Music Education in the Age of Commercial Pop Music

Abstract

As a music teacher, one sees a head-on collision between the school curriculum and young people’s relationship to music. Apart from the work of a few exceptionally  talented teachers, music lessons are mostly failures: most of the teachers and students are playing to survive. Education funding worldwide favours the cheapest, most economically viable courses: there is a constant battle to maintain, let alone improve, music education, with artists and teachers constantly having to present arguments of economic viability. Today’s schoolchildren have grown up without their parents singing to them, with only the radio playing from morning to night. High culture is increasingly taking a back seat to mass culture. In Hungary, Kodály’s pedagogical programme, which is linked to Hungarian folk music, and the institutional system that is still in place today, based on the authority of his personality, mean that the situation of music teaching is unique. We will examine how today’s social situation and cultural background differs from Kodály’s time, how the children’s abilities have changed, and what life strategies are possible for them. Kodály found an adequate answer to the pressing questions of his time: to follow his spirit, we must be able to develop paths in the present with the same freedom, strength and sense of reality as he did.