A school budget is not a spreadsheet. It is a system. Music educators who learn how that system works are best positioned to serve their students.

That was the through-line of the Music IS Education Coalition’s October 1 webinar on school budget cycles. Hosted by Anne Fennell of Music for All and Mark Despotakis of the Pennsylvania Music Educators Association, the session featured two leaders who work inside district budgets every day:

• Christopher Moseley, Education Specialist for Performing Arts at Henrico County Public Schools (Richmond, Virginia) and Program Leaders Council Chair for NAfME

• Dr. Dori Martin-Pitone, Elementary Humanities and K–12 Student Supports, Lower Merion School District (Pennsylvania), and a longtime federal programs coordinator

As Chris put it, his job is learning “how to make a school system work for my students.” Here is what he and Dori shared. None of it requires being a finance expert, only getting curious about how decisions actually get made.

Five lessons from inside the system

Chris was clear up front: he is not a CFO or a purchasing director. He is a performing arts administrator whose desk collects budgets, instruments, repairs, uniforms, facilities, technology, and contracts. Every district differs, so his goal was to hand you the right questions to ask about yours.

1. Timeline is everything

Decisions about next year’s budget may be happening right now. In Henrico, fall enrollment data informs the following year’s staffing, resources, and equipment. The fiscal year may start July 1, but if you want new marching band uniforms on students by the next season, sizing, design, approvals, vendor lead times, and shipping must start long before. The date the money becomes available is not the date planning should begin.

Questions worth answering now:

• When does my principal begin planning the school budget, and when are requests due?

• What enrollment or participation data are decision-makers looking at?

• When is the last day to place purchase orders?

• Does unused money carry over, or is it swept away?

Administrators should consider building an annual budget calendar — when data is pulled, when requests go out, when inventory is evaluated, and when funds must be obligated. And use the quieter months to review inventory and listen to teachers. “If you wait until the problem is urgent, you’re often already late.”

2. Don’t just divide it — prioritize it

Split $250,000 evenly across 21 secondary schools and each gets roughly $12,000. Everyone got something, but did anyone’s problem get solved? That won’t replace a set of aging instruments or fix a theater lighting system. Equal slices can feel fair while guaranteeing that large needs never get addressed.

Chris strongly believes in cyclical replacement plans: know your inventory’s age and condition, what’s due now, what’s next, and what can wait. Then layer in equity. Two orchestra programs may each have 100 students, but if one relies heavily on school-owned instruments, its repair burden is far higher. A per-pupil formula would treat them the same. Equal does not always mean equitable.

The data that should drive priority: inventory condition, number of school-loaned instruments, participation, equipment age, safety, projected growth, and replacement history. The goal is to avoid budgets driven by the squeakiest wheel and to explain why a priority rose to the top.

3. Budget literacy is relationship literacy

When theater joined Chris’s portfolio, his most important new relationship was facilities leadership. The same goes for whoever manages Title IV-A in your district, purchasing (who enforce thresholds, cooperative contracts and approved vendors) and, above all, your principal, who may hold significant site-based discretion.

Don’t get hung up on job titles. Map the functions instead: who controls school-level funds, manages contracts, understands federal funding, approves technology, owns facilities — and who can tell you the real deadline.

“Sometimes advocacy is simply knowing who to call before you need to call them.”

4. Be ready — opportunity moves faster than a committee meeting

“If I call you and say, ‘I have $5,000, can you use it?’ I need you to be able to answer before I close the business day.” Chris has 74 other places that money could go.

Keep a living needs list, not a once-a-year wish list, but a prioritized spreadsheet with items, approximate costs, vendors, and links to recent quotes. Know what you would do with $500, $5,000 and $50,000; those should be different requests. And learn your local purchasing rules before the opportunity arrives: thresholds, contracted vendors and “approved equal” substitutions.

5. Let them see the investment

Henrico pairs a student performance with every school board meeting. When a high school drumline was scheduled to perform, Chris advised wearing the new uniforms the division had purchased a year or two earlier — heat and all. Board members got to see students performing at a high level in the very resources they helped fund.

That is not a sales pitch; it is stewardship of public money. Visibility can be a board performance, a program report, a newsletter, photos, data or an invitation for the principal to walk through rehearsal. The cycle Chris described:

1. Identify a real need

2. Make a strong request

3. Receive the investment

4. Create student impact

5. Make the impact visible

6. Build trust — and talk honestly about the next priority

“Budget advocacy should not begin when you are afraid that you’re going to lose something. It should happen all year long.”

Braiding federal funds with your district budget

Dori grew up in a socioeconomically challenged community where every kid played an instrument — she started on a rubber practice pad, waiting for the day she’d get a real snare drum. Music gave her a way to shine beyond the other academics, and it nurtured the other academics too. That whole-child lens shapes how she approaches funding.

Her core message: district budgets and federal Title funds are separate buckets that work best in tandem. Use each for what it does well.

Know the calendar

• October: gather quotes and build next year’s plan. Find out whether your department is up on the curriculum adoption cycle — that’s when the larger dollars flow.

• January-March: formal board approval of the district budget in many districts, depending on the state. Check with your district to see when the budget is first presented for discussion, which is usually a month or two before formal approval

• January–May: get on the federal programs coordinator’s radar; needs assessments for next year’s applications typically happen by May.

• End of year: business offices often reallocate unspent funds. Have a ready answer when they ask, “Can anyone use this?”

This year’s federal grants are already written and obligated. Everything you plan now is for next year. In regular budgets, unspent money looks like money you didn’t need, and it may not come back.

Frame every request around three goals

Federal funding wants to see you expand access, improve quality, and increase student participation. Be clear on your why. Write SMART goals, because federal programs require a needs assessment up front and an impact report at the end. Participation, surveys, engagement, and behavioral data all count.

Two more rules: federal funds must supplement, not supplant what the district would normally buy for everyone. And make the grant writer’s job easy by handing them a complete plan.

What each Title can support

Title

What it can fund for music

Title I(schoolwide programs)

Music as a schoolwide academic, attendance or engagement strategy — the plan must show how it improves outcomes for students most at risk

Title II

Professional learning, coaching, conferences, books, paid curriculum-writing time, bringing in a consultant

Title III

Language access supports and family engagement for eligible English learners

Title IV-A

Well-rounded education: adaptive and classroom instruments, composition tools, culturally responsive repertoire, guest artists, community partnerships, field experiences, after-school or summer music labs

One caution: some districts transfer Title IV and Title II funds into Title I, which restricts how they can be used. Ask whether your district keeps Title IV-A separate. Dori also advises funding equipment from the regular budget where possible, since federal equipment rules carry heavy policy requirements, then use federal funds for what students do with that equipment.

Plan for sustainability

Before asking, know your district policies, especially board-approval thresholds for equipment and contracted services. Build a preliminary budget with a Plan A and a Plan B, including hidden costs like staff hours to keep a building open. And show how the program will be sustained after federal start-up funds end, gradually moving costs into the regular budget.

“The more you can see how this can grow into something bigger that has an impact beyond just one instrument, the more buy-in and more funding you get.”

From the Q&A

How do you help faculty understand equity-based funding? Be transparent, Chris said. Share the real example: one school’s students own their instruments, another’s don’t. “Sure, I can give everybody $10,000, but nobody can get anything.”

What about a teacher’s passion project? Look for external partners first. The Henrico Education Foundation funds innovative, student-centered projects. One ensemble reframed its annual trip budget to commission a new piece, with students writing the lyrics.

Purchasing wants the cheapest trumpet. Now what? Use the “approved equal” language — and make sure you are the one approving the equal. Back it with repair data: if the slightly pricier model goes to the shop far less often, the district saves money. That only works if you track inventory and repairs. “How long does a copy machine last? They replace those.”

How can choral programs compete when band gets more funding? First compare what each actually needs. Chris has had success framing choral risers and platforms as a safety issue — missing back rails, finger-pinching hinges — which can open an operations funding stream instead of an instructional one. Dori added another model: a district-wide choir that pools resources across buildings.

Can textbook money fund music? Yes, through digital curriculum. Chris replaced outdated elementary materials containing culturally insensitive songs by reframing an $80,000 digital curriculum as about $1,500 per school, with access for every student in class and at home.

What should a request include beyond “I want this”? A need, Dori said, not just a want. A needs assessment can be as simple as “Elementary School A has a music library and School B doesn’t.” Come ready to explain the challenge, the solution and the budget — and why this need outranks others.

Take action

• Take the Arts Education Funding Survey for the 2025–26 school year, supported by Arts Education Alliance, by October 30. Your answers show how schools use these funding sources and strengthen the case for more.

• Ask Karl B, the coalition’s AI assistant at musiciseducation.org. Its curated, research-backed knowledge base now includes guidance on working with school boards — including how to write a letter to your board.

• Explore the new Monitoring School Budgets resources under Advocacy → Local Advocacy at musiciseducation.org. Here is the direct link to the PDF.

What’s next

The full webinar recording will be posted at musiciseducation.org, on YouTube, and in the video player below. Worth rewatching and sharing with colleagues.

Join us November 10 for our next Music IS Education webinar, featuring post-election analysis. Register here!

Music is education. Don’t wait for the cut. Be Proactive!

I’ve spent five decades telling anyone who would listen that arts education isn’t an extra. It belongs to what schools do, not to what schools do when there’s time and money left over. I’ve founded organizations, worked in policy rooms and classrooms, written, and testified. And in all that time, one thing I’ve always wanted more of is data. Solid, longitudinal, student-level data. The kind that lets us stop saying “we know this works” and start saying “here is exactly what we saw.”

Last spring, the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts asked our team at Quadrant Research to look. Rhode Island’s Department of Education (RIDE) had made student-level records available through the state’s Longitudinal Data System, eight years of them, covering school years 2017-2018 through 2024-2025. The question was straightforward: do Rhode Island students who take arts courses have lower chronic absenteeism than students who don’t?

The answer is more interesting than a simple yes.

This wasn’t our first look at the question. Quadrant ran a similar analysis in Virginia in 2024 and found that seniors with four years of arts instruction had chronic absenteeism rates roughly 34 percent lower than their peers. Rhode Island gave us a chance to extend that earlier work: more years of data, sustained-participation cohorts across three grade bands, discipline-specific analysis for music, and formal statistical controls for demographic and district-level differences.

Context

Chronic absenteeism, defined in Rhode Island as missing at least 10 percent of the school year (roughly 18 days), is not a small problem. About one in three Rhode Island seniors was chronically absent in the 2024-2025 school year. Missing that much school is associated with lower academic performance, higher dropout risk, and worse college and career outcomes. The pandemic drove these numbers sharply higher, and while Rhode Island has recovered somewhat, absenteeism sits well above where it was in 2018.

Every state I work with — and I work with 32 of them through the Arts Education Data Project — is asking the same question: what actually gets kids back to school?

What we found

Casual arts enrollment at the high school level doesn’t move the needle much. In recent years, Rhode Island high school students who took an arts course or two were chronically absent at roughly the same rate as students who took none. That surprised me at first. It shouldn’t have. One class in one year is not the same as sustained engagement.

What moved the needle was sustained participation across multiple years. And students who sustained music participation specifically told the strongest story of all.

Rhode Island seniors who took a music class in every year of high school, a cohort our report calls “Career Music” seniors, had chronic absenteeism rates 34.5 to 59.3 percent lower than their peers without sustained music participation. This wasn’t a one-year anomaly. It held in every senior class we studied, from 2021 through 2025. On average, Career Music seniors were chronically absent at rates 45 percent lower than their peers.

And it strengthens with dose. Look at the pattern:

• One year of any middle school music: 7 percent lower chronic absenteeism than peers

• Three consecutive years of middle school music: 23 percent lower

• Four consecutive years of high school music: 45 percent lower

• Seven consecutive years, from grade 6 through grade 12: 49 percent lower

That’s a monotonic dose-response pattern. The longer students stayed engaged, the larger the gap.

Who benefits most

Here’s the part that matters most to me. When we broke the sustained-arts cohort down by demographic subgroup, the largest chronic absenteeism advantages showed up in the groups facing the highest baseline rates: Black students, Hispanic students, and multiracial students. In the 2025 senior class, Black students who sustained four years of arts participation had chronic absenteeism rates 25 percent lower than their peers. For multiracial students, 19 percent lower.

These are the students most at risk of falling behind through absence. They are also the students for whom sustained arts participation shows the largest observed advantage.

That’s not something to shrug off.

What this proves — and what it doesn’t

I want to be careful here. This is a correlational study, not a randomized experiment. Students who choose to take music every year of high school are almost certainly different from students who don’t — in ways involving family support, prior academic engagement, motivation, school culture, and other factors we can’t fully see in the data.

We ran the numbers hard. We applied progressive statistical controls for what we could observe: demographics, year of study, and school district. The sustained-music finding survived those controls with only modest attenuation. The Career Arts finding at the senior level attenuates more substantially but remains statistically significant. The Career MS Arts finding — three consecutive years of middle school arts — doesn’t survive adjustment, which is worth pointing out clearly. Whatever advantage that group shows is fully explained by who is choosing to enroll and where they attend school, not by the participation itself.

We cannot claim causation from observational data. What we can say is this: across eight years of Rhode Island student-level records, the most consistent and adjustment-robust signal we found for lower chronic absenteeism was sustained arts participation, with music the strongest effect within it.

What this means

If you’re looking for a lever to pull on chronic absenteeism — and every state is — sustained arts participation warrants serious attention. Not as a magic solution, but as one component of a broader strategy that also includes family engagement, mental health supports, transportation, and everything else we already know matters.

What sustained arts participation offers that is somewhat different from other levers: it works over time, with the same students, at the schools they already attend. It doesn’t require a new program. It requires that the arts programs students are already in be protected and expanded, that opportunities exist across four years, not just one, and that access is equitable across every district and every community.

What comes next

Rhode Island is one state. Virginia is another. We’re already working on similar analyses in additional states through the Arts Education Data Project. Every additional state we bring into the data conversation strengthens what we can say about the pattern and where it does or doesn’t hold.

Here’s my ask. Arts education needs to be part of every state’s chronic absenteeism strategy. Not as an afterthought or an add-on. As one of the levers we know shows up in the data. If you sit on a school board, ask what sustained multi-year arts opportunities look like in your district: not just which arts courses exist, but whether students can string them together. If you’re a state education leader, ask whether your absenteeism plan includes protecting and growing arts programs. If you’re an advocate, a parent, or a foundation program officer, push for arts education to be treated as what it is: part of how schools keep kids showing up.

The finding here is not a magic solution. It is a signal, one of the most consistent I’ve seen, and it’s up to all of us to act on it.

The press release with quotes from the Governor, Commissioner of Education, and Executive Director of the Rhode Island Council on the Arts is available here

The full report, prepared for the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, is available here.

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Last Saturday at Kinnick Stadium, the Iowa State University Cyclone Marching Band did something rivals almost never do. Before their own performance, and hours before the Cy-Hawk game, Iowa’s oldest and fiercest rivalry, they performed “Alma Mater Iowa.” That is not the Cyclones’ alma mater. It is the other team’s. Small pins reading “DIFD,” meaning “Do It For Derek,” were pinned to their red-and-gold uniforms.

A few hundred miles to the west, the University of Nebraska Cornhusker Marching Band, a rival from a prior era, wore gold ribbons onto the field. In Kalamazoo, MI, the Western Michigan University Bronco Marching Band dedicated a post-game performance of “Amazing Grace” to a young man almost none of them had ever met. Bands in Indiana, Oregon, Wisconsin, Texas, California, and across the Big Ten and other conferences posted messages under that single hashtag. The University of Northern Iowa painted “DIFD” on their own faces before taking the field.

All of it for Derek Phillips, a third-year student and the mellophone section leader of the University of Iowa’s Hawkeye Marching Band, who collapsed from sudden cardiac arrest during the season-opening football game on September 5^th and died three days later.

Who Derek Was

Derek Phillips was, by every account, a serious musician. He studied business analytics and information systems at Iowa's Tippie College of Business, where he'd been inducted into the Business Honor Society, and he was a member of the horn studio in the School of Music. He had just come off what his family called “the absolute summer of his life” as a member of the Colts Drum and Bugle Corps and competing in the 2026 DCI World Championships this past August. He served on the executive team of the Intersection A Cappella group and led the mellophone section for the Hawkeye Marching Band, a position of real leadership inside one of the most demanding ensembles a college student can join. His obituary put it simply: he "poured his whole heart into his music and the people around him."

But when the Iowa Band took the field this past Saturday for the Cy-Hawk game, the moment that broke the stadium wasn't about how well he played. During "Rainbow Connection," the band's formation spelled out his name across the turf. The mellophone section performed a piece Derek wrote himself, folding his music into the tribute. And the Hawkeye Marching Band announced that the leader position of Derek’s H1 squad will remain empty for the rest of the season, held open in the drill design in his memory.

This is a decision an organization makes because someone was a good person and because the ensemble he belonged to recognized what it had lost.

The Response is the Argument

I have spent my career arguing a simple point that many of you will recognize: we do not teach music to create great musicians. We teach music to create great people.

And the proof of this claim is found in moments like this.

Watch or scroll through what happened this past Saturday. Iowa State set aside decades of institutional hostility to play the other schools’ alma mater at their own concert. Nebraska put ribbons on band members who never marched in a single rehearsal with Derek. Programs with no obligation to notice, no shared roster, no institutional tie beyond the fact that they, too, put students in uniforms and march them onto fields each weekend, noticed anyway. Hundreds of high school and collegiate bands and thousands upon thousands of students all responded with nearly identical messages that translate to this: Band is family.

That language is not a coincidence. It’s culture. And it is the specific culture that music education, particularly ensemble music education, builds on purpose, over years, in kids most of the country will never see perform. Rehearsal after rehearsal, students in marching band learn to subordinate ego to something shared. They learn to hold a formation for someone next to them who’s struggling. They learn that the group’s sound only works if everyone’s watching out for everyone else. Nobody calls that “character education” in the moment. It’s just Tuesday practice. But it IS character education, and this is what it produces when the cameras aren’t there to make it look good. It is a reflex toward inclusion and shared grief that cuts across rival programs, in real time, without anyone telling them to do it.

This Is What the Argument Looks Like When It’s True

I have made this case for years, often to school boards, political leaders, and budget committees who treat it as a nice sentiment rather than a description of what actually happens in a music room: we do not teach music to create great musicians. We teach music to create great people. Last weekend, that stopped being a talking point and became something you could watch happen live on national television.

This is not a coincidence, and it is certainly not a metaphor. Young people in music ensembles spend years training to subordinate ego to something shared, to understand that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The group is stronger when everyone works together toward a shared goal. That training does not stay inside the rehearsal hall or on the football field. It surfaced instantly and without instruction the moment one of our own was gone. Rival programs that share nothing but a weekend schedule reached for each other anyway. Because that is what is taught, learned, and, when faced with tragedy, demonstrated. Empathy, compassion, and the grief of losing one of our own.

Derek’s family gave the movement its name, “Do It For Derek.” But they could have just as easily called it what it actually is: proof. Proof that the thing music and arts educators have been arguing for decades is not an abstraction. It is measurable, visible, and last weekend it was spelled out in formation on that football field in Iowa City.

We don’t teach music to create great musicians. We teach music to create great people. Derek Phillips was both. And the response to his passing, from the students who knew him and from the thousands who didn’t but understood exactly what they’d lost anyway, is Exhibit A.

A GoFundMe campaign, “Support for Derek Phillips’ Loved Ones,” has been established to support his family. You may make a donation here.

Watch the complete half time performance below

Back to our regularly scheduled programming just in time for National Arts Education Week!

The start of a new school year is exactly the right time to think about advocacy — not crisis response, not damage control, but the steady, proactive work of building relationships and spreading the good news about what music education does for students.

That was the spirit of the Music IS Education Coalition’s September 10 webinar, titled Ready. Set. Go. Three presentations — one practical toolkit for teachers, one landmark research report, and one celebration from Washington State that arrived just hours before the session began — gave advocates a running start into the 2026–27 school year.

Spread the News: Denese Odegaard’s Year-Long Advocacy Calendar

Denese Odegaard — past president of NAfME and former advocacy committee chair for the American String Teachers Association — opened with a reframe that set the tone for everything that followed. She doesn’t call what she does advocacy. She calls it building everyday support.

The distinction matters. Advocacy, for many teachers, conjures images of emergency meetings, budget fights, and tense conversations with administrators. Odegaard’s approach is the opposite: structured, year-round communication that makes those conversations happen before they become confrontations.

Her centerpiece tool is the 36-Week Advocacy Calendar, one ready-to-use topic for every week of the school year, developed through her work with ASTA. Each week includes a 250-word description, a ready-to-post social media caption, and links to supporting sources. Topics range from the benefits of music education (Week 1) to music and teamwork (Week 2), emotional expression (Week 4), language learning, math skills, problem-solving, careers in music, equity and access, mental health, and a year-end celebration of successes (Week 36). The calendar is available at both astastrings.org and musiciseducation.org.

The practical genius of the calendar is that it removes the blank-page problem. A music teacher who doesn’t know what to post this week has a ready answer. A school communications director who needs content for the district newsletter gets a hand-off that requires zero additional effort. As Odegaard put it: give them the whole plan and say, “Here, every month pull this out and do this.”

Beyond the calendar, Odegaard offered three concrete priorities for the fall:

Form your coalition now before you need it. A network of parents, booster group members, community symphony musicians, music store staff, private lesson teachers, and local supporters who already know you and your program is an entirely different resource than a list of names you’re calling for the first time in a crisis. Odegaard shared how a coalition she helped build, coordinated through a shared Google Doc, flooded a school board with emails and phone calls when a fifth-grade orchestra program faced elimination. The volume of contacts was decisive.

Build relationships with the people who make decisions: school board members, administrators, local media, through consistent, low-stakes communication: invitations to concerts, notes of appreciation after a positive interaction, updates on student achievements. The goal is that when something does come up, you already have a relationship, not a stranger who has only heard from you in anger.

Document your data annually. Enrollment numbers, retention rates, number of performances, budget per course, staffing schedules, alumni outcomes, student and parent testimonials, assembled into a package you can pull when needed. A three-to-five-year plan built collaboratively with administration is worth far more than a single emergency request.

That last point deserves emphasis. When cuts do come, Odegaard is clear: lead with students. Administrators are moved by what children lose access to, not by what teachers lose in their schedules. Focus the conversation there.

The Case for Durable Skills: Mary Dell’Erba and the AEP Report

Mary Dell’Erba, Assistant Director of the Arts Education Partnership (AEP), brought new research that gives music advocates a powerful new language for the conversations Odegaard described.

In June 2026, AEP published Arts Education, Durable Skills and Workforce Success — a report that connects the outcomes of music and arts education directly to the skills that employers are actively seeking and that researchers predict will be most valuable as artificial intelligence reshapes the workforce.

Durable skills - creativity, communication, collaboration, problem-solving, empathy, resilience, and critical thinking - are the skills that inform how we use what we know and how we engage with others. They’ve been called soft skills, human skills, 21st-century skills. Dell’Erba prefers the term durable because it captures something essential: these skills have staying power, no matter how rapidly the world around them changes.

The data behind this framing is striking. An analysis of 76 million U.S. job postings in 2023–24 found that employers requested durable skills in 76% of positions, with nearly half asking for three or more. Researchers project that 39% of workers’ existing skills will be outdated by 2030. Meanwhile, the arts sector is growing: in 2023, the arts contributed $1.2 trillion to the U.S. economy - 4.2% of GDP - a 6.6% increase from the year before, more than twice the total economy's growth rate. The sector supported 5.4 million workers and $553.9 billion in total compensation. The U.S. Department of Labor classifies arts careers — including music therapists, choreographers, talent directors, and performers — as bright outlook careers.

The core of the AEP report is a crosswalk between the four anchor processes of the national arts standards - Creating, Performing/Presenting/Producing, Responding, and Connecting - and the durable skills those processes develop. The Creating process builds creativity, motivation, and problem-solving. Performing builds collaboration and communication. Responding builds resiliency and self-awareness. Connecting builds empathy and critical thinking. Each connection is mapped to concrete classroom examples.

Dell’Erba was direct about why the framework matters beyond music educators: when decisions negatively impact music education, they often don't come from opposition to music. Decision-makers simply don’t understand, or don’t have it top of mind. The AEP report gives advocates language that meets those decision makers where they already are — in conversations about workforce readiness, portrait-of-a-graduate frameworks, and competency-based learning.

AEP’s report identifies six policy levers that can help connect arts education to these broader priorities: portrait-of-a-graduate frameworks (already adopted in more than 20 states, with durable skills cited in 85% of them); competency-based and personalized learning; career-connected and applied learning; apprenticeship programs; flexibility in student pathways; and policy infrastructure that explicitly supports arts learning. Their ArtScan tool, updated for 2026 and available at aep-arts.org/artscan, provides a 50-state map of arts education policy across 13 categories.

One observation from Dell’Erba landed with particular force: “A lot of decision makers, they just don’t know what they don’t know if they don’t have a young person in their life, if they didn’t have a background in music themselves.” The data and the report exist to close that gap.

Breaking News: Washington State Retains Its Arts Graduation Requirement

Just hours before the webinar began, news came from Washington State: the State Board of Education had adopted revised graduation requirements that retain the arts requirement. The story behind the victory is a model for advocates everywhere.

Earlier this year, Washington’s SBE had discussed a proposal to reclassify arts, physical education, and career and technical education requirements as optional electives, framed as expanding student choice. Advocates across the state recognized the risk and responded immediately.

Between April and June, advocates submitted 1,245 pages of public comment. The word “arts” appeared nearly 6,000 times in that record. Inspire Washington’s action alert generated more than 2,000 arts-focused letters in June alone. Thirteen student leaders from the Washington Theatre Education Association submitted personalized videos. Six hundred and six students in 17 counties responded to an ArtsEd Washington survey. Arts for All, ArtsEd Washington, ArtsWA, the Washington Art Education Association, the Washington Music Educators Association, and Washington Thespians all organized community conversations.

And the Washington principals association made the case directly to the board: their surveys showed strong support for maintaining meaningful opportunities in the arts, and they expressed concern that arts and other electives could become casualties of a system intended to create student choice. School leaders, they said, want students to have pathways into careers, apprenticeships, and meaningful work, and the arts are part of that preparation.

The revised requirements now move to the 2027 state legislative session for final approval. Once that process is complete, the Coalition plans to bring in the Washington advocates for a webinar to share their full story.

Your Next Step

Three presentations, three overlapping messages: build relationships before you need them, speak the language of the people you’re trying to reach, and remember that the students in your program are evidence of everything you’re arguing for. Here is what you can do right now:

• Download the 36-Week Advocacy Calendar at musiciseducation.org (under Local Advocacy) or astastrings.org. Share it with your district communications team. Put the first few weeks on your calendar now.

• Read — or share — the AEP report, Arts Education, Durable Skills and Workforce Success, at aep-arts.org. It is the research translation that turns what music educators already know into language that resonates with policymakers and school leaders.

• Download the “Today a Music Student, Tomorrow a...” placards from musiciseducation.org, photograph your students, and post the results on social media. Tag Music IS Education so the Coalition can amplify your program’s story.

• Use Karl B, the Coalition’s free AI advocacy assistant, to draft testimony, prepare for a board meeting, generate talking points around durable skills, or write a letter connecting your program to your district’s portrait-of-a-graduate framework. All the information from this webinar has been loaded into the curated Karl B Knowledge base. Find Karl B at musiciseducation.org.

• Register for the next Music IS Education Coalition webinar on October 1, 2026 — focused on the school budget cycle and how to advocate within it. The registration link is here.

The school year is beginning. The relationships you build this fall, the stories you share this year, and the data you document between now and June will determine how your program is positioned the next time a budget meeting happens — or a graduation requirement comes up for review. Start now, while there is still time to get ahead of it.

Music IS Education is a national coalition supporting state and local music education advocacy. Learn more and access all Coalition resources at musiciseducation.org.

I have seen the statement above across media and social media on September 11, 2026. It provides some context for this story about what happened the day after September 11, 2001, and the days and weeks that followed. I started writing this when I stumbled upon a letter I had kept in my bedroom dresser. I first wrote this on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. I am resharing now as part of the 25th anniversary of that tragic day.

Never Forget.

Today I opened a letter I have not read for nearly a decade. It was from Harold Decker, the president of the American Red Cross. It was a thank you note that accompanied a statue (called Motherland) he sent to me as a special gift. There is a story I have never told behind both the letter and the statue. The story began on 9/11. I decided it is finally time to write it down.

September 12, 2001

On Wednesday, September 12, 2001 I was at home. I got home about 1 AM in the morning following my 19 hours of adventure on 9/11 (which I have detailed in another post). I did not sleep well at all even though I was tired. There was just too much racing through my mind.

We were instructed to check our work voicemail for announcements and instructions from Viacom and MTV Networks (MTV Networks is a division of Viacom, and VH1, where I worked, was a division of MTV Networks). There was a message telling us the office would be closed Wednesday and to check back for updates. Fortunately, I had grabbed my laptop computer and tossed it into my briefcase as we raced out of the building. (This was the famous briefcase that created the bomb scare in Hoboken I have written about).

Being an executive with the company, I had remote access to our systems so I could log in and check email and have access to files. This would be important.

I made some calls from my home office to check on my staff to be sure they all made it home OK. My boss, VH1 President John Sykes, was stuck in Denver following the Giants/Broncos game, trying to get back to New York. John had already called Cablevision CEO James Dolan, who also owned Madison Square Garden, to start the planning for what would become the Concert for New York City. I spoke with our head of communications, John Kelley, and others on our executive team to be sure everyone was OK.

As I sat at my desk, I was feeling kind of helpless. Our nation had just suffered this huge tragedy. The many firefighters in the trucks we saw racing through Times Square on 9/11 never came back. The numbers of presumed dead were being reported in the 10,000 range. The images were horrible. So many people had suffered. So many people died trying to save others. So many people were trying to help. Everything was confusing.

Me? I felt like I could do nothing. How could I help? What could I do? I hated the feeling of helplessness. It ate at me.

Using One’s Resources

As head of Public Affairs for the network, I began to realize it would be up to me to recommend a strategy for how we, as a network, might respond. This helped me understand for the first time that maybe I wasn’t helpless. I started researching the organizations helping address the tragedy. We were getting reports about the urgent need for blood. So, I decided to call the American Red Cross (ARC) in Washington, D.C. They must have a message they want to get out. We have a television network and access to the airwaves to share their message. Maybe this would be our way to help!

The American Red Cross disaster relief program focuses on meeting people’s immediate emergency disaster-caused needs. When a disaster threatens or strikes, the Red Cross provides shelter, food, and health and mental health services to address basic human needs. In addition to these services, the core of Red Cross disaster relief is assisting individuals and families affected by disaster so they can resume their normal daily activities independently. The Red Cross also feeds emergency workers, handles inquiries from concerned family members outside the disaster area, provides blood and blood products to disaster victims, and helps those affected access other available resources. All of these services, and the financial support to provide them, were needed in response to the events of September 11th.

After speaking with someone at the Red Cross PR department, I was transferred to Julie Whitmer. Julie coordinated with the entertainment industry for ARC.

I introduced myself. “My name is Bob Morrison, and I head up public affairs for VH1, part of MTV Networks. I am calling to see what information you may have that we may share with our viewers on ways they may best help the Red Cross and deal with this tragedy. Do you have any messages or public service announcements (PSAs) we could run?”

Julie, who hailed from South Carolina and had a wonderful Southern accent, went to great lengths to explain to me how, because of the scale of the initial attacks, the American Red Cross was overwhelmed with their need to deliver services and relief in New York City, Washington DC, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The ARC lacked the manpower, production resources, and distribution network to get their message out to the American public. This was happening at a time when the public needed clear direction to channel their energy and emotions. She went on to tell me that even if they did have the capacity, they were challenged by the inability to move crews and talent due to transportation restrictions across the country. This was a huge obstacle.

That gave me an idea. Being in the TV business, I suggested she and her team come up with a few 30-second scripts for their key messages. While she worked on the scripts, I told her I would check with our news department to see about getting the scripts read and produced into PSAs.

I spoke with Matt Hanna, who coordinated our news teams, to see what our plans were. He told me we had news crews doing interviews with celebrities throughout that week. Through our discussions, we turned the process into an opportunity to record messages about how the public could help. Matt told me if we had the scripts, we could just piggyback on the other news tapings. They planned on having crew in the field on September 13th.

After making some calls to other department heads and exchanging email messages with our Los Angeles office, we came up with a game plan.

The strategy was very simple:

A) Create clear and direct scripts to provide the American public with information on what they can do and direct them to the appropriate resources. The issues addressed were how to make donations that would directly benefit the victims and their families, how to encourage people to give blood, how to handle the process of grieving and healing, and the need for tolerance.

B) Send out camera crews to locations where we would have access to tape the talent and feed the footage to a central location for editing.

C) Develop a distribution system to allow wide dissemination across the US.

D) Have participating media organizations run the PSAs as frequently as possible to generate financial contributions, blood donations, and to provide information about where to obtain mental health counseling.

We worked with the staff of the American Red Cross to develop scripts to be read by various talent and recorded by our crews in various locations. We agreed VH1 would produce non-branded spots for national distribution and branded spots for VH1’s own air. The topics were financial donations, blood donations, mental health and tolerance.

I then communicated our plan to our executive team at the network:

This is the email in the early afternoon of 9/12/01:

Hi Folks,

We have spent the majority of the day speaking with local and national organizations involved with coordinating relief efforts in response to yesterday’s tragic events to determine what possible role VH1 may play to help.

Here is what we recommend:

Onair:

Current PSA- Continue to provide information about numbers to call. We should be sure we include:

To Give Blood Call 1–800-Give- Life

To Provide Financial Support Call 1–800- Help Now

To donate online go to www.redcross.org

New PSA’s — We have received from the National Red Cross a series of PSA messages that support the three main issues where action is needed: giving blood, giving money, providing comfort and counseling. George has taken this information and crafted a version of the PSA’s that will be VH1-specific. When we are taping the PSA’s with talent, we will tape the VH1 version and one of the Red Cross “generic” versions. We will then edit the PSA’s and provide them to all of our Viacom brethren, so they may run them on their networks while also having a VH1-specific version for our own air. The reason is twofold… 1) The Red Cross needs the help right now and has no capacity to do this since they are dealing with the very real issues of the tragedy. 2) We are in a position to help them… making it the right thing to do.

Online — I have enclosed a banner ad which can be used on our websites. Jason, maybe we can get others in MTVi to use it as well. I also have some additional information that I will send to Jason in a separate email to be incorporated into the site dealing with the three issues (Blood, Money, Counseling)

Press — John Kelley and Linda Alexander have been briefed about our plans since much of the filming will be done in LA. CBS Early Show is interested in making this part of a story they are doing on how Celebrities and the Entertainment industry is working to help.

