Froehlich Ch. 1 Response
The opening chapter of Froehlich’s Sociology text discusses a common problem in undergraduate music students’ perception of their future careers. Few students, she claims, envision themselves as teachers, but almost all hope to become full-time professional performers, living on their talent and their dreams. Many schools of higher education offer degrees in Music Education, but students often complete these only to satisfy their parents with an added element of semi-guaranteed future job security that a career in education supposedly implies.
This is a point of victory for our home team, however: while true for many musicians in the world, this generalization does not apply well to those at Westminster Choir College. A great contributing factor in my personal decision to audition for Westminster was that, even as a B.M.E., I would still have the opportunity to study voice with a private teacher from the same faculty as the performance majors do! Elsewhere, many music education majors are actually treated like second-class citizens, studying only with adjunct faculty, if at all. Here, strict musical identity matters less – at least when defined in Froehlich’s terms of “awareness of the labels you impose upon yourself”, because we are required to fit every label, juggling academics and choir and solo lessons.
What really is true about the world of ALL college-level music is that everyone enters his degree program for his own reasons. Each student suffers from varying levels of self-delusion as to the importance of his work, depth of his talent, and easy grandeur of his future – “if only I could be paid to do what I really love”. At Westminster, however, a great number of students actually expect to become (and are enthusiastic about studying toward becoming) teachers. We have the luxury of an ever-expanding department that turns out dozens of committed and passionate student teachers every year! Yet it is easy to see ourselves as victimized by the larger world, where music is often forced to take a low priority to core curricula and educational standards.
Before students applying for college even approach the teacher/performer identity crisis through their choice of degree programs, many face active discouragement from entering the field altogether. Martin Bergee show great concern for the fate of young music majors’ idealism in a world where music programs are often underappreciated and under-funded. He explores this upsetting duality in his research article, “Certain Attitudes Toward Occupational Status Held by Music Education Majors”, which was published in the Journal of Research in Music Education in 1992. Bergee states that “negative messages” about the career’s pitfalls deeply hinder students’ enthusiasm for the subject before they even begin their study, sabotaging those who have been passionate sources of educational innovation.
First and foremost, he states, students are often dissuaded from becoming teachers when they are offered jobs that require more doing. “Music Education majors may suffer doubly because of their choice of music. Arts in the schools have been declared in ‘triple jeopardy’ (National Endowment for the Arts, 1988). Moreover, vestiges of a ‘those who can’t do, teach’ mentality continue to surface on occasion among music faculty. The image emerges of an undergraduate music education student torn between his or her positive, perhaps even idealistic, view of the profession and a growing awareness that others may not share this view.” The results of Bergee’s study led him to believe that many students interested in music had suffered many attempts made by academic counselors and administrators, friends, or family to dissuade them from the career choice. His results report that “only one-third (32%) of the subjects indicated that they had received no negative messages” from such sources.
This kind of result should lead us to reconsider why and how students are actively discouraged from our profession before they even begin. Once they have enrolled in undergraduate study, many more of Froehlich’s positions come into play, as students are exposed to more and more music of professional performance quality. But how can students of music hope to develop an occupational and social identity through music when they must first overcome society’s overall dismissal of music as a valid career path?
Bergee, Martin. (1992). “Certain attitudes toward occupational status held by music education majors”. Journal of Research in Music Education, 40(2), 104 – 113. (http://athena.rider.edu:4064/stable/3345560?&Search=yes&term=music&term=identity&term=occupational&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dmusic%2Boccupational%2Bidentity%26x%3D0%26y%3D0%26wc%3Don%26resultsServiceName%3DdoBasicResultsFromArticle&item=6&ttl=2952&returnArticleService=showArticle)
Froehlich, Hildegard. (2007). Sociology for music teachers: Perspectives for practice. Upper Saddle Ridge, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.
