I have never met anyone who didn’t like some kind of music.  Even my kids who may not love studying about music or sing in class have favorite music they listen and sing to at home.  Their parents and grandparents have an influence on that as well as I have 5th graders asking to listen to music from groups like Earth, Wind and Fire or AC/DC in class.  Around 90% of parents say they believe it is important to have the arts, including music, in public schools and in some cases, when parents are deciding where to send their children to school, having music can be more important than how strong the academics are.  Even with these kinds of research statistics, people continue to say things like, music is fluff, an extracurricular activity or entertainment as if it has no importance.  So let’s see if we could imagine a world where there is no music.

Well, let’s start with the big occasions.  No music at weddings, birthdays, or funerals.  No  music to walk down the aisle, favorite songs to dance to for the bride and groom, no favorite song of grandma’s to remember her by.  Can you even imagine going to your church or place of worship without music? No music to sing to on trips, nothing to listen to in the car, period. Unless you’re into sports and talk shows. But even then, there’s the theme music and music to get the crowd pumped up for whatever sport you’re watching.  No 7th inning stretch, pep band tunes, no marching bands, no parades, no school fight song, no National Anthem before the game.

No music to eat by or shop by, no more musical chairs.  No concerts, indoor or outdoor, no more musicals or opera to attend with family and friends.  No music to accompany movies or TV shows. And well, who needs instruments if there’s no music?  No piano to sit at after a long day to play the stress away.  No piano for your toddler to experiment with the sound they can produce.  No learning the ABC’s with a song, only rote recitation.  All of us learned our ABC’s by singing them. No more lullabies for mothers to sing to their infants, no music boxes, no CD’s, Spotify or iTunes.

Imagining life without music is pretty bleak and depressing.  Music is that magical connection to memories and emotions that bring us together as families, communities and as a country.  It gets us through the hard times and celebrates the good times.  It is living, audible history that changes into something brand new each time it is performed.

In this country, we seem to have turned all music into some kind of “entertainment”, even in churches.  Entertainment is fine, and the entertainment industry contributes almost $700 billion to the U.S. economy.  But who prepares the people who will eventually become a part of the entertainment industry?  Well, let me see.  Could it be –  the public school system?  Oh sure, a lot of kids also take private lessons, but the foundation of their music education begins in the home and in the public schools, taught by teachers who believe in the power of music to change lives, to connect to those memories and emotions and to bring happiness and entertainment to people all over the world.

However, this training does not come cheap.  It costs money to provide music teachers with the resources and instruments, that in turn provide the quality music education that kids deserve.  Music can help kids find that niche where they feel that sense of belonging, it provides an outlet for creative expression, and it teaches life skills and dispositions too many to list.  No fluff,  not extracurricular, not just entertainment, but essential to our development as human beings.  Every time I see a toddler absent mindedly making up their own melody as they play, it tells me that this is innate and needs to be developed, again by qualified school teachers in the public school system.

What would life be like if there was no music?  Not any life I would want to be a part of.  Fortunately I don’t have to imagine it as I have that music in me and I get to share it with my kids on a daily basis. Whether they like it or not.