Feeling as helpless as we all do, this approach will provide very real and meaningful assistance to the folks on the frontlines of this crisis and is a way we can make somewhat of a difference during this trying time.

Thanks for all your help and cooperation!

George in this case was George Moll. George was based in Los Angeles, where he was the executive producer of our most popular show, Behind the Music. Jason is Jason Hirschhorn, who would go on to become head of the MTV Networks digital group, President of Sling Media, and President of MySpace.

I spoke with Rick Krim (VH1 Executive Vice President of Music Talent) to have him help with the artists, and Mimi James (our LA-based VP in charge of Celebrity Talent) to help with celebs. I called Fred Graver (Senior Vice President of Programming for VH1, now head of programming for the Travel Channel) to be sure we would have the inventory to run the PSAs, and Reggie Fils-Amie, our Senior Vice President of Marketing (now the President of Nintendo USA) to help engage our affiliates and other Viacom divisions.

By sharing the PSAs with our “brethren” in Viacom meant we would get the messages out to CBS, Showtime, CBS Owned and Operated stations, UPN, All the MTV family of networks (MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, etc).

The first scripts were written and approved by the American Red Cross on the afternoon of September 12th.

September 13, 2001

Late on September 12th, I received a voicemail announcement from MTV Networks letting staff know the building would be open on 9/13, but it would be up to individuals whether they came in. I decided to go in so I could better coordinate our efforts from Midtown.

I took my usual 7 AM New Jersey Transit 114 express Bus into the Port Authority Terminal on 8th Avenue and 42nd Street.

As we approached the New Jersey Turnpike, I could see the plume of smoke and dust still rising from the southern tip of the city. The bus was eerily quiet. One of the best views on my commute was coming around the helix… a large circular descent into the Lincoln Tunnel. My kids call it the “Big Cookie” because of the shape. As we made the first big turn to the right, we always had a spectacular view of Lower Manhattan and the World Trade Center. On this day, the view was emotional and stunning. Smoke was billowing from what was now known as Ground Zero. It was a jarring sight… but not as jarring as what I was about to see.

As I came out of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, I saw homemade pictures of people. Men and women… young and old and everything in between. They were the faces of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters, relatives and friends. And they were all missing. If September 11th for me was the escape from New York… September 13th brought home the enormity of the events and the names and faces of those who were then missing but would never return. As I walked up 8th Avenue toward 44th Street, as I had so many times before, people pleaded with anyone who would listen if they had seen their loved one. The pain and the sorrow were unimaginable.

John Sykes had gotten back to New York and invited his team that made it into the office into the conference room, looking out at the Hudson River from the 20th floor of the Viacom building. Rick, Reggie, Jason, and others were there. MTV Networks chairman Tom Freston came down and joined us as we talked about various ideas for the Concert for New York City as well as how we can best serve our community and our viewers.

Once in my office, I checked with our news division to see what the plan was for the day. Matt and his team really came through! The news team sent several film crews out to locations in New York, Los Angeles, and Nashville, TN, to record high-profile artists and celebrities. Melissa Etheridge, Johnny Rzeznik of the Goo Goo Dolls were shot in LA. Sheryl Crow taped in Nashville. Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora recorded in New Jersey.

The raw footage was sent via satellite to Los Angeles for editing and then sent again via satellite to the MTV Networks Network Operations Center for airing and centralized distribution.

At 11 PM on Thursday, September 13, 2001, the first spots hit the airwaves on VH1, just 64 hours after the first airliner struck the World Trade Center. Tapes were then sent to the American Red Cross for additional editing and distribution.

The Push for National Distribution

Julie Whitmer was busy with her contacts as well. The American Red Cross reached out to the National Association of Broadcasters and to the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) for assistance in distributing the PSAs.

In addition, VH1 had relationships with the National Association of Broadcasters, the NCTA (MTV Networks is an NCTA member company), cable system operators (Time Warner, Cablevision, Cox, Adelphia, Charter, Comcast), and the Cable Television Public Affairs Association (CTPAA), which is the group of my public affairs counterparts from the other cable networks and cable systems. CTPAA distributed announcements regarding the satellite feeds. Our head of Marketing, Reggie Fils-Amie, coordinated with the marketing teams from all of the Viacom divisions to support the PSA effort through their businesses. CBS News set up a special satellite feed to serve all local CBS and UPN affiliates. A radio version was fed to Infinity Broadcasting stations and the Westwood One/VH1 Radio Network. Master tapes were provided to MTV, MTV2, Nick at Nite, TV Land, TNN, Comedy Central, CMT, and BET. Additional tapes were sent out to stations or cable operators that lacked the ability to take a satellite feed.

The generic spots were made available to all the MTV Networks and Viacom cable and broadcast outlets, as well as Red Cross constituents. Daily satellite feeds were coordinated with the National Association of Broadcasters and the National Cable Telecommunication Association during the weeks of September 17thand 24th.

By September 18th, the first round of the public service announcements were running on national cable networks, national broadcast networks, local broadcast stations, local cable systems, and local radio stations NATIONWIDE. This mass appeal for support provided the American public with clear directions on how they could help in this time of our nation’s greatest need.

Crews were scrambled for special opportunities. Julie Whitmer had arranged for Julia Roberts to tape a PSA. We had a tight window and had to scramble one of our LA crews to tape the message. This would be critical, since the Julia Roberts PSA would go on to be the most-played PSA during the crisis.

At the same time, plans were coming together for the VH1/Cablevision/Miramax/AOL-produced Concert for New York City (stories from this event will be saved for another time). The concert would take place in Madison Square Garden on October 20, 2001. This would be a perfect place to get more artists, celebrities, and dignitaries to tape messages for the Red Cross.

We set up a PSA taping studio backstage during the Concert for New York City to support a new series of public service announcements for the American Red Cross. Celebrities that participated include: Senator Daschle, Harrison Ford, Backstreet Boys, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Jimmy Fallon, Melissa Etheridge, Jon Bon Jovi, Kid Rock, Richie Sambora, Five for Fighting, among others. The PSA’s were once again distributed nationwide by the American Red Cross and NCTA as well as across all MTVN/Viacom properties. TNN, BET, CBS, and UPN local affiliates. Tapes were available to individual MTVN business units and our cable affiliates across the country.

When all was said and done, the roster of participating artists included: Melissa Etheridge, Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora, Johnny Rzeznik, Graham Nash, Sheryl Crow, Julia Roberts, Backstreet Boys, Will Ferrell, Amy Grant, Travis Tritt, Camryn Manheim, Chi Chi McBride, Calista Flockhart, Rob Lowe, and the group of stars from the Concert for New York City.

Impact

The tremendous outpouring of support for the Red Cross led to the establishment of the Liberty Fund, a separate, segregated account that was created solely to hold and disburse funds related to the September 11 attacks and their aftermath. As a result, in part, of this nationwide television- and radio-industry-coordinated appeal, over $564 million was donated to the American Red Cross. This contributed to:

• Disaster Relief: More than 10 million meals and snacks (more than 100,000 per day) were provided to families, police officers, firefighters, recovery personnel, rescue workers, and investigators. Food, shelter and health services were provided to support the rescue and recovery operations at the three disaster sites.

• Blood Supply: The Nation’s blood supply is at the highest level in history. A ten-day supply is being maintained (up from a 1-day supply prior to September 11th), and the stock of red blood cells is also at record levels, enabling the Red Cross to address current needs and support any future needs.

• Mental Health Support: Red Cross mental health workers also have provided emotional support for more than 144,000 people affected by these horrific events at the disaster sites and across the country.

Caught up in all of the efforts, the Concert for New York City, our VH1 Save The Music events, and my other responsibilities- the impact of all of these efforts completely escaped me… until I received this letter and actually… until I read it again yesterday:

November 27, 2001

Mr. Robert B. Morrison

Vice President — Public Affairs

VH1

1515 Broadway, 20th Floor

New York, NY 10036

Dear Mr. Morrison:

The American Red Cross is profoundly grateful for your proactive and immediate response following the September 11th tragedies on behalf of VH1. Your donation of time, talent and energy dedicated to creating and generously disseminating public service announcements (PSAs) featuring celebrities on VH1, across all of the Viacom companies, and to national and local media outlets nationwide had a direct impact on our ability to serve those in need.

Your compassionate efforts and those of your committed staff to assist the American Red Cross in the wake of the tragedies played a vital role ensuring that our organization could respond in extraordinary, lifesaving ways. Thanks to your support, millions of meals have been served, tens of thousands of people have received mental health and grief counseling, and millions of dollars have been dispensed to families in dire need to cover costs of transportation, childcare, mortgage or rent payments, funerals and related expenses. While extraordinary progress has been made since the September 11 disasters, we realize there is much more to be done.

September 11, 2001 forever changed the landscape of our country and the life of every American. We have never faced a disaster of this size, scope or intensity but we’re meeting the challenge — because of your help. Thank you for reaching out in this time of need, and thank you for continuing to trust the American Red Cross as we bring comfort and care to our nation during these troubled times. Your trust is precious to us, and we will do our very best to uphold it.

Through it all, the American Red Cross mission has not changed. Led by millions of volunteers across the nation, we help people prevent, prepare for and respond to emergencies. We thank you and VH1 for the heartfelt assistance and assure you that your contributions have made a difference. Together, we can save a life.

With my warmest personal regards,

Harold Decker

Chief Executive Officer

With this letter was a small statue. The statue is a miniature of the statue that stands outside of the American Red Cross Headquarters in Washington, DC. It is called “Motherland.” Frid Sogoyan was the sculptor.

The plaque on the statue the Red Cross had sent reads:

With Deepest Thanks and Appreciation To:

Bob Morrison and VH1

For Outstanding Dedication to and Support of

The American Red Cross Following the September 11th Tragedies.

I have kept that letter safe in my armoire in our bedroom. I took it out yesterday (September 10, 2011). It motivated me to write this post for the 10th Anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I did so to pay tribute to those who lost their lives. I did so to pay tribute to those who, in ways both large and small, volunteered their time and efforts to help; I did so to pay tribute to my friends and colleagues across the cable and television industry for their incredible role in making a difference for the people of this country in a time of need… and I did so to teach my children a lesson: that no matter how hopeless or useless you may feel:

You can ALWAYS make a difference… if you choose to.

Robert B. Morrison

September 11, 2011

For all of my readers, I am departing from my usual commentary on music/arts and education to bring you two deeply personal stories. One will be today; the next will post next week. Thank you for indulging me in this detour from my regular topics. And if you find these interesting, please share them with others!

The reason for the detour is this: As the 25th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, all of the coverage has brought back powerful memories and emotions. From escaping the city to organizing the nationwide public service announcement campaign for the American Red Cross to my work on the production team for the Concert for New York City, these events and my roles in them are now part of history.

Nothing was more life-changing than 9/11 itself. We made a promise as a nation to:

Never Forget.

Some context:On September 11, 2001, I was at my desk in Times Square in Manhattan, tending to the start of the day in the Viacom building on the 20th floor, where I was Vice President of Public Affairs for VH1 (part of MTV Networks) and the CEO of VH1 Save the Music. What would transpire over the next 19 hours is something I will never forget. At the time, I sat down and wrote about what had happened on that day as I experienced it. I shared it with my family and friends. Today, in memory of this solemn day, I am sharing it with all of you. It was written on September 12, 2001 and appears exactly as it was then… errors and all!

I was on a conference call with some folks up in Boston this morning, Tuesday, September 11, 2001 sitting in my office on the 20th floor of the Viacom building in the heart of Times Square. Being in the TV business we all have televisions in our offices. Mine was on NBC4. As we were talking on the phone I saw a shot of the World Trade Center with one of the towers burning. It looked to me like there was some sort of fire. Since I wasn’t paying that much attention I continued with my call. As we were talking I heard a loud noise when I turn and looked at the TV I saw the plane slam into the second tower. Now I knew that something strange was happening. I gave my counterparts a little play by play from what I could see. Then the sirens started and all I could see out my window was emergency vehicles racing trough times square and the picture of the burning towers on the Giant TV screen on top of the ABC studios which my office looks right down on. A little while later I saw the report about the Pentagon being struck. Realizing we were still on the phone I ended the call and I tried to call home but I could not get through. Then I checked my email and Nora had sent a message for me to try and call. I sent her one back to let her know I was trying.

Still not having grip on what was happening, I took a lap around my floor to see what was going on from my co-workers. We were getting reports that they were closing the building. As I spoke with a colleague we both agreed that since we did not know what was going on and that we were in the heart of Times Square our best course of action was to send everyone home and try to get folks out of Manhattan. As we began rounding up folks into groups to travel together (folks going to Brooklyn, folks going to Queens, folks going to Jersey and folks who need a place for safety in the city) we saw the first tower go down. At that point people began to cry and we decide to move folks out of the building… fast.

Before we headed to the elevators to exit the building I tried to call home one last time and got through! I was able to tell Nora what my plan was to get out of Manhattan and try to get to Hoboken. I told her I would try to call her later to update her on my progress if my phone would work.

I figured that our best strategy would be to get to Jersey any way possible. Once in Jersey I would have lots of options. In Manhattan I knew they would be few.

We had a team of ten people heading for Jersey. The big question was how? Trains… Closed. Buses… Closed. Subway… Closed. Tunnels… Closed!

That left one way out. WATER!

We were probably a mile or so from the Hudson River (About 6 long Blocks) where we knew there were ferries that usually ran to New Jersey. We were not sure they would be running but we didn’t have any other choice. And, we thought, if they were not running we were ready to pay a private boat to get us off the Island. So off we went.

As we walked down 42nd street I was amazed by the calm. No running. No screaming. Just people moving in all directions. We walked by the Port Authority Bus Terminal and it was indeed closed. Another guy I worked with, Jed walked on point. I followed up the rear so we could keep the group of ten together. It was a bright sunny day. Under normal circumstances it would be a perfect day for a walk.

Once we reach 12th Ave (the Hudson River) we looked to our right. Circle Line had all their boats at dock and nothing was moving. We looked to the left and NY Waterways had a line of people gathered. I then looked to the left again and there, where I was used to seeing the two towers of the World Trade Center, was a huge plum of orange and black smoke and dust. I just gasped. I could not believe my eyes. It was tragic. It made us more anxious to get off the Island since we really had no idea what was going on.

We quickly found our spot at the end of the Ferry line. It wasn’t that long of a line at the time. It was at most a s short block and a half. Since our offices were relatively close to this part of town and we left the office quickly I am sure we beat most of the rush. Not very many people used, let alone were aware of, the water ferries. So, I am sure it took a while for many folks to realize this was an option.

Once on line, we sent a scout to find out what the situation was. She came back in 10 minutes with the report they were running one Ferry to NJ. All the others were down by the Trade Center to help evacuate people from there. I tried to call Nora several times and finally got through. I let her know the Ferry was running and would take me to Weehauken. She was concerned about her brother and sister who both work in Manhattan. I told her to tell them to get to the Ferry as quickly as possible. Phones in NYC were not working so she tried email and was able to get through to them that way. I asked her to call the rental car companies in Hoboken. Maybe I could rent a car and drive out. No luck. All the companies were out of cars or closing. At that point I figured I would worry about it when I got to NJ.

The line was now snaking around the terminal and was getting longer very quickly as folks were coming from all directions. That is when I had my first great humanity moment.

There were thousands of people lining up for Ferry in a very orderly way. No police, no panic. Just a bunch of people waiting patiently (New Yorkers DO NOT wait patiently for ANYTHING!) for their turn to get on the Ferry. This small simple act was very inspiring. My great humanity moment was quickly followed by Bomb Scare #1. Some one yelled there was a bomb. At that point everyone began to run… in all directions. Jed and I kept our group together. We really didn’t move much but the line in front of us just disappeared. A manager told everyone not to panic that it was a false alarm. People quickly settled down and the line reformed. They added another Ferry, the line began to move faster, then two more Ferry’s were added and before you know it we were on the boat.

We took our group to the back of the boat. The Captain told us that buses were running from the dock in Weehauken down to Hoboken. I knew that once I was in Hoboken that my transportation options would dramatically increase.

As we were pulling away from Manhattan, Jed and I went to the stern of the boat. We stared at the skyline and the plume of smoke. I just stared with great intensity, burning the image of this tragic day in my mind. Jed pulled out a disposable camera and took some photographs. Then we just stared at the city until the boat reaches dock in New Jersey.

Mission #1 Get To New Jersey- Accomplished! 12 Noon. Not bad at all. I had a great sense of relief that we were out of any immediate danger. I was able to get through to Nora again to let her know I was off the Island and almost to NJ. I would try to call her once I got to Hoboken.

As we got off the boat we listened for instructions about the busses. Then we gathered to determine who would be going where. The group split up with 4 of us going to Hoboken and the others deciding to take buses to other locations. We got on the bus, waited a few moments and then off we went! Three folks that I traveled with got off just as we hit Hoboken. They gave me their phone numbers in case I got stuck and needed a place to stay. Then they were off. I was now going solo.

We finally arrived at the Hoboken Terminal. This is where the PATH trains go into NYC at the World Trade Center. Another Ferry runs to Wall Street from here. NJ transit has trains and buses that run out of there as well. I got off the bus and looked around. Some people were mulling around and there were some NJ Transit buses gathered. No one had a clue what was going on. I ask some NJ transit leaders if they have any idea about the buses running. Anything to Newark? Anything going west? They said they were trying to figure it out but to check at the train station. As I headed to the station a guy comes out and says no trains are running. Great. Now I was stuck. No trains, No buses, No Cars and even if I had a car the roads in and out of Hoboken were closed. But, I was happy I was out of Manhattan!

As I am trying to think of what to do next I here I guy yell “we need volunteers! Anyone want to volunteer to help?” I knew I was stuck there with no where to go at the time. I knew my family was safe. It would take the transit authority a few hours to figure out what they were going to do. So I thought I might as well make myself useful. “I’ll help!” I said… as did about 10 other people. “Great,,” he said. “Right this way!”

They took us through the barricade and brought us to the triage area that was just being set-up outside the terminal. We signed in, were given tags based on any special skills (CPR, Emergency Medical Service, Foreign Language) Mine just said “volunteer” on the front and a long tag across my back with the same word.

Next were the instructions: Volunteers were needed to help guide the thousands of people that will be evacuated from the World Trade Center Area. The injured would have tags with color bars in descending order: Black, Red, Yellow, and Green. If green was the lowest color it just meant that the person was mostly in some form of mild shock or emotional distress. Yellow meant minor, non-life threatening injury, red meant major injury… possibly life threatening injury and would be given priority treatment at every stage of the evacuation. Black meant… well let’s just say we would never see any black tags. They passed out handfuls of surgical gloves (we were required to change after each person we touched) and we were off and running.

I needed a place to put my briefcase. I was instructed to put by the station exit since it was not open. So, I wrapped my strap to the handrail and went back for my instructions.

Emergency tents were set-up with colored mats to match the tags (except for black) We helped set up the tents, moving medical supplies, water, I.V. bags, etc. Once we were done we were given instructions on how to greet people and get a sense for any problems they may have. Mostly, we were there to provide a friendly face and a comforting hand for these folks who had been through this great trauma.

Once people were taken off the Ferry they were put into two groups Tagged and Untagged. EVERYONE had to go through decontamination because most people were covered in dust comprised largely of what was thought to be asbestos (turns out it was just pulverized concrete) and there was some concern about the presence of Anthrax (which ended up not being an issue). Decontamination basically was soaking everyone in a water-based solvent. And I mean SOAKING WET. People were coming through in Armani suits and expensive dresses as well as T-shirts and jeans and everything in between. Everyone got dowsed. As a result, everyone we greeted was soaking wet and wrapped in a towel or blanket (actually it was mostly thin sheets. Some were mildly grumpy about being wet… but very happy to have escaped the World Trade Center.

Bomb Scare #2 — So we are all set up. The first wave of people start to come in and then there was a bomb scare. Someone over heard the police radio saying there was an unidentified package and it was suspected to be a bomb. People begin to run from the Ferry dock. I find an officer to ask what was happening and he said “We have an unidentified bag by the terminal exit.” I said… Is it black?” “Yes” said the officer. “That’s not a bomb… that is my briefcase!” “Are you sure?” Take me there and I will show you. The officer escorted me to the area where the brief case which was now roped off in red tape. “That’s it!” I said. He called in to call of the alert and took my name and identification for the record. That made me feel terrible. My god… all of these people scrambling and police moving stuff around because of where I put MY brief. I wanted to crawl away. The other volunteers razzed me a little but also encouraged me to stay… as long as I let someone know where my bag was!

While we were working I was removed from what was going on as far as the attacks, who did it, why, what else was hit, etc. But we did get some rumors. “They took out the Sears Tower in Chicago!” one said. “Seattle Space Needle” said another. Someone else weighed in with “The Supreme Court.” 8 planes had been hijacked. Camp David was hit. We never really new what was fact and what was fiction other than what we were looking at directly across from our makeshift MASH like unit, on the other side of the Hudson River in the smoke filled crater that used to be the World Trade Center. That was our backdrop.

Now we were getting into a routine. Ferry comes in. Badly hurt to red triage, everyone else into decontamination. And no one… NO ONE leaves the secure area before having a doctor check them out (mostly to ensure there were no respiratory problems)

It got to the point where I was working with the volunteer leader at the entry point for everyone. After seeing how they had us set-up we went to the incident commander (the person in charge of the whole area) and recommended a better plan for receiving and directing people. Our plan would allow those that did not need medical attention to be greeted and guided out of the are and directly to public transportation so they could begin the process of finding their way home. He agreed so we reset the area, had water tables brought in and made sure we had enough people up with us to catch and guide people to be sure they were OK and to help them understand what option they had for getting home.

We started to try and lighten the mood a little bit. “Welcome to Hoboken” we would say with great enthusiasm. “Beautiful Downtown Hoboken!” Many people were glad to be there. Others laughed at the line. Some would look up and smirked at the absurdity of a welcoming party in Hoboken. Some guy cracked “it was nice for the chamber of commerce to send out a greeting party.” After all… it is HOBOKEN, NEW JERSEY! It certainly helped us cheer people up.

Jersey City? Some one would say. Go to the right and take the bus. What about the train? Trust me take the bus. Another would say “I want to get to northern Jersey. How about the bus. We became very blunt with folks. Here is your option. Go into the terminal get on the train and get off in Newark. Once you are in Newark you will have plenty of options. But, my best advice for you is to “get the hell out of Hoboken and head west. The fasted way out of here and the fasted way to anywhere BUT here is the train.” We discouraged anyone from taking the bus unless they were locals because the bus set-up was a mess and most of the main roads around the area were closed down. We began echoing the old saying “Go West Young Man” since Newark was about 10 miles to the west.

By 3:00 I had been standing out in the bright sun for more than 5 hours. This was becoming a problem. As many of you know I have inherited my grandfather hair line (or lack of one to be more precise) which was now feeling like it had a become a color resembling something akin to the color of a fully cooked lobster… fire engine red. Realizing I needed a lid for my dome I took a break to leave the security area in search of a hat. Unfortunately, every store, bar, pharmacy I walked into in a few block radius had nothing. Finally, I hit a New York Health Club and saw in the window one of those blue floppy beach hats with their logo. It was no fashion statement but I knew my forehead would not mind.

Hat on head (as opposed to in hand) I returned to the security area. They were now requiring us to wear complete white body suits with attached booties. So, there I am in this all white zippered jump suit with attached gray booties… and a floppy blue hat! This came in handy since it gave me a distinct look. For Curious George it was the Man in the Yellow Hat. In Hoboken, I became the guy in the Funny Blue Hat!

The reason for the extra precautions with the body suits was because we were expecting a massive amount of people coming over from the World Trade Center in a very short amount of time. They were right.

The Ferries were being loaded at Battery Park (at the foot of the World Trade Center) and scrambled out as fast as possible. Thousands of severely wounded were being sent to Jersey City, Liberty State Park other areas became a temporary morgue. We were getting all of the yellow and green tagged folks plus anyone else who made their way to the launch area inside the quarantined zone in Manhattan.

For the next three and half-hours we went non-stop as thousands and thousands of people came through our station. Few were wearing the red tags. The ones that were came on stretchers and body boards. Many were frightened, hundreds were without shelter, and most were reduced to wanting the basic items of human need: food, shelter and something we all have yet to find… security.

During this time my brother in law Allen (who lives in Hoboken and my sister in-law Amy called to let me know they had made it home. I asked them to come down and lend a hand…, which they did. It was nice to have some familiar faces around. Things started to slow down. In came pizzas and water. Folks were eating in quick order. After about an hour Amy and Allen left to get food. Amy came back with a hoagie and iced tea for me. Just what I needed! During this break to eat I went over to one of the EMS trucks. It had “Scotch Plains Rescue” on the side. This was comforting since this is the rescue squad from our hometown. We spent a few minutes visiting while I inhaled my sandwich. I had a great sense of pride in our town having them there.

Before I went back to work I was able to call home and speak with Nora about what was going on. Natalie was very worried and upset. Andrew kept asking “Dada OK? Dada OK?” They both knew something was up because of all the phone calls and because I was not there. I was able to talk to them both so they knew I was OK. I told them both I would wake them when I came home… not really knowing when that would be.

After the massive wave of refugees from Manhattan came through many of the volunteers started to leave. I went to the watch commander and let him know that we needed information about what was happening so we would be able to keep people to help. Were more ferry’s coming? Was this the end? Beginning? Middle? No one really knew. So he said, come with me. He took me into the command center and made another volunteer and I responsible for organizing the next wave of volunteers for the evening. The little fireball of a lady from the city EMS group had folks signing in new volunteers and began to instruct us about what to do with the new group. We were to take the new folks and train them on what we had been doing all day. It was my turn to tell them about the tags and what the colors meant and position everyone t were they would be needed. By 8:00 the commander came by look at me and asked “How long have you been here?” “A while” I said. One of the staff people who were there when I first came in said. He’s been here all day. “Time for you to take a break.” Train this person to do what you have been doing and I do not want to see you back here for 3 hours.

The nice thing about Hoboken is my brother in-law lives there. So I had him pick me up and we went back to his place. It was there that I saw the television reports for the first time and was able to here President Bush’s speech to the nation. I was able to call Sandi to let her know I was OK. Called Nora again, check on some of my staff and rested on the couch.

By 10:30 I was ready to go back. I asked Allen to come with me. If they needed the help we would stay. If not, I could head home.

When we got the station I was impressed that everything was lit up with floodlights. Some of the folks I had worked with earlier were back from break. “What’s going on?” I asked. “They keep telling us we are supposed to get a lot of injured… but nothing has been coming. We really do not know?” I told Allen I was going to hang out for a few minutes then probably go home. So he went back to his place. I spoke to some more folks who said no one has come through in hours. I looked over and saw the lines of ambulances. The Scotch Plains crew was in the same spot. Nothing was happening.

I went to the one person, James, who I had worked with the most. He was an EMS volunteer leader. He looked at me and said “I think we are probably done here.” “Why?” I asked.

“Because there is no one to rescue. The hospitals in New York are staffed and waiting… but no one is coming through. Everyone is dead or they are already at the hospitals and treatment centers. There is no one left for us to help.”

As his words sank in I reached out to shake his hand. We embraced. “Time for me to get home.” And with that I got my now infamous briefcase, took off my body suit, twisted my blue hat, and headed into the subway.

The station was quite. No one was there. I was tired, both mentally and physically. The days activities and emotions began to sink in. As I got on the PATH train to Newark I look around. One long train…. Just 3 people! It was very strange. If I took the PATH the other direction the next stop would be the World Trade Center. I looked up from my seat to see the PATH map with the stops all listed. There was the last stop “World Trade Center.” I just kept thinking “How could that stop and those buildings no longer be there?” The reality and enormity continued to sink in.

“Jersey City”, the conductor would call out. “Pavoinia/Newport” a few minutes later “Grove Street” then “Journal Square.” After about 20 minutes I finally heard, “Last stop Newark!” The train came to a stop. As I got off I look around. Everything was just deserted. A few people here or there. But it seemed like a ghost town.

Having started the day with only about 20 bucks in my pocket and having given half of that to someone else so they could get home I figured I could not get a cab for 10 bucks to Scotch Plains. So I went to the ATM and took out $100.

“Taxi” I yelled. The van pulled forward and I jumped in. “Where you heading” the driver asked. “Home” I said. And off to Scotch Plains we went. We drove for about 30 minutes and just talked about the day. What it was like for him as he was driving passengers around. Some trying to get from Newark Airport to hotels. One guy he drove with for 4 hours as he tried to get into New York. The passenger finally got out of the cab 4 miles from the George Washington Bridge and decided to walk. We spoke of terrorism and tolerance. Of the evil imposed on us and the goodness that emerged. It was comforting just to talk to some one about what it all meant… then agreeing that neither of us had a clue.

He took me to where I park my car (I take the bus in through the Lincoln Tunnel every day) “How much for the ride?” “30 dollars.” He said. “Here’s $60. Thanks for the company and be careful going home!” He was a nice guy struggling to make a buck on a horrible day. But he was kind and warm as we chatted. After a day like today we all could use a nice tip. I got in my car. As I turned the key I realized how different the world was now from the 19 hours earlier when I parked here. Then I drove home.

As I came into the house most of the lights were out. I went upstairs and gave Nora a hug and a kiss. Then I tucked Andrew in and let him sleep. As I entered Natalie’s room she popped up rubbing her eyes. “Daddy!” She said excitedly through a yawn. “You’re OK” “Yes P, I am OK.” (I call her P, which is short for Peanut, which is a name I have called her since the first day she was born) After a huge hug she asked “Why did the bad men knock down the building?” “I wish I knew P… I wish I knew. But I am home and we are all safe.” “Did you help all the people from the building, Daddy?” “I helped as many as I could, sweetheart. Now time to go back to sleep and I will see you in the morning.” “OK, Dada” and off to sleep she went.

I went downstairs to get a drink and then sat on the couch. It is a ritual I do for the most significant life changing moments in my life. I sat on this couch the evening Natalie was born in September, 1995. I did the same with Andrew in September,1999. In both instance I felt such a sense of wonderment about how our live and our world had been transformed (for the better!) with the arrival of each child.

Tonight was one of those life-changing moments. Just like the others in magnitude… and nothing like the others in emotion. As I sat and reflected on the day: The things I saw, the fear, the anger, the disillusionment, the hate, the kindness, the humor and the tears. The grief still to come was off in the distance. The joy to be alive and safe the blessing for the moment.

How could this happen? Where would this go? What would be next? What does this mean? And how do I protect my family? Questions, Images, Sights and Sounds all swirling together.

I thought about how the day’s events were suddenly reshaping our world. And as I had done with the other life-changing moments in my life and as the enormity of the day’s events set in, I sat on my couch… and cried.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Up Next… What happened on September 12, 2001.

Students are walking back into classrooms this month, from kindergarten through graduate school, with no idea that the terms of their education have already shifted beneath them. Somewhere in that number is a high school senior choosing a major this fall, and a college junior who picked one two years ago under a different set of rules.

On June 29, 2026, the U.S. Department of Education finalized a rule that does something no version of federal higher education policy has ever done before. It ties a college program’s eligibility for federal student loans to a single number: whether its graduates, four years after completion, earn more than the median high school graduate in their state.

The rule is called the “Do No Harm” earnings accountability framework, folded into a new reporting structure the Department calls STATS. It takes effect in July 2027. Unlike the Gainful Employment rules that preceded it, which mostly applied to for-profit and career-training programs, this one reaches nearly every degree program in the country that touches federal financial aid. Bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral. Public, private, nonprofit. If a program can’t clear the earnings bar, it loses access to the loans that let most students attend in the first place.

Read the Department’s own language and the intent is unambiguous. If a program cannot show that it leaves its graduates financially better off than if they had never enrolled, it should not be underwritten by federal taxpayers. That is a coherent sentence. It is also a complete philosophy of education, arrived at without anyone having to argue for it.

What instrumentalism actually claims

Call this philosophy what it is: instrumentalism. It holds that the value of an education is identical to what it pays. Not correlated with. Identical to. A program that produces confident, adaptable, literate citizens who earn modestly has, under this test, produced nothing worth funding. A program that produces narrow technical competence at a high starting salary has, under this test, succeeded completely.

Nobody had to win an argument to install this premise. It arrived as a measurement, which is precisely what makes it powerful and worth examining closely. A test presents itself as neutral. This one is not. It has already decided what counts as a return before it collects a single data point.

Instrumentalist education treats schooling as production. Inputs in, credentialed workers out. Humanist education treats schooling as formation, the cultivation of a person capable of judgment, adaptation, and citizenship in conditions no one can fully predict. These are not new positions. Aristotle presented this exact argument in the fourth century BCE, and he did so over music. In the Politics, he asks directly whether education should aim at the useful or at virtue, at production or at the free and adaptable mind, and he chooses music as his test case precisely because it has no obvious utilitarian payoff. That is the debate a regulation finalized in 2026 believes it has settled by fiat.

No education system has ever organized itself this way

Every education system durable enough to be remembered organized itself around something broader than earnings. Athenian paideia trained citizens for judgment and civic participation. Roman rhetorical schools built orators and administrators through the study of language, history, and public speech. The medieval trivium and quadrivium formed reasoning minds before it formed careers. The American liberal arts college, well into the twentieth century, understood itself as the making of a person first and a professional second.

None of these systems were indifferent to livelihood. They simply refused to let livelihood be the only question worth asking. The closest historical precedent for what STATS attempts is the vocational education movement launched by the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, which carved out a parallel track for career training alongside academic education. Even that reform did not try to subordinate the entire system to a single earnings threshold. What is happening now has no real precedent. It is not a return to an old debate. It is a more totalizing claim than either side of that debate has previously made.

This is not the first time instrumentalist logic has narrowed a curriculum. I have documented elsewhere the five waves of “back to basics” that have reshaped K-12 education over the past seventy years, each one defining the basics in the image of whatever the moment feared: Sputnik, minimum competency testing, A Nation at Risk, No Child Left Behind, and now a workforce-readiness wave that has already stripped fine arts from both Oklahoma and Indiana base diploma requirements.

The creation of workers, instead of creating thinkers

Look closely at what that fifth wave actually asks students to produce, and the pattern sharpens considerably. Beginning with the Class of 2029, Indiana’s redesigned diploma allows a student who doesn’t earn one of the state’s readiness seals to graduate instead by satisfying three fallback requirements: a graduation pathway, postsecondary readiness, and a formal demonstration of “employability skills.” Not a broad course of study. A documented skill set, employability, named as its own credential category.

