Listen to This

by Alex Ross

  14

  LEARNING THE SCORE

  THE CRISIS IN MUSIC EDUCATION

  The first day I went out to Malcolm X Shabazz High School, in Newark, New Jersey, the corridors of the school were empty. When I told the guard at the entrance that I had an appointment to see Hassan Ralph Williams, the director of the Malcolm X Shabazz marching band, I was informed that the teachers and students were “at the memorial.” The memorial was for Dawud Roberts, a sixteen-year-old Shabazz football player, who, a few days before, on February 9, 2005, had suffered a fatal stab wound on Johnson Avenue, a few hundred feet from the school. Some students enjoy Williams’s class, which meets for three hours every afternoon, because they love playing music; others see it more pragmatically, as a way to get through the day unscathed.

  A tall, suave, mellow-voiced man with a mustache and a gleaming shaved pate, Williams is a native of Ozark, Alabama. He served in the army for twenty-one years, leading marching bands in the 82nd Airborne Division and in the 25th Infantry. He then played jazz in New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere with musicians such as Walter Bishop, Jr., and Woody Shaw. He got into teaching almost by accident, looking for work that would keep him busy between gigs. According to Donald Gatling, a longtime teacher at Shabazz, the school had a lackluster band when Williams arrived, in 1988. Now the Malcolm X Shabazz marching band is considered one of the better ones in the state, in demand for its pealing brass, explosive drum line, and manic energy.

  The band room is decorated with the faces of jazz masters. Duke Ellington holds the place of honor, above the center of the blackboard. There are also placards stating the virtues of discipline, decorum, respect, and attention. One of them says, “The future belongs to those who prepare for it.” A corner of the blackboard is posted with some student essays on the topic of Mozart’s Requiem. “Mozart died while trying to complete this piece about Death,” one student wrote. “How ironic.” In front of the blackboard are five computers, each equipped with the Sibelius composing program and various tools for teaching notation. Williams encourages the students to learn musical notation at the computer, and to write their own music.

  When I walked in, the Shabazz band was rehearsing John Philip Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever. The kids were making a happy noise, but details were getting lost. “Listen downward,” Williams kept saying, trying to get the upper lines in sync with the lower ones. He wanted the players to bring out Sousa’s dance rhythms, such as the habanera, and the songful, Italianate shape of his melodies. “A long time ago, before electricity and TV and radio, people used to dance to this,” Williams said. Two clarinetists responded by jumping out of their seats and dancing around, half gleefully and half sardonically.

  Members of the Shabazz band, who range in age from eight to eighteen, work hard. They not only practice from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. each school day but also play most weekends, either at football games or at public events. In the summer, they go on the road to band camp. Williams does more than beat time; he teaches music history, social history, and black history. (Ninety-five percent of Shabazz students are African-American.) Sometimes he interrupts his usual attitude of jazz cool with a military bark. “This ain’t gonna roll,” he might roar when there is too much noise in the room. “This isn’t happening. You may look around and see a chair coming at your head!” But the drill-sergeant routines last only a few minutes, and the kids aren’t afraid to talk back. If Williams asks, “Who’s got the melody?” a girl might answer, “You do!” If he drops the name Wynton Marsalis, a few might shout out, “Who dat?” (They know.)

  Later in the rehearsal, the piccolo players were struggling with the twirling solos that accompany Sousa’s most famous tune, the one to which the words “Three cheers for the red-white-and-blue” are sung, or, as Williams prefers to render it, “Be kind to our four-legged friends.” Jihad Moore, a tall junior with a crooked smile who wore a blue-and-white basketball jersey with the number 24, was amusing himself by making an imaginary pistol out of his piccolo, holding one end of it with his thumb and gesturing toward the floor, gangsta-style. Williams was trying to get him to concentrate. He’d been telling Jihad that if he got to a certain level with the flute, or mastered a more unusual instrument like the oboe, he might be able to get into college on a scholarship. He sat Jihad next to another player, Kahliah Jordan, and had both students type their parts into the computers, using the Sibelius software. He figured that it would help them grasp the parts and memorize them.

