This article was originally published on 14 September 2022

In the autumn of 2020, music teacher Shari North became unofficial mentor to an enthusiastic young colleague at their Dallas, Texas middle school (teaching the equivalent of Years 7-9). The new teacher had just finished her student teaching and was anxious to begin - except, of course, there were no students in her classroom to teach. They were at home, since the school was effectively closed due to Covid. 

The new teacher would spend her first year teaching many of the young musicians - some of whom had never actually played a note on their instruments - from her school office, on Zoom. 

North, who had been teaching music for nearly 30 years, imagined imparting her veteran knowledge to the new teacher, but that never really got off the ground. Schools soon “reopened” but only a third of students showed up, so North and the new teacher were thrown into uncharted territory: teaching students in the classroom and students at home on Zoom at the same time. Learning to play the clarinet or the viola was impossible over a tenuous internet connection, so they focused on rhythm and theory exercises. 

With no curriculum and no roadmap, North said they got creative: she taught students The Cup Song from the movie Pitch Perfect, refitting it to the tune of Feliz Navidad. After school, North and the new teacher sat together in North’s office and commiserated, often having a dark laugh about how impossible it all seemed. 

After a few months, the new teacher considered leaving. Her previous life as a freelance jazz musician, moving from gig to gig, suddenly seemed more sane. “She’s super smart and talented, and the mountain of stress and responsibilities she took on is unimaginable,” North says. “Everybody has considered leaving.” 

Flagging enthusiasm

Music lessons weren’t exactly great for the pupils, either. When they did come back to the classroom, their instrument-ready masks - little curtains that split in half for a trumpet or flute - meant North couldn’t see if their mouths were making the correct shape. Clarinetists were encouraged to buy “clarinet bags”, shaped like a pillow case, to cover their entire instrument to keep droplets from entering the air, covering their mouths and their hands.

North’s experience was far from unique - Covid school closures disrupted most American music programmes, and most music teaching across the UK as well. Even once school was back in session, things were so different, with music lessons often unrecognisable: concerts and events were cancelled, and ensembles were unable to practise. Children’s enthusiasm for music understandably flagged; many dropped out of extracurricular activities. 

Like a lot of people who have dedicated their lives to teaching music, North worries that the damage done to both music teachers and students might be long lasting, even permanent. Music education had taken a lot of blows before the pandemic, and among teachers like North, there’s a feeling of doom that a centuries-long chain has been broken, perhaps irreparably. Reduced exposure to music means millions of students have missed out on the foundational knowledge it takes to get interested in music. Music, like sports, needs a baseline of skill to enjoy, not necessarily as the foundation for the life of a professional musician, but to be proficient enough to enjoy singing or playing.

Experts and teachers in the US and the UK agree that Covid only exacerbated and sped up an unravelling of music education that had begun many years before - especially in urban and rural areas, where schools have had difficulty maintaining their music provision for decades. They have faced unfavourable circumstances at every turn: shrinking budgets, policy patchworks with plenty of loopholes, teacher burnout and shortages, competing academic pressures - and, maybe most mysterious of all, a deep disinterest by some schools to put the kind of time and money into music departments that it takes for them to be successful. 

Behind all these reasons may be an underlying assumption that perhaps music education is no longer a necessary part of school. That the idea of learning to play a sousaphone while marching, or singing the bassline of O Come, All Ye Faithful at Christmas is outdated, and isn’t really worth as much - it’s not as useful - to students as other academic pursuits like reading, algebra or science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem). Which would explain why, in the States, music is now often “opt-in”: schools and districts partner with non-profits that come in and provide resources, instruments and support, often in after-school sessions, rather than compulsory lessons. 

In the UK, music remains a statutory part of the national curriculum up to GCSE. But in January, Ofqual chair and academy chief Ian Bauckham came under fire for suggesting that schools could suspend “specialist” subjects like music in order to fill pandemic-related staffing gaps in core subjects. Although he later backtracked, calling his comments “badly judged”, damage to the subject’s reputation had arguably already been done. 

Exam entries for music are also down. Statistics released in May by the exams regulator Ofqual showed that GCSE entries for music, along with other creative subjects such as drama, had fallen compared to 2021 entries, prompting fears that such subjects could “largely disappear” from schools as cost pressures make them increasingly difficult to sustain. 

The assumption that music is “less useful” than other subjects has taken root in the UK, too, then. But that assumption is wrong. According to a growing body of scientific evidence, learning to play music, or learning to sing, is uniquely beneficial to students’ academic lives. Not only does it improve academic performance, but music learning also changes the brain and makes learning easier. 