New York has built the same logic into statute. Students on the state’s Career Development and Occupational Studies track must complete a “work skills employability profile,” an instructor-rated, two-to-four-page document, before they can exit high school. In 2026, the Board of Regents went further, announcing a move toward a first-in-the-nation competency-based diploma, justified in language that should sound familiar to anyone who has followed this argument: colleges, employers, and communities, the Department said, increasingly seek graduates who can “think critically, communicate effectively, solve complex problems, collaborate with others, and adapt to a rapidly changing world.” Those are precisely the capacities music and arts instruction cultivates. They are being invoked to justify a diploma redesign that arts requirements are, in practice, displaced to make room for.

Washington State is having the same fight in public, and less settled than either. The State Board of Education’s FutureReady proposal, developed after two years of workforce-alignment study citing Georgetown University data that three-quarters of the state’s job openings through 2032 will require postsecondary credentials, initially put required credits in the arts, career and technical education, and health and physical education on the table for elimination. State Superintendent Chris Reykdal, the state’s own chief education officer, publicly urged the Board to retain them. The proposal remains unresolved as of this writing, headed for a Legislature vote in 2027, with the arts credit’s status still in question. The fact that a sitting state superintendent had to intervene to keep the arts in a graduation requirement tells you how far the narrowing of options for students has already traveled.

None of this happens through a single dramatic vote. It happens credit by credit, profile by profile, diploma redesign by diploma redesign, each one reasonable on its own terms, each one justified by the same workforce-readiness language, each one quietly substituting a documented worker for an educated mind as the thing a diploma is meant to certify. This is the terrain STATS inherits. What follows is that same logic, one tier up, with federal loan eligibility behind it instead of a high school diploma.

Where the test breaks, even on its own terms

Set the historical argument aside for a moment. The test does not even do the narrow job it was built to do.

The rule entirely eliminates the debt-to-earnings measure from the prior Gainful Employment framework. A program whose graduates clear the earnings bar while carrying disqualifying debt now counts as a success. Earnings without any accounting for debt is not a measure of value. It is half a measure, presented as a whole one.

The earnings benchmark itself is a state-level median, which compresses enormous county-by-county and regional labor market variation into a single number. A graduate’s actual local economy, the one that determines whether a given salary is comfortable or precarious, disappears from the calculation entirely.

The four-year window is its own distortion. It fits salaried, linear career paths reasonably well. It fits almost nothing else. Careers built on freelance work, commission income, entrepreneurship, or a decade of teaching before a program directorship, the shape of most careers in the arts and an increasing number of careers everywhere else, compound over time in ways a single snapshot at year four cannot see.

And here is the detail that should concern people who have never set foot in an arts classroom. When the first year of debt-to-earnings data under the prior Gainful Employment rule was released in 2017, graduate arts programs at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Southern California each failed the test. Not marginal for-profit operations. Three of the most selective research institutions in the country. Harvard suspended admissions to its graduate theater program in response. None of the three ever actually lost federal aid eligibility, because the rule required two consecutive failing years to trigger a penalty, and it was rewritten or rescinded, four times over, before any of them reached that threshold. This is evidence the instrument cannot see value it was never built to detect, and that even Washington has never quite trusted its own test enough to let the consequences take effect.

If this is what the instrumentalist test does to its own preferred terrain: a major, a career outcome, a paycheck, it was never going to have anything useful to say about the rest of what an education is for.

The case was never only about arts majors

Here is the distinction the entire policy debate has ignored, and it is worth reviewing. Arts education was never primarily about producing professional artists. It is part of the formation every student receives, the future engineer included, the future physician included, the future legislator included. STATS can only ever ask whether people who majored in art earned enough money four years later. It cannot ask, because it was never built to ask, whether arts coursework belongs in the formation of everyone else.

As I have stated many times before, over the decades:

That is not a reaction to a 2026 regulation. It is a position I have held and stated publicly for most of my decades-long career, well before anyone in Washington drew up an earnings threshold. And it is not a new position even at that. It is the position every durable education system has taken for five thousand years. Music and the arts, taught by qualified teachers, have appeared as foundational disciplines in every serious system of education across recorded history, not as a pipeline into professional performance, but as part of how a mind and a citizen were formed. That record does not bend to fit a four-year earnings snapshot. It predates the snapshot by five millennia.

What the instrumentalists cannot ask

An instrumentalist policy justified by workforce readiness and preparation for a changing economy cannot even ask whether a citizenry, formed by more than their major, benefits the society that funds the system. That is a civic question. The earnings premium metric only speaks to the market. It has no vocabulary for the return a democracy gets from citizens who can reason, adapt, and judge well, because that return does not show up on an IRS earnings record four years after graduation.

The deeper irony is that the workforce itself disagrees with the premise. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 names creative thinking, resilience, and lifelong learning among the capacities employers most need through 2030. Bob Sternfels, McKinsey's global managing partner, told the Financial Times in January 2026 that liberal arts graduates, long deprioritized in the firm's hiring, bring the kind of novel, non-linear thinking that complements what AI models still cannot do. The policy narrows the curriculum in the name of workforce readiness at the exact moment the workforce is saying, on the record, that readiness looks like something an earnings snapshot cannot measure.

Fifteen years of regulatory effort have gone into refining this instrument. Not one year has gone into asking whether earnings is the right thing to be measuring in the first place.

That student walking into a classroom this month deserves an education aimed at the person he or she is becoming, not only the earnings statement he or she will file four years after graduation. They deserve the choice their parents and grandparents had: to study something because it fosters judgment and adaptability, as much as because it clears a threshold set by a federal regulation. Aristotle thought that choice was worth arguing over. So should we.

The instrumentalists have no use for instruments.

This interview was conducted as part of the Education Commission of the States’ (ECS) Arts and Minds Series, which features the views of today’s leading thinkers on topics pertaining to the arts in education.

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Only three weeks after sharing my latest update on the threats called out in The Storm Is Here, the Federal Government has targeted, as a matter of national security, those weapons of mass destruction we refer to as… brass instruments.

On Thursday, August 6, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security published a notice in the Federal Register proposing a 25% tariff on brass wind instruments and their parts (HTSUS codes 9205.10.0000 and 9209.99.4080). The notice is included in a longer list of “derivative” metal products, welding equipment, fire extinguishers, and industrial cranes that the administration wants to bring under Section 232, the same national security authority used for steel, aluminum, and copper.

Read that again. Trumpets, trombones and French horns, treated as a national security matter alongside cranes and welding equipment.

The affected parties have until August 27, 2026, to comment before the rate is finalized. That’s 17 days from the date of this article.

To be clear, this is a choice. Brass winds do not need tariffs imposed on them for national security. These products and the families that purchase them are being targeted to further disrupt music education and the arts more broadly, as I have written about previously. It is part of the broader attack on the arts in this country.

Why brass, why now

This didn’t come out of nowhere. As I wrote about recently, the Supreme Court, earlier this year, ruled 6-3 that the administration’s use of emergency powers under IEEPA to impose the “Liberation Day” tariffs was unconstitutional. Tariffs are a tax, the Court said, and only Congress can levy one. That ruling brought some order back to import pricing after eleven months in which duty rates changed at least 60 times. But it didn’t end tariffs. It sent the administration looking for a legal foundation the courts are less willing to question, and Section 232 is that foundation. Courts have upheld it before and have said plainly that they won’t review the President’s motives or engage in fact-finding once a Section 232 investigation is underway. That’s likely why brass instruments, of all things, are being swept in under a national security label nobody has actually explained. The notice uses the phrase “national security” nine times. It never says why a trumpet qualifies.

Every policy has a jump-the-shark moment, the point where something that used to be taken seriously tips into self-parody. Steel and aluminum, you can argue about. Semiconductors, sure. A student trumpet, officially declared a national security matter: that’s the moment. Somewhere in the Commerce Department, someone signed off on treating French horns like they’re uranium centrifuges.

I’m not the only one raising an eyebrow. Bryan Riley of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation told reporters, “It’s not immediately clear why trumpets threaten to impair U.S. security.” Cullen Hendrix of the Peterson Institute for International Economics noted that earlier rounds of instrument tariffs “have raised prices and suppressed imports, particularly of instruments for beginners, without boosting domestic production.” Both are quoted in Reason’s coverage of the proposal. The Washington Times covered the same proposal, and its headline says it as well as anything: “Trump vs. trumpets: New tariff plan hits the orchestra’s brass section.” The Washington Times of all places!

NAMM, the music products industry trade association, released its detailed response here.

Who actually pays for this

Here’s something worth saying as plainly as I can, because it gets lost every time this topic comes up. Tariffs aren’t paid by the country that made the instrument. Tariffs are paid by the American company that imports it, and that cost moves down the chain from there. To the retailer who sells it. The school district who buys it, and the parents who rent it. U.S. Manufacturers, retailers, and the American public are the ones who pay the price. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York examined tariffs in 2025 and found that U.S. importers absorbed 86 to 94 percent of the added cost, while foreign exporters barely lowered their prices. Import prices on tariffed goods rose roughly 11 points more than on goods that weren’t tariffed.

This is not some theoretical exercise. The Music Trades put a number on last year alone: an effective 14.8 percent tariff rate cost the music products industry $627.3 million, split between higher consumer prices and losses borne by manufacturers and importers. A new 25 percent tariff on brass winds lands on top of that, and it will be paid by American dealers, American school districts and American families.

The Ohio irony

If you want to see how little the “protecting American manufacturing” argument holds up, look at Ohio. The Washington Post reported this week on laid-off workers at Conn-Selmer’s Eastlake factory, a plant that closed despite tariffs meant to protect exactly this kind of manufacturing. The factory is gone. The jobs are gone. And now a steeper tariff shows up anyway, raising costs for schools and families with nothing left to protect.

What this means for music programs

Brass instruments have already been getting more expensive before this proposal existed. NAMM has highlighted what makes this worse than the headline rate suggests: once an instrument’s brass, bronze, or nickel content crosses a certain threshold, the tariff applies to the instrument’s full value, not just the metal in it. A modest student trumpet or French horn doesn’t need to be expensive to begin with for a 25 percent jump to push it out of a rental fleet or a district’s replacement budget, especially in Title I schools already stretching every dollar.

What you can do now

Buy Now! If you are a music educator or administrator in a district with plans to make brass wind purchases this year, consider placing your orders now before the new tariffs go into effect.

Tell Congress! If you are a parent, educator, or concerned citizen, contact your congressional representatives about the negative impact this will have on your local music programs, particularly for beginning band programs.

Tell the Media! Let the local news outlets know what happens when instrument costs increase by 25% and the impact this will have on families who may already be struggling to pay for them. Highlight the absurdity of targeting brass instruments as a “national security” concern.

Tell the Administration! If you’re a retailer or manufacturer, go straight to NAMM. They’re the industry’s clearinghouse on this, compiling the HTS codes affected, coordinating formal comments, and tracking the proposal in real time. Their tariff and trade policy page has the latest and a way to get involved. If you plan to file a public comment, the deadline is August 27, 2026, through regulations.gov, docket BIS-2026-0331. To see what’s actually being proposed, the Federal Register notice itself, docket 2026-15961, is short enough to read in ten minutes. (At the time of this writing, the comment page for this proposal was not available).

The bigger picture

Most of what’s squeezing music programs right now - enrollment declines, teacher shortages, a narrowing curriculum - moves slowly through budget cycles and legislative sessions that make it hard for any one person to feel like their voice matters. This one is moving quickly.

Time is of the essence.

Don’t dawdle.

When I published The Storm Is Here on March 31, several of the seven threats still had open threads. A federal budget not yet proposed. A Supreme Court tariff case whose aftermath was uncertain. A Middle East conflict just beginning. An OBBBA whose fiscal machinery had not yet switched on. In the ninety days since, every one of those threads has resolved, and each resolved in the direction the article warned about.

I am not revising the original. The seven threats stand exactly as written. This addendum records what has changed, and what it means that the conditional verbs are now gone.

1. Federal Funding: The FY27 Budget Landed, and Congress Repeated the Pattern

I wrote that the administration would submit its FY2027 budget “in the coming weeks” and would likely renew the push to consolidate and eliminate Title IV-A. It arrived on April 3, 2026, three days after publication. The request proposed folding Title IV-A into a new “Make Education Great Again” (MEGA) block grant funded at $2 billion. That is $4.6 billion less than the seventeen programs it would absorb, with 25 percent mandated to literacy and 25 percent to math, squeezing whatever remained for the arts. Migrant Education and English Language Acquisition were zeroed out. The Department of Education was cut to $76.5 billion.

Then, on June 9, the House Appropriations Committee rejected the consolidation and preserved Title IV-A, with a token 0.4 percent increase, while cutting the Department overall to $70.7 billion, roughly 10 percent below the enacted FY2026 level. The Senate has not yet acted.

This is the same pattern I described, now running a second time inside a single year: propose deep cuts, accept what Congress preserves, and keep eliminating programs through administrative action in the meantime. The “one-year reprieve” is no longer a one-off event. It is a documented cycle. FY27 advocacy is not a future task. It is live right now.

2. The OBBBA Was a Delayed Fuse, and the Fuse Is Now Burning

In March I called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act a fiscal pressure system rather than a single cut. What wasn’t obvious then is that almost none of it had taken effect yet. The machinery was written into law but not switched on. Now the phase-in calendar is clear, and nearly all of it lands on the same state general funds that flow to your district, arriving precisely as the last ESSER dollars have been liquidated.

What is now scheduled to hit states:

October 1, 2026: the state share of SNAP administrative costs rises to 75 percent, a shift of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per state, per year. New Medicaid eligibility restrictions take effect the same day.

• December 31, 2026: Medicaid work-reporting requirements begin, and eligibility redeterminations move from annual to biannual, raising administrative cost and coverage churn.

• January 1, 2027: the federal tax-credit voucher program opens (see below).

• October 1, 2027: SNAP error-rate penalties require states to cover up to 15 percent of benefits, and the Medicaid provider-tax cap begins ratcheting down toward a 3.5 percent floor by 2032.

• October 1, 2028: states must impose Medicaid cost-sharing copays of up to $35 per service.

The voucher deserves its own paragraph, because it is the single largest new federal lever pointed at public-school funding. It is uncapped, with no limit on participants or on total revenue foregone. Donors receive a dollar-for-dollar federal credit of up to $1,700, meaning they are fully reimbursed for contributions to private-school scholarship organizations. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates $26 billion over ten years. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates as much as $51 billion a year, larger than Title I and IDEA combined. Governors must opt their states in by January 1, 2027, which turns this into a live, state-by-state political decision being made right now. Whether your state participates is not settled. That means it can still be influenced.

And the graduate-pipeline squeeze I described is no longer pending. The OBBBA’s elimination of Grad PLUS loans took effect July 1, 2026. The cap on borrowing that narrows the pool of future music educators is now the law in force, not a line on a calendar.

3. The Middle East Line Is No Longer a Hedge

In March I wrote, cautiously, that the United States had entered active military conflict in the Middle East, and that how much worse the fiscal picture became would depend on what the coming months brought. The coming months brought the 2026 Iran war.

Strikes on February 28 killed Iran’s supreme leader, and Iran responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz. A Pakistan-brokered ceasefire in April collapsed. Hostilities re-escalated this month. The ceasefire crumbled again on July 9, the United States resumed strikes on July 13, Iranian forces struck tankers in the Strait, and the conflict remains active as of this writing. The Strait is effectively closed, with tolls reported above $1 million per ship and global oil flow disrupted.

The spiking oil prices, upward inflation pressure, and competition between war costs and domestic discretionary spending that I flagged as a risk are now the operating environment. Education is a discretionary line. When a federal government is managing a war on top of the structural deficits already baked into current law, that line has less protection, not more.

4. The Tariff Picture Flips This Week

My tariff section was accurate as of February 20, when the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs 6-3 and the administration bridged the gap with a 15 percent global tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, good for 150 days. That window expires July 24. New Section 301 tariffs are expected to take effect as early as July 25.The structure I described is being replaced almost as this addendum is written.

What has moved since March:

• A Section 301 “Forced Labor” action announced June 2 already sets a 12.5 percent duty on China, Japan, India, Brazil and dozens of others, and 10 percent on six additional countries.

• A second Section 301 “Excess Capacity” action, hitting sixteen economies including the EU, China, Canada and Mexico, is imminent.

• Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum now stand at 50 percent, raising input costs for domestic manufacturers such as Conn-Selmer.

• The average effective tariff on imported musical instruments reached 16.6 percent in the first quarter of 2026, up from 15.9 percent in 2025, nearly triple the 2024 rate.

NAMM’s own assessment is that “Section 301 levels are anticipated to resemble IEEPA levels,” and that tariffs may stack on top of one another. In the language of the original article: the Supreme Court retired one instrument, but the orchestra is being reassembled under a different section of the Trade Act. If your district deferred instrument purchases in 2025 waiting for relief, understand that you may be waiting through a second act, and that the $627 million the industry already absorbed is baked into prices regardless.

5. A New Cost Shift, and a Partisan One: Federal Disaster Aid

There is one more cost moving from Washington to the states, and it was not among the original seven. But it is not a new kind of threat. It is the one this article already named. In the section on the OBBBA I wrote that Medicaid, SNAP, and voucher costs each “push costs onto states, and states absorb those costs from the same general funds that flow to local school districts.” In the section on state tax reform I noted that Georgia alone has “passed more than $2.4 billion in annual education costs onto local districts.” Federal disaster assistance is the newest lever in that same fiscal pressure system, squeezing state budgets from above. It is being restructured in two ways at once.

The first is the cost share. The FEMA Review Council, reporting out in May, recommended that the federal government initially cover only 50 percent of a state’s estimated recovery costs, with the rest, up to the traditional 75 percent, earned back through “performance measures,” on a two-to-three-year timeline. For most of FEMA’s history the federal floor was 75 percent, and in practice it ran higher for catastrophic events. By one analysis, simply holding the share to that 75 percent minimum, rather than the larger share the executive branch had historically absorbed, would have shifted roughly $27 billion onto states and localities between 2008 and 2024. Starting at half is a larger transfer still. The Council also recommended raising the damage threshold a state must clear to qualify for a federal declaration by more than 50 percent, a change that would have disqualified 29 percent of the disasters declared between 2012 and 2025.

The second change is harder to put in a budget table, but every governor now understands it. An Associated Press analysis of FEMA records going back to 1989 found that under the current administration, states that voted for the president have more than 75 percent of their disaster requests approved, while states that did not are approved less than half the time. By the governor’s party, the split is 80 percent for Republicans and roughly 60 percent for Democrats. Approvals that once took under three weeks now average about a month and a half, and often stretch past two months once inspections are counted. In July, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island were all denied aid for a February snowstorm. A denied or delayed declaration does not make the damage disappear. It relocates the bill to the state, which pays it from the same general fund that pays for schools.

For a music educator, the link is one step removed, but it is real, and it is the same link the original article drew. Every dollar a state must divert to cover a disaster the federal government used to share is a dollar that does not reach the funding formula feeding your district. It is one more cost pushed down to the level where, as the piece put it, music and the arts are “what you fund when you have money left over.” In a state already squeezed by the OBBBA, the expired ESSER cliff, and a war-inflated budget, disaster aid adds another push from above to a cascade the article already traced, and, for the first time, it makes the size of that push depend on how your state voted.

The seven threats have not changed. What has changed is the verb tense. In March these were forecasts. In July they are facts on the ground. A budget filed. A war underway. A tariff regime turning over this week. An OBBBA whose fuse is now lit. A disaster-aid backstop that now arrives slower, smaller, and conditioned on how your state voted. The response is the same as it has always been, and it is the only thing that has ever worked: show up before the decision is made. The FY27 bill is being written now. Your governor’s voucher decision is being made now.

Advocacy is not something you do. Advocacy is something you are.

Part Two, the update to the eighth threat, follows later this week.

Related Links:

The Storm is Here: Seven Threats Every Music (and Arts) Educator Must Understand Right Now

The Eighth Threat: From South Orange-Maplewood to Watertown, Music Education in the Culture War

The Founding Discipline: The history of the role of music and arts education across human history.

Eight articles. Eight civilizations, movements, centuries, and institutional revolutions. I have been building this record across eight installments of this series because the record exists and deserves to be stated in full. It has not been assembled before in this form: as a single, cumulative evidentiary case tracing music and the arts as foundational disciplines of human education from the Sumerian tablet houses of 3000 BCE to the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. Not as a survey. Not as a celebration. Not as an advocacy piece. As evidence.

I spent five decades in this field before writing a word of this series. I have seen the arguments made badly and well, seen the policy wins and the policy retreats, seen the data collected and the data ignored. What I have not seen, until now, is the full historical record laid out as what it actually is: Proof.

This article states what the record proves.

The Four Claims, Settled

The thesis of this series contains four claims. Each has been substantiated across the preceding articles. This is the moment to name what the evidence has established.

The first claim: music and the arts are foundational domains of human knowledge and expression. Not enrichment. Not supplemental. Not optional. Foundational. In the Zhou dynasty, music ranked second among the Six Arts, ahead of archery, charioteering, calligraphy, and mathematics, because ritual and music together constituted the moral and civic core of the entire curriculum.^[1] In Plato’s Republic, mousike was not one subject among many. It was the discipline through which the soul was ordered before reason could govern it.^[2]Aristotle was even more direct: music belongs in education not as a tool for some other end, but because leisure itself requires formation, and only music provides it.^[3] The Quadrivium placed music among the four mathematical sciences alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, not as an artistic interlude in the university curriculum but as one of the four ways a mind learns to reason about quantity and relationship.^[4]Boethius, al-Farabi, and Guido of Arezzo, writing across three centuries and two religious traditions, made the same argument: music is a discipline of the intellect, not an ornament of leisure.^[5]

The second claim: instruction has been delivered by qualified teachers. The chain is unbroken, and the evidence is specific. The Sumerian ummia held a formal title designating expert instructional status. The Egyptian shemayet trained within a hierarchical professional system attached to temple institutions. Guido of Arezzo codified the first systematic pedagogy for music reading around 1030 CE and trained singers who, in turn, trained other singers across half of Europe.^[6] Luther’s town schools required competent music instruction as an explicit condition of the school ordinance. Bach was appointed Thomaskantor in Leipzig in 1723 after an examination process that included a compositional audition; he held the title of teacher in a civic school, not that of a court musician in a private household.^[7] Lowell Mason’s Normal Musical Institutes trained 1,500 teachers a year.^[8] By 1831, the Prussian teacher training seminaries required musical competence as a condition of certification.^[9] The Music Supervisors National Conference, founded in April 1907, was from its first meeting an organization of credentialed practitioners committed to standardized professional preparation.^[10] The Kodály method, the Orff-Schulwerk, the Dalcroze approach, and the Suzuki method each required specialized teacher preparation in the method itself, not merely general musical competence.^[11] State licensure made the “qualified teacher” standard a legal requirement in American public schools. The chain runs from the ummia of Ur to the licensed music educator of the twenty-first century without a break.

The third claim: music and the arts have been taught in every serious system of education in human history. The series documented Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India, Greece, Rome, the Islamic Golden Age, medieval Christendom, the Lutheran Reformation, Counter-Reformation Catholic institutions, the Orpheon movement in France, the Prussian Volksschule, the Tonic Sol-fa movement in England, and the American public school system. Across every one of these, without exception, music held a recognized and required place in what it meant to educate a person. The Islamic Golden Age scholars al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and al-Kindi did not omit music from their encyclopedias of the sciences; they gave it systematic treatment because their tradition understood it as a science.^[12] Charlemagne’s Admonitio Generalis of 789 CE required that cathedral schools teach singing alongside reading and arithmetic.^[13] The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum of 1599, the governing document of Counter-Reformation education, built music into the formal curriculum of schools operating across four continents.^[14] Not one serious system omitted it. Not one serious civilization looked at the question of what a complete education required and answered: not music.

The fourth claim: the record is continuous and universal across human history, not modern, not Western, not episodic. The edubba of Sumer is three thousand years older than the Boston public school system. The gurukula tradition of Vedic India, in which the student lived with the teacher and learned the Sama Veda through precise oral transmission, predates the European university by two millennia.^[15] The Yueji, the Record of Music, attributed to the Confucian tradition and compiled no later than the early Han dynasty, argues for music’s centrality to moral and political order in terms that Plato would recognize as his own.^[16] These traditions did not influence one another. They arrived at the same conclusion independently because they were observing the same thing: a complete human being requires formation that only music provides.

The Pattern the Series Has Been Tracking

There is a second argument in this series. It has been planted across four earlier articles and has not yet been identified as a pattern. It is time to name it.

Every civilization in the record taught music. Not every regime did. Some sought to suppress, control, or erase it. Those regimes form a recognizable class, and understanding what they share is as important to the thesis as understanding what the affirmative record shows.

The first signal appears in Article 3. Plato’s warning about musical modes in the Republic is sometimes read as an argument against music. It is the opposite. Plato argued that musical modes had to be carefully controlled because they had direct power over the character of the citizens who heard them.^[17] He was not dismissing music. He was acknowledging that it was too powerful to leave ungoverned. Only disciplines that matter are worth controlling.

The second signal appears in Article 4. Byzantine iconoclasm, in its two phases from 726 to 842 CE, was a theological project that targeted the visual arts. The state moved against images because they had power, and power required regulation by the state.^[18] The logic of suppression is always the same: the art form is not trivial. If it were trivial, it would not need to be suppressed.

The third signal appeared in Article 6. The English Reformation dismantled the choral foundations, dissolved the cathedral schools, silenced the organs, and burned the repertoire. The institutional infrastructure for sacred music education in England, built over four centuries, was largely destroyed within a generation.^[19] The destruction was not incidental to the Reformation’s program. It was integral to it. The reformers understood, correctly, that the musical tradition carried a theology they wished to erase. To erase that theology, they had to destroy the institutional apparatus that transmitted it.

The fourth signal appeared in Article 8. The twentieth century built the most sophisticated professional infrastructure in the history of music education. It also produced the most systematic attempts to destroy that infrastructure in human history. Four regimes. Four distinct projects of suppression. All four shared the same structural logic.

In 1933, the Nazi government established the Reichsmusikkammer as an instrument of state control over all musical life in Germany. Membership was mandatory for any musician who wished to work. Jews, Roma, political dissidents, and practitioners of jazz and atonal music were excluded. The purging of Jewish music educators from German schools and conservatories was among the regime’s earliest and most thorough acts of professional dismantling. In 1938, the regime mounted the Entartete Musik exhibition in Düsseldorf, displaying jazz, atonal works, and compositions by Jewish composers as cultural pathologies requiring eradication. Music education was not peripheral to the Nazi project. It was central because the regime understood that music shapes the formation of persons and required persons formed in a particular way. ^[20]

In 1948, Andrei Zhdanov, acting on Stalin’s behalf, issued decrees that subjected Soviet music to the doctrine of socialist realism. Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Khachaturian were formally condemned. Composers were required to produce music accessible to the masses and ideologically correct in its emotional content.^[21] The Zhdanov decrees were not primarily about aesthetics. They were about control of the formation process. A state that controls what music its citizens hear and what music its musicians are trained to produce controls something deep within the apparatus of civic identity.

In 1966, the Cultural Revolution in China targeted the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Faculty were forced to undergo public criticism sessions, sent to labor camps for reeducation, and, in some cases, killed. The conservatory effectively ceased to function as an educational institution for the duration of the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976.^[22] The Red Guards explicitly identified the transmission of traditional musical culture as a counterrevolutionary act. To sever the future from the past, you destroy the institutions that transmit the past. Music schools are exactly those institutions.

In 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia and, within months, murdered an estimated ninety percent of the country’s classical musicians, dancers, and artists.^[23] The apsara dance tradition, transmitted continuously for a thousand years, came within a generation of total extinction. After 1979, surviving artists spent decades attempting to reconstruct what had been lost, training students from memory of what their teachers had taught them before the killing began.

Four regimes. One pattern. Each is characterized by closed information environments, enforced ideological conformity, and a deliberate rupture with historical continuity. Each treated the arts and arts education not as peripheral concerns but as primary targets, because each understood, correctly, that arts education is where cultural formation happens.

None of these regimes is described by serious historians as a serious system of education. They are described as catastrophes. The suppression pattern is diagnostic. When a regime moves against music and the arts, it is not making a curricular adjustment. It is announcing what kind of society it intends to build. Every serious civilization in the historical record answered that question one way. These regimes answered it another. The contrast is part of the record.

The Present Moment in Historical Context

In March 2026, I published “The Storm Is Here: Seven Threats Every Music and Arts Educator Must Understand Right Now.” The seven threats documented there — the collapse of federal ESSER funding, the proposed elimination of the Department of Education’s grant programs, tariff-driven instrument cost spirals, K-12 enrollment decline, teacher pipeline contraction, voucher-driven diversion of public funds, and state-level curriculum narrowing - collectively constitute the most significant structural threat to institutional music education in the democratic world since the twentieth-century totalitarian episodes described above.

That is not a rhetorical escalation. It is a structural observation.

The distinction between what happened under the Reichsmusikkammer and what is happening now is real and important: those were states acting with explicit intent to suppress. What is happening now is not directed suppression. It is institutional erosion through indifference, through accumulated budget pressure, through the recurring American habit — documented in Article I of this series - of constructing “the basics” in the image of whatever the moment is afraid of.

The habit has a fifty-year record in American education. Sputnik produced a curriculum defined by physics and mathematics. The minimum competency movement of the 1970s produced a curriculum defined by reading and arithmetic. A Nation at Risk produced a curriculum defined by the Five New Basics, which did not include the arts. No Child Left Behind produced a curriculum defined by what its tests measured, and its tests did not measure music. Each wave narrowed the definition of what counts as foundational. Each wave told the generation of students it governed that their formation as musicians, visual artists, actors, and dancers was not, in the official vocabulary of American education, a basic.

The Goals 2000 generation fought that definition successfully. The 1994 National Standards for Arts Education and the federal law that preceded them established, for the first time in American law, that the arts are core academic subjects.^[27] The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 went further, naming music and the arts explicitly in its definition of a well-rounded education. ^[28] That language did not arrive by accident. It arrived because the people who understood what was at stake made the argument and won it in the legislative arena.

The question now is whether the next generation will hold what was won or allow it to erode under the accumulated weight of seven simultaneous threats.

And then came an eighth.

In “The Eighth Threat: From South Orange-Maplewood to Watertown, Music Education in the Culture War,” I documented what the preceding months made unmistakable: a coordinated pattern of ideological attacks on what students are permitted to perform. In Watertown, Wisconsin, the school board voted 7-1 to bar the high school Wind Symphony from performing composer Omar Thomas’s “A Mother of a Revolution,” overriding the music director’s professional judgment, the district’s opt-out policy, and the unanimous support of the student musicians who had rehearsed the work all year. The same pattern appeared in Westfield, Indiana; Northern Lebanon, Pennsylvania; Spring Cove, Pennsylvania; Marion County, Florida; and other districts where school officials overrode educators’ repertoire selections on ideological grounds.

The Educational Theatre Association’s 2024 data captured the scale of the shift: more than 75 percent of theatre educators reported pressure to change their repertoire selections in the 2023-24 school year, up from 6 percent the year before. Two-thirds reported self-censoring at the selection stage.^[24] The chilling effect is the point. The repertoire pipeline narrows quietly, in decisions made before any program is printed, as pieces that never get selected because an educator has learned to preemptively calculate the political cost.

The eighth threat differs from the first seven in kind, not merely in degree. The structural threats operate through budgets, schedules, and demographic trends. None requires anyone to actively want music education to disappear. The eighth threat is intentional. It is aimed directly at the music itself, the composers who write it, the educators who teach it, and the students who perform it.

The structural logic has a history that this series has already documented. In 1938, the Nazi Entartete Musikexhibition identified composers whose work would no longer be permitted in German concert halls or classrooms. The mechanism: a state actor designates which artists are ideologically unacceptable and forbids educators from teaching them. The framing has shifted from “degenerate” to “indoctrination.” The function is identical.^[25]

The distinction between what happened under those regimes and what is happening now remains real and important. Those were states that wielded the full apparatus of coercion and violence. What is happening now operates through school board votes, administrative overrides, and the accumulated weight of public denunciation. The scale is different. The structural logic is not.

The seven structural threats and the eighth ideological one are not separate phenomena. They compound one another. A music program already weakened by budget pressures and scheduling erosion is less able to withstand a political attack from the community. A music educator already isolated by pipeline contraction is less likely to fight back against a board override. The storm and the culture war arrive simultaneously, amplifying each other.

Indifference is no less dangerous than intention. Systems that took generations to build can be degraded in a single budget cycle. The Orpheon movement in France, which brought choral music to tens of thousands of working-class Parisians throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, was largely dismantled by the First World War’s fiscal catastrophe and never rebuilt to a comparable scale.^[26] The English choral foundation system, destroyed in the 1540s, took a century and a half to be restored in any recognizable form. The Cambodian classical tradition is still being reconstructed.

The recovery timelines are long, while the degradation timelines are short. That asymmetry is the most important structural fact in the history of arts education, and it belongs in the record alongside everything else.

What the Record Says

Five thousand years of evidence. Dozens of civilizations. Every serious system of education in human history. One conclusion.

Music and the arts are foundational domains of human knowledge and expression, taught by qualified teachers in every serious system of education throughout human history. That sentence is not a thesis to be argued. It is a finding to be reported. The argument has already been made by the Sumerian scribes, who built music into the tablet house curriculum; by Confucius, who placed music second among the Six Arts; by Plato, who devoted three books of the Republic to musical formation; by Aristotle, who called music the discipline that education cannot lack; by Boethius, who made music one of the four mathematical sciences of the university; by Luther, who wrote that, next to theology, he gave music the highest place; by Lowell Mason, who persuaded the Boston School Committee in 1838 that music belongs in public schools not as enrichment but as instruction; by the Prussian state, which made musical competence a requirement for teacher certification; by the French Republic, which built the Orpheon into the Paris school system; and by the Congress of the United States, which named the arts a core academic subject in 1994 and explicitly named music in 2015.

The question is not whether music and the arts belong in education. That question has been answered in every civilization serious enough to have an education system, long before anyone thought to ask it, because the answer was obvious to every civilization that thought carefully about what a complete human being is and what a complete education requires.

The question now is whether the current generation of educational decision-makers, when they propose eliminating music teachers, consolidating arts programs, redirecting graduation requirements away from the arts, banning composers from school performances, defining the basics as whatever the workforce needs this decade, and calling music a distraction, understand what they are proposing to stop doing. And whether they know what kind of historical company that decision puts them in.

The record is in. It has been in for five thousand years. This series has presented it.

The conclusion belongs to the evidence, not to the argument. The evidence is unanimous.

Previous Articles in This Series

The following are the eight articles that precede and substantiate this conclusion. Each makes a discrete claim. Together they constitute the full evidentiary record.

Article I — Back to Basics... Again

Article II — The Founding Claim: Music as Original Curriculum

Article III — The Philosophical Foundations: Why Every Major Tradition Required It

Article IV — The Quadrivium: Music as Mathematical Science

Article V — The Question of Access: Elite or Universal?

