Scott Price is Assistant Professor of Piano, Piano Pedagogy, and Coordinator of Group Piano at the University of South Carolina. A graduate of the University of Oklahoma, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and Bowling Green State University, he has studied with Jane Magrath, Thomas Hecht and Virginia Marks. He has performed at the national conventions of the Music Teachers National Conference, Music Teachers National Association, the National Conference on Piano Pedagogy, and has given performances and seminars at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas TX, the University of Oklahoma Seminar for Piano Teachers, the North Dakota State Music Teachers Convention, the South Carolina State Music Teachers Convention, and the Bowling Green State University Summer Music Institute. He has served as repetiteur with Lyric Opera Cleveland, and as music director for Lyric Opera Cleveland's Educational Outreach program. He has been a faculty member of the Cleveland Music School Settlement and the Bowling Green State University Creative Arts program. Dr. Price is Co-Editor of Piano Pedagogy Forum.
Scott Price
School of Music
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
sprice@mozart.sc.edu
803.777.1870
As the scientific community finds that the musical experience has positive influence on health and well-being, music is once again gaining stature as an integral component of human development, health, life, and well-being. In a very exciting and unexpected way, science is becoming the champion of the musical disciplines.
Outside of research and performance circles, it is not surprising that arts funding and education continues to be undermined and undervalued in and era where the general public, donors, and taxpayers, are forced to think of their lives in terms of basic subsistence. When the average person has to make "cut and dried" concrete decisions concerning their child's education, they often have one very fair and valid question for the musician: "Why is it important for me that you do what you do and why is it important that I support your work?"
It is to the credit, in large part, of the scientific community that we can now give to the general public, the answers that they demand in a timely and current language. The scientific disciplines are now able to help musicians voice the answers to concrete questions with carbon steel answers. What the musical community has always known through intuition, philosophy and education, the scientific community is now supporting with concrete data. When the general public asks us the question "Why?", we now have many answers, both steely and holistic, beginning with "Studies have shown..."
In one sense, a new and vitally intriguing energy is being pumped into our profession from an unexpected source. Our own discipline is being outfitted with a new exterior while suffering no damage to its integral core. We are already witnessing a quiet explosion of interest in the effect of music on the human condition. From one perspective, the new findings of the scientific community can be coupled with the knowledge and skill of the musical community creating new possibilities for education, performance and research.
In another sense, the question "Why?" was asked and the musical establishment remained silent. Musicians did not step to the front to defend their art with current answers in a language that the general public could understand and embrace. Although it is a boon to have other disciplines devoting time and research to the effects of music on the human condition, we must also admit that someone outside of the musical realm is answering the questions and providing information and justifications to the general public. When the answers and justifications are provided for us by an extra-musical discipline, the identity and future development of our art is being defined by those who may have goals other than those which we as musicians know to be at the heart of the musical experience. Regardless of the attractiveness of the research and rhetoric, our existence and future growth is being defined and determined for us.
I believe that most of those persons involved in pure research have the best intentions, and very often the same aspirations, as musicians. Although the apparatus and the trappings of the experiment may differ, we both seek after a truth that may improve the quality of life for our fellow men. We also step outside of the popular culture in an attempt to free ourselves from the biases and preconceptions of a rapidly changing cultural vista. When artistic and scientific disciplines begin to provide answers for one another, it is this rapidly changing popular culture (and the bureaucracies that sustain it) that must be carefully gauged and monitored.
Without careful monitoring and active participation in new areas of research involving music, we risk redefinition, fragmentation, and possible reallocation of our resources. In the worst of scenarios, the musical discipline could find itself at the mercy of a segment of popular culture that values financial gain as the ultimate goal. The sub-disciplines in our art form could be redirected to serve the ambitions of others.
Although the subversion of the musical art is a "worst-case scenario," the boundaries of the ivory tower are being crossed by those who genuinely seek new horizons in the search for a better quality of life for the world society. The emergence of interdisciplinary studies involving music are a reality and the form, function, and perception of music is rapidly taking on a new persona in current society. To remain viable and creditable in the academic world and in contemporary society, perhaps it is time to forge a new unity between performance and research that may lead to a new and equalized perception of the role of the musical experience in the new millennium.
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