Hopefully, the evidence has arrived just in time to put music education on life support. But how did things go so wrong in the first place? And just what is the scale of the problem?

While music had been central to education at least as far back as Aristotle and Plato - two teachers who believed singing and playing music built character and constructed the soul - the tradition was still very much alive through the first part of the 20th century. In the States, many primary school teachers, like those trained in New York City, were required to know how to play the piano that was furnished in every classroom, for daily singing. 

But during the later half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, accountability measures aimed at raising reading and maths standardised test scores gobbled up schools’ time and energy, while budget cuts tore away at resources bit by bit. 

The promise of Stem and Steam (science, technology, engineering, arts and maths) education - where a student could design a piece of music software on their very own iPad - made playing violins and recorders seem quaint, even old-fashioned. Music went from a daily occurrence to a weekly one.

It’s a similar picture in the UK. Some of today’s primary students don’t receive much in the way of music learning at all, and a shrinking set of older students - often made up of the school orchestra and those with years of private lessons - participate past Year 9. 

Though it’s always challenging to figure out exactly who is getting music education and how much, several indicators point to shrinking participation numbers. In the States, recent federal data show that more than a million American elementary (primary) students don’t get any music in their school day, but even that depends on several factors - race, class and even region. An upper-middle-class 8th grader (Year 9 student) living in Massachusetts is twice as likely to have music at school than a poor student in Mississippi. 

In the UK, music participation is also dropping. As well as GCSE music entries being down, a 2020 report from advocacy group UK Music warned of an “alarming drop” in the number of students taking A-level music. And a 2021 report from the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, or ABRSM, warned that robust early music learning dropped off dramatically around the age of 13. 

Evaporating participation has created a new problem: there aren’t enough young musicians to become music teachers. College and university music education courses often have entrance requirements for students who can already sing or play an instrument proficiently. 

The complex problem of music teacher shortages 

Philip Hash, a professor of music education at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois, and author of the paper Supply and Demand: Music Teacher Shortage in the United States, says the lack of music education in schools has helped to create a current music teacher shortage. While Hash blames general working conditions as part of the problem - fewer people are going into teaching overall, citing low pay, poor working conditions and little respect - there’s no doubt that lack of music experience also plays a role. 

“I think a music teacher shortage is a complex problem,” Hash says, “but because of the decline in secondary music participation, there are going to be fewer candidates in college prep programmes [courses designed to prepare students for university, which are common in the US].” 

Similar declines are being seen across the UK. According to Steven Berryman, president-elect of the Chartered College of Teaching and part of the expert panel for the National Plan for Music Education in England, the declining entries for GCSE and A level mean some universities have had no choice but to accept students who don’t have an A level in music. 

“We know that music teacher trainees are also declining,” Berryman says. “Despite the flexible routes into teaching here in the UK, we need more musicians to enter the classroom. Specialist primary music educators are rare, and many students will be taught by a primary teacher who may have only received a limited amount of musical training.” 

David Rickels, associate professor of music education at the University of Colorado Boulder and former chair of the Society for Music Teacher Education Executive Committee at the National Association for Music Education in the US, often gets panicked phone calls from principals looking for a qualified music teacher. Since Covid, those calls have increased, as teachers have left the profession and fewer are graduating from university music courses. But Rickels thinks the worst is yet to come.

“It’s something that [university] programmes are nervous about right now,” he says. “We’re not going to see the biggest hit [to music teaching] for a few more years. The students who are in 10th grade (Year 11) now are more likely to stick it out than the beginner taking Zoom lessons on the trumpet, because it’s not a real learning experience. It’s going to be a challenge to recruit music students into universities, and it will affect the general music teacher pipeline.”  

Fewer music students means fewer music professionals, which ends up meaning fewer music opportunities for young people. “The problem reinforces itself,” says Hash. 

Somewhat ironically, as the pool of music students, courses and teachers gets smaller, the evidence grows on the learning advantages bestowed on music students. Recent research shows that music lessons, whether instrumental or voice, improve language and reading skills, reading and maths test scores, and executive function skills - all the things schools already want for their students. 

Take, for example, the work of neuroscientist Nina Kraus, head of the Brainvolts Lab at Northwestern University outside Chicago. Kraus and her team have been following music students for two decades, and finding over and over again that musicians’ learning advantages are connected to how their brains process sound. 

In her book, Of Sound Mind: how our brain constructs a meaningful sonic world, Kraus describes how the brain’s auditory system is more vast and integral to cognitive processes than we may think. Hearing is a major component of learning language, learning to read and playing music. Consistent music learning sharpens the areas of the brain responsible for sound, her studies have found, and therefore strengthens the areas responsible for language and reading. 