Article VI — The Reformation Turn: Music for the People

Article VII — The 19th Century Revolution: Music Enters the Public School

Article VIII — The 20th Century Professionalization: What the Century Built

Related Articles

The following articles document the contemporary threat environment this series places in historical context.

The Storm Is Here: Seven Threats Every Music and Arts Educator Must Understand Right Now

The Eighth Threat: From South Orange-Maplewood to Watertown, Music Education in the Culture War

Sources and Notes

The notes below identify the primary and scholarly sources on which the historical claims in this article rest. Sources for the eight preceding articles are cited in their respective endnote sections.

[1] The liù yì (六藝), the Six Arts of Zhou aristocratic education, are described in the Zhouli (周禮), Rites of Zhou, in the chapter on the Baoshi (保氏), Guardian. The ranking of ritual (li 禮) first and music (yue 樂) second is explicit in the text. For a standard edition and translation, see Biot, Édouard, Le Tcheou-li, ou Rites des Tcheou (Paris, 1851), vol. 1. On the li-yue pairing as the moral and civic core of the curriculum, see Nylan, Michael, The Five “Confucian” Classics (Yale University Press, 2001), 72–111.

[2] Plato, Republic, Books II–III, trans. G.M.A. Grube, rev. C.D.C. Reeve (Hackett, 1992). The argument for musical education as soul-ordering precedes the argument for mathematical and dialectical education; mousike is the foundation, not the ornament.

[3] Aristotle, Politics, Book VIII, trans. C.D.C. Reeve (Hackett, 1998). Aristotle’s argument that music is the only subject that directly forms character is the clearest ancient statement of the foundational claim.

[4] On the Quadrivium and music’s place within it, see Boethius, De institutione musica, in Bower, Calvin M., trans., Fundamentals of Music (Yale University Press, 1989). On the Quadrivium’s institutional role in medieval university education, see Lindberg, David C., The Beginnings of Western Science (University of Chicago Press, 2007), 200–216.

[5] On al-Farabi’s Kitab al-Musiqi al-Kabir: Sawa, George Dimitri, Music Performance Practice in the Early Abbasid Era (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1989). On Guido of Arezzo (c. 991–1033 CE): Guido of Arezzo, Micrologus, trans. Warren Babb, in Hucbald, Guido, and John on Music (Yale University Press, 1978).

[6] On the Egyptian shemayet: Teeter, Emily, Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011). On the Sumerian ummia: Kramer, Samuel Noah, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character (University of Chicago Press, 1963), 229–248.

[7] On Bach’s appointment to the Thomasschule: Wolff, Christoph, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (Norton, 2000), 225–258.

[8] On Lowell Mason’s Normal Musical Institutes: Birge, Edward Bailey, History of Public School Music in the United States (Oliver Ditson, 1928), 50–80.

[9] The Prussian certification requirement for musical competence appears in Calvin E. Stowe, Report on Elementary Public Instruction in Europe (1837), and is documented in Horace Mann’s Seventh Annual Report to the Board of Education of Massachusetts (1843).

[10] The Music Supervisors National Conference was founded in Keokuk, Iowa, in April 1907. It became the Music Educators National Conference in 1934 and the National Association for Music Education (NAfME) in 2011. On the founding: Mark, Michael L., and Charles L. Gary, A History of American Music Education, 3rd ed. (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 215–230.

[11] On specialized teacher preparation requirements for Kodály, Orff, Dalcroze, and Suzuki methods: Choksy, Lois, et al., Teaching Music in the Twenty-First Century, 2nd ed. (Prentice Hall, 2001).

[12] Al-Farabi, Kitab al-Musiqi al-Kabir (Grand Book on Music), c. 900 CE, is the most comprehensive treatise on music theory produced in the Islamic Golden Age. On al-Kindi’s foundational role: al-Kindi, Risala fi Khubr Talif al-Alhan (On the Composition of Melodies), c. 840 CE.

[13] Charlemagne, Admonitio Generalis, 789 CE, Chapter 72. For the Latin text and translation, see King, P.D., Charlemagne: Translated Sources (Kendal, 1987).

[14] Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis Iesu, 1599. On music’s role in Jesuit schools, see O’Malley, John W., The First Jesuits (Harvard University Press, 1993), 200–242.

[15] On the gurukula tradition and Vedic oral transmission: Staal, Frits, “The Sound of Religion,” Numen 33, no. 1 (1986): 33–64. On the Sama Veda: Rowell, Lewis, Music and Musical Thought in Early India (University of Chicago Press, 1992), 20–50.

[16] On the Yueji (樂記), Record of Music: Cook, Scott, “Yue Ji — Record of Music: Introduction, Translation, Notes, and Commentary,” Asian Music 26, no. 2 (1995): 1–96.

[17] Plato, Republic, 399a–401d, on the guardians’ musical education and the prohibition of certain modes.

[18] On Byzantine iconoclasm: Brubaker, Leslie, and John Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (c. 680–850): A History (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

[19] On the English Reformation’s destruction of choral foundations: Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (Yale University Press, 1992).

[20] On the Reichsmusikkammer: Kater, Michael H., The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (Oxford University Press, 1997). The Reichsmusikkammer was established by the Reich Chamber of Culture Law of September 22, 1933. Wikipedia, “Reich Chamber of Music”.

[21] On the Zhdanov decrees (1948): Fay, Laurel E., Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2000), 147–175. The formal decrees were dated February 10, 1948. EBSCO Research Starters, “Zhdanov Denounces Formalism in Music”.

[22] On the Cultural Revolution’s destruction of the Central Conservatory: Mittler, Barbara, Dangerous Tunes: The Politics of Chinese Music in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China since 1949(Harrassowitz, 1997). Seventeen Shanghai Conservatory professors or spouses committed suicide by the revolution’s end; Isaac Stern’s 1979 visit documented the destruction of pianos. Gao Music Academy, “Influence of the Great Cultural Revolution on Music”.

[23] On the Khmer Rouge’s destruction of Cambodian classical arts: Phim, Toni Samantha, and Ashley Thompson, Dance in Cambodia (Oxford University Press, 1999). An estimated 80–90 percent of Cambodia’s classical artists were killed during the period 1975–1979.

[24] Educational Theatre Association, State of Theatre Education Report 2024. More than 75 percent of theatre educators reported pressure to change repertoire selections in the 2023–24 school year, up from 6 percent the year before; two-thirds reported self-censoring at the selection stage.

[25] On the Entartete Musik exhibition (Düsseldorf, 1938): Potter, Pamela M., Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (Yale University Press, 1998). The parallel between the Watertown board vote and the Nazi exhibition’s mechanism of designating politically unacceptable composers is drawn in “The Eighth Threat“.

[26] On the Orpheon movement and its decline: Fulcher, Jane F., “The Orpheon: Choral Music in France, 1852–1870,” Musical Quarterly 63, no. 1 (1977): 37–54. The Orpheon network reached approximately 47,000 singers in some 1,200 societies at its peak in the 1860s; the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) substantially weakened it, and the First World War effectively ended it as a national movement.

[27] Goals 2000: Educate America Act, P.L. 103-227, signed March 31, 1994. The Act formally added the arts to the National Education Goals’ enumerated core subject areas. On March 11, 1994, the Consortium of National Arts Education Associations released the National Standards for Arts Education (MENC, 1994), covering dance, music, theater, and visual arts.

[28] Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, P.L. 114-95, signed December 10, 2015. The Act defined a “well-rounded education” to include, by name, music and the arts — the first time federal law explicitly named music and the arts in a positive definitional framework.

The nineteenth century embedded music in public schools. The twentieth century built the profession. Those are two different things, and the distinction matters.

What Lowell Mason established in Boston in 1838 was a policy. What the twentieth century built was an infrastructure: trained and certified teachers, codified pedagogical methods, state licensure systems, national and international professional organizations, a peer-reviewed research base, federal statutory recognition, and the architecture for transmitting all of it across generations. The “qualified teachers” claim at the center of this series’ thesis is not merely a historical inference in the twentieth century. It is, for the first time, empirically demonstrable.

This article is the story of how a profession built itself, from a church basement in Keokuk, Iowa, in 1907, to the signing of Goals 2000 in 1994, to the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. It is also a story that has a shadow. The same century that built the most sophisticated music education infrastructure in human history produced the most systematic assaults on it. Both belong in the record.

The Call to Keokuk

On April 10, 1907, 104 music supervisors from school districts in sixteen states gathered at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Keokuk, Iowa. They had come at the invitation of Philip Cady Hayden, the music supervisor for the Keokuk public schools and editor of a periodical called School Music Monthly. Hayden had sensed something: that the scattered individuals doing this work in cities and towns across America needed to find each other.^[1]

What emerged from those three days was not a conference but a permanent organization. Sixty-nine attendees signed on as founding members of what became the Music Supervisors National Conference, the direct institutional ancestor of what is today the National Association for Music Education.^[2]

The founding moment is worth dwelling on. In 1907, music supervisor was not a credential with a defined pathway. It was a role that people arrived at by different routes, from different training, with different methods and different expectations. The Keokuk meeting was, among other things, an act of professional self-recognition: these were not miscellaneous practitioners of a recreational activity. They were educators in a discipline, and they needed the infrastructure that serious disciplines have. The MSNC built it. It established a standard course of study for grades K through 6 by 1919. It developed working relationships with universities and teacher preparation programs. It created the professional community that gave music teaching its own norms, its own literature, and its own accountability.^[3]

In 1934, reflecting its growth beyond supervisors to include music educators at every level from pre-kindergarten through university, the organization renamed itself the Music Educators National Conference. It would carry that name until 1998, when it became MENC: The National Association for Music Education, and finally NAfME in 2011.

Similar professional associations were forming in parallel across the industrialized world. The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in Britain, founded in 1889 by Sir Alexander Mackenzie and Sir George Grove, was setting examination standards that would be used across the British Empire and beyond. European conservatoires were developing their own credentialing traditions. The impulse to professionalize music teaching was not an American invention. It was a global recognition that the nineteenth century’s institutional commitments required a twentieth-century professional structure to sustain them.

The Methods Revolution

Four figures, four countries, one generation. Each arrived at an independent conclusion about what music education required, and each built an institution to carry that conclusion forward. Together, they gave the twentieth century its pedagogical vocabulary.

Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950) had been teaching harmony at the Geneva Conservatory since 1892 when he began to notice that his students could read and analyze music without physically understanding it. His response was eurhythmics: a system in which rhythmic movement became the foundation of musical understanding. The body would learn what the eye had been asked to do alone. In 1910, with the support of Wolf Dohrn, he established an institute at Hellerau, outside Dresden, and for four years it functioned as one of the most remarkable educational experiments in Europe. Stanislavski visited. Mary Wigman studied there. Marie Rambert trained there and carried the method to London. The school closed when World War I broke out; Dalcroze returned to Geneva and founded the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze in 1915, which today remains the only institution authorized to confer the highest Dalcroze certification.^[4]

Carl Orff (1895–1982) began his experiment at the Güntherschule in Munich in 1924, a school of gymnastics, dance, and music that he co-founded with Dorothee Günther. What he developed there over the following decade was Schulwerk: elemental music-making through rhythm, movement, speech, and percussion, rooted in the natural play of children. The published volumes appeared between 1930 and 1935. Gunild Keetman enrolled as a student in 1926, joined the teaching staff in 1928, and became Orff’s essential collaborator. World War II disrupted the work, but in 1948 the Bavarian Broadcasting Company asked Orff to create a radio series for children, and the method was reborn in that postwar collaboration. Between 1950 and 1954, Orff and Keetman completed the five volumes of Music for Children, which was subsequently translated into eighteen languages and adopted in schools across Europe, North America, and beyond.^[5]

Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967) came to his educational project through folk music. In 1925 (the story goes) he overheard schoolchildren singing songs they had learned in school and was appalled. What he heard was musically impoverished: rote, mechanical, disconnected from the Hungarian musical tradition he had spent two decades collecting with Béla Bartók. He spent the next two decades writing, arguing, and organizing. In 1945, the Hungarian government incorporated his principles into the national school curriculum, and by 1950 the first primary school with music as a daily subject had opened. The Kodály method, sequential skill-building through singing, solfège, folk music, and ear training, was presented at the International Society for Music Education conference in Vienna in 1958, in Tokyo in 1963, and in Budapest in 1964, where Kodály was named honorary president. It traveled precisely because the profession had built the infrastructure to receive it. In 2016, UNESCO inscribed the Kodály concept as an item of Intangible Cultural Heritage.^[6]

Shinichi Suzuki (1898–1998) arrived at his central insight during a rehearsal with his brothers in the early 1930s. He noticed the obvious: all Japanese children speak Japanese. A language of immense complexity, learned effortlessly, through listening and imitation and a nurturing environment. What children could do with language, they could do with music. He called it the mother-tongue method, or Talent Education. He began teaching violin to very young children in the 1930s, established the Talent Education Research Institute in Matsumoto in 1946, and by 1950 the institute was recognized by Japan’s Ministry of Education. In 1964, Suzuki toured the United States with a small group of students, presenting them to the Music Educators National Conference. The level of their playing changed American string pedagogy. International associations followed.^[7]

What these four represent, taken together, is a profession doing what maturing professions do: building a research-grounded intellectual infrastructure, testing it in institutions, publishing it, certifying teachers in it, and transmitting it internationally. None of these methods is a tradition or an oral transmission. Each is a codified pedagogy, subject to training, examination, and professional accountability. Each traveled because the profession that received them had the architecture (journals, conferences, university programs, credentialing bodies) to carry them.

Credentialing and the University

Concurrent with the methods revolution, the question of who was qualified to teach music was being answered at the level of formal training. The first program designed specifically for public school music teachers was established in 1886 by Julia Etta Crane, who founded the Crane Normal Institute of Music in Potsdam, New York, on the conviction that teaching music was a professional act requiring professional preparation, no different from teaching reading or history.^[8] Boston University had granted the first Bachelor of Music degree in 1876 to Charles Henry Morse, establishing the university as the first music degree-granting institution in the United States.^[9] The four-year Bachelor of Music Education degree, which became the standard entry point into the profession, emerged across American universities through the early twentieth century.^[10] State certification regimes developed in parallel, requiring music teachers to hold a specialized degree. The university music education program became the standard entry point: a four-year preparation that combined musicianship, pedagogy, supervised clinical experience, and professional examination.

The shift from “music teacher” as a role to “music educator” as a licensed profession was not semantic. It was structural. It meant that the claim this series has been making across eight articles, that music is taught by qualified teachers, was now a legal requirement, enforced by state licensing boards, documented in institutional records, and backed by professional standards that a public could inspect and a legislature could mandate.

European conservatoires had been building credentialing traditions of their own. The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, examining students across the Commonwealth and beyond, had established graded certification systems that functioned as quality benchmarks for music teachers and students alike. Continental conservatoires in Paris, Vienna, Leipzig, and Amsterdam had long operated as the credentialing spine of European music education. These were not parallel developments to the American state licensure movement. They were its antecedents, and American professional organizations understood themselves as building on that tradition.

Federal Recognition: The Long Arc

On September 29, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act in the White House Rose Garden. It established the National Endowment for the Arts as an independent federal agency, the first time the United States government formally recognized that the arts were a national concern deserving federal investment. Johnson’s words at the signing have been quoted often enough to become familiar: “Art is a nation’s most precious heritage. For it is in our works of art that we reveal ourselves, and to others, the inner vision which guides us as a nation. And where there is no vision, the people perish.”^[11]

The NEA was not a music education agency. But its creation was the first federal signal that the arts occupied a distinct and valued place in American life, a signal that the profession had spent six decades earning.

The second signal was harder to win, and the story of how it arrived belongs to Article I of this series, which tells it in full. What the present article records is the institutional fact: on March 31, 1994, President Clinton signed the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, which formally added the arts to the National Education Goals’ enumerated core subject areas. It was the first time United States law identified the arts as a core component of the K–12 curriculum.^[12]

On March 11, 1994 — twenty days before Goals 2000 was signed — the Consortium of National Arts Education Associations presented the National Standards for Arts Education to Secretary of Education Richard Riley at the National Press Club in Washington. The profession had defined what students should know and be able to do in the arts before federal law had finished deciding whether the arts were a core subject. Covering dance, music, theater, and visual arts, the Standards were the second set of national content-area standards published in the United States, following mathematics in 1989, a fact worth underscoring. The arts did not trail the other disciplines in producing rigorous, discipline-specific national standards. They led the field except for one.^[13] By the late 1990s, nearly every state had adopted arts standards of its own. The profession had done what every other core discipline had done: defined what students should know and be able to do, in the language the policy moment required.

The wave appeared to have broken in the profession’s favor. It had not.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 named the arts among ten core academic subjects in its statutory language, a holding of the legal ground that Goals 2000 had won.^[14] But NCLB also installed a testing regime focused on reading and mathematics, and mandated consequences for schools that did not meet proficiency targets in those subjects. What followed was not a change in law but a change in practice. Research by the Center on Education Policy, tracking school districts nationally, documented significant reductions in instructional time for subjects outside the tested core. Music and the arts were not removed. They were squeezed. Slowly, district by district, schedule by schedule, as principals facing accountability pressure made the rational calculation that time was finite and tests measured reading and math.^[15]

The gap between statutory inclusion and classroom reality is one of the most important structural facts in the history of American music education. NCLB did not repeal Goals 2000. It created conditions in which Goals 2000’s gains eroded without anyone having to say so.

The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 addressed this directly. ESSA replaced NCLB’s framework with a requirement that schools provide a “well-rounded education,” and it named music and the arts explicitly among the subjects that definition encompasses.^[16] The word “explicitly” matters. Music and the arts were not implied, not assumed, not bundled into a generic category. They were named. ESSA is the most specific statutory affirmation of music as a core educational discipline in the history of American federal education law. It is the moment federal statute caught up with what the profession had been building since Keokuk.

The Shadow of the Century

There is a history that runs alongside the professionalization story, darker and necessary to name.

The same century that built music education’s most sophisticated institutional infrastructure also produced its most systematic assaults. They were not accidents. They were policies.

In 1933, Joseph Goebbels established the Reichsmusikkammer as a division of the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Every musician in Germany (composer, performer, conductor, teacher, instrument manufacturer) was required to hold membership. Membership could be denied on grounds of race or political affiliation. The result was the systematic exclusion of Jewish musicians from German musical life, the banning of works by Mendelssohn, Mahler, and hundreds of others, and the effective state takeover of what music could be created, performed, taught, and heard.^[17]

In 1938, the regime made that logic visible. The Entartete Musik exhibition, organized by Hans Severus Ziegler and mounted at the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf in May of that year, displayed jazz recordings, atonal scores, and works by Jewish composers as cultural threats requiring eradication. Its cover image, a caricature of a Black jazz musician wearing a Star of David, compressed the racial and ideological argument into a single graphic. The state did not merely exclude music it found dangerous. It put it on trial.

In January 1948, Soviet Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov opened a meeting of the Union of Soviet Composers and put the profession on trial. The charge was “formalism,” meaning art for art’s sake, individuality, experimentation, Western influence. The accused included Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Khachaturian: three of the most significant composers of the twentieth century. The February 1948 decree of the Central Committee banned performances of their works in Moscow and required public acts of self-criticism. Shostakovich, in particular, navigated the following years in a state of sustained terror, producing what the state required while encoding what he actually thought in music that the regime’s ideological apparatus was not equipped to read.^[18]

In China, the Cultural Revolution launched in May 1966 closed conservatories, outlawed Western music, destroyed instruments, and sent musicians, professors, and intellectuals to labor camps in the countryside. By the time the revolution ended with Mao’s death in 1976, seventeen Shanghai Conservatory professors or their spouses had committed suicide; others died in prison or in forced labor. When the American violinist Isaac Stern visited Shanghai to perform in 1979, he could not find a single playable piano in the city. Every one had been destroyed.^[19]

In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge seized power in April 1975 under the banner of Year Zero, a revolutionary rupture with the entire past. Music was banned. Musicians were targeted. By the time the regime was toppled in January 1979, an estimated 80 to 90 percent of Cambodia’s musicians, dancers, teachers, and instrument makers had been killed or had disappeared.^[20]

These are not peripheral events in the history of music education. They are central to it. What they share is the logic that this series has been tracing since Plato’s warning about modal change in the Republic: music is not ornamental. It shapes people. It transmits culture. It forms civic and moral character across generations. Regimes that understand this and want to control the formation of their populations have, across history, moved to control music first.

The regimes that did so in the twentieth century shared recognizable characteristics. They operated as closed information environments. They enforced ideological conformity as the condition of participation in public life. They pursued revolutionary projects requiring the rupture of continuity with the past. None of these regimes is described by serious historians as a serious system of education. They are described as cautionary tales.

That is a connection this series will return to in its final article.

What the Century Assembled

By 2015, when ESSA named music explicitly in federal law, the United States had assembled something no prior civilization had built: a fully professionalized music education system, with licensed and credentialed teachers, codified and internationally peer-reviewed methods, national content standards, university degree programs in music education at every level, a substantial research base, and statutory recognition at the federal level. Music education associations operated in every state. NAfME had more than 50,000 members. The Suzuki, Orff, Kodály, and Dalcroze methods were taught in university preparation programs and practiced in classrooms across every continent.

The profession that Philip Cady Hayden had imagined when he sent out his invitation to Keokuk in 1907 (an organized, serious, self-accountable community of educators) had been built. What Mason’s 1,500-teacher conventions had gestured toward in the 1840s was now a credential, a degree, a state license, a national standard, and a federal statute.

The record this series has been building since the tablet houses of Sumer reaches, in the twentieth century, its most fully articulated institutional form. Five thousand years of continuous practice, transmitted through teachers, embedded in formal institutions, justified by the deepest philosophical and civic arguments each civilization has produced, arrived in the twentieth century at its first comprehensive professional infrastructure.

The final article of this series draws the full record together and names what it proves.

Previous Articles in this Series:

Article VII — The 19th Century Revolution: Music Enters the Public School

Article VI — The Reformation Turn: Music for the People

Article V — The Question of Access: Elite or Universal?

Article IV — The Quadrivium: Music as Mathematical Science

Article III — The Philosophical Foundations: Why Every Major Tradition Required Music

Article II — The Founding Claim: Music as Original Curriculum

Article I — Back to Basics… Again

Introduction — The Founding Disciplines

Sources and Notes

The sources and references for the historical claims in this article are listed below in order of first citation in the text. Footnote numbers correspond to the superscript markers in the body of the article.

[1] Philip Cady Hayden (1854–1925) served as music supervisor in Quincy, Illinois beginning in 1888 before moving to Keokuk, Iowa, where he founded The School Music Monthly in 1900. The magazine became the official publication of the NEA’s Department of Music Education in 1904. The founding conference at Westminster Presbyterian Church, April 10–12, 1907: Wikipedia, “Philip C. Hayden”; HMDB.org, NAfME historical marker, Keokuk, Iowa.

[2] The Music Supervisors National Conference became the Music Educators National Conference in 1934, “MENC: The National Association for Music Education” in 1998, and NAfME on March 8, 2012. NAfME, “NAfME History”.

[3] Standard course of study for grades K–6 established 1919: Quizlet, “History of MENC”; Gayle Woodruff, “A New Look at a Significant Cultural Moment: The Music Supervisors National Conference 1907–1932,” Journal of Research in Music Education (2007), Gale Academic OneFile.

[4] Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950). The Hellerau institute operated 1910–1914; Dalcroze returned to Geneva and founded the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze in 1915. Institut Jaques-Dalcroze, “Émile Jaques-Dalcroze”; Britannica, “Eurythmics”.

[5] Carl Orff (1895–1982) and Dorothee Günther co-founded the Güntherschule in Munich in 1924. Gunild Keetman enrolled as a student in 1926 and joined the teaching staff in 1928. The original Schulwerk was published 1930–1935. The postwar radio series began September 1948; the five-volume Music for Children co-authored with Keetman was published 1950–1954. Britannica, “Carl Orff”; Cleveland Orff, “Carl Orff and His Schulwerk”.

[6] Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967). The 1945 curriculum adoption and 1950 first music-primary school: AWAKE, “The Kodály Concept”. ISME presentations 1958 (Vienna), 1963 (Tokyo), 1964 (Budapest): Sandra Heslop, “The Kodály and Rajkó Methods,” American Hungarian Educators Association (2015). UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage inscription 2016: Wikipedia, “Kodály Method”.

[7] Shinichi Suzuki (1898–1998). The Talent Education Research Institute founded in Matsumoto, 1946; Ministry of Education recognition, 1950; 1964 US tour and MENC presentation: International Suzuki Association, “Shinichi Suzuki”; Suzuki Music Schools, “About Dr. Shinichi Suzuki”.

[8] Julia Etta Crane (1855–1923) founded the Crane Normal Institute of Music in 1886 at the Potsdam Normal School in New York, creating the first college program in the country dedicated to training public school music teachers. The school was purchased by the State of New York in 1926 and is today the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam. SUNY Potsdam, “Julia Ettie Crane and Her Dream”; SUNY Potsdam, “History”.

[9] The first Bachelor of Music degree in the United States was granted June 7, 1876, by Boston University to Charles Henry Morse. Louis Elson, “First American Degrees in Music,” History of Education Quarterly 1, no. 1 (March 1961): 35–40. Boston University College of Fine Arts, “Boston University Marks 150 Years of the School of Music”.

[10] The Bachelor of Music Education as a distinct four-year university degree developed in the United States through the 1910s and 1920s, concurrent with the growth of state certification requirements for music teachers. Wikipedia, “Music Education”; BestCollegeReviews.org, “History of Music Colleges in America”.

[11] President Lyndon B. Johnson signed P.L. 89-209, the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, September 29, 1965. The quoted words are from Johnson’s Rose Garden remarks. National Endowment for the Arts, “1965”; NEA, “About”.

[12] Goals 2000: Educate America Act, P.L. 103-227, signed March 31, 1994. The Act formally added the arts to the National Education Goals’ enumerated core subject areas, alongside English, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, history, and geography. Available via Congress.gov (H.R. 1804).

[13] Consortium of National Arts Education Associations, National Standards for Arts Education: What Every Young American Should Know and Be Able To Do in the Arts (Reston, VA: Music Educators National Conference, 1994). Covering dance, music, theater, and visual arts; the second national content-area standards published in the United States, after the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics standards of 1989. Available via ERIC ED365622.

[14] No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, P.L. 107-110, listing the arts among ten “core academic subjects” (Title IX, §9101). Available via Congress.gov.

[15] Jennifer McMurrer, Choices, Changes, and Challenges: Curriculum and Instruction in the NCLB Era (Washington, DC: Center on Education Policy, July 2007); Instructional Time in Elementary Schools: A Closer Look at Changes for Specific Subjects (Center on Education Policy, February 2008). Findings from a nationally representative survey of 349 school districts, November 2006 – February 2007.

[16] Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, P.L. 114-95, defining “well-rounded education” to explicitly include music and the arts. Available via Congress.gov.

[17] Reichsmusikkammer (Reich Chamber of Music), established 1933 under Joseph Goebbels. Richard Strauss served as president November 1933 until his dismissal in July 1935 following the Gestapo interception of a letter to his Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig. Wikipedia, “Reich Chamber of Music”.

[18] The Central Committee decree on music, February 10, 1948, preceded by Zhdanov’s speech to the Union of Soviet Composers in January 1948. Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Khachaturian were among the condemned. EBSCO Research Starters, “Zhdanov Denounces Formalism in Music”.

[19] Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976. Music schools closed, instruments destroyed, conservatory faculty sent to labor camps. Seventeen Shanghai Conservatory professors or spouses committed suicide by the revolution’s end. Isaac Stern’s 1979 Shanghai visit documented the destruction of pianos; his return is the subject of the documentary From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China (dir. Murray Lerner, 1981, Academy Award for Documentary Feature). Gao Music Academy, “Influence of the Great Cultural Revolution on Music”.

[20] Khmer Rouge, April 1975 – January 1979. An estimated 80–90 percent of Cambodia’s musicians, dancers, teachers, and instrument makers were killed or disappeared. Toni Shapiro-Phim, “Preserving a Cultural Tradition: Ten Years After the Khmer Rouge,” Cultural Survival Quarterly (1990); Wikipedia, “Music of Cambodia”.

The question sounds simple. The answer is not what most people expect. In Prussia in 1763, in Paris in 1819, in England in the 1840s, and in Boston in 1838, when modern governments first organized free, compulsory, tax-funded schooling for the children of ordinary people, they included music. Not as an ornament. Not as a reward for finishing arithmetic. As a founding discipline of the democratic educational project, justified on the same grounds of formation that Plato and the Yueji had argued two millennia before, and that Luther’s schoolmasters had acted on two centuries before that.

This article documents that moment. The 19th century is the pivot point in the series: the period when the institutional record of more than five thousand years of elite, specialized education gave way to mass public schooling. What went into those founding curricula is not a minor historical detail. It is the evidentiary core of the series’ claim that music has been treated as foundational in every serious system of education throughout human history.

The century produced four overlapping stories, told in different languages and national contexts, that arrived at the same conclusion. The Prussian story is the oldest and the most direct ancestor of the American one. The French story is the least told in English-language accounts and the most instructive about what democratic music education can become at scale. The English story is the most self-consciously democratic of all: a movement that declared musical literacy a right of the working poor and built the institutional infrastructure to deliver it. The American story, centered on Lowell Mason and the Boston School Committee vote of August 28, 1838, became the direct foundation of what American music educators inherit today.

All four belong in the record. All four point in the same direction.

Prussia: The Oldest Template

The Prussian Volksschule, the people’s school, is where the story of mass public music education begins. Frederick the Great’s Generallandschulreglement of 1763 established the first tax-funded compulsory elementary school system in the world, requiring all children, girls and boys alike, to be educated from roughly age five to thirteen or fourteen.^[1] The curriculum the Prussian state inscribed into law was not reading alone or arithmetic alone. It was reading, writing, arithmetic, religion, and singing. Singing was in the founding legislation. Not added later. Not permitted as an enrichment. Mandated.

By the early nineteenth century, the institutional logic had advanced a step further. Prussian teacher-training seminaries required musical competence as a condition for certification. The principle was stated in unambiguous terms in an 1831 American survey of Prussian education:

The implication is clear. In Prussia, a teacher who could not teach music was not a complete teacher. The qualification was professional, not aspirational. The pedagogical vehicle for this requirement was already in print: Hans Georg Nägeli and Michael Traugott Pfeiffer had published their Gesangsbildungslehre nach Pestalozzischen Grundsätzen (Methods of Teaching Singing According to Pestalozzian Principles) in Zurich in 1810, codifying the Swiss reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s principles into a systematic music pedagogy. Sounds before notation. Rote before reading. The voice as the primary instrument. A sequential introduction of musical elements. This was a teachable method, not a vague aspiration, and it was already in use in German and Swiss schools when an American educator arrived to observe it.

France: The Orphéon and the Democratic Chorus

The French story runs in parallel and reaches more deeply into the social fabric than any other nineteenth-century music education movement. It begins with Guillaume-Louis Bocquillon, known as Wilhem (1781–1842), a composer and pedagogue who, in 1819, was appointed to create a system of singing instruction for the primary schools of Paris.^[3] Beginning at a single school on the rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais, Wilhem extended his method to eleven Parisian schools by 1835, when the Paris municipal council voted to extend choral instruction to all communal schools in the city. By 1836, knowledge of singing had become obligatory for the elementary teacher’s certificate in France, a direct institutional parallel to the Prussian requirement.

What made the Wilhem experiment remarkable was not only its reach into schools but also what it became outside them. Beginning in 1833, Wilhem gathered students from his various school programs into a single choral society. He named it the Orphéon, after Orpheus, and in doing so named something larger than a choir. The Orphéon became the vehicle through which choral instruction spread from schoolchildren to the working-class adults of Paris: artisans, laborers, and workers from the city’s industries. Evening classes opened in 1835 on the Rue Montgolfier, then spread across the city in similar classes, all following the Wilhem method. The Dictionary of Music and Musicians put the civic ambition plainly: “out of this presently grew the establishment of the Orpheon, the vast organisation which has since covered France with singing societies.” Charles Gounod succeeded Wilhem after his death in 1842, dividing the Orphéon into left-bank and right-bank sections and expanding it into a national institution with civic and patriotic dimensions that persisted through the rest of the century.

The Orphéon is the nineteenth century’s most direct answer to the question posed in Article 5 of this series: who had access, and to what? In France, the answer was: eventually, nearly everyone. What began as a school program became a national movement. What began as pedagogy became culture. The instrument was the same in both cases: qualified instruction in singing, systematized, scalable, and understood by its founders as a democratic act.

The Transmission: Woodbridge and the Pestalozzian Bridge

The Prussian model did not remain confined to Prussia. Between 1825 and 1829, William Channing Woodbridge, a Connecticut-born geographer and educational reformer, traveled through Germany and Switzerland, observing schools. He spent time with Pestalozzi himself, with Nägeli, with Pfeiffer, and with their students. What he saw in those schools, children learning to sing systematically, by method, from trained teachers, as a regular part of their daily instruction, convinced him that American schools were missing something foundational.

On August 24, 1830, Woodbridge addressed the inaugural meeting of the American Institute of Instruction. His paper was titled “Vocal Music as a Branch of Common Education.” He did not frame music as an amenity or an enrichment. He framed it as what common schooling was supposed to deliver, and he argued the case based on what he had observed in German and Swiss schools.^[4] The children who performed at his address that day had been trained in music under the direction of Lowell Mason, a Boston church musician whom Woodbridge had already enlisted as a collaborator.

Mason took the Pestalozzian principles Woodbridge brought back from Europe and built them into the first systematic American music pedagogy. His Manual of the Boston Academy of Music, published in 1834, codified the method: sounds before symbols, active participation before passive listening, and the sequential unfolding of musical elements in an order the child’s developing mind could follow.^[5] The Boston Academy of Music, which Mason co-founded with Woodbridge in 1833, served as the institutional vehicle: the first school in the United States dedicated to the systematic teaching of music and the base from which Mason would train the teachers who would carry the method into the public schools.

Boston, 1838: The Magna Carta of Music Education

The campaign to place music in the Boston public schools was neither swift nor easy. The Boston School Committee authorized an experiment in 1837, then balked at funding it. Lowell Mason resolved the impasse himself. On November 14, 1837, he offered to teach at the Hawes School in South Boston without pay, supplying his own materials. The committee accepted.^[6]

For nine months Mason taught. On August 14, 1838, the children of the Hawes School gave a public demonstration concert. The committee was persuaded. Fourteen days later, on August 28, 1838, the Boston School Committee voted to establish vocal music as a permanent subject in all of Boston’s public schools.