  “Put a trill on that first A-flat,” he said, leaning over their shoulders.

  Jihad frowned at his part and asked, “Do we have to write grandioso?”

  “No, skip the grandiose”

  Williams offered a new incentive. “I’ll take y’all to the International Buffet if you get this solo. Just the piccolos, at the International Buffet. But only if you all get it. If you all get this, we can wipe out any band on the planet.”

  “I’ll wipe out any piccolo players,” Jihad answered enthusiastically.

  The standout player in the band was a senior named Vernon Jones. A slender young man with bright eyes and wide cheekbones, Vernon was getting a brilliant singing sound out of his trumpet—which Williams had bought for him—and, whenever the others took breaks, he kept working away at tricky leaps and rapid runs. He was also a composer, and wrote music and made arrangements on the computers. Like many bands, Shabazz spices up its repertory with Top 40 songs, and Williams often relied on Vernon to find suitable songs and make idiomatic arrangements. Vernon needed only thirty minutes to knock out an arrangement of “I Believe I Can Fly”—a pungent, slightly weird orchestration, amped up by drums and brass, dense with jazzy harmonies. Vernon had been in Williams’s band since he was seven; he had been accepted at Rutgers, and his acceptance letter was taped to the blackboard.

  Toward the end of the rehearsal, Williams stepped back and listened with his arms folded. He asked another of the trumpet players, a round-faced, wide-eyed eight-year-old named Keyshawn Mayo, to take over. Earlier in the day, Keyshawn had been offended that he had been demoted to a secondary part. “I can play first trumpet,” he said. “I’m the best person my age.” Now his face lit up, and he ran to the front. His small voice filled the room as he snapped his fingers: “And a five! And a six! And a seven and an eight!”

  When President George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, in 2002, he probably did not intend it to have a debilitating effect on arts education in the United States. The law rewards schools that meet certain testing standards in core subjects—reading, math, the sciences—and punishes those that fall short. By 2006, 71 percent of school districts had narrowed their elementary-school curricula in order to make up the difference, and the arts had repeatedly been deemed expendable. In California, between 1999 and 2004, the number of students enrolled in music courses fell by nearly half, from 1.1 million to 589,000. Music education had been disappearing from schools for decades, but No Child Left Behind transformed a slow decline into a precipitate fall.

  Advocates have issued studies, pamphlets, and talking points that marshal alarming statistics on the diminishment of music programs and argue passionately for their preservation. But there is something maddeningly vague at the heart of the literature. Why must music be taught? The answer seems obvious in the case of Vernon Jones: he’s a natural musician, and, for him, the Shabazz band is the first step in what may turn out to be a major classical or jazz career. For most students, though, the usefulness of music class is much less clear. Anyone who has loved music from an early age feels certain that it has a unique and irreplaceable value, but it is difficult to translate that conviction into hard sociological data. Whenever advocates try to build a case for music on utilitarian grounds, they run up against fundamental uncertainties about the ultimate purpose of an art whose appeal is, as Plato anxiously observed, illogical and irrational.

  The Mozart Effect has often been cited by proponents of music in schools. In 1993, researchers c
laimed that a group of thirty-six undergraduates who had been subjected to ten minutes of Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos performed better than average on the abstract-and-spatial-reasoning section of the IQ test. Subsequent studies failed to reproduce this result. Nonetheless, the Mozart Effect inspired several books, a ream of newspaper articles, the pseudo-educational Baby Mozart video, and a shadowy-sounding organization called the Music Intelligence Neural Development Institute. People love the idea that they might be able to make their kids smarter by switching on Mozart once a day; it’s seen as a shortcut to Parents’ Weekend at Harvard. But kids aren’t likely to fall in love with music that is administered to them like vitamins.

