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Michael Gagliardo
In my last Green Paper post, I wrote about the cuts being made by the Culver County School System in Indiana. The cuts, which were radical to say the least, were designed to save the strings program in the Culver County Schools. They involved eliminating strings from instruments, having the school orchestras march at the halftime of football games, and having instrument repair work performed by state inmates in correctional facilities. Outrageous. But here’s the rub.
There is no Culver County, Indiana. There is no town of Ford Creek. Paul LaCosta, Bud Parker, and Beth Ann Pederson are fictional characters. The entire press release was a work of fiction.
If you read “The Onion,” you probably caught on pretty quickly. For a music major who briefly entertained a side career in both journalism and creative writing, I was fairly pleased with my work. But as a scientist, my little experiment fell flat.
You see, the entire goal of that blog post was to get people to respond. It was meant to be written in such as way that it would be shocking, but still believable. After all, we’ve heard of some strange things that school systems have done to save money. So why not? My hope was that string teachers, and for that matter arts educators and arts professionals of all types, would read this and have no choice but to respond.
Maybe I went too far over the top and made it too unbelievable. But the only response I received, the only comment posted, was from an old college friend of mine who I urged to read the post via my Facebook page. Disappointing. But I did learn something.
The Green Papers are designed to create a dialogue. But you can’t have a dialogue when only one person is doing the talking. So maybe it’s time for those of us who are in these types of positions – positions of leadership or administration – to stop talking and start listening.
This project cannot work with just the Green Paper Ambassadors writing blog posts and hoping someone is reading them. So this is my challenge to you, dear reader. Tell me what my next blog post should be about. Of course, we have to keep things in context – it needs to refer to the ASTA Green Paper on the Future of Strings. But pick any element, and tell me what you want to hear about, or better yet, what you want to discuss. That is the goal of this project – discussion. Communication. Thoughtful conversation about the future of our art.
So let’s hear from you, readers. I’m listening.
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I would like to hear more discussion about persuading school systems and communities to recognize the foundational importance of classical music and cultivating a lifelong appreciation, not just the marching band-during-the-school-years mentality.
Hey Mike!! I figured I would chime in on the conversation.
I agree with Denise – I look back and think “Wow, if it wasn’t for those crazy middle and high school teachers playing that music during my core classes, I would have never been introduced to the classic musicians out there! I was never in a marching band, and the school systems and communities need to develop more creative ways of bringing the classical music into our system without having to force the marching band on each kid (plus, there isn’t enough room on the marching band for each kid!)
The music teachers already in the system need to get creative with promoting music education in the classroom where “music” is not the primary focus. I had a teacher who used the element song to teach us all the elements of the periodic table – that same teacher also used the alphabet melody to teach us the Greek alphabet …. almost 15 years later, I still remember both as if it were yesterday!! If the music teachers give core=class instructors ideas on how to integrate music, could this help?? What would need to happen for that to happen??
Discussion please.
Thanks!!