The resolution that followed has been called the Magna Carta of Music Education. What it said is as important as its name. The committee evaluated music not on aesthetic grounds but on three standards: intellectual, moral, and physical. Intellectually, music trained attention and cultivated the faculties of perception. Morally, it shaped character and elevated the affections. Physically, vocal instruction expanded the chest and strengthened the lungs. The aesthetic case, the claim that music is beautiful and therefore worthy of a place in education, was conspicuously absent.

This is not an oversight. It is a strategy, and it is worth understanding clearly. Mason and his allies knew that the aesthetic argument, however true, would not move a school committee responsible for public funds. The formation argument would. And the formation argument was the same one Plato had made in the Republicand the Yueji had made in its opening pages: music shapes the person before reason can intervene, and an education that ignores this has not completed its task. The Boston School Committee of 1838 would not have recognized those texts, but it endorsed the conclusion.

Mason served as superintendent of music for the Boston school system through 1845, the first person to hold such a position in American public education. By 1850, the national teacher conventions he convened at the Boston Academy of Music were drawing 1,500 educators from across the country, forming the first national infrastructure for training American music teachers.^[7]

Boston was not, in fact, alone. Mason’s brother Timothy was simultaneously building a parallel program in Cincinnati, where students performed a public concert two months before the famous Hawes School demonstration of August 1838. The Boston vote became the canonical reference point because it produced the formal institutional record. But the impulse was running in multiple American cities at once, independently, drawing on the same Pestalozzian principles that Woodbridge had imported from the same German schools.

England: Music for the People

In England, the democratization of music education took a different institutional form and a more explicitly social one. The Tonic Sol-fa movement, by the 1870s the most successful popular music education program in the English-speaking world, was founded not by a professional musician or a government committee but by a Congregationalist minister, John Curwen (1816–1880), who adapted a notation system invented by a Norwich schoolteacher, Sarah Ann Glover (1786–1867).^[8]

Glover had been teaching her Norwich Sol-fa system to children at her school throughout the 1830s. Curwen encountered her work in 1841, recognized its potential for something far larger than a single classroom, and in January 1842 launched the Tonic Sol-fa method as a national campaign. He founded the Tonic Sol-fa Reporter and Magazine of Vocal Music for the People in 1851 to promote the method, resigned his ministry in 1864 to devote himself entirely to music education, served on the West Ham School Board from 1870 to 1873, and incorporated the Tonic Sol-fa College in 1875 to train and certify teachers. The title of his journal named his constituency without equivocation: Music for the People.

The social reform dimension of the movement was inseparable from the pedagogical one and must not be understated. Curwen, with the conviction of a Victorian dissenting minister, believed that musical literacy was a moral instrument: a discipline of the body and spirit accessible to those who could not afford a pianoforte lesson, a counterweight to the gin-house, and a force for rational recreation and upright living among the urban working class. The movement was entangled from the beginning with the temperance movement, chapel culture, and the emerging politics of women’s suffrage. It drew its volunteers and students from the same communities that filled the Nonconformist chapels of industrial England.

The method made this possible because it was genuinely teachable to people without formal musical training. Movable-do solfège, with its hand signs and simplified notation, enabled a volunteer teacher in a Sunday school or a factory workers’ evening class to convey the basics of sight-reading within weeks. By the third quarter of the century, Tonic Sol-fa had hundreds of thousands of practitioners across Britain. The movement reached British colonial schools in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and South Asia, carrying the original program’s democratic ambition into new geographies. Choral traditions in Wales that persist to this day owe a direct debt to Curwen’s campaign.

John Pyke Hullah (1812–1884) attempted something similar in the 1840s with a fixed-do system adapted from Wilhem’s French method, reaching tens of thousands of working-class adults through evening classes in London. Hullah’s approach was eventually superseded by Curwen’s movable-do system, but the two campaigns together established the institutional premise: music education belonged in mass schooling, and the working people of England had the same claim to it as anyone else.

What the Founding Curriculum Actually Contained

Four countries. Four institutional contexts. The same conclusion.

In Prussia, music was inscribed in the founding legislation of the world’s first mass compulsory school system and made a condition of teacher certification before the American republic had held its first presidential election. In France, Wilhem turned a single Parisian school program into a national choral institution that reached artisans and laborers as well as schoolchildren, and made singing a requirement for the teacher’s certificate by 1836. In England, Curwen built a teacher-training college, a publishing operation, a national network, and a social reform movement, all in the service of the proposition that musical literacy was a democratic right. In the United States, Lowell Mason taught without pay, trained without precedent, and won the vote that made music a permanent subject in Boston’s public schools, then spent the next seven years building the national teacher-training infrastructure that spread the decision beyond Boston.

None of these campaigns treated music as an add-on to an existing curriculum after the real subjects had been secured. All of them understood music as part of a complete education. The formation argument that drove Mason’s 1838 campaign was the same one that drove the Prussian certification requirement, Curwen’s mission to the working poor, and Wilhem’s vision of a France covered with singing societies. The intellectual tradition that runs from Plato and the Yueji through the medieval quadrivium and the Lutheran Schulordnungen arrived, in the nineteenth century, at its first mass institutional expression. What had been a conviction of educators and philosophers became the policy of democratic states.

The “qualified teachers” claim of this series, which became empirically demonstrable in the medieval period through Guido of Arezzo and the cathedral school system, evolved into a modern institutional structure in the nineteenth century. Mason’s conventions trained 1,500 teachers a year. Curwen’s college certified teachers through examination. The Prussian seminaries required musical competence before awarding any teaching qualification. These are not traditions or oral transmissions. They are credentialing systems, the first modern infrastructure for producing qualified music educators at scale.

What Gets Built Gets Inherited

The Boston vote of August 28, 1838, did not remain confined to Boston. By the 1860s, public school music had spread across New England. By the 1880s, it was a recognized subject in most major American cities. The Tonic Sol-fa movement reached every continent where British schools operated. The Prussian model influenced educational reform movements across Europe and beyond.

What the nineteenth century built was not merely music in schools. It was the institutional architecture that the twentieth century would inherit and professionalize: teacher training programs, published methods, certification requirements, civic rationale, and national organizations. The Music Supervisors National Conference, founded in 1907 and eventually renamed the Music Educators National Conference and then NAfME, was the direct institutional heir to what Mason began in 1838.^[9] That story, the story of how the profession formalized itself across the twentieth century, is the subject of the next article.

Here is what the nineteenth century adds to the series’ record: when modern democratic societies first established mass public schooling, they included music. Not because a lobby demanded it. Not as a concession to sentiment. Because the educators and statesmen who designed those systems understood, drawing on a tradition this series has been tracing for five thousand years, that a complete education required it.

That is what the record shows. It has shown this since the tablet houses of Sumer. The nineteenth century marks the moment the record shifted from elite and specialized to democratic and universal.

The basics, it turns out, have always included music. They still do.

Previous Articles in this Series:

Article VI — The Reformation Turn: Music for the People

Article V — The Question of Access: Elite or Universal?

Article IV — The Quadrivium: Music as Mathematical Science

Article III — The Philosophical Foundations: Why Every Major Tradition Required Music

Article II — The Founding Claim: Music as Original Curriculum

Article I — Back to Basics… Again

Introduction: The Founding Disciplines

Sources and Notes

The sources and references for the historical claims in this article are listed below in order of first citation in the text. Footnote numbers correspond to the superscript markers in the body of the article.

[1] Frederick the Great, Generallandschulreglement (1763). On the Prussian Volksschule curriculum including singing from the founding legislation: Wikipedia, “Prussian education system”; K12 Academics, “Origin of Prussian Education System”; K12 Academics, “History of Education in Germany”.

[2] “Seminaries for Teachers in Prussia,” American Annals of Education and Instruction, Third series 1 (June 1831): 253–257. Quoted and cited in “Music Teacher Education in America (1753–1840),” College Music Symposium 31 (1991). The full Prussian teacher-training curriculum, including vocal music and music theory as required subjects, is documented in the same source.

[3] On Wilhem’s 1819 appointment and the Orphéon: “A Dictionary of Music and Musicians / Wilhem, Guillaume,” Wikisource; “A Dictionary of Music and Musicians / Orphéon,” Wikisource. On the 1836 teacher certification requirement: ernestreyer.com, “Wilhem”. On the Orphéon’s extension under Gounod: fr.wikipedia.org, “Orphéon”.

[4] William Channing Woodbridge, “On Vocal Music as a Branch of Common Education,” address to the American Institute of Instruction, August 24, 1830; published as “Music as a Branch of Common Education,” American Annals of Education and Instruction, Third series 1 (February 1831): 64–67 and (June 1831): 269–73. On Woodbridge’s European observations and transmission to Mason: Visions of Research in Music Education (University of Connecticut); “Tracing the Role of Music in America’s Public Schools,” ERIC ED368611.

[5] Hans Georg Nägeli and Michael Traugott Pfeiffer, Gesangsbildungslehre nach Pestalozzischen Grundsätzen (Zurich, 1810). Lowell Mason, Manual of the Boston Academy of Music (Boston: Carter, Hendee and Co., 1834). Mason stated the Manual was based on Nägeli and Pfeiffer; scholars have noted it drew more directly on G. F. Kübler, Anleitung zum Gesang-Unterrichte in Schulen (Stuttgart, 1826). See “Music Teacher Education in America (1753–1840),” College Music Symposium 31 (1991).

[6] On the November 14, 1837 acceptance of Mason’s offer to teach without pay, the August 14, 1838 demonstration concert, and the August 28, 1838 Boston School Committee vote: Carol A. Pemberton, “Critical Days for Music in American Schools,” Journal of Research in Music Education 36, no. 2 (1988): 69–78, abstract. The committee’s three-standard evaluation framework (intellectual, moral, physical) and the “Magna Carta” designation: “The Role of Music in Society Past, Present and Future,” Cleveland State University; hymndex.com, “Lowell Mason”.

[7] On Mason’s superintendency and the 1,500-teacher conventions: Encyclopedia.com, “Lowell Mason”; Britannica, “Lowell Mason”. On the Cincinnati parallel under Timothy B. Mason: Terri Brown Lenzo and Craig Resta, “Two Brothers, Two Cities: Music Education in Boston and Cincinnati from 1830–1844,” Contributions to Music Education 38, no. 1 (2011): 27–43, summarized at NAfME, “A Musical Mason in Boston — and Cincinnati”.

[8] Sarah Ann Glover (1786–1867) invented the Norwich Sol-fa system. John Curwen (1816–1880) adapted and systematized it as Tonic Sol-fa from January 1842. On Curwen’s life, the Tonic Sol-fa College (1875), and West Ham School Board service: Wikipedia, “John Curwen”. On the social-reform dimensions, temperance, chapel, and women’s suffrage: C. M. McGuire, Music and Victorian Philanthropy: The Tonic Sol-fa Movement(Cambridge University Press, 2009), reviewed at ResearchGate; Phyllis Weliver, “On Tonic Sol-fa, January 1842,” BRANCH. On the spread to South Africa, Fiji, and other nations: music-ed.net, “Curwen Method”. On Hullah’s competing fixed-do system: Wikipedia, “Tonic sol-fa”.

[9] On the spread of public school music from Boston through the 1860s–1880s: K12 Academics, “History of Music Education in the United States”; “Instituting Music in the Boston Public School Curriculum: A Classic Example of the Diffusion of Innovation,” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education. On the Tonic Sol-fa movement’s colonial reach: music-ed.net, “Curwen Method”. The Music Supervisors National Conference was founded April, 1907, in Keokuk, Iowa; it became the Music Educators National Conference in 1934 and NAfME in 2011.

The Reformation changed that.

Not everywhere. Not at once. Not without violent contradiction. But beginning in the third decade of the sixteenth century, in the towns and principalities of Protestant Germany, a new idea entered the history of music education, one that had no real precedent in the ancient or medieval worlds.

The move toward formal music education as a mass phenomenon begins here, two centuries before the public school as we know it.

The engine of that move was a single conviction, held with the full force of theological seriousness, by the man who had just rewritten the religious map of Europe.

Luther’s Conviction

Martin Luther (1483–1546) was, before anything else, a musician. He played the lute and the flute. He composed hymns, including Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, that are still sung in churches today. He understood music not as an amenity to religion but as one of its primary instruments, working on the soul by a mechanism he described with precision.

His most direct statement on music’s educational rank appears across several sources in his collected works, in formulations that vary slightly but converge on the same claim. In the Tischreden (Table Talk): “I place music next to theology and give it the highest praise.” In the preface to the Symphoniae iucundae of Georg Rhau (1538): “Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise.” In What Luther Says, volume two: “I firmly believe, nor am I ashamed to assert, that next to theology no art is equal to music; for it is the only one, except theology, which is able to give a quiet and happy mind.”^[1]

These are not rhetorical flourishes. They are doctrinal positions. Luther believed that music was a gift of God, not in the vague sense that beauty is a gift, but in the precise sense that music, like the Word, could reach the human soul and reshape it. The Preface to Georg Rhau is the fullest articulation of this theology. Music, Luther writes, is the one art that can “drive away the devil, the originator of depressing care and distressing disturbances,” almost as effectively as theology itself. The same power that made music dangerous to Plato (its capacity to penetrate to the innermost soul before reason can resist) made music indispensable to Luther.

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The corollary was institutional. If music had this power, and if the Reformation’s project was the spiritual formation of an entire people, not just a clergy, not just a scholarly class, then music must be taught to an entire people. To every child. In every school.

Luther made this explicit in two foundational educational writings. In his 1524 letter To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany That They Establish and Maintain Christian Schools, addressed to civic leaders rather than church authorities, he argued that the formation of Christian citizens was a civic responsibility, not merely an ecclesiastical one.^[2] In his 1530 Sermon on the Duty of Sending Children to School, he pressed the point further, warning parents who kept their children from schooling that they were failing both God and the civil order. The curriculum he envisioned for these civic schools was clear. He wrote, in a formulation preserved across multiple sources:

Together with mathematics. Not alongside it as an elective. Not after it as a reward. The pairing is deliberate and it has Pythagorean and Boethian precedent, as Article 4 of this series documented. But the scope is new. Luther is not describing the education of princes or choristers. He is describing the education of the children of craftsmen and farmers and merchants in the reformed Protestant town.

The Lutheran Town School

The institutions that carried Luther’s conviction into practice were the Lateinschule and Stadtschule (the Latin school and the town school) that proliferated across Electoral Saxony and the Protestant territories of the German lands through the 1520s, 1530s, and 1540s. The foundational legal instruments were the Kirchenordnungen and Schulordnungen (church and school ordinances) issued by territorial rulers implementing the Reformation. In Saxony, the Visitation of 1528, organized by Luther and Philipp Melanchthon, produced the Instructions for the Visitors of Parish Pastors, which included provisions for schools. Melanchthon, who would become known as the Praeceptor Germaniae (Teacher of Germany), worked alongside Luther to design the curricular framework these schools would follow.^[4]

The Schulordnungen of Lutheran territories were consistent in placing music among the required subjects. Singing was taught daily. Choral performance in church was not a specialized activity reserved for trained choristers: it was the regular work of schoolboys as a class. The school and the choir were, in the Lutheran town, the same institution organized for two related purposes. The children learned to sing because singing was prayer, and prayer was the point of Christian formation.

Georg Rhau, to whose collection of choral music Luther wrote his famous preface, was himself a Thomaskantor, the cantor of the school attached to St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, before he became a printer in Wittenberg. His collections of Symphoniae iucundae (1538) and Neue deudsche geistliche Gesenge (1544) were pedagogical publications, designed for use in the Lutheran school choir. The preface Luther wrote for the 1538 collection was addressed not to scholars but to schoolmasters. Music in the Lutheran school was not a theoretical discipline on the page. It was a performed discipline, sung daily by students who were learning it as part of their Christian formation.^[5]

The reach of this system, by the time of Luther’s death in 1546, was substantial. School ordinances requiring music instruction had been issued in Electoral Saxony, the Duchy of Württemberg, the Imperial City of Nuremberg, Braunschweig, Hamburg, Lüneburg, and dozens of smaller Protestant territories. The pattern was not uniform: the quality of instruction varied enormously, and the shortage of qualified schoolmaster-cantors was a persistent problem Luther himself acknowledged, but the structural commitment was clear. Music was a required subject in the reformed Protestant school. Its absence was a failure of educational duty, not a neutral pedagogical choice.

Bach at the End of the Line

The institutional endpoint of Luther’s project, what two centuries of Reformation schooling in music eventually produced, is a single figure who remains the most studied musician in Western history.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was the Thomaskantor in Leipzig from 1723 until his death. The title was old: the cantorate at the Thomasschule, the school attached to St. Thomas Church, had existed since the school’s founding in 1212, and the institution had embraced the Reformation in 1539. By Bach’s appointment, the Thomaskantor was the third-ranking officer of the school, below the rector and the conrector, responsible for teaching music and originally also Latin to the boys of the Thomasschule, directing the singing at four Leipzig churches, and providing cantatas for all Sundays and feast days of the liturgical year.^[6]

Bach held a schoolmaster’s appointment in a publicly administered institution governed by the Leipzig City Council. His contract, signed on May 22, 1723, ran to fourteen clauses. It required him to lead a “sober and secluded life,” to set a good example for his students, to obtain the burgomaster’s permission before leaving the city, and to set music that was “not too long” and “not operatic”: music that would “inspire devotion” rather than distract from it. He was required to teach the boys singing, theory, and the playing of multiple instruments on every weekday except Thursday.^[7]

This is the infrastructure of the Lutheran school cantor descended directly from the Reformation ordinances of the 1520s and 1530s. The Thomasschule was not a conservatory. It was not a court institution. It was a Latin grammar school, under municipal governance, with a cantor whose duties included daily music instruction for schoolboys. The music Bach wrote for his students and his churches, including the cantatas, the Passions, the motets, and the keyboard works, emerged from a publicly mandated educational obligation that stretched, institutionally, back to Luther’s 1524 letter to the councilmen of Germany.

The greatest body of music in the Western canon was produced by a schoolteacher doing his job.

The Counter-Reformation Response

The Protestant Reformation did not go unanswered. The Council of Trent (1545–1563), the Catholic Church’s comprehensive response to the Lutheran challenge, reaffirmed church music’s centrality to liturgy and to the formation of the faithful. What the Counter-Reformation added to the educational history of music was a new institutional vehicle: the Jesuit college.

The Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1540 and confirmed by Pope Paul III, became within two decades the most expansive educational network the world had seen. By 1600 the Jesuits operated hundreds of colleges across Europe, reaching from Portugal to Poland and extending through their missions into Asia and the Americas. Their curricular framework, the Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis Iesu (1599), the Ratio Studiorum, was among the most consequential educational documents ever written.^[8]

The Ratio Studiorum placed drama and performance at the center of the curriculum in a way that had no precedent in the medieval university. Section IV of the document, governing the studia inferiora, made it mandatory for Jesuit schools to exercise students in rhetorical self-expression through dramas, debates, and the declamation of poetry. The earliest Jesuit plays were performed in Latin; as the tradition developed through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, performances grew more elaborate, incorporating music, elaborate scenery, and vernacular elements.^[9] The purposes named by the Ratio and by Jesuit commentators were consistent: plays improved memory, cultivated physical and vocal control, trained students in grace and bearing, and developed the eloquence that was the primary educational goal of the entire curriculum.

Charles Porée, the French Jesuit who taught rhetoric at the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris from 1708, wrote in 1733 that theater was the discipline that asked students to practice every civic and moral virtue at once: “Is there any duty, whether of a private or public, of a domestic or civil nature, which the theatric muse does not inculcate?”^[10] Porée’s statement captures what the Jesuits understood about performance that their Protestant counterparts grasped about music: the arts, practiced under discipline, in community, before an audience, are not ornamental preparation for the serious work of education. They are the serious work of education.

Music in the Jesuit college paralleled drama in its institutional weight. The cathedral choir tradition, reinforced by Trent’s affirmation of polyphonic music in worship, required schools attached to cathedrals and churches to train singers to a professional standard. The Roman Seminary, the seminaries established across Catholic territories under Tridentine reform, and the network of Jesuit colleges all produced trained musicians as a by-product of their formation of clergy and civic leaders. The Counter-Reformation, in this respect, ran on the same institutional logic as the Reformation: music was too important to the spiritual and civic formation of the person to be left out of the school.

The English Rupture

The Reformation did not produce uniform institutional outcomes. Two Protestant traditions, running in parallel, made opposite decisions about music. The consequences of those decisions played out across centuries.

Luther’s tradition has been described above. The English Reformation produced something different.

Henry VIII’s break with Rome in 1534, accelerated under Edward VI and the Lord Protector Somerset, destroyed the institutional infrastructure that had sustained English music education for three centuries. The dissolution of the monasteries (1536–1541) swept away the principal centers of musical training in England. The chantries, the endowed chapels that employed trained singers and in many cases maintained schools, were suppressed by the Chantries Act of December 1547, which dissolved approximately 2,374 chantries and guild chapels across England and Wales.^[11] The Act’s preamble condemned the institutions as products of the “vain opinion of purgatory,” their theological premises now heretical. Their educational and musical functions were, in the reformers’ accounting, secondary to their doctrinal offensiveness. The funds were supposed to be redirected to grammar schools and the poor. Most, in practice, flowed to the Crown and to Edward’s advisors.

The choral foundations attached to the great cathedrals and collegiate churches, institutions that had trained professional singers for generations, were shaken, though not all destroyed. The Elizabethan settlement eventually stabilized the cathedral choir as an institution, and the choral tradition of the Church of England survived. But the Puritan strain within English Protestantism, descended from Calvin’s Zurich rather than Luther’s Wittenberg, remained hostile to musical elaboration in worship. The organs that had accompanied the choirs of English cathedrals and parish churches were, in many cases, silenced or dismantled during the period of Edwardian and later Cromwellian reform.^[12] What the Lutheran Reformation built, a school system that placed music at its center, the English Reformation largely failed to replicate. The choral foundations that survived were aristocratic and ecclesiastical enclaves, not the municipal institutions Luther had imagined.

The contrast is the article’s analytical hinge. Two Protestant traditions, originating within the same broad reform movement, made opposite institutional decisions about music. The Lutheran tradition embedded music in the required curriculum of the civic school, descending through two centuries of school ordinances to the Thomasschule where Bach taught. The English tradition, shaped by Reformed Protestantism’s more anxious relationship to sensory worship, disrupted and in many places dismantled the musical infrastructure it inherited, without building a replacement. The recovery of English music education as a mass phenomenon would wait for the nineteenth century, for figures like John Hullah and John Curwen working in a very different institutional context, the subject of the next article in this series.

The point is not that one tradition was right and the other wrong in any simple sense. It is what the contrast reveals about the relationship between institutional decisions and long-term outcomes. When a regime treats music as incidental to its educational project, when it is willing to let musical institutions collapse in the service of other priorities. The damage is real and takes generations to repair. The Lutheran territories had professional music in their schools and in their town churches, trained by qualified cantors under civic mandate, for two hundred years before Bach held his pen. England was still working to build a comparable system when Lowell Mason crossed the Atlantic to study it.

What This Article Has Established

The Reformation era is where the history of music education makes its decisive turn toward universality. The claim substantiated here is not that universal access was achieved. It was not, in the full modern sense, anywhere in the sixteenth century. The claim is that the principle of universal music instruction, as a civic and religious obligation owed to every child, was articulated with theological force and implemented in institutional form for the first time in human history. Luther did not just believe that music mattered. He convinced the municipal governments of Protestant Germany to put it in the school ordinances.

The result, two centuries on, was Bach. The Thomasschule was not a conservatory producing virtuosi for the courts of Europe. It was a publicly governed grammar school, producing educated Christian citizens for the city of Leipzig. Music was at its center because Luther had insisted it must be, and the Reformed tradition had built the institutional architecture to carry that insistence forward. When the greatest musician of the Baroque period sat at his desk in Leipzig to write cantatas for Sunday services, he was fulfilling a contractual obligation as a schoolteacher in a publicly funded institution, an institution that owed its existence, in direct institutional lineage, to the Reformation’s conviction that music belonged to every child, not just to the trained chorister or the nobleman’s son.

The next article in this series takes that conviction into the nineteenth century. The question it addresses is how the principle Luther articulated for Protestant Germany became the founding commitment of the modern public school: in Boston in 1838, in England through the Tonic Sol-fa movement, in the Prussian Volksschule, and what it means that music entered the democratic public school not as an enrichment, not as a frill, but as part of the founding curriculum itself.

Previous Articles in this Series:

Article V — The Question of Access: Elite or Universal?

Article IV — The Quadrivium: Music as Mathematical Science

Article III — The Philosophical Foundations: Why Every Major Tradition Required Music

Article II — The Founding Claim: Music as Original Curriculum

Article I — Back to Basics… Again

Introduction — The Founding Disciplines

Sources and Notes

The sources and references for the historical and philosophical claims in this article are listed below in order of first citation in the text. Footnote numbers correspond to the superscript markers in the body of the article.

[1] Luther’s formulations on music’s rank appear in multiple sources. “I place music next to theology” appears in the Tischreden (Table Talk), WA-TR 6, §7034; What Luther Says (WLS), ed. Ewald Plass (St. Louis: Concordia, 1959), §3091, p. 980. “Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise” appears in the Preface to Symphoniae iucundae, Luther’s Works (LW), vol. 53, pp. 321–22 (Fortress Press). The “no art is equal to music” formulation is in WA 50, pp. 371f; WLS 2, pp. 982–83. All three formulations are independent attestations of the same conviction, not variants of a single passage.

[2] Martin Luther, To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany That They Establish and Maintain Christian Schools(1524), LW vol. 45, pp. 339–78 (Fortress Press). The letter was addressed to civic rather than ecclesiastical authorities, reflecting Luther’s conviction that the formation of Christian citizens was a public, not merely ecclesial, responsibility.

[3] “Children must sing and learn music together with mathematics” is preserved in multiple early sources; the formulation is discussed in Michael Baker, Martin Luther and Music Education (MA thesis, Concordia University Chicago), drawing on LW vol. 45, p. 369, where Luther also defines music as “part of the whole of mathematics,” placing the pairing within the Pythagorean-Boethian tradition traced in Article 4 of this series.

[4] On Melanchthon’s role in Lutheran school reform and the curricular framework of the Visitation: the Instructions for the Visitors of Parish Pastors in Electoral Saxony (1528), to which Luther wrote the preface, is in LW vol. 40, pp. 263–320. On the Kirchenordnungen and Schulordnungen, see Emil Sehling, ed., Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1979 reprint), the standard scholarly collection.

[5] Georg Rhau (1488–1548) served as Thomaskantor in Leipzig from 1518 before moving to Wittenberg as a printer. His Symphoniae iucundae atque honestas (Wittenberg, 1538) collected fifty-two Latin motets for use in the Lutheran school and church (CPDL). Luther’s preface is in LW vol. 53, pp. 321–24. On Rhau’s role in the Lutheran pedagogical music tradition, see Robin A. Leaver, Luther’s Liturgical Music: Principles and Implications (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007).

[6] On Bach’s appointment, duties, and institutional position at the Thomasschule: Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (New York: Norton, 2000), chapters 11–12, the standard scholarly biography. The Thomasschule’s history runs from its Augustinian founding in 1212; it embraced the Reformation in 1539, at which point all church property passed to the Leipzig City Council. The Kantor was, thereafter, a municipal employee.

[7] Bach’s fourteen-clause contract of May 1723 is Document 91 in Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel, eds., The New Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents, rev. Christoph Wolff (New York: Norton, 1998). On Bach’s actual teaching schedule and the structure of the Thomasschule under his tenure, see the Schulordnungof 1733, translated and analyzed at bach-cantatas.com.

[8] Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis Iesu (Rome, 1599). Standard English translation: Claude Pavur, S.J., trans., The Ratio Studiorum: The Official Plan for Jesuit Education (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2005). On the Jesuits’ network of colleges by 1600 and the Ratio‘s codification of theater as required curriculum, see Jesuit drama, Wikipedia, with primary sources cited therein.

[9] Ratio Studiorum, Section IV (studia inferiora): the rules for the prefect of lower studies mandate student performance in drama as a regular curricular exercise. The evolution from simple Latin declamation to elaborate polyphonic theatrical productions is traced in Marc Fumaroli, L’Age de l’éloquence (Geneva: Droz, 1980).

[10] Charles Porée, S.J., De Theatro (1733), quoted in the Oxford Handbook chapter on Jesuit theater; the translation follows the version in Lueger (2010) as cited therein.

[11] The Chantries Act: Dissolution of Colleges Act 1547, 1 Edw. 6 c. 14, December 1547. The number of 2,374 chantries and guild chapels suppressed is the figure given in the primary surveys; see also the Britannica entry “Chantries Act.” On the destruction of monastic institutions as centers for music and learning: the dissolution of the monasteries ended close to 900 religious houses and displaced approximately 12,000 people, among them the trained musicians serving the monastic choirs and schools.

[12] On the destruction and silencing of English organs during the Reformation and Interregnum: “The English organ: how it evolved through history,” Classical Music Magazine (January 2024). On the broader musical consequences of the English Reformation, see Peter Phillips, “The English Reformation and its effect on choral music,” in The Cambridge Companion to Choral Music, ed. André de Quadros (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

The previous article ended on an admission it made no effort to soften. The cathedral school, the monastery, the madrasa, and the medieval university were not open to everyone. Neither, before them, were the Sumerian edubba, the Egyptian Per Ankh, the Zhou court academies, or the Vedic gurukula. Formal advanced education, in every civilization this series has examined, was the possession of a minority. Music was foundational to that education. But the education itself reached only a few.

This is the objection that does the most damage if it is left unanswered, because it appears to shrink the thesis to nothing. If music was foundational only to the schooling of scribes, priests, aristocrats, and clerks, then the phrase “every serious system of education in human history” quietly contracts into “the education of elites,” and the claim that music belongs at the foundation of everyone’s education loses its historical footing. The opponent does not even have to construct an argument. He only has to point at the gate.

So let us not flinch from it. The concession is real. It is also aimed at the wrong target.

Two Questions, Not One

The phrase “elite versus universal” smuggles in a confusion. It treats two different questions as though they were one. The first question is: who had access to formal schooling? The second is: who had access to musical formation? These are not the same question; they do not have the same answer, and almost every confused argument about access to music education stems from collapsing them together.

Answered honestly and separately, the record is clear on both. Formal schooling was elite, and music was no more elite than anything else taught in it. Musical formation, by contrast, was something close to universal, transmitted through channels that had nothing to do with schools at all, in every culture we can document. Both statements are true. They describe two different tracks running in parallel through human history, and music was foundational to each. Sorting out which track an objection is really about is most of the work. The rest of this article does that sorting.

What “Elite” Actually Describes

Begin with the formal track and grant it in full.

The edubba trained scribes, a literate professional class serving the temple, palace, and state, were never more than a sliver of the population. The Egyptian Per Ankh was an institution of the temple elite. The Zhou Six Arts educated the sons of the aristocracy. In India, the dharmaśāstra tradition restricted Vedic study to males of the three “twice-born” (dvija) varnas and held the Shudra and women ineligible to study the Veda, or, in the strictest formulations, even to hear it. That restriction the Vedas and Upanishads themselves do not impose, and a long internal tradition of protest contested it, but it was real and enforced all the same.^[1] Greek and Roman formal education was for free citizen males; women, the enslaved, and resident foreigners stood outside it. The medieval university conferred its degrees on a clerical and scholarly minority drawn from a population that was overwhelmingly illiterate.^[2] None of this is in dispute, and none of it should be minimized.

Now notice what the eliteness actually attaches to. In every one of these systems, music was restricted exactly insofar as the whole curriculum was restricted, and not one degree more. The Sumerian student who learned music theory first had to be admitted to the tablet house, which also taught him cuneiform, mathematics, and law. The medieval student who studied music as one of the four mathematical sciences had first to enter a university that also gated arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, grammar, logic, and rhetoric behind the same wall. Music was not the privileged enclosure within the curriculum. It was simply inside the building, on equal footing with everything else.

This is the move the objection cannot survive. If “music was confined to an educated elite, and therefore was not truly foundational” is a valid argument, then it is equally valid to say that reading was confined to an educated elite and was therefore not truly foundational. Literacy, for most of recorded history, was rarer than musical competence, not more common. Arithmetic was rarer still. No one draws the conclusion that reading and arithmetic are therefore ornamental, optional, or unfit for the foundation of education. The eliteness of premodern schooling is a fact about premodern schooling. It is not a fact about music. To wield it against music specifically is to apply to one foundational discipline a standard that, applied evenly, would dissolve the entire concept of foundational disciplines.

The formal track was elite. Music sat at its foundation on precisely the terms reading and arithmetic did. That is the first answer.

The Track That Reached Everyone

The second answer is the more important one, and it inverts the objection completely.

While literacy stayed locked behind the schoolhouse wall for five thousand years, musical formation did not. It ran on a second track entirely, and that track was, in every culture we can document, close to universal. The child who never saw the inside of a tablet house still learned to sing. The peasant who never read a word still knew the songs of the harvest, the wedding, the funeral, the feast day, the work of the field and the loom. Music reached the people that literacy would not touch for thousands of years, because music traveled through the institutions everyone belonged to: religious ritual, the life-cycle ceremonies of birth and marriage and death, the agricultural and seasonal calendar, communal labor, and the great civic festivals that gathered the whole community at once.

This is the fact the “elite versus universal” framing is built to obscure. Of all the disciplines a serious education has ever contained, music is the least plausible candidate for the charge of elitism, not the most. It is the one foundational domain whose reach, through the informal track, approached the universal millennia before public schooling existed to make any of the others universal. A civilization could keep reading and writing inside a narrow professional caste for two thousand years. It could not, and did not, keep singing there. The song was everywhere.

One tradition shows how far the universal track could reach. Among Aboriginal Australian peoples, the songline is not a song about knowledge; it is the form in which a civilization’s knowledge is held. Sung in sequence across the land, the song cycles encode law, genealogy, navigation, water sources, and ecological knowledge: a map and a legal code carried in melody.^[3] They are not freely available. Custody belongs to particular clans, and the deeper knowledge is released only through initiation, by elders, in stages, to those judged ready. That restriction is not the absence of pedagogy. It is pedagogy, structured, sequential, and gatekept, built around music as the medium of the most important knowledge the culture possessed.

But universality of participation invites a harder question, and the honest article has to meet it.

But Was It Taught, or Only Absorbed?

The objection now changes shape. Granted that everyone sang. Was that musical formation taught, by anyone who could be called qualified, or was it merely absorbed, picked up by osmosis from the surrounding culture the way a child picks up a dialect? If the universal track had no teachers, then it supports claim three of this series (every serious system) while quietly surrendering claim two (qualified teachers). The universality would be real but unschooled, and the thesis would be only half-defended.

The answer is that the informal track was not informal in the sense of unstructured. Across cultures with no contact and no shared inheritance, it produced exactly what the formal track produced: recognized masters, rigorous multi-year training, graduated stages of competence, and institutional gatekeeping of who could claim the title. It simply housed these things outside the university. Four examples, drawn from four cultures, make the point unmistakable.

