Imagine that you were not allowed to speak unless you were quoting Socrates, Cicero, Aristotle, Winston Churchill, Lincoln, etc., not even “Please pass the salt” unless you were quoting. Imagine that you were an English major but were not allowed to write any of your own thoughts, no essays, not even an email; you could only copy down quotes from Twain, Dickens, Faulkner, Joyce, Cervantes, Goethe, Wilde, etc . Imagine that you went to art school but were never trained or encouraged to do anything but reproduce famous paintings, never, never paint or sculpt anything that you thought up, ever. Just copy Picasso, Renoir, Degas, Ingres, Leonardo – keep your vision out of it. Imagine if you went to music school and never played anything but the notes of some distant (and likely deceased) composer, never received encouragement or training to make your own music…
Oh, wait. That is, in fact, how it is in music school. No creating. Just recreating. Nothing wrong with re-creating. But leaving out creation leaves out half of musical life, and, truth be told, more than half of the fun of making music.
Any garage band worth its salt composes its own songs. Why is it that a terminal-degreed music student can’t write a convincing piece for their own instrument? Can I see a show of hands of those who suspect that something – something important – is missing from the current system of music education?
