Music Education for Global Peace
Could Quality Teaching of Music Promote the World’s Social Health?
With quality teachers and more weight in every school curriculum, music education could be a great tool for community building. It could even facilitate global peace.
Celebrating Musical Communities is the theme of the 2007 National Conference of the Australian Society of Music Education. Teaching music well and passionately could be a powerful but neglected way of building communities and making world peace. Although the idea is not new it should be examined with much more determination and coordination across the globe.
Music education to facilitate community building
The surge in popularity of “world music” as a genre raises hopes of bridging cultures and national borders. Intuitively some have said that music is the “universal language”. Maybe those arguing the negative case are thinking of it more as a listening experience rather than the activity of music-makers. When musicians from different cultures seriously play or sing together divisions disappear. Now current scientific research suggests strongly that humans developed the first music principally as a social binding agent.
Perhaps we should give more attention to how music – especially vocal music – can counteract the alienating factors in contemporary society. Music can be a means of initiating and sustaining human relationships, as with the lullaby shared by individuals like a parent and infant. It can work among larger groups: the school hymn and the national anthem are just two common examples. Why not aspire to global music pieces in which no single cultural tradition is allowed to dominate?
Critical appreciation essential
At the same time, people need to be aware of the origin, nature and purpose of the music they are hearing or making. They need to make judgements of the music lest they become the pawns of manipulators in pursuit of power or wealth. Consider advertising jingles for cigarettes and junk-food, or Richard Wagner’s great operatic works which Hitler used to draw the masses. Music teachers are often only too familiar with the type of school principal or community leader who gives whole-hearted support to the choir or band only when there is a chance to impress visiting dignitaries or to get some extra publicity through the local television or paper.
We must eradicate this sort of thinking by showing parents and our professional colleagues in other curricular areas that music-making and music appreciation are at least as essential to the development of children as literacy, mathematics and science. Music must be a major component in every school curriculum. Then perhaps electoral pressure will convince our representatives in government to give far more support to music education. An outstanding Australian example of this sort of effort was the Music – Play for Life campaign in Australia and the associated National Review of Music Education in Schools.
Music to make world peace?
Educators should help people, whatever their abilities, to make music in everyday life. If people could more readily participate in live music from their own and other cultures there would be far less division of humanity. We need to promote much more cross-cultural musical touring. But such programs must not be in the hands of governments and high authorities, who tend to use them as a means of diplomacy and self-promotion. The tours should be run from the grass-roots – by schools, educators, local arts bodies and the like – with some facilitation by government.
The emphasis should be on musical education rather than just concert performance: help the audiences to know and understand the instruments and the contexts in which the music developed; encourage them to join in the singing; teach them to handle and learn to play the instruments.
We should indeed, like the ASME National Conference, celebrate musical communities. More than that, let’s work to expand and link them across the world!
