Music Education Needs to Be a Click Away

In the article, Music Education Needs to Be a Click Away, David Gelernter laments the fact that his Yale students (aside from serious musicians/music majors) do not even know who Beethoven is, much less anything of his works.  He notes that, despite easy access to huge quantities of musical recordings through services like iTunes and Spotify, it is still difficult to access many great classical recordings.  Additionally, even if they can be accessed, they are often hard to understand.  Even on CD cases, it can be hard to find the performers or sometimes even the date/location of the recording.  Though online services have many recordings of classical pieces (and great classical performers), they are often missing the best.  After making these observations, Gelernter asks his readers to consider how we might examine these issues together and possibly resolve them together.  His suggestion is to create accessible bundles of classical music that children could listen to several times over in chunks, or to match recordings to editions of scores and create a program that would follow along with the recording for you in a score.  This could be useful, he argues, for both professionals and amateurs, who then could communicate in a social-media-like forum.  The end goal would be a more well-educated public and opportunities for classical musicians.

I was instantly interested in this article because, even as a school of music student and a classical musician myself, I often feel that my knowledge of the great classical works is inadequate.  While I am certainly not ignorant of Beethoven, or any of the other huge names, I often find myself horribly undereducated about the lives, works, and influence of the less "mainstream" greats.  Unless I have performed in or seen their works, I sometimes have no knowledge at all.  Until I decided to pursue music seriously, I never listened to classical music regularly.  I suffer from the modern lack of exposure to classical music just as Gelernter's Yale students do, just to a lesser degree.  However, what I found most intriguing was his suggestion of the site for scores and recordings to be synced that could also serve as a sort of "communication platform" for musicians and listeners.  It struck me as very similar to our concept at DePauw for 21cm.org and "the hub."

Therefore, my discussion question for all of you is, could we feasibly incorporate something like this into the networking system for musicians we are creating here at DePauw?  What would it look like? How would we appeal to the larger public?  And, for those of you interested in music education, how could it be used to better educate and interest our youth in the great classical composers and their works?