Consider first the West African griot, the jeli of the Mande world. The griot is a hereditary professional, a musician, oral historian, genealogist, and praise-singer, whose office is documented in Ibn Battuta’s fourteenth-century account of the Mali Empire and is bound up with the founding epic of that empire, in which the griot Balla Fasséké advises Sundiata Keita and establishes the Kouyaté line of griots that survives to this day.^[4] The Mande term for the griot’s body of knowledge, jeliya, derives from the word for blood, marking the craft as something transmitted by lineage. A griot is trained for years, within the family and the clan, in a corpus of music, history, and verbal art that demands a mastery no casual participant could approach. This is non-literate, non-Western, and non-academic. It is also, by any honest definition, expert pedagogy conducted by qualified practitioners. The absence of a school building does not make it amateur. It makes it a different institution doing the same work.

Consider next the town musicians of medieval and early modern Europe: the German Stadtpfeifer, the English waits, the Italian piffari, the Dutch stadspijpers. From the late fourteenth century, towns across Europe employed salaried civic musicians whose duties ranged from sounding the hours and the alarm to performing at weddings, religious services, and civic ceremony.^[5] Entry was not casual. It followed the apprenticeship structure of the guilds. A musicians’ guild is documented in Paris as early as 1321 and in England by 1469, and the apprentice trained under a master for years, expected to command a battery of wind and string instruments, and admitted to the profession only after demonstrating that command. The system produced working competence at scale, and not infrequently real distinction. Orlando Gibbons, a leading composer of early Jacobean England, was the son of William Gibbons, a town musician who led the Cambridge waits. Here was structured, examined, guild-regulated musical training operating entirely outside the cathedral school and the university, a track between elite formal schooling and pure folk transmission, and one that trained the working musicians of an entire continent.

Consider third the Renaissance workshop, the bottega, where the visual arts ran the same architecture. There was no school one attended to become a painter. One was apprenticed. A boy of thirteen or fourteen entered the studio of a master under contract, lived and worked there for years grinding pigments and preparing panels, advanced by demonstrated skill to the rank of journeyman, and reached independent master status only after years more. In the guild system that governed the crafts, that final step was commonly marked by a qualifying work, the origin of our word masterpiece. The lineage this training produced is the lineage of Western art itself. From Verrocchio's single Florentine workshop, in the 1460s and 1470s, came Leonardo da Vinci, Pietro Perugino, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo entered at about fourteen in 1466 and was registered in 1472 with the Compagnia di San Luca, the Florentine painters’ confraternity.^[6] No university granted these credentials. The training was nonetheless formal, sequential, contractually bound, and policed by professional bodies with the authority to recognize mastery. Expert teachers, expert pedagogy, no campus.

Consider, finally, the gamelan of Bali. Nearly every village cooperative, the banjar, owns a gamelan and supports a sekaha, the ensemble club whose instruments are held to belong to the community as a whole. Children join at six or seven and learn through maguru panggul, “the teacher is the mallet”: the master plays a passage at tempo, the students answer, and the cycle repeats until the interlocking parts are seated in the body. No notation is used, and among Balinese masters its use is frowned upon.^[7] This is not schooling in the Western sense, not in classrooms and not for grades, yet it is rigorous, sequential, master-led instruction, embedded in temple ritual and communal life and sustained across centuries.

West Africa, the towns of Europe, the workshops of Florence, the villages of Bali: four traditions across three continents, sharing no common model, several with no contact with one another at all. Each generated trained masters, structured transmission, and gatekept standards for the artistic disciplines, and each did so outside the elite academic institutions whose narrowness the objection relies on. The universal track had teachers. It always had teachers. What it lacked was a building that historians of education were in the habit of counting.

Three Questions Worth Asking

Set the dead binary aside, then, and ask the questions that actually carry information: what kind of access, to what kind of training, for what kind of mastery?

Asked this way, every culture turns out to have maintained two tiers at once. There was a tier of participatory competence, the singing, playing, and dancing that the whole community shared through ritual and festival and the ordinary occasions of a life, and this tier was, for music, effectively universal. And there was a tier of specialist mastery, the griot, the temple musician, the Stadtpfeifer, the cathedral choirmaster, the master of the bottega, reached through years of expert training and restricted to those who completed it. This two-tier structure is not peculiar to music. It is the structure of every serious domain of human skill. Most people in every society could count; few were mathematicians. Most could speak persuasively; few were trained orators. The existence of a restricted expert tier has never been evidence that the foundational tier was absent.

What distinguishes music is the size of its foundational tier. For most of human history, the participatory base of musical competence was vastly broader than the participatory base of literacy. The person who could not read could almost always sing, and had been taught to, by the living practice of a community that treated the teaching as a matter of course. Music was not the discipline that failed to reach the people. It was, very nearly, the only foundational discipline that did.

What the Access Question Settles

Return now to the objection that opened this article, and weigh what is left of it.

Formal education was elite. True, and music sat at its foundation on exactly the terms reading and arithmetic did, which means the eliteness convicts music of nothing that it does not equally convict the entire idea of a foundational curriculum. Musical formation was widespread. Also true, and it was widespread to a degree literacy would not match until the modern public school, transmitted through a universal informal track that, far from being unschooled, sustained recognized masters and rigorous training in every culture that has left us a record. Both tiers, the elite-formal and the universal-informal, placed music at the foundation. Both transmitted it through those who had mastered it. The access question, pressed for a clean verdict against the thesis, returns the opposite of what the objection wanted. Music is not weakened by the history of access. It is the discipline that comes through that history with the broadest reach and the deepest continuity of any in the curriculum.

There is one thing the two-tier history does not yet contain, and it is the thing worth naming as this article closes. For nearly all of the five thousand years surveyed so far, the two tracks ran separately. The universal track gave nearly everyone musical participation but rarely formal, expert, sequential instruction. The elite track gave formal expert instruction but only to a few. The achievement of joining them, of delivering the trained, qualified, formal musical education of the elite track to every child as a matter of right, is not ancient. It is recent, hard-won, and historically novel. It begins to take shape when the Reformation places music in the schoolroom of an entire town, and it is completed only when the nineteenth-century common school makes formal music instruction universal in the modern sense.

That synthesis is the rarest and most fragile thing in this entire history. It is also the precise thing the present moment proposes to dismantle. Before we can measure what is at stake in that, we have to watch the synthesis being built.

When did the formal track begin to open to everyone? That is the subject of the next article.

Previous Articles in this Series

Article IV - The Quadrivium: Music as Mathematical Science

Article III - The Philosophical Foundations: Why Every Major Tradition Required Music

Article II - The Founding Claim: Music as Original Curriculum

Article I - Back to Basic… Again

Introduction: The Founding Disciplines

Sources and Notes

The sources and references for the historical and philosophical claims in this article are listed below in order of first citation in the text. Footnote numbers correspond to the superscript markers in the body of the article.

1. On the elite character of formal education throughout antiquity, the standard synthesis remains H. I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. George Lamb (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956). On the Vedic restriction specifically: the Manusmṛti limits Vedic study to males of the three dvija (twice-born) varnas (Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya) and excludes the Shudra and women, while other dharmaśāstra texts are less uniform and the Vedas and Upanishads themselves impose no such restriction. See Patrick Olivelle, trans., Dharmasūtras: The Law Codes of Āpastamba, Gautama, Baudhāyana, and Vasiṣṭha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), and Olivelle’s argument that dvija as a formal category is a first-millennium-CE development. A long internal tradition of protest against these exclusions is well documented; see the overview in the Encyclopædia Britannica entry “dvija.”

2. On the predominance of illiteracy in medieval Europe and the restricted reach of formal learning, see M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 3rd ed. (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). The medieval university’s institutional placement of music in the quadrivium is treated in Article 4 of this series.

3. On songlines as the integrated carriers of law, navigation, genealogy, and ecological knowledge, see Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly, Songlines: The Power and Promise, First Knowledges series (Melbourne: Thames & Hudson Australia / National Museum of Australia, 2020). On the governance of sacred and restricted knowledge by clan custodianship and graded initiation, see “Living Songs: Music, Law and Culture in Aboriginal Australia,” Australian Music Centre.

4. Thomas A. Hale, Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), the standard English-language study of the tradition, its hereditary (clan-based) transmission, and the range of the griot’s social functions. The earliest external description is in the fourteenth-century travel account of Ibn Battuta. On Balla Fasséké, the Kouyaté line, and the role of the griot in the Epic of Sundiata, see the standard translations of the epic, e.g., D. T. Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, trans. G. D. Pickett (London: Longman, 1965). The Mande term jeliya (“musicianhood”) derives from jeli (blood), marking the heritability of the craft.

5. On the Stadtpfeifer, waits, piffari, and stadspijpers: the term Stadtpfeifer is attested from the late fourteenth century, and municipal musicians appear across Europe from c. 1370, regulated through guild apprenticeship. The Confrérie de Saint-Julien-des-Ménétriers (Corporation des ménétriers) was established in Paris in 1321; in England, the earliest known charter to the king’s minstrels was granted by Edward IV in 1469, applying to the whole of England except Chester and open to women as well as men. On the English waits and on William Gibbons, leader of the Cambridge waits and father of the composer Orlando Gibbons, see John Harley, Orlando Gibbons and the Gibbons Family of Musicians (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), and the entry “Wait (musician).” On the German tradition, see Walter Salmen, The Social Status of the Professional Musician from the Middle Ages to the 19th Century (New York: Pendragon, 1983).

6. On the bottega system and the apprentice-to-master progression of Renaissance craft training, see Anabel Thomas, The Painter’s Practice in Renaissance Tuscany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Leonardo entered Verrocchio’s workshop c. 1466 at about age fourteen and was registered in the summer of 1472 in the libro rosso of the Compagnia di San Luca, the Florentine painters’ confraternity. His documented pupils include Leonardo da Vinci, Pietro Perugino, and Lorenzo di Credi; Sandro Botticelli (whose master was Filippo Lippi) and Domenico Ghirlandaio are linked to his circle by influence and contact rather than by apprenticeship. See also Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1568).

7. On the banjar and sekaha organization of Balinese gamelan and communal ownership of the instruments, and on maguru panggul (“the teacher is the mallet”) as a practice-based, notation-free pedagogy, see Michael Tenzer, Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Art of Twentieth-Century Balinese Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), and Michael B. Bakan, Music of Death and New Creation: Experiences in the World of Balinese Gamelan Beleganjur (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Indonesian gamelan was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2021.

The previous article ended at the philosophical foundation. Plato’s Republic and the Confucian Yueji gave us the why: music as the formation of the person, the audible structure of the soul, the discipline that shapes character before reason is fully formed. Two civilizations, separated by continents and centuries, arrived at the same conclusion about the same domain. The convergence was the evidence.

Conviction is one thing. Institutional architecture is another. A philosophical claim about music’s role in formation does not, by itself, produce schools. It does not produce trained teachers, written curricula, mandated subjects, or the daily rhythms of instruction that sustain a discipline across generations. The historical question this article takes up is what happens next. Between roughly 500 and 1500 CE, a thousand years that includes the consolidation of Christendom, the Islamic Golden Age, the Carolingian Renaissance, and the founding of the European university, that conviction was turned into institutional fact.

The story runs in two parallel streams. The Christian Latin West, drawing on the Pythagorean and Platonic inheritance through a single late-Roman scholar, built music into the seven liberal arts that defined formal education across a millennium. The Islamic scholarly tradition, drawing on the same Greek inheritance through parallel transmission channels, arrived independently at the same architectural conclusion. Both placed music among the mathematical sciences. Both produced sustained institutions to teach it. Both treated it as a foundational discipline of advanced learning, not as ornament or recreation. The convergence Article 3 documented at the philosophical level repeated itself, on a longer timescale, at the institutional level.

Boethius and the Quadrivium

The man who gave the medieval West its curricular framework for music was a senator awaiting execution.

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c. 480–524 CE) was a Roman aristocrat, philosopher, and senior official in the court of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, king of Italy. In 523 he was charged with treason, on grounds that historians have argued about ever since, and imprisoned at Pavia. He was executed in 524. Before his death he completed the works that would shape European education for the next thousand years: De institutione arithmetica, De institutione musica, the Consolation of Philosophy, and translations of Aristotelian logic that became the foundation of the medieval trivium. The institutional reach of these texts is hard to overstate. De institutione musica would remain the principal textbook on music at European universities into the sixteenth century.

It was Boethius who coined the term quadrivium (Latin for “four ways”), translating the Greek tessares methodoi from the Neopythagorean mathematician Nicomachus of Gerasa (c. 60–c. 120 CE), whose Introduction to Arithmetic Boethius adapted into the Latin tradition.^[1] The four disciplines were arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. Boethius described them as the study of number in itself, number in proportion, magnitude at rest, and magnitude in motion. The structure was not arbitrary. Music’s placement among the mathematical sciences reflected the Pythagorean understanding, inherited through Plato, codified by Nicomachus, and transmitted by Boethius, that musical intervals were audible expressions of numerical ratio. The octave was the ratio 2:1. The fifth was 3:2. The fourth was 4:3. The same proportions that ordered the strings of a lyre ordered the planetary spheres and the harmonies of the human soul.

This is what gave Boethius his famous tripartite division of music in De institutione musica. Musica mundanawas the music of the cosmos: the inaudible harmony of the heavenly bodies, the seasons, and the elements, organized by the same ratios that governed the audible scale. Musica humana was the harmony of body and soul, the proportional integration of the human being. Musica instrumentalis was the music actually produced by voices and instruments. This is what we today would call simply “music,” and Boethius treated it as the lowest of the three categories because it was the most immediately accessible and the least conceptually demanding.^[2]

The framework had two consequences that mattered for the next millennium. The first is that music was understood, in the institutional architecture of European learning, as a science. Not a performance art, not an aesthetic enrichment, but a branch of mathematics with cosmological reach. The second is that the study of music was understood as a prerequisite to higher learning, part of the discipline by which the student’s mind was prepared to engage with philosophy and theology. The four mathematical arts train the mind to move from sense perception to intelligible reality. Without that training, the rest of the curriculum could not be properly approached.

For roughly a thousand years, every educated person in Latin Europe who passed through formal advanced education studied music in that framework. The framework was Boethian. The textbook was Boethius. The placement was the quadrivium.

The Islamic Parallel: al-Kindī, al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā

Running parallel to the Latin West, and intellectually outpacing it for several of the same centuries, the Islamic scholarly tradition reached the same conclusion about music’s institutional place. The path was different, the language different, the religious framework different. The conclusion was the same.

The first major figure is Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī (c. 801–c. 873), known as “the Philosopher of the Arabs.” Working in ninth-century Baghdad at the height of the Abbasid translation movement, which systematically rendered Greek scientific and philosophical texts into Arabic at the House of Wisdom, al-Kindī produced the first sustained Arabic treatments of music as a branch of mathematics. He is credited with the first systematic use of the term mūsīqī in a book title, drawing the word directly from the Greek mousikē.^[3]The transmission line was direct: the Greek mathematical understanding of music passed through ninth-century Baghdad as it would later pass, in parallel, through sixth-century Italy.

The figure who consolidated music as a mathematical science in the Islamic tradition was Abū Naṣr Muḥammad al-Fārābī (c. 870–950), called “the Second Master” in Islamic philosophy, second only to Aristotle. Working primarily in Baghdad and ending his career in Damascus, al-Fārābī produced Kitāb al-Mūsīqī al-Kabīr (”The Great Book of Music”), the most comprehensive treatise on music theory produced in the medieval world to that point.^[4] The work runs to hundreds of pages, divided into theoretical and practical parts, treating sound generation, musical intervals, melody, instruments, and rhythm. Al-Fārābī himself was reportedly a virtuoso performer on the ʿūd. His broader work, Iḥṣāʾ al-ʿulūm (”Enumeration of the Sciences”), classified the disciplines of knowledge along Aristotelian lines and placed music among the mathematical sciences. Iḥṣāʾ al-ʿulūm was translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona at Toledo around 1175 as De scientiis. Through that translation, the Islamic classification of music as a mathematical science fed directly back into the curriculum of the medieval Latin university.

The third major figure is Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn Sīnā (980–1037), known in the Latin West as Avicenna and the most influential philosopher and physician of the Islamic Golden Age. Ibn Sīnā’s encyclopedic Kitāb al-Shifāʾ (”The Book of Healing”) was structured around four parts: logic, natural sciences, mathematics, and metaphysics. The mathematical section was organized as a quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. The music section, Jawāmiʿ ʿilm al-mūsīqī, worked through the theory of intervals, scales, rhythm, and composition with a rigor that would not be matched in the Latin West for centuries.^[5]

What this parallel demonstrates is structural. The decision to place music among the mathematical sciences of advanced learning was not the parochial conclusion of one civilization working within one inheritance. It was the conclusion reached, with comparable rigor and across multiple centuries, by the two great learned traditions of the medieval world. The convergence Article 3 documented at the philosophical level, with Plato and the Yueji independently arriving at the same understanding of why music was foundational, recurred on a longer timescale and across different institutions, at the curricular level. Boethius and al-Fārābī did not know each other’s work. Neither needed to. The conclusion was independently arrived at.

The Institutional Infrastructure: Schola Cantorum and the Carolingian Buildout

Curricular philosophy is one thing. Sustained institutions are another. A text that names music as one of the four mathematical sciences does not, by itself, train a generation of singers, instrumentalists, and music theorists. That requires schools.

The earliest sustained institution for music education in the Christian West was the Schola Cantorum of Rome, the papal singing school that would serve, in time, as the ancestor of the modern Sistine Choir. Tradition attributes the founding of the Schola to Pope Sylvester I (d. 335), but the firm institutional anchor is the reorganization carried out under Pope Gregory the Great (590–604), whose role in standardizing chant across the Western Church gave the school its enduring form.^[6] By the seventh and eighth centuries the Schola Cantorum was the central training institution for plainchant in the Latin West. Boys were admitted from across Western Europe, the course of study was reported as nine years, and the school served not only the papal liturgy but as a model for institutions established elsewhere: in Lyon under Pepin, at Metz, at Aachen under Charlemagne, and across the cathedral and monastic schools that proliferated through the early medieval West.

The decisive institutional moment was Charlemagne’s Admonitio Generalis of 789. Charlemagne, crowned King of the Franks in 768 and Emperor of the Romans in 800, had begun in 780 to reform the palace school at Aachen from a school of military training and court etiquette into a serious place of learning. The architect of that reform, from his arrival at Aachen in 782, was Alcuin of York (c. 735–804), a deacon trained at the cathedral school of York and summoned to the Carolingian court as Charlemagne’s chief educational adviser. It was Alcuin who organized the curriculum of Carolingian education around the seven liberal arts inherited from late antiquity, formalizing the structure of the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy), and embedding the Boethian framework into Frankish education.

The Admonitio Generalis, issued in 789, was the imperial codification of that framework. Among its educational provisions was the requirement, repeated in subsequent capitularies, that every monastery and abbey across the empire establish a school in which boys would be taught “the Psalms, the notes, the chant, computation, and grammar.”^[7] Music was not added to the curriculum. Cantus, chant, was named in the founding legislation as one of the five subjects every school was required to teach. The mandate did not apply to the children of nobles alone. As enacted by Theodulf of Orléans, Alcuin’s successor in 796 as the emperor’s adviser on educational matters, the requirement extended to the external schools attached to monastic buildings, meaning to the children of the village and surrounding districts. The Carolingian system did not produce universal music education in the modern sense. But it did produce, in legislative record, the first empire-wide mandate that music be taught in every monastic and cathedral school across Western Christendom.

The same century that built that mandate watched the Byzantine East tear itself apart over religious images. The First Iconoclasm (726–87), initiated by the Emperor Leo III the Isaurian and continued under his son Constantine V, banned the production and veneration of icons and ordered the systematic destruction of existing images. The Second Iconoclasm (815–43) renewed the policy under Leo V the Armenian, ending only with the restoration of icons under the Empress-regent Theodora in 843.^[8] The Byzantine controversy targeted images rather than music directly, but it represents the first major instance in the institutional period of a state-religious power moving systematically against the artistic inheritance under its authority. The contrast with the Latin West in the same decades is the analytical hinge. In 789, while iconoclast emperors in Constantinople were destroying icons and persecuting their defenders, Charlemagne’s Admonitio Generaliswas codifying chant into the required curriculum of every school in the empire. Two empires, two artistic policies, two trajectories. The regimes that move against the artistic record form a recognizable class. This article does not develop the point. The thread is picked up in later articles and synthesized in Article 9.

Guido of Arezzo and the Pedagogy That Scales

A curriculum requires teaching technology. A mandate that every monastery teach singing produces no choir if the music itself cannot be transmitted reliably from one generation to the next. Through most of the early medieval period, music was taught by oral apprenticeship: a master singer would teach a chant by demonstration, and a student would learn it by ear over weeks or months. The system worked, but it did not scale. As the Carolingian church demanded standardized chant across a continent, the limits of oral transmission became the bottleneck.

The man who broke that bottleneck was Guido of Arezzo (c. 991/992–after 1033), a Benedictine monk who taught at the monastery of Pomposa on the Adriatic coast before moving in about 1025 to the cathedral school of Arezzo, in central Italy, under the patronage of Bishop Tedald.^[9] Guido produced the pedagogical innovations that made music education systematically transmissible. He refined and stabilized the four-line staff notation that became the foundation of Western musical notation. He developed the system of solmization syllables (ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la) drawn from the initial syllables of successive lines of the hymn Ut queant laxis, the system that became modern solfège. He elaborated the Guidonian hand, a mnemonic device in which each portion of the hand represented a specific note within the hexachord system, used by teachers to indicate pitches by pointing to their own palm. His Micrologus de disciplina artis musicae, written around 1025–26 at the commission of Bishop Tedald, was, after Boethius’s De institutione musica, the most widely distributed medieval treatise on music.

The point worth landing is institutional, not technical. Guido is remembered today in music education courses primarily for solfège, the do-re-mi that every elementary music teacher inherits from him a thousand years later. The more important fact is that the pedagogy was developed at a cathedral school, on commission from a bishop, to serve the choir of a cathedral. Guido was a trained teacher, employed in a documented institutional context, working to solve a documented institutional problem. The pedagogy did not float free of the institution. It was produced inside it, by it, and for it. The “qualified teachers” claim of the series, that music has historically been delivered by trained, expert practitioners working in formal institutional contexts, becomes empirically demonstrable in the medieval period, and Guido of Arezzo is one of the named figures who demonstrates it.

A skilled teacher using Guido’s methods could train a choir in months rather than years. That capacity, replicated across the cathedral and monastic schools of Latin Europe, is what allowed the Carolingian mandate to become a working institutional reality.

The Quadrivium in the Medieval University

The institution that consolidated Boethius, Alcuin, and Guido into the longest stable curricular structure in Western educational history was the European university.

The university crystallized in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries as a recognizable institutional form. Bologna emerged around 1088, the University of Paris coalesced around 1150, Oxford was active by about 1167. The inherited curriculum was the seven liberal arts, Alcuin’s structure drawn ultimately from late antiquity, with the trivium prerequisite to the quadrivium. To hold a Master of Arts degree from a medieval university was, by the architecture of the institution itself, to have studied music as one of the four mathematical sciences. The standard textbook through the entire run was Boethius’s De institutione musica, supplemented by the Islamic transmission of al-Fārābī’s De scientiis and the practical pedagogical tradition descending from Guido.

This was the formal academic position of music in European higher education for roughly four centuries, until the curricular reorganizations of the early modern period, beginning in the late fifteenth century and consolidating through the sixteenth, began to break apart the medieval framework. The trivium and quadrivium did not disappear overnight, but by 1500–1550 the older curricular architecture was visibly under stress, and the early modern university would reorganize the disciplines along different lines.

For perspective: that four-century run is the single longest stable institutional embedding of music as a foundational discipline in Western educational history. No subsequent placement of music in formal education has lasted that long without significant structural revision: not the Lutheran town school, not the nineteenth-century common school, not the twentieth-century American public school music program. The medieval university quadrivium is the institutional benchmark against which every later embedding of music in formal education should be measured.

After the Quadrivium: The Chapel

As that speculative tradition receded from the universities, the practical institution that had run beside it since the Schola Cantorum was reaching its height. Every Renaissance cathedral and princely court maintained a chapel, and at the head of each stood a maestro di cappella: a salaried professional who trained the choirboys, drilled the singers, and often composed the music they performed. The line of descent is unbroken. The papal chapel that grew out of the Roman schola cantorum had become, by the sixteenth century, the most prestigious musical institution in Europe, its loft filled with choristers trained from boyhood. And the teachers were the foremost composers of the age. Josquin des Prez, the central figure of the Franco-Flemish school that staffed Europe's chapels, served the Sforza at Milan, sang in the papal choir, and led the Este chapel at Ferrara; Palestrina, a Roman choirboy, rose to direct the music of St. Peter's. When Ottaviano Petrucci printed the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton at Venice in 1501, the first collection of polyphony printed from movable type, the music he sent across the continent was theirs. The quadrivium's speculative science was leaving the curriculum. The institution that trained musicians was not.^[10]

The Unfinished Question

Two streams. A thousand years.

The Christian Latin West and the Islamic Golden Age, working in different languages and under different religious frameworks, arrived independently at the same conclusion about where music belonged in the architecture of advanced learning. Boethius placed it among the four mathematical sciences. Al-Fārābī did the same. Charlemagne mandated it by capitulary. Guido of Arezzo produced the pedagogy that made the mandate workable at scale. The European university institutionalized the whole structure for four hundred years, with Boethius’s treatise as the standing textbook.

The record is not in dispute. Across the central millennium of Western and Islamic learning, music was one of the foundational disciplines of formal education: codified in legislation, embedded in the curriculum, transmitted through trained teachers operating in named institutions, and integrated with the broader study of mathematics, philosophy, and theology.

That is the institutional case. It is one of the strongest sections of the series’ historical record, and it deserved a full article.

But the honest reader of this material will have noticed a question the article has so far skirted. The cathedral school, the monastery, the madrasa, and the medieval university were not open to everyone. Formal advanced education of any kind was, for most of the period this article describes, an elite project. To say that music was foundational to the institutional curriculum is not the same thing as to say that everyone had access to that curriculum. The next article takes up the harder question directly. Who actually had access — to what kind of training, to what kind of mastery, in what kind of institution? The honest answer is more nuanced than either the “education has always been universal” or the “education has always been elite” position acknowledges. Both have always been true at once. The next article unpacks how.

Previous Articles in this Series:

Article III - The Philosophical Foundations: Why Every Major Tradition Required Music

Article II - The Founding Claim: Music as Original Curriculum

Article I - Back to Basis… Again

Introduction: The Founding Disciplines

Sources and Notes

The sources and references for the historical and philosophical claims in this article are listed below in order of first citation in the text. Footnote numbers correspond to the superscript markers in the body of the article.

^[1]Boethius coined quadrivium in De institutione arithmetica I.1, translating Nicomachus of Gerasa's tessares methodoi. On Nicomachus's dates (c. 60–c. 120 CE) and his role as the Neopythagorean source for Boethius's quadrivium framework, see the Wikipedia entry on Nicomachus and the Britannica entry "Nicomachus of Gerasa." Standard modern reference for Boethius's text: Boethius, Boethian Number Theory: A Translation of the "De Institutione Arithmetica," trans. Michael Masi (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1983).

^[2]Boethius, De institutione musica I.2, on the three categories of music. Standard modern reference: Boethius, Fundamentals of Music, trans. Calvin M. Bower, ed. Claude V. Palisca (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). On the work’s continuous use as the standard music textbook at European universities from the ninth century into the sixteenth, see Bower’s editorial preface, esp. pp. xi–xxxix.

^[3]On al-Kindī's role as the first systematic Arabic music theorist and his use of the term mūsīqī: Henry George Farmer, A History of Arabian Music to the XIIIth Century (London: Luzac, 1929); Peter Adamson, Al-Kindi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). On al-Kindī's life and dates, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on al-Kindi, by Peter Adamson.

^[4]On al-Fārābī’s Kitāb al-Mūsīqī al-Kabīr and his classification of music as a mathematical science: Owen Wright, “Fārābī, al-,” in Grove Music Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Therese-Anne Druart, “al-Farabi,” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Standard scholarly Arabic edition: al-Fārābī, Kitāb al-Mūsīqī al-Kabīr, ed. Ghaṭṭās ʿAbd al-Malik Khashaba and Maḥmūd Aḥmad al-Ḥifnī (Cairo: Dār al-Kātib al-ʿArabī, 1967). On the Latin transmission of Iḥṣāʾ al-ʿulūm as De scientiis: Gerard of Cremona’s literal translation dates to approximately 1175 at Toledo; see Charles Burnett, “Arabic into Latin: The Reception of Arabic Philosophy into Western Europe,” in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

^[5]Ibn Sīnā's Kitāb al-Shifāʾ is structured in four parts, with the mathematical section comprising arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, directly mirroring the Boethian quadrivium. The music section, Jawāmiʿ ʿilm al-mūsīqī, is one of the most extensive medieval mathematical treatments of music. Standard Arabic edition: in Kitāb al-Shifāʾ, Vol. 3: al-Riyāḍiyyāt (Mathematics), eds. Aḥmad Fuʾād al-Ahwānī and Maḥmūd Aḥmad al-Ḥifnī (Cairo, 1956). On Ibn Sīnā's musical thought: Roni Granot and Nabil Shair, "The Origin and Power of Music According to the 11th-Century Islamic Philosopher Ibn Sīnā," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Series 3, 29:4 (2019), 585–598.

^[6]On the Schola Cantorum of Rome: David Hiley, Western Plainchant: A Handbook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), chapter on early institutional development; James McKinnon, The Advent Project: The Later-Seventh-Century Creation of the Roman Mass Proper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). The traditional attribution to Pope Sylvester I derives from later medieval sources; the institutional foundation under Gregory the Great is the firm scholarly anchor. The nine-year course of study is the figure traditionally reported in the medieval sources; see the Encyclopædia Britannica entry “schola cantorum.”

^[7]Charlemagne, Admonitio Generalis (789), c. 72. Standard edition: Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Capitularia Regum Francorum, ed. Alfred Boretius (Hannover, 1883), vol. I, no. 22. English translation in P.D. King, Charlemagne: Translated Sources (Lambrigg: P.D. King, 1987), 209–20. The Latin original (“Psalmos, notas, cantus, compotum, grammaticam”) has been variously translated. The older Catholic Encyclopedia rendering interpreted notas as “musical notation,” but recent scholarship (Evina Steinová, “Psalmos, notas, cantus: On the Meanings of nota in the Carolingian Period,” Speculum 90:2 [April 2015], 424–57) argues notas more likely refers to manuscript abbreviations and shorthand. Cantus, chant, is the unambiguously musical term in the list, and is by itself sufficient to establish the music-curricular mandate.

^[8]On Byzantine iconoclasm in both periods: Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (c. 680–850): A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), the authoritative scholarly treatment. The date conventions used here (726–87 and 815–43) follow the Brubaker/Haldon and Metropolitan Museum formulations; some general references use 726–787 and 814–842, with the variation reflecting different anchor events at the close of each period. See also Helen C. Evans and Brandie Ratliff, eds., Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition, exhibition catalogue (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012).

^[9]On Guido of Arezzo and the Micrologus: Dolores Pesce, “Guido of Arezzo,” in Grove Music Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Encyclopædia Britannica, “Guido d’Arezzo.” Standard English collection of his writings: Warren Babb, trans., Hucbald, Guido, and John on Music: Three Medieval Treatises, ed. Claude V. Palisca (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). On Bishop Tedald of Arezzo’s patronage of Guido and the commissioning of the Micrologus: see the Britannica and Encyclopedia.com biographical entries, both drawing on the standard scholarly account.

^[10] On the Renaissance chapel, the office of maestro di cappella, and the choirboy-to-singer-to-master career path, see Iain Fenlon, ed., The Renaissance: From the 1470s to the End of the 16th Century (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989), and Richard Sherr, ed., Papal Music and Musicians in Late Medieval and Renaissance Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), the latter on the papal chapel's descent from the Roman schola cantorum and its choir of boys and adult professionals. On Josquin des Prez (c. 1450/55–1521), central figure of the Franco-Flemish school, and his service to the Sforza, the papal chapel, and the Este of Ferrara, see Patrick Macey et al., "Josquin (Lebloitte dit) des Prez," Grove Music Online. On the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton (Venice, 1501) as the first collection of polyphony printed from movable type, see the Encyclopædia Britannica entry on Ottaviano dei Petrucci.

For twelve years, I served on a regional board of education in New Jersey, including as board president. I served on the board of directors of the New Jersey School Boards Association, and I was a finalist for New Jersey School Board Member of the Year. I am not writing as an outsider to how school boards work. I am writing as someone who has done the job.

In every training I received as a board member, the same principles were drummed in. A board of education exists to ensure that the schools are well run. The superintendent runs the schools and makes recommendations to the board. The board does not draft curriculum. The board does not micromanage instruction. And school boards are non-partisan. Politics gets left at the boardroom door. What’s best for students becomes the central focus.

By those standards, the Watertown Unified School District Board of Education in Wisconsin did not just make a bad decision when it voted 7-1 on May 12 to bar the Watertown High School Wind Symphony from performing Omar Thomas’s “A Mother of a Revolution!” The Watertown board violated the most fundamental basics of board service. It acted in the absence of a permanent superintendent, one whom the board itself had placed on administrative leave in January. It overrode a policy the board itself had adopted just months earlier. It overrode the professional judgment of a certified music educator who had followed every step of that policy. And it did so even though only one family had opted their child out of performance under that very policy. That is not what school board service is. That is something else.

This piece is about what that “something else” is, and why it now belongs on the list of threats every music educator in this country needs to take seriously.

The Eighth Threat

When I published “The Storm Is Here” earlier this year, I identified seven converging threats to music education: federal funding retrenchment, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the cost spiral, the enrollment cliff, the educator pipeline crisis, curriculum narrowing, and technology displacement. Each of those threats is structural. Each operates through budgets, schedules, demographic trends, and policy frameworks. None requires anyone to actively want music education to disappear. They require only that resources keep flowing somewhere else.

The events of the past several months have made clear that a different kind of threat is now in play. This one is not structural. It is intentional. And it is aimed directly at the music itself.

The Stratechuk Precedent

Music programs have been culture war terrain before. From 2004 through 2010, the most prominent school music censorship case in the country played out in New Jersey, in a district that had adopted its religious-music policy in the 1990s. The South Orange-Maplewood School District barred religious songs from school-sponsored holiday performances. In October 2004, the district issued a memo clarifying that the ban extended to instrumental versions as well, no wordless “Silent Night,” no band arrangements of “Joy to the World,” no dreidels in printed programs. Parent Michael Stratechuk sued.