When Kraus followed music students for multiple years, she found that their brains were more receptive to subtle differences in speech, and could hear speech more clearly in noise. These findings, she says, translated into stronger language learning. The researchers also found that musicians had stronger memory and attention skills than non-musicians.

“Musicians’ brains more quickly and accurately encode certain ingredients of speech sounds than do those of non-musicians,” Kraus wrote in American Scientist. “Music training improves the brain’s ability to process speech sounds against a noisy background, such as the din of a busy restaurant. This neural resilience made sense because musicians also had a superior ability to understand speech in a noisy environment.” 

Enhanced hearing and language skills make reading easier, in part due to musicians’ improved phonological awareness - the ability to hear the separate sounds in words, that’s a key ingredient in learning to read. Studies have shown how music training increases phonological awareness, even in those with learning challenges such as dyslexia, where often the ability to hear and process speech sounds is diminished. 

The brain’s sharpened sense of sound isn’t the only way music improves learning: music lessons also strengthen the brain’s management system - the ability to remember, plan ahead, control reactions and stay organised - contained in the frontal lobes and often referred to as executive function. 

‘Messy and challenging’ 

Studies show that music training bolsters executive function, which plays a critical role in a variety of academic tasks from completing homework and handing it in on time to learning to read. Researchers say music learning matures critical areas of the brain associated with intelligence and communication, making young musicians’ brains more adult-like. 

In one study of an after-school music group in Philadelphia, researchers found that when they compared two after-school groups, a homework club and an orchestra, the musicians’ executive functioning, along with their grades, improved faster and better than the students focused solely on academics.  

“Stripping music education out of schools is a counterproductive thing,” says psychologist Steven Holochwost, who led the study. “The irony of the control group in our study is the kids were in a homework club. All they did was practise reading and maths, and the music kids did better. There might be some kids for whom more reading instruction is not the answer - maybe for those kids, put a trombone in their hands, and see what happens.”  

Music learning benefits all students but seems to be especially beneficial for students who come from impoverished backgrounds. In a recently published longitudinal study of low-income music students in Los Angeles, after a few years of intensive music practice, student test scores in both reading and maths jumped considerably. Students who began the study the farthest behind academically gained the most - a 39-point average gain in English, and 33 points in maths. 

As more and more evidence accumulates, it’s becoming clearer how music instruction increases the cognitive function necessary for academic learning. 

“These heightened skills facilitate success in school,” Kraus writes. “School administrators and policymakers should invest in music education because it equips students to fare better in their courses.” 

Experts in music research agree that music instruction should be offered to every student, while acknowledging the tension between the benefits of music and the current state of affairs. 

Some recommend that in order to grow music access, requirements need to be loosened, and the very idea of what constitutes school music should reach beyond the traditional school orchestras and choirs.

According to Rickels, some schools are already expanding their reach, offering rock music instruction, hip hop and electronic music to students. Creating a wider tent for what constitutes music learning and musicianship, he explains, means more students might be interested in studying music seriously, and more might be qualified to pursue music education. 

“We’ve been locked into a particular model for so long,” he says. “It’s messy and challenging to redefine what good musicianship looks like, but it has to happen so that we can keep relevance for music education school programmes.” 

The UK is aiming for a more unified approach. The recently published National Plan for Music Education calls for every child in key stages 1 to 3 to receive at least one hour of high-quality curriculum music teaching per week, supported by co-curricular learning and musical experiences. It’s an ambition that Berryman says will require a significant increase in resources to realise. The national curriculum’s current loose and general framework for music means that music experiences can vary quite a bit from school to school; Berryman says a visit to 10 different schools would present 10 different ways of teaching and approaching music learning. 

“School leaders will need to work with considerable ingenuity, and in partnership, to make music a rich experience for every child,” he says.

The only way forward is to go back

Yet neuroscientists and researchers who study music and the brain underscore that in order to get the brain benefits from learning music, students must be engaged in serious music study - not just music listening, or mixing tunes on a DJ turntable. Genre doesn’t matter; serious engagement with learning to read music does. 

“In terms of the developing brain, you can’t get the benefits unless students play in more traditional forms,” says researcher Anita Collins, author of The Music Advantage: how music helps your child develop, learn, and thrive. “Not only playing an instrument but also learning to play in a group.” 

It might be that in order to save music education, the only way forward is to go back: playing a stringed instrument or a woodwind one, singing in a choir, learning a complicated four-part harmony.

Sometimes progress sounds like an old tune, played over again.

Holly Korbey is a journalist and the author of Building Better Citizens. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic, and she is a regular contributor on education for KQED MindShift and Edutopia. She tweets @hkorbey