Today, Byron is reporting from San Diego and the final day of the National Association of Schools of Music conference.

The National Association of Schools of Music is the accrediting body for the nation’s music schools. At the NASM conference each year, schools are represented, mostly by their department chairs or deans, to conduct the business of the association and convene a discussion on the issues facing music schools.

At this conference, NASM welcomed Henry Fogel to give the keynote address. Mr. Fogel has recently joined the ranks of music school executives at the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. As the former president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association and former president and CEO of the League of American Orchestras, Henry has spent a long time rallying the cause of arts advocacy.

If you’ve been following our blog, you’ve met Henry before, here and here. He’s a friend of ours and is a supporter of what acousticians bring to the table in supporting the music industry.

As I have heard Henry speak many times at League conferences, but for many music school administrators this was their first time hearing Henry’s position on arts advocacy. It’s a message that needs to be widely heard. And, what better forum than this to rebroadcast these ideas?

Henry speaks broadly about the “marginalization of the arts,” and the need to “establish the place of music in our society.” His proof that the arts are, indeed, being marginalized includes the “shrinking of arts coverage” in the media (both corporate and public broadcasting) and reduced public support of arts funding.

The major obstacle to broad public support for the arts that Henry cites is the fact that most people don’t believe that they know enough about art music to allow themselves join the cultural conversation.

It is, unfortunately, not a surprise that the art music industry reinforces this “isolationist” attitude to its own detriment. The specific examples that Henry references include, program notes written in indecipherable musical jargon, the undue reverence we assign to the position of “maestro” and the seriousness with which we conduct music concerts, the ritualization of concert protocol and the cultural litmus test of knowing when to applaud, and the lack of cultural diversity in leading cultural organizations. (While diversity is changing rapidly now, the stigma of exclusivity remains recent enough to continue to cast a shadow on the industry. Henry notes that the first woman to be hired by the New York Philharmonic is still playing! She is the double-bassist Orin O’Brien, hired by Leonard Bernstein in 1966.)

If one accepts that the arts are marginalized by society and that is somewhat self-reinforced in the industry, the question, logically, remains “why advocate for the arts in the first place”? And for this, Henry calls on the power of music to bring people together. Simple and incontrovertible.

Music schools have tremendous potential to reverse trends in the marginalization of arts. Henry suggests the following:

- Arts advocacy should occur at all levels in a community, and educators are traditionally under-represented.
- We should teach students how to speak about music and its place in society.
- Formal activism (policy, funding issues) should be encouraged.
- Students should be taught how arts organizations work—both to gain tools to navigate them as a professional, but also to understand what is required to keep them operating.
- Art music should respond sensitively to the changes in society, particularly the more visually oriented world in which we now live.
- Performances within music schools should be allowed freedom to take risks and serve as laboratories of the art in order to allow the art form to progress.
- Ticket prices are too high to welcome a diverse audience.

As he has in speeches before, Henry concluded with a quote from Arthur Miller, an eloquent justification of why the arts matter and why they need our devoted advocacy. “When the cannons have stopped firing, and the great victories of finance are reduced to surmise and are long forgotten, it is the art of the people that will confront future generations. The arts can do more to sustain the peace than all the wars, the armaments, and the threats and warnings of the politicians.”

Read more thoughts from Henry on the archives on his (recently shuttered) blog.