Why Music Education Matters (to me and to the world)
I’ve played violin nearly all my life. I was four when my parents got me started playing violin at the Fairfield Fiddle Farm in rural Wisconsin.
We moved around quite a bit when I was growing up, and my parents made sure I had access to violin, either through school orchestra or through lessons or some other way. Through school, playing violin was my means of fitting in and my escape from a tough crowd in the lunch room. I’m sure it helped me succeed academically, too. Through some of these moves I needed support — either lessons or an instrument or money to go on the orchestra tour. People, mostly music teachers and former teachers, stepped up and helped me.
Much later (in 2014), I had given birth to my daughter and had finished an apprenticeship as a luthier, which I did on nights and weekends after my day job doing marketing at a public television station.
I was very much looking for my next step, when I read an article about an organization that made sure students had musical instruments. And they were about to launch this platform to help people donate their once-loved but no longer used musical instruments. And they were looking for a leader — an executive director. This was a record scratch moment for me. I got up from my desk, left the office, and took a walk to think it through. I took over for the founder and launched Instruments in the Cloud in early 2015.
In Minnesota, nearly 40% of K-12 students attending public schools qualify for free or reduced lunch. In the U.S., just over 50% qualify. After years of budget cuts to arts education programming, it is very unlikely that a teacher has an instrument on hand to lend to a student who can’t afford to rent or purchase one, and the expectation has been reset in most programs that students are expected to provide their own instruments in order to participate.
Schools say they provide instrumental music to students, but by the program’s design and by resource constraints, they’re really only offering it as an option to half of students — the half who can afford to participate. This is an issue of social equity, and is especially troubling given the immense benefits that studying music can have on a student’s academic journey (also given the power of creating art for art’s own sake).
Given my experience, this social inequity bothers me deeply. I’m thankful that I have been able to examine and wrestle this problem in my role, and I do get intrinsic joy in working to solve it.
I continue to play violin today with my daughter, who is now trying out violin (she did her first kids open mic last week, and I am absolutely beside myself with pride. Go on, ask me about it.)
