If We Build It They Will Come: Using Music Technology to Reach “The Other 80%” In Secondary School Programs


In music education we begin children’s elementary music experience by encouraging everyone to join in music making through singing and perform- ing on rhythm instruments, autoharps, recorders, flutophones, and more. Music making and music learning include one and all; everyone gets to par- ticipate.


Music teachers use participatory music David B. Williams


making as a way to introduce concepts of rhythm, pitch, melodic shape and harmonic changes, and form and style.


Then what happens? As our students matriculate through levels of schooling, music participation becomes more selective. We move from partici- patory music making as a model to the tradition- al performance model where perfection is a key goal: no wrong notes and fewer opportunities for creative music expression.


Performance ensem- Rick Dammers


bles—band, orchestra, chorus, marching band and jazz band—dominate the secondary music cur- riculum with a general music class or advanced placement theory perhaps added to the curriculum.


For those students attracted to these ensembles the benefits of this training and experience is expan- sive and well documented. Some students go on to professional music careers; others carry their extra-musical and musical experiences with them into other careers and as an integral part of their personal lives. We are not advocating changing this component of our nation’s music education tradition.


Dave Williams’ review of several studies (Wil- liams, 2012) has shown that on average across the country, by the time students advance through middle school to high school, only 20 percent of students are involved in these traditional mu- sic classes (also see Elpus and Abril, 2011 and NJAEP, 2014). Many students who participated in music making in the lower grades have since distanced themselves from school music.


These


are what we call “The Other 80%,” the students who no longer are active in the traditional second- ary school music program. It is further insightful, that while nationally only 20 percent on average are involved in traditional secondary performance


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ensembles, a much greater percentage of students sing or play an instrument outside of school. The longitudinal series of studies, Monitoring the Fu- ture (Johnston et al., 2010), showed that over some 30 years, an average 57% of students in 8th, 10th, and 12th grades—not just those in music class- es—reported that they play an instrument or sing outside of school at least once or twice a month if not daily. In terms of lifelong music making, the NAMM-commissioned Gallup survey (NAMM, 2003) showed that 54% of households have some- one that plays a musical instrument and 48% play two or more (see Williams, 2012, for a full discus- sion of these data).


McAllester’s predictions in the 1967 Tanglewood report were incredibly prescient. He stated some 60 years ago: “We have a splendid beginning in the early grades, when children are sometimes lucky enough to get acquainted with rhythm and melody on all sorts of simple and uncon- ventional instruments. They have the thrill of exploring the delights of free creativity without a long apprenticeship in technique first.... We might entertain the idea that someone who never does develop skills on conventional instruments could become a gifted performer on unconventional ones.... Someone who never learned to read conven- tional notation might nonetheless become an outstanding composer in some medium where notation has yet to be invented, or may even be impossible to invent” (p. 97).


Field of Dreams. Change is on the horizon with new playing fields designed within our traditional music curriculum. Music teachers, innovative and self-motivated, are creating new environments for The-Other-80% to explore students’ creative music potential. It is being done in many ways: song writing, guitar and ukulele ensembles, Ma- riachi bands, drumming circles, and various ethnic ensembles. All these activities help bridge music education in school with music in society and use these activities to nurture a greater knowledge and appreciation of the building blocks of music that


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