The Future of Music Education: Disruption and Opportunity

5 minute read

Michael Cain

Cofounder and CEO Ekwe

A Kaleidoscope of Contradictory Forces: The State of Music Education in the 21st Century

The current landscape for music education, both within and outside K-12 institutions, is a kaleidoscope of contradictory and conflicting forces, narratives, and data. Starting with the good news, according to some reports, 92% of public school students do have access to music education, with 46% participating in some form of music education every day. Those numbers aren't terrible. However, at the same time, over 3.6 million students do not have the same access, with a disproportionate number of them being concentrated in schools in major urban communities, which have the highest percentage of students eligible for free/reduced-price meals, and often a majority Black, Hispanic, or Native American student body.

We are unavoidably aware of the reality of music programs living constantly in danger of being cut due to shrinking budgets. At the same time, we can also see an increase in more diverse offerings such as popular music, electronic and digital music production, as well as world music programming. Of course, while the tried-and-true traditional ensemble and repertoire-based programs still reign supreme, they no longer occupy the same singular position of total dominance as before.

Access aside, what should quality music education look like in the 21st century? It’s clear to see that it needs updating and improving, but in what sense? There are no easy and quick answers as to what music education is missing, what it should look like, what it needs, or how it can be reimagined to reflect and be responsive to cultural diversity. The demographics of our students will only continue to be more multicultural in makeup. And we, too slowly, have come to recognize that music education needs to address and help correct the historic exclusion of practices from diverse populations and be artistically and technologically relevant to meet the needs of the 21st-century learner.

No quick answers for sure, but maybe we've reached a point where we are, at least, asking better questions and attempting to grapple with some important considerations along the way.

Framing the Discussion with NAFME Music Standards

To provide context for this discussion, let's refer to the National Association for Music Education (NAFME) music standards of 2014. These standards serve as guiding frameworks to enhance musical literacy by emphasizing conceptual understandings and processes that musicians have engaged with for generations. The core competencies identified in these standards are creating, performing, and responding to music.

It's important to note that the standards themselves are not curriculum or actionable classroom techniques for skill acquisition. Instead, they offer frameworks to assist teachers in developing and designing their curriculum. They primarily outline the artistic processes that form the foundation of art and music creation. The application of these standards can vary significantly depending on the specific situation, and this adaptability is what makes them valuable.

However, it can also lead to confusion.

The Confusion Surrounding Creating, Performing, and Responding to Music

What, really, does creating, performing, and responding to music mean, especially in the 21st century? These concepts have undergone a radical transformation over the last 200 years or so and are about to transform again in unimaginable ways. Many predictions regarding the future of music education squarely place it, it seems, in the metaverse. Naturally, discussions of emerging trends often focus heavily on innovations in technology: AI music creation platforms, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), gamification of music software, and the like. Clearly, these technologies will have an enormous impact on music education, but how so? And what questions should we be asking in the face of this?

Let’s take a look back to help us look forward. An incomplete history of electronic music making might start with the telegraph patented in 1837. (You read that right, 1837!) This could be considered the birth of modern communications, with ensuing telegraph lines stretching across the US by the 1840s. Evolutionary steps from there include the telephone, patented in 1876, the phonograph (1877), Thaddeus Cahill’s incredible invention, the Telharmonium (1896), an instrument that was built to bring music into people’s homes via telephone lines. (Music sent directly to our homes? In 1896?) The Telharmonium is the predecessor to the synthesizer and, more specifically, the Hammond B3 organ. And we haven’t reached the 1900s yet.

The next century brought us the recorded music industry, changing how we hear and consume music forever. The ability to listen to a wide range of music in our own homes changed everything. The film industry brought us the idea of the soundtrack, music as something that accompanies life and daily activities. Radio brought even more mobility to the music listening experience, as did the Walkman cassette players of the 1980s. Of course, we have the music streaming platforms of today.

Then there's hip hop, which not only gave voice to whole communities, but completely redefined what music is fundamentally, including what an instrument is. It took the turntable and turned it from a passive device that only plays music into an interactive musical instrument. And sampling turned any sound, such as a car door or birds chirping, into a potential musical instrument.

This is just scratching the surface of the history, but returning to the core competencies as identified by NAFME, the reality is we've spent the last 200 years experiencing rapidly shifting meanings and definitions of what it means to be a creator, performer, and responder of music. And music education has been hard-pressed to keep up.

Looking forward, given that we are on the cusp of shifts so seismic in scale and rapid in speed regarding what music fundamentally is, how it's made, and what it's used for, we have to ask the question: what will this mean for the future of music education?

The Impact of AI Digital Music Creation on Music Education

One of the core considerations for me is the macro trend reality that younger generations expect to participate in the content they are fans of, rather than just passively consume it. We now live in an era of the content creator. Social media and other technology have enabled practices such as photography and video, which used to be difficult technological feats, to be easily accessible to most as long as you have a smartphone.

Music has been a bit slow to join that club, but with the coming AI music creation platforms in particular, creating music will be as easy as typing or saying a few prompt words into a program and having music generated instantly. Will that produce "good" music or is that even close to the historically understood definition of improvising, composing, or producing music? Hard to say, but the data shows AI music creation will be readily embraced as a legitimate creation practice by future generations.

Text-prompted music creation platforms will make music creation as ubiquitous as photos and videos are now made on smartphones. Music makers will create, recreate, remix, and share music as often and easily as they post photos on social media. I'm thinking of the quote by Frank Zappa (sometimes attributed to Keith Jarrett): "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." These platforms convert text to music, in which case they make "composer" more of a "describer." Music education needs to prepare for this.

Interestingly, the NAFME rationale and justification for the core competencies is "to enable students to become successful musicians and successful 21st-century citizens." It's hard to argue with that. Along with the upcoming revolution in AI-generated music, here are some other considerations music educators will need to think through in attempting to empower students to become successful musicians and 21st-century citizens.

Fully virtual artists will live alongside human artists. I'm not just speaking about entirely AI-generated music; I'm speaking about entirely AI-generated artists. We have this now, and it will only grow. In this world, virtual artists will create virtual music, but with real fan bases. Along with that will come fully virtual music teachers. Again, the data says this will be embraced by future generations. Is music education prepared for that?

The amount of music currently being created digitally is massive. Around 125 thousand songs are created for upload to streaming platforms daily. With AI-generated music platforms, that number will increase exponentially. We could see daily numbers in the millions. The fragmentation and saturation of music distribution channels will be unimaginable, and this will inevitably have a profound impact on our students. Again, is music education prepared for that?

How will the NAFME standards hold up against this backdrop? It's not entirely clear, and different teachers in different teaching environments will have different answers and solutions. Perhaps, in a world of rapid change, the broad and flexible nature of the core ideas of creating, performing, and responding will be the very thing that allows them to continue to be helpful and relevant frameworks for future music teachers.

As mentioned before, there are no quick answers to all of this, but there are two enduring principles that I think are essential to keep in mind as we move into this future. As with all things, movement produces counter movement, and that's always held true with technology. Every technological innovation comes with both adoption and backlash, or counter movement. While we can expect future generations to embrace many of the changes coming, we can also expect to see some form of backlash and counter movement to those changes as well. The future will not be one-dimensional or one-sided, in other words.

The other principle is that challenges always present opportunities. Music education has had significant challenges for a long while now, and perhaps the coming disruptions to the fundamental notion of music making itself will present music education with a much-needed opportunity for innovation. If, on a very basic level, we have no alternative but to accept the fact of the coming transformations, we can also simultaneously accept and embrace the opportunities that will inevitably come with it.