. Music Education Solutions can be found @musicedsolution and Primary Music Magazine @primarymusicmag. Until then, thank you.
