Combatting the Pipeline Issue in Music with Art
After reevaluating my goals for my Creative Engagement project in “Media, Movements, & Community Engagement,” I decided to shift to a more focused approach to fighting for equity in music. Rather than using a niche community experience to combat a major issue, such as diversity in the music industry, I decided to make my project focus on making music education more accessible. This idea stems from the long-term fight to combat the pipeline issue that exists in music. This pipeline issue leads to wealthy individuals being the successful majority in the music industry.
One clear example of this epidemic is LaGuardia High School. This school is NYC’s only selective performing arts high school. According to Anna Fondiller’s case study of the school for Barnard University, LaGuardia “fails to reflect the general racial makeup of the city at large… Certain K-12 public schools consistently send students to La Guardia, while others never do. In later graphics, it is apparent that this trend linked to the fact that the schools sending few to no students to La Guardia are those which lack art and music programs, lack funding and contain more students in racial and ethnic minorities.”
After elementary school, music education usually becomes optional, or extracurricular. This makes music less accessible to students who don’t have the opportunity to dedicate time after school to music. Many students have to work and support their families. According to The Hechinger Report, “Students from districts serving a mostly low-income community are still less likely to have music offered at their school than students in wealthier communities.” There are proven benefits to music education access. The Children’s Music Workshop shares, “Schools with music programs have an estimated 90.2% graduation rate and 93.9% attendance rate compared to schools without music education, which average 72.9% graduation and 84.9% attendance. Schools that have music programs have an attendance rate of 93.3% compared to 84.9% in schools without music programs.” This issue is proven at the college level, and beyond into the industry.
My Creative Engagement project is specifically centered around the New Brunswick community, with an interactive music mural located at Lincoln Elementary School, located at 50 Bartlett Street in New Brunswick, NJ. There is an open wall on the side of the school directly facing the basketball courts. This would be a great spot to create an interactive, colorful, music art installation, for the New Brunswick youth. My goal in creating this project is to bring life to how these children view music. Rather than using a forced curriculum or sound, the project would be free and allow the children to experiment with music as they please. This was a priority to me, due to the majority of students coming from families where they may be listening to music from their cultures, rather than mainstream popular music. I wanted to make a project that encouraged creativity and experimentation in an easily accessible place. The creative intervention of this project is to intervene the lack of resources and accessibility to music for these students by creating a surplus of events and access to programs/funds.
I believe some great stakeholders for this specific project are the music students and music-focused organizations at Rutgers University, along with the New Brunswick Jazz Project. Firstly, the students studying and participating in music have resources and time that could be shared to put on free events to work with these New Brunswick children. Specifically, the New Brunswick Jazz Project has “successfully fostered a supportive environment for regular live jazz performance in New Brunswick and has presented more than 700 events featuring over 1000 acclaimed national and international jazz leaders, sidemen, and special guests.” The non-profit already regularly partners with the New Brunswick Public Schools putting on “after-school enrichment programming in the form of jazz performances with student participation and talkbacks.”
I had hopes of speaking with Mason Gross School of the Arts students and faculty to learn more about the school’s music education curriculum. However, the Rutgers strike made it impossible to meet with these individuals, so I looked into the program via the Mason Gross site. According to the music education program homepage, “Practicums in local schools are included in the program.”
Combatting this pipeline issue has no clear solution — it’s a complex issue with many factors only allowing for a select group of (usually) wealthy people to find success. However, I believe that putting funds and resources into lower-income, diverse communities will promote potential greater diversity and inclusivity in the industry.