The case went to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the policy in 2009. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal in October 2010. The fight in Stratechuk was unambiguous in its political valence. The controversy was that public schools were excluding religious music from their concerts.

In December 2004, while the case was still in court, opponents of the policy organized what they called an “illegal night” of Christmas carols and Hanukkah songs in the community, a community performance of repertoire the schools would not perform. Twenty-two years later, when the Watertown community packed Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church to hear the Wind Symphony play Omar Thomas’s banned piece with the composer himself conducting, the parallel was exact. The tactic was identical. The political polarity had reversed.

The Arc, 2004 to 2026

The decade between Stratechuk and the current surge was not silent, but it was sporadic. In 2013, an elementary school in Kings Park, New York, removed “Christ the Savior” and “Holy infant” from “Silent Night” before a fifth-grade concert and faced a parent walkout. In 2015, Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction issued a notice of noncompliance to Tucson Unified after teachers used Rage Against the Machine’s “Take the Power Back” in a Mexican-American history class, the song was held to violate state law against “advocating ethnic solidarity.” In 2016, Elmore County, Alabama, Superintendent Andre Harrison banned the Holtville High School marching band from playing “Amazing Grace” at halftime, then reversed the ban under pressure from parents. In 2018, the Forest Hill High School marching band director in Jackson, Mississippi, was placed on administrative leave, and the band was barred from state competition after a halftime show depicting students dressed as medical workers pointing rifles at students dressed as SWAT officers.

These incidents share little ideological consistency. They look like what they were, sporadic flare-ups driven by local complaints, with no organized political movement behind them.

Beginning in 2023, the pattern changed.

In January 2023, an elementary school in Marion County, Florida, sent permission slips home asking parents to authorize their children to learn “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, a song written by James Weldon Johnson in 1900, later adopted as the official song of the NAACP, performed at every Super Bowl pre-game show since 2021, and printed in forty-nine Christian hymnals. The episode followed Florida’s passage of its anti-CRT statute. In March 2023, the Waukesha, Wisconsin, school district blocked first graders at Heyer Elementary from performing “Rainbowland” by Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton. Teacher Melissa Tempel spoke out publicly and was fired in July. The same year, the Northern Lebanon, Pennsylvania school board voted 7-2 to bar “The Addams Family” musical, with one of the board members acknowledging he had applied “a Christian lens” to his decision.

In May 2024, the Spring Cove Middle School chorus in Pennsylvania pulled “Lift Every Voice and Sing” the day before the concert, citing “divisiveness and controversy in the nation.” The NAACP opened a formal investigation. In October 2025, Mississinewa High School in Gas City, Indiana, canceled its production of Jodi Picoult’s “Between the Lines” days before opening night after a single parent complained about a character’s gender identity, even though the licensed version the school had purchased never explicitly identified the character that way.

In April 2026, Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith posted to his official campaign page, attacking a Westfield High School indoor percussion performance that used music from Ravel’s Boléro, Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol. He accused the school of “giving the middle finger” to Christian conservative families and urged parents to use Indiana’s voucher program to pull their children out of public schools like Westfield. He doubled down days later on conservative radio, calling the performance “demonic.” “Bring it on,” he said. “I’m right, and they’re wrong.”

Three weeks later, the Watertown vote.

The Pattern Is the Point

These incidents share a structural pattern that makes them recognizable as part of the same phenomenon rather than a series of coincidences. In every case, a board, an administrator, or a public official overrode a music or theatre educator’s professional judgment. In every case, the intervention was framed in the language of protecting students. In every case, the educator had followed proper procedure, selecting repertoire, notifying families, offering opt-outs where applicable.

In Watertown, band director Reid LaDew sent a letter to parents in October 2025 notifying them of the piece and offering an opt-out. Of more than thirty students in the Wind Symphony, three initially considered opting out. Ultimately, only one did. The remaining students rehearsed the work for most of the school year. The band director followed the policy. The board overrode it anyway.

What does it mean when procedural compliance offers no protection? It means the rules were never the point. The rules were the pretext.

The EdTA Data Shows the Scale

What looks anecdotal from news headlines becomes systemic in the data. The Educational Theatre Association’s 2024 State of Theatre Education Report, a survey of more than 1,800 K-12 theatre educators in public and private schools nationwide, found that more than 75 percent of respondents reported pressure to reconsider their play and musical choices during the 2023-24 school year. The prior year, that number stood at 6 percent. Twenty-two percent of educators were forced to make actual changes, up from 4 percent the year before. Two-thirds reported they are now self-censoring at the selection stage.

A more than twelvefold increase in pressure on educator repertoire decisions in a single year is not a cultural shift. It is a campaign. The American Library Association’s 2024 data points in the same direction: 72 percent of demands to censor school and library content now come from organized pressure groups, elected officials, board members, and administrators. Parents account for 16 percent.

The targets are predictable. Repertoire that engages LGBTQ+ themes, Black history, religious diversity, or political subject matter draws scrutiny first. But the scrutiny is widening. A nineteenth-century French opera. An instrumental piece with no lyrics. A song about rainbows performed by first graders. A hymn that appears in forty-nine Christian hymnals. There is no longer a safe selection.

Why Music Is Uniquely Exposed

Music’s structural vulnerability in this environment is the same as that identified in the curriculum-narrowing analysis of the original Storm framework. Music is not on state accountability dashboards. Music is not tested. Music is not embedded in school performance ratings. The disciplines themselves are not electives, but the courses sit in elective space within the master schedule, with no external assessment system protecting their content from local political pressure.

Attacking a state-aligned ELA curriculum invites pushback from the assessment system. Attacking a band piece invites no such friction. The political cost of overruling a music educator is low. The political reward, in the current environment, can be high. Watertown’s board members ran on a platform to end “indoctrination” in schools. The Omar Thomas vote was, in the vice president’s own words, the platform in action.

The chilling effect is the point. Every band director who saw a colleague publicly attacked by name by elected officials for programming a piece by one of the most-performed contemporary wind-ensemble composers in America has now received the message. Self-censorship at the selection stage is the predictable downstream outcome. It will be invisible in any dataset because no piece will appear on any program for anyone to count. The repertoire pipeline narrows quietly.

This Is Not About Music

The most important thing to understand about the eighth threat is what it actually targets. The board members in Watertown were not making a musical argument. The lieutenant governor of Indiana was not making an aesthetic argument. The Pennsylvania administrators who cut “Lift Every Voice and Sing” were not making a curricular argument.

Music programs are being used as the terrain on which a broader political conflict is being fought. The actual subject is not what students should be allowed to perform. The actual subject is who has the authority to make that decision, and what kind of cultural content public schools are permitted to engage with at all.

Music education has been pulled into this conflict for two reasons. First, music programs are visible. Concerts are public events. Marching band performances happen on Friday nights in front of thousands of people. State finals draw regional press. That cultural reach makes school music programs efficient targets for political messaging. Second, music’s curricular standing, a federally recognized core subject in statute, electively scheduled in practice, leaves it institutionally exposed in ways that math and English are not.

You did not choose to be in this fight. The fight came to you.

The Older Pattern

The structural logic of what we are seeing has a history. Music programs are not the first place this pattern has appeared. They are not even the first place it has appeared in living memory.

In May 1938, the Nazi regime opened an exhibition in Düsseldorf called Entartete Musik, Degenerate Music. It identified composers whose work would no longer be permitted in German concert halls or classrooms. Mendelssohn. Mahler. Schoenberg. Jazz, condemned for its African American origins. Schools were forbidden to teach the proscribed repertoire. The mechanism, a state actor identifying which composers were spiritually unacceptable and forbidding educators from teaching them, is the same mechanism Watertown applied to Omar Thomas. The framing word has shifted from “degenerate” to “indoctrination.” The function is identical.

In 1948, Andrei Zhdanov issued a decree on Stalin’s authority denouncing Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Khachaturian as “formalist” composers whose music was “alien to the Soviet people.” The composers were forced to appear publicly and recant. The state did not need to imprison them. It needed only to make their music professionally radioactive. Self-censorship did the rest. That is the chilling effect, named seventy-eight years before any of the events documented in this article, and a playbook every band director in America now has reason to study.

The pattern recurs. Red Guards smashing pianos in Chinese conservatory courtyards during the Cultural Revolution. The Taliban’s prohibition of music in Afghanistan. ISIS filming itself destroying artifacts at Palmyra. The Khmer Rouge murdering musicians and dancers in Cambodia specifically because of what they made. The Vandals’ fifth-century sack of Rome gave the English language a word for the destruction of culture by those who do not value it: vandalism.

The scale of these movements is not the scale of an American school board in May 2026. The structural logic is. A ruling faction designates which artists are illegitimate. Public denunciation of educators is required, not optional. The pretext language, degenerate, formalist, feudal, indoctrination, converts political disagreement into the language of contamination. The next generation is the target, because the operative concern in every case is what students are permitted to learn. And the faction that prohibits produces nothing. It can only forbid what previous civilizations created.

Music has historically been among the first things to go when this pattern emerges in a society. It is no accident that it is going first now.

The Compounding Effect Returns

The compounding logic of the original Storm framework applies here as well. The eighth threat does not replace any of the original seven; it interacts with them, making each one harder to resist.

A district facing budget pressure under the cost spiral is more likely to capitulate to a board majority demanding cancellation of a controversial piece. A band director worried about being one of the 411,000 vacant or underqualified positions in the Learning Policy Institute’s shortage data is more likely to self-censor at the selection stage rather than draw fire. A music program already invisible in the state accountability system because of curriculum narrowing has less institutional standing to invoke when a board overreaches. A workforce-aligned graduation pathway that compresses arts scheduling makes any surviving program smaller, more fragile, and easier to eliminate the next time a politically motivated board decides to make a point.

Each threat makes the others sharper.

What This Means

First and foremost, always follow your district policies. Document everything. Musical selections, lesson plans, concert themes, connection to state learning standards, and alignment to district curriculum. If a piece is challenged, record the procedural history, how the work was selected, when families were notified, what the opt-out process looked like, who objected, and on what grounds. The Watertown case became part of the public record in part because the band director followed every procedural requirement, and the board overrode him anyway. That record matters now, and it will matter more later.

Connect with your state music education association the moment a challenge surfaces. State MEAs and many national advocacy groups are tracking these incidents and building the advocacy infrastructure to respond. The response to the Watertown vote, 350 students walking out the next day, a packed church performance with Omar Thomas conducting, more than 26,000 watching the livestream, did not happen by accident. It happened because the field responded with speed. The first 72 hours determine the public narrative.

Talk to your colleagues across disciplines. The EdTA data is your data. Theatre, visual arts, and dance educators are being pressured by the same mechanism. Supporters and parents of all of the arts programs showing up together at a school board meeting carry more weight than any of them alone. And if the board of education members forget who they are there to represent? Vote. Them. Out.

A Note for Board Members

If you are a board member reading this, I will speak to you directly. School board service is not a campaign platform. It is not a political messaging opportunity. It is a fiduciary responsibility to the students and families in your district. The superintendent runs the schools. Your job is to ensure they are well run. Your job is not to draft curriculum, override the professional judgment of certified educators, or substitute your own political preferences for policies your own board adopted.

When a board does what the Watertown board did, override a policy the board itself adopted, and publicly humiliate a music educator who followed every step of the controversial-issues procedure that the board itself had put in place, that board is not doing the job. It is failing in the most fundamental responsibilities of board service. Those board members need professional development. The communities that elected them deserve better.

This, Too, Shall Pass.

We do not teach music to create musicians. We teach music to develop human beings capable of engaging with the full range of human experience through one of the oldest and most powerful languages we have. We have done this for millennia. That is the work. That is what is under attack.

Stay with the policy. Follow it carefully. Let your community come to its program’s defense. In every historical example in this article, the people have had the last word.

The last word is elections.

Elections, even for the school board, have consequences. Pay attention. Hold people accountable. Choose wisely.

And remember… Advocacy is not something you do. Advocacy is something you are.

Sources cited in this article include reporting from Wisconsin Public Radio, Urban Milwaukee, TMJ4, CBS 58, WMTV, Channel 3000, the Watertown Daily Times, and Madison.com on the Watertown case; WTHR, WOWO, and YouAreCurrent on the Westfield case; WITF, Fox43, and LancasterOnline on the Northern Lebanon vote; NBC News, Indiana Public Radio, and OnStage Blog on the Mississinewa cancellation; the Altoona Mirror on Spring Cove; the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Spectrum News on the Waukesha “Rainbowland” case; ClickOrlando and WCJB on the Marion County, Florida permission-slip episode; Religion News Service and the Findlaw archive of Stratechuk v. Board of Education for the South Orange-Maplewood case; the Educational Theatre Association’s 2024 State of Theatre Education Report; the Learning Policy Institute’s teacher-shortage analysis; the American Library Association’s 2024 Office for Intellectual Freedom data; the Arts Education Data Project; and the NAACP for the history of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Historical references in “The Older Pattern” draw on established documentation of the Reichsmusikkammer’s 1938 Entartete Musik exhibition, the 1948 Zhdanov decree, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and other twentieth-century cultural-suppression movements.

Two minds give us our clearest answer. Plato wrote the Republic in Athens around 380 BCE. The Confucian Yueji, the Record of Music, crystallized during the Warring States period (475–221 BCE) and reached its received form in the Western Han, in a civilization Plato could not have known existed. The two texts make remarkably similar arguments about why music is foundational to the formation of a person.

They could not have read each other. Their philosophical inheritances had nothing in common. Their political contexts, their cosmologies, their gods, their writing systems were as different as any two literate cultures the ancient world produced. Yet on the question of what music does to a human being, and what an education must therefore contain, they speak with one voice.

The convergence is itself the evidence. When two of the deepest philosophical traditions of antiquity, working independently, reach the same conclusion about the same domain, that conclusion has earned the status of an independent discovery about education itself. The intellectual case for music as foundational education is not Greek. It is not Chinese. It is not modern. It is what the most serious reflection on the question produced when each tradition asked it on its own terms.

This article puts those two arguments in dialogue.

Plato: Music as the Formation of the Soul

The argument in the Republic is laid out across Books II and III, roughly between 376e and 403c. The conclusion is famously summarized at 401d:

The claim here is not aesthetic. It is mechanical.^[1] Plato is describing what he takes to be a fact about human beings: that musical experience reaches a layer of the person that reasoned argument cannot reach, and shapes that layer through repeated exposure, before reason is fully formed. The child who sings noble songs in a noble mode becomes, through that singing, a noble person. The child who absorbs disordered music absorbs disorder. By the time reason arrives to evaluate what has been absorbed, the work is largely done.

This is why Plato treats the selection of musical modes with the seriousness most philosophers reserve for political constitutions. Each Greek mode carried, in the doctrine Plato inherited, a distinct ethical signature. The Dorian was austere and martial, suited to courage. The Phrygian was the mode of self-restraint and peaceful, voluntary action. The Lydian was relaxed and dissipating; the Mixolydian, plaintive and weakening; the Ionian, soft. Plato’s prescription in the Republic is that only the Dorian and the Phrygian are admitted into the education of the guardians. The others are excluded, not because they are inferior music, but because they shape the wrong dispositions.^[2]

Plato did not invent this doctrine. He attributes it explicitly to Damon of Athens, the fifth-century BCE music theorist whose lost work supplies the technical backbone of every passage on musical ethos in the Republic and the Laws. Damon’s biography survives only in fragments. Ancient sources report that he was associated with Pericles, advised on educational reform, and was eventually ostracized for political reasons. The ostracism tradition is preserved only in later texts, and modern scholarship is appropriately cautious about its specifics.^[3] What is not in doubt is that Plato treats Damon as the authority on musical ethos, and treats musical ethos as foundational to political education. The Republic is the philosophical elaboration of an argument Damon advanced a generation earlier.

Aristotle, working in the same tradition with a different temperament, reaches the same conclusion through a different proof. Politics Book VIII is the most sustained treatment of music education in the surviving Greek philosophical corpus. The argument at 1340a is decisive:

Note the word imitations. The Greek is mimēmata, meaning likenesses or representations. Aristotle is making a precise philosophical claim: music produces in the listener’s soul a likeness of the moral disposition the music expresses. Listen to courage, become courageous. Listen to fear, become fearful. The mechanism is not metaphor.^[4] It is, in Aristotle’s psychology, a literal description of what happens to the soul of someone exposed to music. And because it is literal, education that fails to control this exposure has failed at the level where character is actually formed.

Two thinkers, master and student. One inherited tradition. One conclusion: an education that does not form the soul through music has not formed it.

The Yueji: Music as the Alignment of Heaven, Earth, and the Human Person

Five thousand miles to the east, working from a tradition Plato could not have known, the Confucian Yueji makes a parallel argument with the same structural shape and the same level of seriousness.

The Yueji is the nineteenth chapter of the Liji, the Book of Rites, one of the Five Classics of the Confucian canon. Its textual history is layered. Traditional attribution to Gongsun Nizi, a second-generation disciple of Confucius, has been challenged on internal grounds. The most current scholarship, particularly Scott Cook’s, places probable composition in the Warring States period (475–221 BCE), with the received form compiled in the Western Han by Liu Xiang and later editors.^[5] Material related to the Yueji also appears in the Yueshu chapter of Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian. The text we have is genuinely ancient and represents the mature philosophical reflection of the Confucian tradition on the role of music in moral and civic life.

The argument is built on a paired conceptual structure. Music (yue 樂) and ritual (li 禮) are presented as inseparable disciplines, each doing work the other cannot do. Ritual orders the outer relations of human society: hierarchy, propriety, the formal structure of conduct. Music orders the inner state of the person and tunes those outer relations to what the Yueji calls the harmony of heaven and earth. The text’s defining formulation, in James Legge’s standard 1885 translation:

The cosmological frame is real, but it should not be mistaken for ornament. The Yueji is making a precise philosophical claim about what music does.^[6] The tones a person hears resonate with the emotions; the emotions move within and take shape as sound; the sound, in turn, shapes further emotion. The chapter describes the process directly: “All the modulations of the voice arise from the mind, and the various affections of the mind are produced by things (external to it)… when the mind is moved to sorrow, the sound is sharp and fading away.”^[7] Music is the literal embodiment of the inner state, and listening to music is the literal reception of an inner state into one’s own. What you sing shapes who you are.

This is why the Yueji treats the cultivation of music as the cultivation of the person. The work is not aesthetic. It is formative. And because what shapes the person also shapes the polity, the cultivation of music is also the cultivation of civic order. The Yueji is explicit: “the ancient kings, in their institution of ceremonies and music, did not seek how fully they could satisfy the desires of the appetite and of the ears and eyes; but they intended to teach the people to regulate their likings and dislikings, and to bring them back to the normal course of humanity.”^[8]

The pairing with ritual completes the picture. Ritual without music is rigid; music without ritual is unanchored. The Yueji’s argument is that a person fully formed requires both, and that the formation through music is what places the work in resonance with the larger order of things.

The same argument appears in compressed form in Analects 8.8, attributed to Confucius himself: 興於詩，立於禮，成於樂. In Legge’s rendering: “It is by the Odes that the mind is aroused. It is by the Rules of Propriety that the character is established. It is from Music that the finish is received.”^[9] Music is the culminating discipline. A person not perfected through music is not perfected.

The Convergence

What Plato and the Yueji share is not aesthetic theory. It is a theory of formation. Three convergences are worth naming directly.

First, the mechanism. Both traditions argue that music acts on the soul through repeated exposure, before and beyond reason. Plato calls this the penetration of rhythm and harmony into the inmost part of the soul. The Yueji describes the same phenomenon as the resonance of sound with the emotions: when the feelings move within, they are embodied in sounds. The two formulations are not translations of one another. They are independent descriptions of the same phenomenon: that the human being is shaped by what the human being hears, sings, and plays, and that the shaping is not optional, not merely additive, but constitutive.

Second, the stakes. Both treat music as constitutive of moral and civic life, not adjacent to it. Plato’s claim is that an education that fails to shape the soul through music has not produced a person fit for citizenship. The Yueji’s claim is that an education that fails to perfect through music has not perfected at all. The two traditions disagree on much. They do not disagree on this. A person without musical formation is, in both accounts, a person whose formation is incomplete.

Third, the practical conclusion. Both place music at the foundation of education, alongside the disciplines that order the body and the mind. For Plato, mousikē and gymnastics are the two halves of Greek paideia, and the curriculum is unimaginable without either. For the Confucian tradition, music is one of the Six Arts (liù yì 六藝): rites, music, archery, charioteering, calligraphy, and mathematics, the foundational curriculum of the educated person, codified in the Rites of Zhou and elaborated across the Confucian canon. Music is not an addition. In neither tradition. It is one of the load-bearing pillars.

The two civilizations had no contact. The Persian, the Vedic, the Egyptian traditions of the same period were not the channel by which Greek and Chinese thought converged on this point. They converged because the question, asked seriously, has one answer.

The intellectual case for music as foundational education is not Greek. It is not Chinese. It is what the deepest philosophical traditions of two independent civilizations produced when each took the question seriously.

Where They Diverge, and Why the Divergence Confirms the Thesis

The two traditions do not arrive at identical conclusions on every point. The divergence is worth examining, because it reveals what is and is not shared.

Plato is more anxious. His treatment of music throughout the Republic is shadowed by the worry that musical change will corrupt. Modes must be selected; the wrong ones must be excluded. The poets must be supervised. New compositions are dangerous. The work of education is largely the work of guarding the discipline against degradation.

The Yueji is more affirmative. Music expresses cosmic order when society is well-tuned; the work is alignment, not constant vigilance against decay. The text describes music as the natural emanation of a well-ordered soul and a well-ordered polity, not as a fragile artifact requiring protection against the corruptions of the day. When the ruler is correct and the rites are observed, the music will be right; when the music is right, the people will be right.

The temperaments are different. The substance is identical. Both insist that music is too important to be left to chance. Both insist that the discipline must be cultivated, transmitted, and taught with the same seriousness as the disciplines of letters or law. They disagree on how to guard it. They do not disagree on whether to.

What Both Traditions Saw Coming

There is one passage in the Republic that does additional work, and it is worth attending to here because it points forward to a thread that will run through the rest of this series.

At 424c, Plato has Socrates issue a warning. In Paul Shorey’s Loeb translation:

The claim is not casual.^[10] Plato is drawing the obvious corollary from the doctrine he has spent two books elaborating. If music shapes the soul, and the soul is the foundation of the polity, then a change in the music is a change in the polity. The reverse follows. A regime that wishes to alter the political order can do so by altering the music. The same insight that places music at the center of education makes it the natural target of those who would control formation.

The Confucian tradition draws the same corollary, with the same seriousness. The longstanding distinction between yayue 雅樂, the elegant or correct music of the ancestors, and suyue 俗樂, the vulgar or popular music of the moment, is, at its heart, a recognition that music is too consequential to be left to taste. Wrong music shapes wrong dispositions; wrong dispositions yield wrong societies. The Qin dynasty’s book burnings of 213 BCE under Qin Shi Huang are traditionally credited with the loss of the Classic of Music (Yuejing) as a freestanding text. The Yueji survives only because it was preserved as a chapter within the larger Liji. Whether the Yuejing ever existed as a single freestanding work is contested in modern scholarship. What is not contested is that the Qin regime understood the philosophical traditions of the Confucian school to be politically threatening, and acted accordingly.^[11]

The argument is the same in both traditions. Music matters enough to be worth controlling. The thread plants here. Later articles in this series will trace where it leads.

What This Article Has Established

The previous article in this series documented where music has been taught as foundational education. Six civilizations, three continents, three thousand years of institutional life. This article has documented why the traditions that taught it understood themselves to be doing so. The intellectual case for music as foundational education is not a recent invention. It is the original case.

That case was made, in different words, on opposite sides of a world that did not know it was one world. The Greeks and the Chinese arrived at the same answer because the question, taken seriously, has one answer.

The next article in this series takes up what happened next. The case made by Plato and the Yueji did not stay as philosophy. Across the next thousand years, in two great institutional traditions, it became architecture. In the Latin West, music joined arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy as one of the four mathematical sciences of the quadrivium, the foundational curriculum of the cathedral schools and the medieval university. In the Islamic Golden Age, working from the same Greek inheritance and extending it in original directions, scholars like al-Farabi and Ibn Sina produced comprehensive mathematical treatises on music as a science of proportion, number, and cosmic order. For a thousand years, the European and the Islamic university each held music in the curricular position the Republic and the Yueji had argued for.

The case made in argument became the case made in stone.

That is the subject of the next article.

Previous Articles in this Series:

Article II - The Founding Claim: Music as Original Curriculum

Article I - Back to Basis… Again

Introduction: The Founding Disciplines

Sources and Notes

The sources and references for the historical and philosophical claims in this article are listed below in order of first citation in the text. Footnote numbers correspond to the superscript markers in the body of the article.

1. Plato, Republic 401d–402a. Translation: Paul Shorey, Plato: The Republic, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930). Warren D. Anderson, Ethos and Education in Greek Music: The Evidence of Poetry and Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), and Francesco Pelosi, Plato on Music, Soul and Body, trans. Sophie Henderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), trace the scholarly history of this passage as the locus classicus for the doctrine of musical ethos in Plato.

2. Plato, Republic 398c–399c, on the selection of modes. The treatment of the Greek harmoniai is more nuanced than the brief summary here suggests; Andrew Barker, Greek Musical Writings, vol. 1: The Musician and His Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 128–140, provides the standard analysis of the modal system Plato inherited and his philosophical selection from it. On the Phrygian as the mode of self-restraint and voluntary action in Plato (as distinct from Aristotle’s later association of Phrygian with ecstatic states), see Tosca A. C. Lynch, “Why Are Only the Dorian and Phrygian Harmoniai Accepted in Plato’s Kallipolis? Lyre vs. Aulos,” in Lomiento and Meriani, eds., Proceedings of the 7th International Moisa Meeting (Pisa-Roma: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2016).

3. For Damon of Athens, see Anderson, Ethos and Education in Greek Music, pp. 39–73; Robert W. Wallace, Reconstructing Damon: Music, Wisdom Teaching, and Politics in Perikles’ Athens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), the definitive modern treatment and the source for the dating used here (c. 500–after 415 BCE). The biographical record is fragmentary: the ostracism tradition derives largely from Plutarch’s Pericles 4 and the later scholiastic tradition; the pseudo-Aristotelian Athēnaiōn Politeia 27.4 attests the Pericles association without the ostracism claim itself.

4. Aristotle, Politics VIII, 1340a–b. Translation: Benjamin Jowett, The Politics of Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), vol. 1. The standard modern reference is the Loeb edition by H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932).

5. For the Yueji’s textual history, see Scott Cook, “Yue Ji 樂記 — Record of Music: Introduction, Translation, Notes, and Commentary,” Asian Music 26, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 1995): 1–96; Cook’s introductory analysis (pp. 6–22) is the most thorough English-language treatment of the dating question. Cook argues that probable composition belongs to the Warring States period, with received-form editing under Liu Xiang in the Western Han. Cf. Ulrich Theobald’s reference article on the Yueji at chinaknowledge.de.

6. Yueji, in James Legge, trans., The Lî Kî, Sacred Books of the East, vol. 28 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885). The passage is drawn from the central portion of the chapter, in the discussion of music as cosmic harmony paired with ritual as cosmic distinction (Yueji sections 11–12 in the standard sectioning used at ctext.org/liji/yue-ji, where the Chinese text and parallel English translation are available). Legge’s parenthetical insertions are part of his translation method and have been preserved. Cook (1995) provides a fully annotated modern alternative.

7. Yueji, Legge translation, pp. 92–93. The quoted passage combines the opening lines of the chapter (Yueji 1 in standard sectioning) with the description of the six emotional sources of sound that follows immediately (Yueji 2).

8. Yueji, Legge translation, p. 100 (Yueji section 6 in standard sectioning).

9. Confucius, Analects 8.8. James Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. 1: Confucian Analects, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893). For modern alternatives, see D. C. Lau, trans., Confucius: The Analects (Lun yü) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1979); Edward Slingerland, trans., Analects: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003).

10. Plato, Republic 424c. Translation: Paul Shorey, Plato: The Republic, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930), vol. 5, p. 333.

11. For the Qin book burnings, see Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian, “Annals of Qin Shi Huangdi,” in Burton Watson, trans., Records of the Grand Historian: Qin Dynasty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 54–55. The 213 BCE edict targeted historical and Confucian texts. For the contested status of the Yuejing as a freestanding work, see Erica Fox Brindley, Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012); for the three principal schools of interpretation on whether the Yuejing ever existed as a single text, see the summary in Ulrich Theobald, “Yuejing,” chinaknowledge.de.

We find this.

In the 1950s, French archaeologists working at Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast, the site of the ancient port city of Ugarit, recovered a clay tablet inscribed in cuneiform. It dates to roughly 1400 BCE. The tablet, cataloged by Emmanuel Laroche as Hurrian Hymn No. 6, is a hymn to Nikkal, a goddess of orchards. It is the oldest substantially complete piece of notated music in human history.^[1]

What makes the tablet remarkable is not that someone wrote down a song thirty-four centuries ago. It is what the song is written down as. Alongside the Hurrian lyrics, the scribe inscribed a system of intervals, scales, and tuning instructions for a nine-stringed instrument called the sammûm, most likely a lyre. The notation is not a memorial. It is a set of directions. Someone needed to teach someone else how to play this piece, and the technology of writing was pressed into service to make that transmission possible.

Notation of this kind exists because music was being taught. The Hurrian tablet does not stand alone. It belongs to a layer of about thirty-six musical fragments excavated from the Royal Palace at Ugarit, which in turn belong to a much older Mesopotamian tradition of formal music instruction stretching back another thousand years.^[2]

This is the question reshaped:

When we look at the deepest layer of the documentary record, the moment in human history when civilizations first organized formal education into institutions, what subjects do we actually find?

Not subjects added later, after literacy, arithmetic, and law. The actual subjects present at the founding.

In Mesopotamia, in Egypt, in Zhou China, in Vedic India, in classical Greece, in Rome: across six civilizations, three continents, and roughly three thousand years, one answer recurs with a clarity that becomes impossible to dismiss as coincidence. Music is there. Not at the margins. At the foundation.

The schools were built around it.

Mesopotamia: The First Schoolhouse

The Sumerian word for school is edubba, literally “tablet house.”^[3] The institution emerges in the third millennium BCE, becomes systematized in the Old Babylonian period (roughly 2000–1600 BCE), and produces the documentary record from which we have reconstructed the world’s first known formal curriculum. The reconstruction is detailed because the schools generated their own evidence: thousands of clay tablets, copied and miscopied by students learning their craft, recovered from buildings like the so-called House F at Nippur.^[4]

The edubba trained scribes, the literate professional class who served the temple, the palace, and the administrative state. Its curriculum has been mapped in stages: cuneiform sign formation, Sumerian vocabulary and grammar, mathematical and metrological exercises, model contracts, proverbs, and finally the advanced literary corpus.^[5] But this is not the whole picture.

Among the tablets recovered from Nippur and other Old Babylonian sites is a body of material that the Assyriologist Anne Draffkorn Kilmer and her colleagues have spent decades reconstructing: cuneiform texts containing systematic instructions on the tuning of stringed instruments, the names of intervals, and the relationships between scales. Whether these texts functioned as tuning manuals for performing musicians or as pedagogical exercises within the edubba itself remains a matter of scholarly debate. Either reading sustains the same conclusion: music theory was being formalized, written down, and taught.^[6]

The picture sharpens further when we look outside the scribal schools to the temples. Sumerian textual evidence indicates that organized choral practice was underway by the third millennium BCE in Lagash, particularly at the temple of Ningirsu: responsorial chanting with instrumental accompaniment, of a complexity that could not have arisen without expert instruction.^[7] The combination is unmistakable. Music in Mesopotamia was theorized, notated, and taught by professionals, in institutions, alongside the very invention of writing itself.

Egypt: The House of Life

The Egyptian institution most often translated as “school” is the Per Ankh, the House of Life. The earliest references to it appear in royal decrees from the Old Kingdom; the first archaeologically confirmed Houses of Life date to the New Kingdom, including one identified in April 2025 by the Egyptian-French mission at the Ramesseum, the mortuary temple of Ramesses II.^[8] The Per Ankh was attached to major temple complexes (Abydos, Memphis, Sais, Heliopolis, Akhetaten, Thebes) and functioned simultaneously as scriptorium, library, training center, and scholarly community. Theology, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, ritual, and the sacred sciences were preserved and transmitted within its walls.

Music in Egypt operated on a parallel institutional track, deeply integrated with the temple system but structured through its own formal hierarchy. The professional title shemayet (“musician,” most often held by women) designated a trained ritual musician attached to the cult of a specific deity. Heset designated a singer. Performers were organized into rotating ensembles called khener, and chantresses served in groups called phyle that rotated through temple service over the year, with the chief of each phyle reporting directly to the high priest.^[9] This is institutional structure, not casual practice. Queen Nefertiti held the title; so did the wives and daughters of high officials. The Egyptologist Emily Teeter has documented the office in detail, and the 2009 Oriental Institute volume on the chantress Meresamun reconstructs in extraordinary detail what the life of one such trained temple musician actually involved: her instruments, her training, her social and legal standing.^[10]

The training itself appears to have been apprenticeship-based within the temple system, parallel to the more strictly scholastic instruction of the Per Ankh rather than housed within it. The distinction matters. What the Egyptian record demonstrates is not that music was taught as a tablet-house subject the way scribal arts were, but that a formal, hierarchical, professional system existed for training musicians whose work was understood to be necessary to the maintenance of cosmic and civic order. The chantress who woke the god in the morning and sang the god to sleep at night was not improvising. She had been trained, by trained predecessors, in a tradition that stretched across dynasties and required mastery before the title could be bestowed.

That is what qualified means. And it has meant that since at least 2200 BCE.

China: The Six Arts

The Zhou dynasty, founded around 1046 BCE, organized the education of the aristocratic class around six disciplines known as the liù yì (六藝), the Six Arts. The Zhouli 周禮 (Rites of Zhou), in its chapter on the Guardian (Baoshi 保氏), describes the system in which young princes and aristocratic sons were instructed in: ritual (lǐ 禮), music (yuè 樂), archery (shè 射), charioteering (yù 御), calligraphy (shū 書), and mathematics (shù 數).^[11]

Note the order. Ritual first; music second. Together, these two (lǐyuè) formed the moral and civic core of the entire curriculum. Archery and charioteering followed as physical disciplines; calligraphy and mathematics as technical ones. A Zhou education without music was not a partial education. It was not an education at all.

Confucius (551–479 BCE) inherited this framework and made it central to his pedagogical program. He did not invent the Six Arts; he canonized them. In the Analects (8.8), he condenses the entire educational arc into a single sentence: 興於詩，立於禮，成於樂. Be aroused by poetry; established by ritual; perfected by music.^[12]Music is not the introduction. It is the culmination. The student who has mastered everything else but has not been formed by music has not yet completed the work.