  Other studies suggest that music students score higher on proficiency tests, or that their math grades go up with each year of study, or that they are less likely to get in trouble with the law. But none of this pro-music science has stemmed the cuts in music programs. To the contrary, music invariably presents itself as the most tempting target. In California, the decline in visual-arts courses was minimal compared with that of music classes, and enrollments in theater and dance went up. According to the advocacy group Music for All, which in 2004 issued a dire report on the California crisis called “The Sound of Silence,” music programs “represented single, relatively significant, politically expedient targets for cuts.”

  Part of the problem is that American music education has largely evolved out of classical-music culture, whose standoffish mentality long ago became self-defeating. Another problem is that music education lacks a powerful lobby. When politicians speak up for it, striking things happen. When Mike Huckabee was governor of Arkansas, he not only professed a love for music, as Bill Clinton often did, but devised legislation to bolster it. In 2005, Huckabee signed a law requiring every child in grades one through six to receive at least forty minutes a week of instruction in music and other arts. “In the true spirit of No Child Left Behind,” Huckabee explained, “leaving the arts out is beyond neglect and is virtual abuse of a child.”

  Although Huckabee has had a few imitators—in 2006, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced a plan to rescue music and arts education in California—the national outlook remains grim. Public funding for anything related to the arts has been contentious since the 1880s, when the progressive patron Jeannette Thurber failed to persuade Congress to fund a national conservatory. For practitioners of classical music, jazz, folk music, and other tradition-minded disciplines that lack mainstream commercial appeal, the situation looks particularly bleak. How can they engage listeners who have heard almost nothing about the history and practice of the art in school? One alternative has increasingly become the norm: they can do the teaching themselves.

  Around the same time I started going out to Malcolm X Shabazz in Newark, I met up in Brooklyn with a twenty-seven-year-old pianist named Soheil Nasseri, who had been visiting school assemblies around the city in an effort to incite interest in classical music. Nasseri’s trick was to start the session by talking about hip-hop. At Fort Hamilton School in Bay Ridge, he caught the attention of the crowd by mentioning that he was a friend of the impresario Damon Dash, whose name drew respectful nods. Nasseri then invited a student named Jovan Parish onstage, gave him a hip-hop handshake, and had him rap over some minor-key piano chords. (There was a line about “my vocabulary skills are ill.”) It was up to the children to decide what this had to do with Beethoven’s Sonata in F-sharp, which Nasseri played next. Afterward, students offered a string of questions about Beethoven and the piano: “What do you do when you make mistakes?” “What’s the name of the piece that goes ‘buh-buh-buh-BUH’?” “Why don’t you compose yourself?” “When you play someone else’s music, aren’t you stealing?”

  These days, virtually every orchestra, opera house, chamber-music series, and jazz organization has an education department. Musicians are sent into schools to teach the basics and, in theory, to encourage an interest that will survive the rigors of adolescence, in the course of which any kid with a liking for classical music discovers that it’s considered stuffy, sissified, and terminally uncool. The effectiveness of “outreach” depends on the charisma of the person reaching out. Nasseri certainly has a knack for talking to kids. So, too, does David Robertson, the conductor of the St. Louis Symphony, whose guileless manner recalls the style of the late, great Fred Rogers. Michael Tilson Thomas, at the San Francisco Symphony, is a natural teacher, stirring memories of his longtime mentor, Leonard Bernstein.

  Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, has a similar gift for discussing music in a sophisticated yet unaffected way. One day I watched Marsalis take command of an unruly crowd of schoolkids at the Apollo Theatre, in Harlem. He launched into a lecture on connections between jazz and modern art, the thesis of which was that jazz was a form of modernism, and he backed it up with pictures, performances, and a never-ending stream of talk. He dropped the names Jackson Pollock and Piet Mondrian, gave a shout-out to Frank Gehry, and supplied a lovely definition of the word “cosmopolitan” (“It means you fit in wherever you go”). He administered discipline (“I’m old school—no talking”), explained the blues as a kind of emotional vaccination (“The blues gives you a little to keep it away”), and interrupted an explication of the African practice of call-and-response to acknowledge a sneeze (“Bless you—call-and-response!”). One of the teachers in the audience said to a colleague, “They ain’t gettin’ it. I couldn’t appreciate this when I was their age.” But, on the subway afterward, there was a positive buzz among the kids. One quoted a Marsalis aphorism to his friend: “You gotta have heat in everything you do.”

  Many orchestra administrators cling to the idea that a smattering of Young People’s Concerts will indoctrinate children into the wonders of classical music. Sarah Johnson, when she was running education programs at the Philadelphia Orchestra, became skeptical of that approach. “Many people say, ‘Wow, we can bring twenty-six hundred students into the hall,’ and feel like it’s a great thing,” Johnson told me. “This may have worked in the age of Bernstein, when classical musicians were celebrities on radio and early television. Today, those kids need to meet the musicians, find out how they got into music, what else they do when they’re not playing. It has to be more up close and one-on-one. People have this picture of musicians as not quite human. We need to humanize them. We want to get to the point where we are cultural partners at certain schools, practically giving them a new music-faculty member.”

  The writer and consultant Joseph Horowitz, the author of Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall, has long urged orchestras to reinvent themselves as miniature conservatories and cultural centers. With orchestras such as the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the New Jersey Symphony, and the Pacific Symphony, Horowitz has devised cross-disciplinary festivals that can be translated into curricula for area schools. “The orchestra should be, first and foremost, an educational institution,” Horowitz told me. “It should know how to explain to an audience what the art means and where it came from. Orchestras can feed the humanities programs at high schools. You can do Mozart and have the drama department put on Amadeus. You can do Dvorak and get American-history classes and African-American studies involved. Dvoák is the greatest gift, because there is no better way to link American and European musical traditions.”

  Not every orchestra is prepared to undertake such an approach. When Horowitz was working with the New Jersey Symphony, he made contact with Hassan Williams and the students of Malcolm X Shabazz. He invited them to events at the hall and visited the school with members of the orchestra. (It was Horowitz who suggested that I observe Williams’s class.) On the occasion of a New Jersey Sibelius festival, Vernon Jones was inspired to write a Sibelius-like piece for band. Unfortunately, the initiative met resistance from a member of the administration, who did not enjoy having the students on the premises. One day, when they left the hall, he was heard to say, “Never again.” That man is no longer with the orchestra, but his s
pirit persists at more than one classical institution.

  On Westminster Street, in the West End section of Providence, Rhode Island, there are diners, corner markets, auto-repair stores, and, at number 1392, the Providence String Quartet. People often do a double take at the surreal sight of a chamber group playing Beethoven behind a storefront in a lower-income neighborhood. Although the quartet performs at colleges and museums, its main mission is to teach. It is the heart of a nonprofit organization, Community MusicWorks, which does more than bring music to young people; it is an authentically revolutionary outfit in which the distinction between performing and teaching disappears.

  The core members of Community MusicWorks, which was founded in 1997, are Jesse Holstein and Jessie Montgomery, violinists; Sebastian Ruth, violist; and Sara Stalnaker, cellist. They were trained for conventional careers at Juilliard, Oberlin, and Brown University, but they chose a different definition of success. Ruth, a man with an elegant face and a mellifluous voice, is their ringleader. He grew up in Ithaca, the son of two ex-hippie parents, who sent him to the Alternative Community School. Instead of going to a conservatory, he went to Brown and studied the philosophy of education. He read the work of Paulo Freire, the author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and Maxine Greene, who wrote Releasing the Imagination. Greene has argued that arts education can be not only a leisure pursuit or subculture for gifted children but an instigator of social change. Ruth decided to put these ideas into practice, by playing in a group that was part of the street life of a city.