A Deeper-Hearted Case
For Music Education
Colleen A. Q. Sears
The College of New Jersey
colleen.sears@tcnj.edu
T
he United States is grappling
with massive changes in education, including Common
Core implementation, assessment testing,
and new teacher evaluation and certification models. These shifts have yielded some
interesting posts on my social media newsfeeds:
“Mother Obliterates Common Core in 4
Minutes”
“Common Core Is Killing Common
Sense”
“How Common Core Destroys Minds
and Souls”
Battle terminology often appears in the
public responses to changes in education.
Extreme rhetoric aside, the challenges facing teachers are real and significant. For music teachers, policy shifts have created a need
to defend the role of the arts in schools. Music education is increasingly justified by its
correlation to career success in articles such
as “Why Music? The Boardroom Case for
Music Education” and “Is Music the Key to
Success?”1 By engaging in constant resisting
and defending, we risk losing the core of
what we do as music educators and why we
do it. What if we were to pause and consider
two questions: What is at the heart of music teaching? In the end, what is significant
about what we do?
On my first day of teaching at the College of New Jersey, I was uncertain about
how to begin my “Contemporary Issues in
Music Education” class that would meet
later that day. To calm my restlessness
on my drive to work, I cued up National
Public Radio’s Radiolab broadcast about
outer space.2 One guest was Ann Druyan,
creative director for the Voyager Interstellar Message Project of 1977, the initiative
responsible for the audio content on two
gold records that are aboard the Voyager
Spacecraft, currently traveling through in-
terstellar space. According to Druyan, the
record contains the sounds of “a kiss, a
mother’s first words to her newborn baby,
Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, greetings in fiftynine most populous human languages and
one nonhuman language, the greetings of
the humpback whales.”3 The record also includes compressed sounds of Ann Druyan’s
brain waves, heartbeat, eye movement, and
nervous-system impulses. As the sounds of
her body faded, host Jad Abumrad said,
“Billions of years from now, our sun will
have reduced our planet to a charred, ashy
ball, but that record with Ann Druyan’s
brain waves and heartbeat on it will still
be out there somewhere intact, in some remote region of the Milky Way, preserving a
murmur of an ancient civilization that once
flourished on a distant planet.”4 A charred
Earth, a pristine golden record—humanity captured in sounds moving through the
universe long after we are gone. Imagine
that our students are like these golden records. What lasts when they leave? How will
they remember their time with us?
I think of what has lasted for me—the
imprints of music education on my own
golden record: the looks on the faces of my
band students after a brilliant performance
of a piece they never thought they could
play; a letter from a parent of a child with
Tourette’s syndrome saying that he relaxes
in my class because he feels safe and supported; a boy described by his peers as “the
worst kid in the school” who enjoyed playing the guitar in my general music class; the
students in my “Contemporary Issues in
Music Education” course who listened to a
portion of Radiolab’s “Space” broadcast that
first day and engaged in a profound discussion about the purpose of music education.
Some of the grooves in my golden record are deeper than others. The deepest
ones belong to my little brother, Andrew
TEMPO 54
Quinn. I was eleven when he was born. I
remember how warm and heavy he felt as
I rocked him to sleep while singing “This
Old Man.” We swayed in each other’s arms,
and I rested my chin on his head as we sang
our special song: “Andrew Pandrew Mandrew.” At age 4, he chanted the opening of
my Les Miserables marching band show. His
sweet voice played on my college answering
machine when he was in third grade and
I was a freshman music education major.
“Hi Colleenie. I have a question about the
Flutophone.” I beamed with pride when
he performed in the New Jersey All-State
Band. We shared recordings of Eric Whitacre’s music and danced like kids to Chuck
Mangione’s “Land of Make Believe” and
Herb Alpert’s “Spanish Flea.”5 We played
flute and saxophone duets together. I attended his concerts with Cornell University’s Symphonic Band. We still sang “Andrew Pandrew Mandrew,” but now he was
the one resting his chin on my head.
In March 2013, Andrew was killed at
age 22 in a hit-and-run accident in New
York City. Nearly one thousand people attended his wake, including nearly every
music teacher he ever had. A recording
of Andrew performing on the saxophone
OCTOBER 2016