The depth of this conviction is on display in the Yueji 樂記 (Record of Music), preserved as the nineteenth chapter of the Liji 禮記 (Book of Rites). The Yueji is one of the most sustained philosophical treatments of music’s place in human formation in any premodern tradition, and it is the centerpiece of the next article in this series. For our purposes here, what matters is institutional. By the Zhou, the most powerful state in East Asia had already placed music at the second position in a six-part formal curriculum and embedded it in the philosophical foundations of its political order. The pattern that began in Mesopotamia did not travel to China. It arose there independently. And arrived at the same answer.

India: When Music Is the Pedagogy

The Indian case is the most striking, because in the Vedic tradition, the relationship between music and education does not run in the direction we expect. Music is not a subject that schools teach. Music is the medium through which the most sacred knowledge in the entire civilization is transmitted.

The Sama Veda (the third of the four Vedas, composed in its Samhita layer between roughly 1200 and 1000 BCE on the academic consensus, with oral roots considerably older) is essentially a music-pedagogy document.^[13] Its content draws on the hymns of the Rigveda but reorganizes them as melodic compositions, with precise instructions for pitch, rhythm, and modulation. The hand gestures used to teach the chants are themselves a notational system, transmitted teacher-to-student through the guru-shishya lineage and within the residential schools known as gurukula.^[14]

A trained reciter of the Sama Veda (a Sāmavedin) undergoes a course of study that, in living tradition still preserved by Namboothiri Brahmins in Kerala and other lineages, can take fifteen to twenty years to complete.^[15] The curriculum proceeds in named stages: moolanta, Ooha Rahasyanta, Astha Brahman, Praatishaakhya, Shrouta, Smartha. Each requires years of disciplined oral instruction and exact reproduction of melodic forms. UNESCO inscribed Vedic chanting on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008, recognizing what insiders had long known: this is among the longest unbroken pedagogical traditions on earth.^[16]

The implication for our argument is sharp. In Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China, music was one of the foundational disciplines a serious education required. In India, it was the very vehicle of religious knowledge. The question of whether music belonged in education could not even arise. To know the Veda was to be able to sing it. To teach the Veda was to be able to teach someone else to sing it. The civilization had no separation between sacred learning and musical training because the sacred learning was musical training.

Greece: The Inheritance, Not the Origin

By the time we reach classical Greece, a great deal has already happened. Mesopotamian music theory is more than a millennium old. The Egyptian temple system has been training chantresses for two thousand years. The Zhou Six Arts are settled doctrine. The Sama Veda is in active oral transmission. When Plato and Aristotle write about music in education, they are not innovating. They are codifying, and arguing about, a pattern they inherited.

The Greek term mousikē covered more than music in our modern sense, embracing poetry, song, dance, and the rhythmic-melodic arts together. In Republic II–III (376e–403c), Plato makes mousikē one of the two foundational disciplines (alongside gymnastikē) through which the guardians of his ideal city are formed. The argument is not that music is a useful supplement. It is that music shapes the soul before reason can, and that a polity which neglects this formation produces citizens incapable of recognizing virtue when they encounter it.^[17]

Aristotle takes up the same question in Politics Book VIII. He names four customary subjects of education: letters (reading and writing), gymnastics, music, and drawing. He devotes the bulk of the book to defending music’s place against contemporary skeptics who view it as mere amusement. “Music,” he writes at 1340b, “has the power of producing a certain effect on the moral character of the soul, and if it has the power to do this, it is clear that the young must be directed to music and must be educated in it.”^[18]

Aristotle’s argument is not without complications. He draws a sharp distinction between citizen students learning music for the formation of their own character and professional musicians performing for the entertainment of others, whom he regards with characteristic Athenian class disdain. The distinction matters and should not be glossed. But it does not weaken the foundational claim. It strengthens it. Aristotle is so insistent that music belongs in citizen education that he is willing to construct an elaborate philosophical apparatus to protect that core claim from his own discomfort with professional performance. The teacher must be expert. The curriculum must be carefully designed. The student must learn to play, not merely to listen. None of this is the language of a thinker who believes music is optional.

The same logic extended outward into civic life. Athenian theater was not entertainment in the modern commercial sense. The Great Dionysia, the annual dramatic festival held in honor of the god Dionysus, was a state-funded religious and civic event in which trained choruses of citizens performed tragedies and comedies in front of the entire polis. These choruses were recruited, financed, and outfitted by a choregos (a wealthy citizen-producer), then drilled for months by a chorodidaskalos (chorus-trainer) working alongside an aulētēs(pipe-player). The chorus was the moral and dramatic center of every production. Its training was rigorous, its performance public, and its function pedagogical: civic and religious formation through the disciplined practice of song and dance. The same Greek civilization that placed mousikē at the foundation of the curriculum extended that logic into its largest civic ritual. The Douris cup the previous article opened with, a school scene from fifth-century Athens depicting lyre instruction alongside the teaching of letters, was not a stylized image. It was the curriculum.

Rome: The Defense Becomes Necessary

By the first century CE, the Roman empire had inherited and systematized Greek educational practice. Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, completed around 95 CE, is the most comprehensive treatise on education to survive from the ancient world. In Book I, chapter 10, Quintilian devotes an extended argument to defending music’s place in the orator’s training against contemporary critics who, he tells us, consider it effeminate or beneath the dignity of a serious student.^[19]

The argument Quintilian makes is itself revealing. He cites the Greeks. He cites Pythagoras. He cites the long tradition of statesmen and generals who studied music. He insists that the orator’s voice, the rhythms of his speech, his command of cadence and pause and emphasis, all derive from musical training. The case he makes is brilliant, but the fact that he has to make it at all tells us something important: the tradition is by now so old that it is being questioned by people who have forgotten why it was instituted in the first place.

This is the recurring shape of the historical record. The cultures that established music as foundational education did so on grounds they understood clearly. The cultures that inherited those traditions, generations later, sometimes had to be reminded.

Quintilian was reminding his contemporaries in the year 95.

What the Record Shows

Six civilizations. Three continents. Roughly three thousand years of documented institutional life, from the Sumerian edubba to Quintilian’s Rome. They were not in communication with one another. The Zhou court did not consult the Egyptian temple priests. The Vedic gurukula did not borrow from the Sumerian tablet house. Plato did not read Confucius. Each civilization, working from its own resources and toward its own ends, arrived independently at the same structural conclusion: that the formation of educated human beings requires music, that this formation must be undertaken by qualified practitioners, and that an institution which omits it has not built a complete education at all.

This is what the slogan “back to basics” turns out to mean when it is taken seriously. Not the basics of 1955, or 1983, or the FY2026 budget cycle, but the basics of every civilization that ever built a school. The previous article observed that “the basics” is a category constructed in the image of whatever the moment is afraid of. The historical record shows what an honest definition of foundational education actually contains. It contains music. It has contained music for five thousand years, in every serious system of education the human species has ever produced, and the record on this point is unbroken.

The next article takes up the question this one leaves open. Why? When civilizations separated by oceans and millennia, with no shared philosophical inheritance, independently arrive at the same conclusion about what education must contain, what were they all responding to? Plato’s Republic and the Confucian Yueji, written by people who could not have known of each other’s existence, make remarkably similar arguments about why music is foundational to the formation of a person.

That parallel is the subject of the next article.

Sources and Notes

The sources and references for the historical claims in this article are listed below in order of first citation in the text.

1. The Hurrian songs comprise approximately thirty-six fragmentary musical compositions excavated from Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, Syria) in the early 1950s, dating to a stratum from the fourteenth century BCE. The complete hymn, designated h.6 in Emmanuel Laroche’s catalog, was first published by Laroche in Ugaritica V (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1968), 447–544 (h.6 transliteration at 463), with a revised text in 1975. See also Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin, “A Hurrian Musical Score from Ugarit: The Discovery of Mesopotamian Music,” Sources from the Ancient Near East 2/2 (Malibu: Undena, 1984). Multiple scholarly reconstructions of the notation exist (Kilmer & Crocker 1976; Duchesne-Guillemin 1984; Dumbrill 1998; Vitale), producing audibly different results from the same tablet; the argument here does not depend on which reconstruction is correct, only on the existence of teachable notation.

2. The Hurrian fragments were recovered from the Royal Palace at Ugarit in a stratum dating to the fourteenth century BCE. The notation system itself draws on much older Mesopotamian musical theory, attested in cuneiform tablets from Old Babylonian Nippur (c. 1800 BCE) and earlier.

3. The Sumerian e2-dub-ba-a literally translates “house where tablets are passed out.” On the institution generally, see Åke W. Sjöberg, “The Old Babylonian Edubba,” in Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild Jacobsen on His Seventieth Birthday June 7, 1974, ed. Stephen J. Lieberman, Assyriological Studies 20 (Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1976), 159–179; and Eleanor Robson, The Tablet House: A Scribal School in Old Babylonian Nippur, Revue d’Assyriologie 93 (2001): 39–66.

4. House F at Nippur, excavated in the mid-twentieth century, has provided the single largest body of evidence for Old Babylonian scribal pedagogy. See Robson, The Tablet House, for the standard reconstruction of curricular stages.

5. The four-stage curriculum (sign formation, lexical lists, mathematical and literary exercises, advanced compositions including the Tetrad and Decad of canonical Sumerian literary works) is reconstructed primarily from the House F finds at Nippur and parallel material from other Old Babylonian sites. See Niek Veldhuis, Elementary Education at Nippur: The Lists of Trees and Wooden Objects (Groningen, 1997), for the foundational study.

6. Anne Draffkorn Kilmer and Steve Tinney, “Old Babylonian Music Instruction Texts,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 48, no. 1 (1996): 49–56 (with corrections in JCS 49 [1997]: 118); and Anne Kilmer and Jeremie Peterson, “More Old Babylonian Music-Instruction Fragments from Nippur,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 61 (2009): 93–96. See also Kilmer’s foundational earlier work: The Discovery of an Ancient Mesopotamian Theory of Music, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 115, no. 2 (1971): 131–149. The interpretive question (whether the tablets functioned as performance instructions or as pedagogical exercises within the edubba) is openly acknowledged in the 2009 paper.

7. On organized choral practice in third-millennium Lagash and the role of the temple of Ningirsu, see Charles Plummeridge, “Schools,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), DOI 10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.43103. For the broader context of professional musicianship in Mesopotamian temple and palace life, see Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, “Mesopotamia §8(ii),” in the same volume; and the broader corpus surveyed throughout Kilmer’s published work.

8. On the Per Ankh, see Alan H. Gardiner, The House of Life, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 24, no. 2 (December 1938): 157–179. Earliest references appear in Old Kingdom royal decrees; archaeologically confirmed sites include Tell el-Amarna and, as announced by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities in April 2025 by the joint Egyptian-French mission (Supreme Council of Antiquities, the French National Centre for Scientific Research, and Sorbonne University), the Ramesseum of Ramesses II at Luxor.

9. On the phyle organization of chantresses and the hierarchy reporting to the High Priest, see Emily Teeter, “Female Musicians in Pharaonic Egypt,” in Rediscovering the Muses: Women’s Musical Traditions, ed. Kimberly Marshall (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 68–91.

10. Emily Teeter and Janet H. Johnson, eds., The Life of Meresamun: A Temple Singer in Ancient Egypt, Oriental Institute Museum Publications 29 (Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2009). The volume reconstructs the social, religious, and musical context of a chantress of Amun, c. 800 BCE, whose intact mummy and coffin are housed at the Oriental Institute. See also the burial of Nehemes-Bastet, a chantress of Amun whose intact burial was discovered in the Valley of the Kings (KV64) in 2011 and excavated by Susanne Bickel and Elina Paulin-Grothe of the University of Basel in 2012, providing exceptionally detailed evidence for the social standing of trained temple musicians.

11. Zhouli 周禮, Baoshi 保氏 chapter. The text identifies the Six Arts as the formal curriculum for the education of “the sons of the state.” On the broader system, see Michael Nylan, The Five “Confucian” Classics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

12. Analects 8.8: 子曰：「興於詩，立於禮，成於樂。」 Translations vary; the rendering here follows the standard reading in which 成於樂 places music as the completing or perfecting element of moral formation. James Legge’s classic translation: “It is by the Odes that the mind is aroused. It is by the Rules of Propriety that the character is established. It is from Music that the finish is received.”

13. On the dating of the Sama Veda, see Michael Witzel, The Development of the Vedic Canon and Its Schools: The Social and Political Milieu, in Inside the Texts, Beyond the Texts, ed. Witzel, Harvard Oriental Series, Opera Minora 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 257–345. The Samhita layer is conventionally dated c. 1200–1000 BCE; oral composition predates the Samhita.

14. The hand-gesture notation system (hasta-mudrā) used in Sama Veda transmission is described in the Naradiya Shiksha, a technical treatise on Vedic chant pedagogy. See Wayne Howard, Sāmavedic Chant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), the standard scholarly study.

15. Howard, Sāmavedic Chant, on the multi-stage curriculum and timeframes; see also the curricular descriptions maintained by living Sama Veda gurukula institutions in Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh (e.g., Veda Vedanta Gurukula Mahavidyalaya, Sringeri). On the endangered state of the Kerala Namboothiri tradition specifically, see C. M. Neelakandhan and K. A. Ravindran, Preservation Techniques of the Ṙgveda Chanting of Kerala (Sri Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, 2015), and the Sama Veda audio-visual documentation completed by the same institution.

16. UNESCO, “Tradition of Vedic Chanting,” inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, 2008 (originally proclaimed 2003). See ich.unesco.org/en/RL/tradition-of-vedic-chanting-00062.

17. Plato, Republic II–III, esp. 376e–403c. On Damon of Athens and the Greek doctrine of musical ethos, see Warren D. Anderson, Ethos and Education in Greek Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966). For the broader institutional context of Greek musical practice, see Anderson, Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

18. Aristotle, Politics VIII.5, 1340b10–14. Translation follows the H. Rackham Loeb edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932). Aristotle’s full argument runs from 1337a–1342b and includes his distinction between citizen musical education and professional performance, the latter of which he regards as unsuitable for free men. The “four customary subjects” passage is at 1337b22–25. On the institutional structure of the Great Dionysia, the choregia, and the role of the chorodidaskalos, see Peter Wilson, The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia: The Chorus, the City and the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

19. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, I.10. The Loeb edition (trans. Donald A. Russell, The Orator’s Education, 5 vols., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) is the standard modern reference.

In December 2024, the Indiana State Board of Education approved a redesign of the state’s high school diploma. The new framework, built around three “readiness seals” for enrollment, employment, or enlistment, takes effect with the Class of 2029. Among the changes: fine arts no longer appear among the base diploma’s directed electives. World languages don’t either. The redesign was driven, in the explicit framing of state officials and the governor, by alignment with the workforce.^[1]

It is tempting to read this moment as a crisis. New. Unprecedented. The breaking point.

It is none of those things.

After five decades in this field, I can tell you the Indiana decision is not the first time I have seen this move. It is the latest expression of a recurring American pattern. The fifth time in living memory that public education has lurched toward a narrowed definition of “the basics.” I came into this field during the second of those waves. I have watched the third and fourth play out from inside the institutions that fought them.

The pattern is the point. Each wave has its own anxiety, its own policy mechanism, its own roster of disciplines that count. Each follows the same shape. Each leaves the same casualty list. And each, set alongside the others, reveals what the slogan “back to basics” is built to obscure: the basics are not a thing one returns to. They are a category that gets constructed, again and again, in the image of whatever the moment is afraid of.

Let me walk you through the five waves. Then the question they all evade.

The First Wave: Sputnik and the Cold War Curriculum

October 1957. The Soviet Union launches a 184-pound metal sphere into orbit. The political reaction is immediate. The educational reaction is swift. Within eleven months, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), which President Eisenhower signed on September 2, 1958.^[2]

The NDEA is clear about what counts. Title III provides federal funds for “the strengthening of science, mathematics, and modern foreign language instruction.” Title V supports guidance counselors who can identify scientifically gifted students. Title VI funds language and area studies.

The arts are not in the bill. The humanities, broadly construed, are not in the bill. The legislation takes its name from “national defense” and means the words seriously: education is being redefined as a strategic asset, and the disciplines that matter are the ones that produce engineers, physicists, and Russian-speaking analysts.

The cultural Cold War runs in parallel, with the State Department exporting jazz musicians and the eventual establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965, but those efforts never fuse with the K–12 curriculum reform triggered by Sputnik. Federal money flows to where the anxiety points. What does not get federal investment does not get strengthened. What does not get strengthened gets slowly reframed, in the implicit logic of the era, as ancillary.

This is the first time in the postwar period that the federal government has formally chosen which disciplines count as foundational to the national interest.

It chooses narrowly. The frame holds.

The Second Wave: Minimum Competency and the Birth of a Slogan

The 1970s. The trigger this time is different, declining SAT scores, disorientation following the educational experimentalism of the 1960s, the recurring cultural panic captured in book titles like Why Johnny Can’t Read (Rudolf Flesch’s bestseller, originally published in 1955 and steadily reprinted into the 1970s).^[3] But the move is familiar: define the basics, and tighten the screws on whatever falls outside.

The mechanism is minimum competency testing. Florida moves first, requiring an exam for high school graduation. Other Southern states follow, then a wave of others. From 1975 through 1982, thirty-nine states enacted some form of minimum competency testing program.^[4]

The phrase “back to basics” enters American education’s vocabulary not as a description but as a slogan, a shorthand that means, when one looks at what is actually being tested, reading and arithmetic. Sometimes a touch of writing. Often nothing else.

The squeeze is implicit. Schools facing testing requirements in two subjects rationally allocate time toward those two subjects. Time is finite. Music, art, theater, foreign languages, civics, science taught with depth rather than breadth, all of these become, in instructional reality if not in formal designation, the residual category. What is tested is taught. What is not tested becomes negotiable.

This wave is rarely remembered as a curricular narrowing. It is remembered, when it is remembered, as a response to declining standards. But its long effect was to install in American education a habit of mind: the basics are what the test measures.

Once that habit is installed, the next wave has only to expand the testing.

The Third Wave: A Nation at Risk and the Strategic Use of Standards

April 1983. The National Commission on Excellence in Education publishes A Nation at Risk. The report’s most quoted line remains its diagnosis:

“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”^[5]

The frame is again national-strategic, but the anxiety has shifted from defense to economics. Japan, not the Soviet Union, is the comparator. The threat is not missiles but trade.

The Commission’s recommendations were specific. It named the “Five New Basics”: four years of English, three years of mathematics, three years of science, three years of social studies, and a half-year of computer science.^[5] The arts were not in the list. Through the late 1980s, states adopted graduation requirements that mirrored the New Basics framing. Standards work began across content areas, with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics releasing the first national content-area standards in 1989.^[6]

Then came Charlottesville.

In September 1989, President George H.W. Bush and the National Governors Association convened an education summit at the University of Virginia, with Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas leading the governors' delegation as NGA chair. The product was the National Education Goals — the framework that would shape American education policy for the next decade. Goal Three named the “core subjects” in which all students would demonstrate competency: English, mathematics, science, history, and geography.^[7]

Music and the arts were not listed.

That omission was the catalyst for everything that followed.

What it produced was not pushback in the conventional sense. It was something sharper. Working through institutions led by John Mahlmann at the Music Educators National Conference, Karl Bruhn and Larry Linkin at the National Association of Music Merchants, Mike Greene at the Recording Academy, and myself with the American Music Conference, the arts education community made a strategic decision: rather than fight the standards movement from the outside, they would use it. The standards framework was the language of policy legitimacy in that decade. The arts would write their own.

The National Commission for Music Education was assembled in 1990. Its 1991 report, Growing Up Complete: The Imperative for Music Education, led to the founding of the National Coalition for Music Education. The strategic premise was clear: the arts would secure their place in the federal curriculum by producing what the other disciplines were producing — rigorous, discipline-specific national standards in the language of the standards movement itself.

The rallying moment came in November 1991, when Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander, in a letter to MENC, described music and arts education as “extracurricular.” For advocates, this was the last straw. On February 25, 1992, NARAS CEO Mike Greene used the Grammy Awards broadcast, watched globally by an estimated 1.5 billion viewers, to call out the omission of the arts from America 2000. Ten days later, Alexander’s office announced the creation of the “America 2000 Arts Partnership.”^[8] In February 1993, the new Secretary of Education, Richard Riley, released a formal statement affirming the arts as “a vital part” of American education.

The institutional victory followed. On March 31, 1994, President Clinton signed the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, which formally added the arts to the National Education Goals’ enumerated core subject areas, the first time U.S. law identified the arts as a core component of the K–12 curriculum.^[9] In April of the same year, the Consortium of National Arts Education Associations released the National Standards for Arts Education, the second content area to publish national standards, after mathematics in 1989.^[10] Through the late 1990s, nearly every state adopted arts standards of its own. Research efforts built an empirical base, including music and its impact on child development, the founding of the Arts Education Partnership in 1995, and the Champions of Change report in 1999. Philanthropy surged in parallel — Mr. Holland’s Opus in 1996, VH1 Save The Music in 1997, expanded school programs from the GRAMMY Foundation and others.

The strategic appropriation worked. The standards framework, used against the arts in the 1980s, became the vehicle for the arts’ formal recognition. By every visible institutional measure, the arts had won inclusion.

The wave appeared to have broken in their favor.

It had not. The next wave was already forming.

The Fourth Wave: No Child Left Behind and the Hollowing of Inclusion

January 2002. President George W. Bush signs the No Child Left Behind Act. The mechanism this time is different from anything that has come before: not a curriculum framework, not a slogan, not a set of graduation requirements. NCLB establishes a national accountability regime based on annual high-stakes testing in reading and mathematics. Schools whose tested students do not improve face escalating federal sanctions: identification, restructuring, takeover.

NCLB did not repeal the arts’ core academic status. It preserved the designation, listing the arts among ten core academic subjects, language carried directly forward from the 1990s arts inclusion victory. The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 would later broaden this to “well-rounded education,” explicitly enumerating music and the arts.^[11]

The statutes held.

The testing apparatus did not.

The map of what got tested became, in practice, the map of what got taught. Schools facing federal sanction reallocated time, staffing, and budget toward the tested subjects. Untested subjects, including the arts, that the law itself named as core, became the line items principals adjusted when accountability pressure mounted. The 1994 National Standards for Arts Education remained on the books in nearly every state. The instructional minutes, the arts specialist positions, the rehearsal-room budgets moved elsewhere.

By 2007, the data was clear. A Center on Education Policy survey of 349 school districts found that 62% had increased instructional time for English language arts and mathematics since NCLB took effect. To do so, 44% had cut time from other subjects. The cuts were not evenly distributed: among districts that reduced time for art and music specifically, the average reduction was 57 minutes per week — a 35% loss of elementary instructional time in those disciplines. The pattern was sharpest in districts with schools identified as "needing improvement" under NCLB: 30% of those districts had cut time from art and music.^[12]

By the early 2010s, federal pressure on tested subjects had crystallized into something more durable than testing alone. The Common Core State Standards Initiative, launched in 2009 by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, produced national standards in only two subjects: English language arts and mathematics. The federal government — through Race to the Top grants and ESEA flexibility waivers — incentivized rapid adoption. Forty-five states and the District of Columbia adopted Common Core within four years.^[13]

By elevating two subjects to a national framework while leaving the arts at state standards developed two decades earlier, Common Core deepened the hierarchy NCLB had built. The political backlash was severe. Conservative critics attacked the initiative as federal overreach; by 2016, several states had withdrawn or rebranded their standards. But the backlash did not roll back the curricular narrowing Common Core had cemented. It only changed the political vocabulary in which the next wave would be argued.

The wave ran for nearly twenty years. It captured both political parties. And it revealed what the prior waves only suggested: it is possible to win on paper and lose in practice. The 1990s arts coalition had done the legislative and institutional work. The strategic appropriation of the standards movement had succeeded. NCLB-era implementation rendered that success, in too many districts, hollow.

The lesson is plain. Naming the arts as foundational is necessary but not sufficient. Implementation reveals the actual hierarchy.

The Fifth Wave: Workforce-as-Basics

The present. The current wave is workforce-driven. The anxiety has shifted again, automation, artificial intelligence, the “skills gap,” and global competitiveness rebooted for a digital era. The policy mechanism is no longer a single federal law but a distributed pattern: state-level diploma redesigns, expansion of Career and Technical Education, “future ready” rebrandings, employer-aligned graduation requirements, and work-based learning mandates. Even the US Department of Education got in on the act, focusing on only four subjects and calling arts education “a distraction.”

The Indiana redesign described above is one of dozens. In 2024 alone, states committed more than $105 million in new funding to college-and-career pathways tied to workforce readiness.^[13]

What gets defined as basic in this wave is what policymakers claim employers need. The metric of educational value becomes economic utility, measured in the short term. Disciplines that do not produce immediately legible labor-market outcomes become, in policy framing, optional, sometimes warmly endorsed in rhetoric, but structurally moved to the periphery of the requirement architecture.

There is a complication worth highlighting. When employers themselves report their actual hiring needs, through the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, through McKinsey’s January 2026 reversal on liberal arts hiring, they describe creativity, adaptive judgment, and the capacity for original thinking under uncertainty as their top unmet demands.^[14] The workforce-readiness movement is narrowing the curriculum in the name of employer demand at exactly the moment that demand is shifting away from the narrowing. The fifth wave is built on a definition of “workforce ready” that the workforce itself has begun to publicly repudiate.

The Indiana case is instructive precisely because it is not extreme. After significant public protest, Indiana’s Secretary of Education Katie Jenner emphasized that fine arts had not been required even under the previous Core 40 diploma, a true statement that does not address the deeper change. The previous architecture made arts a directed elective alongside world languages and CTE, signaling their place in a serious academic preparation. The new architecture replaces that signal with twelve “personalized electives” oriented toward seal pathways, two of which are explicitly workforce-keyed.^[15]

The disciplines have not been banned. They have been moved.

This is the recurring pattern. Each wave uses the language of common sense, basics, accountability, and readiness to relocate certain disciplines from the foundation to the optional layer. None of the waves calls this a curricular philosophy.

All of them are.

Whose Basics?

It is worth pausing here to ask a question the slogan “back to basics” is constructed to forbid.

Whose basics? Against what baseline?

The Sputnik wave defined basics as what served national defense. The minimum competency wave defined basics as what could be measured on a state exam. The Nation at Risk wave defined the "New Basics" of an economy under threat from Japan. The NCLB wave defined basics as what stood between a school and federal sanctions. The current wave defines basics as what policymakers say employers need from a high school graduate, even as the employers themselves describe something different.

These are not the same definition. They are not even compatible definitions. Each was generated under specific political pressure, in response to a specific anxiety, and each was presented to the public as a return to something, as if there had once been a stable agreement, somewhere in the past, about what the basics were, and the moment’s work was simply to recover it.

There was, and is, no such agreement.

There has never been a moment in American educational history when “the basics” denoted a fixed set of disciplines outside the political conditions that defined them. The phrase is always a construction. It is always defined by what it excludes.

This is not an indictment of any one wave. It is an observation about the category. To debate which subjects are basic is already to accept the framing. The more interesting question, the question this series takes up, is what serious civilizations have actually treated as foundational to the education of the young, across centuries, across continents, across political and economic forms wildly unlike our own.

What the Real Basics Actually Are

Every wave of “back to basics” has been a return to a recently constructed past. Sputnik wanted the basics of 1955. The minimum competency movement wanted the basics of some imagined prewar classroom. A Nation at Risk wanted a Cold War rigor that had never quite existed. NCLB wanted the basics of what could be measured on a bubble sheet. The current wave wants the workforce of an economy whose time has passed.

None of these is actually going back. They are arguments about the recent past, dressed in the language of permanence.

If we are going to take the slogan seriously, if we are going to actually go back to basics, then the question is not which mid-century curriculum to recover. The question is what serious civilizations have treated as foundational across the entire arc of recorded history. Not for fifty years. Not for two hundred. For five thousand.

That record exists. It is long, well-documented, and remarkably consistent across cultures that had nothing else in common. And it disrupts almost every familiar nostalgia about what education used to be.

Pick the era. The American Founders. The 1950s before Sputnik. The medieval university. Fifth-century Athens. The schools of pharaonic Egypt or Sumerian Uruk. In every one of those eras, across language, religion, political form, economic structure, music and the arts were not extracurricular. They were not enrichment. They were not negotiable. They were, in formal curricular structure and in the philosophical writings that justified those structures, foundational.

This series, The Founding Disciplines, will substantiate that claim. Four previews of what is coming.

Ancient Greece. The Greek term mousike did not mean what “music” means today. It encompassed music, poetry, and dance, a unified domain of formation. Mousike and gymnastics were the two halves of Greek education itself. Plato’s Republic devotes substantial portions of Books II and III to musical education. Aristotle’s Politics devotes Book VIII to it. Both treat music as constitutive of the formation of citizens. Not ornamental. Constitutive.

The medieval university. When the European university crystallized in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, its curriculum was the seven liberal arts, structured into the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). Music was one of the four mathematical sciences. To be educated, by the architecture of the university itself, was to know music. The Islamic scholarly tradition, contemporaneous and parallel, ran the same architecture, with figures like al-Farabi producing comprehensive mathematical treatises on music that would shape both traditions.

Reformation Germany. Martin Luther placed music second only to theology among human disciplines. The Lutheran town schools of sixteenth-century Germany required every child to learn music. Two centuries before American public schools existed, communities across Protestant Europe had already built music into the institutional fabric of universal education.

Boston, 1838. When music entered the curriculum of the American common school under Lowell Mason, it was not added to an existing structure. It was part of the founding architecture of American public education itself.

These are not hand-picked exceptions. They are representative. This series will work through them in detail, including the schools of Sumer and Egypt, the Confucian Six Arts, the Vedic curriculum, the Roman Quintilian, and the long institutional history that delivers music into the American common school and, from there, into the modern profession.

So yes. Let’s go “back to basics.”

All the way back.

And what will we find when we do?

There has never been a serious civilization that treated music and the arts as disposable. The record is 5,000 years old, and it is unbroken.

The next wave of education reform will be built by someone. The question is whether it will be built on a fifty-year selective memory, or on what the actual record of human civilization shows.

Next: Article II of The Founding Disciplines: The Founding Claim: Music as Original Curriculum.

Sources and Further Reading

The data, statutes, and historical claims in this article draw on the following primary sources. Readers who want to go deeper on any section will find these the most useful starting points.

1. New Indiana Diploma approved by the Indiana State Board of Education, December 11, 2024, with implementation for the Class of 2029 and optional adoption beginning in 2025–26. The previous Core 40 diploma’s directed electives, which included world languages, fine arts, and career and technical education, are replaced by twelve “personalized electives” oriented toward enrollment, employment, or enlistment readiness seals. Indiana Department of Education materials and contemporaneous coverage in Indiana Capital Chronicle and Chalkbeat Indiana, December 11, 2024.

2. National Defense Education Act of 1958, P.L. 85-864. Title III: “Financial Assistance for Strengthening Science, Mathematics, and Modern Foreign Language Instruction.” Available via the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GovInfo).

3. Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can Do About It (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955), reissued and reprinted across the 1960s and 1970s as a recurring touchstone for declining-literacy panics.

4. “Student Performance Standards and Testing,” ERIC ED252530, p. 14. See also John L. Rury, Ryan Belew, and Jennifer Hurst, “The Origins of American Test-Based Educational Accountability and Controversies About Its Impact, 1970–1983,” Teachers College Record (2022), tracing the movement’s origin in Florida and its diffusion through Southern and other states.

5. National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, April 1983). The “Five New Basics” recommendation appears in the report’s section on Content. Full text available via ERIC ED226006 and the Internet Archive.

6. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (Reston, VA: NCTM, 1989) — the first national content-area standards published in the United States.

7. 1989 Education Summit, held September 27–28, 1989 at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. The summit was convened by President George H.W. Bush, with Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas leading the governors' delegation in his role as chair of the National Governors Association. The summit produced the framework that became the National Education Goals, formally announced by the NGA in February 1990. Goal Three named English, mathematics, science, history, and geography as the core subjects in which all students would demonstrate competency; the arts were not included.

8. For a comprehensive account of the November 1991 Alexander letter, the February 1992 Grammy Awards address by Mike Greene, the Maryville (Tennessee) protest concert, and the announcement of the America 2000 Arts Partnership, see Bob Morrison, “The Untold Story of How Music and Arts Education Became Core Subjects,” bobmorrison.substack.com, March 2025.

9. Goals 2000: Educate America Act, P.L. 103-227, signed March 31, 1994. The Act formally added the arts to the National Education Goals’ enumerated core subject areas, alongside English, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, history, and geography. Available via Congress.gov (H.R. 1804) and GovInfo.

10. Consortium of National Arts Education Associations, National Standards for Arts Education: What Every Young American Should Know and Be Able To Do in the Arts (Reston, VA: Music Educators National Conference, 1994). The standards covered dance, music, theater, and visual arts. They were the second national content-area standards published, following the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ standards of 1989. Available via ERIC ED365622.

11. No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, P.L. 107-110, listing the arts among ten "core academic subjects" (Title IX, §9101); Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, P.L. 114-95, replacing that language with "well-rounded education" and explicitly enumerating music and the arts. Both available via Congress.gov.

12. Jennifer McMurrer, Choices, Changes, and Challenges: Curriculum and Instruction in the NCLB Era (Washington, DC: Center on Education Policy, July 2007); follow-up analysis in Instructional Time in Elementary Schools: A Closer Look at Changes for Specific Subjects (Center on Education Policy, February 2008). Findings drawn from a nationally representative survey of 349 school districts conducted November 2006 – February 2007.

13. Common Core State Standards Initiative, launched in 2009 under the joint sponsorship of the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers. By 2014, 45 states and the District of Columbia had adopted the standards. Federal incentives included the U.S. Department of Education's Race to the Top competitive grant program ($4.35 billion in initial funding, with state adoption of "college- and career-ready standards" as a scoring criterion) and ESEA flexibility waivers granted under the Obama administration's NCLB waiver authority.

14. ExcelinEd, “7 Education Policy Trends for State Lawmakers in 2025,” December 2024.

15. World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025, ranking creative thinking, resilience, curiosity, and lifelong learning among the top skills employers identify for the workforce through 2030. McKinsey & Company CEO Bob Sternfels, in a January 2026 Harvard Business Review IdeaCast interview reported by Fortune (January 14, 2026), announced the firm’s reversal on hiring priorities, actively recruiting graduates capable of “discontinuous leaps” in thinking that AI cannot replicate, with creativity, aspiration, and judgment named as the firm’s most-needed capacities.

16. Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner, remarks at Indiana State Board of Education meeting, December 11, 2024, encouraging local districts to “consider locally-created pathways for those students who are interested in the arts.”