Convergence

I have just gotten back from a road trip through five midwestern states looking at colleges with my son. He's 18 and wants to find a college or university that will provide an education that supports and cultivates his interest in becoming a composer.

This can be seen as an affirmation of my own calling to become a composer until you understand a little more about his interests and how they significantly diverge from my path. He has always been someone interested in invention and creative work and so it does not come as a surprise to me that composing/song-writing are attractive channels of expression. What marks him as a different generation is his complete embrace of popular music.

Back in the olden days, an interest in composition was fired by the likes of composers like Mozart and Beethoven and if you were really hip, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. If you were an egghead, you might get excited by Shostakovich or even Stockhausen.

My son's library of songs on iTunes includes works by all of these composers but his definition of a composer blows the wheels off of mine when I was his age. He embraces Rhymesayers and the Atmosphere crowd that live down the boulevard from our house, he embraces traditional Persian and Balinese gamelan music, and all the things that a teenager might find at LimeWire or iTunes. His musical practice is actually (as opposed to virtually) Catholic. There is no stylistic filter.

What I have observed, however, is that musical literacy is given the same weight as the aural tradition. Improvisation is equal to (and possibly even more important) than performance of notated music. This Catholic acceptance of all traditions and styles has altered the expectation he has for what kind of education he wants. And that expectation is not being met by his prospective colleges/universities with the same degree of passion or openness.

And I can understand the position of institutions. They are trying to keep up but must measure their reaction to students' demands against their responsibility to educate their students fully in the foundation concepts that hold our culture and country together. In other words, institutions must evolve incrementally and not take radical, revolutionary steps forward without first considering the threats, opportunities, costs, and benefits of change.

Students don't have that luxury. They have four years (or five) in college and then they will move on to whatever comes next -- grad school or work or travel or a change of direction. And music is moving fast right now. It has been accelerating for at least 15-20 years. That increasing tempo is being driven by technology.

And this is where the theme of this little essay comes from: convergence. We normally think of convergence as describing a phenomena of the uniting of media functions into a single platform or hardware device. The iPhone is held up as the epitome of this convergence: a phone, a camera, a video camera, a web browser, a gaming device, a computer with email access, a television, a movie screen. All in one device.

Students today experience this kind of convergence everyday and have come to anticipate -- and more importantly expect -- their life experience to be one series of convergences after another.

As I have learned from teaching a class in music business at the University of St. Thomas, students see themselves as customers and they believe that they can demand - and get - value and convenience. If not, they turn away.

I think that there are a few colleges/universities who are engaging in this new expectation and some who seem to have thrown up their hands in frustration or confusion. In music composition, the schools that we visited on this last road trip fall into these two categories with most folks trying desperately to keep up with their students.

But music composition education is still moving too slowly. Is any school ready to think about improvisation as a true equal to notated music? What would that mean in the organization of music theory and ear-training classes?

Is any school ready to educate if Brother Ali is equal in importance to Ludwig Spohr? And if this is possible, do we need to think of music composition education as a collaborative or inter-media art form since the next generation of composers will need to know how to create lyrics/poetry, create computer animations or make music videos, create interactive games, create images for their merchandise?

Is convergence happening quickly enough in music education? I know, for my son, that schools that open themselves to the aspirations of students' creativity will become more and more attractive. Schools that offer professional training with a prescribed, defined job outcome are going to decline.

So - who is creating convergence in music education? My son wants to know.