It is no secret that playing music is difficult. I mean, just go ask random strangers on the street to sing, and you'll get answers ranging from “I can't sing” to a black eye because there's some parts of town you don't just go and talk to random strangers. It gets worse if you give them a viola and ask them to try it out. I'd recommend against that.
Don't get me wrong. Some people can sing in this world. Some people can even play violas. But in America, at least, there is a noticeable dearth of musical knowledge. I would bet the pants on my head that the extent of the average American's musical repertoire consists of The Alphabet Song (aka Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star (aka Ah, vous dirai-je, maman)), Row Row Row Your Boat, The Itsy Bitsy Spider, Frere Jacques, The Star-Spangled Banner, and random snippets of Stephen Foster tunes. Maybe some hymns. Oh, and a handful of Christmas songs.
I don't bring this point up to berate the American public, I bring it up because I've noticed it makes teaching musical literacy (by which I mean the ability to look at a sheet of music and sing or play it mostly accurately by sight, much in the same way a literate person such as yourself can look at these words I have typed and understand them mostly accurately the first time through)... Sorry, got lost in the parenthetical there. Teaching musical literacy is really hard in America. I don't know if it's just America. I suspect it's not, but that's the experience I've got to work with so I'm running with it.
To be sure, teaching literacy of any kind is rather difficult. Think of how long it takes or took your kids to learn how to read even their own language. It took a rather long time. Much, much quicker than your friend's kids, of course, but still. We're talking years of reading at a very basic level to get to the point where a bunch of otherwise random scribbles become imbued with the sounds and meaning of words they already know. Ask your kiddo to say “Cat,” and they say “Cat” pretty quick. Ask your illiterate but otherwise genius kid to read “Cat” and, all of a sudden, they're reduced to “C-A-T... Cat.” Reading is hard, is what I'm saying.
Reading music is also hard, but it is made more difficult by the aforementioned lack of musical... anything, really. Imagine you don't speak a word of Japanese. Imagine you don't even know what Japanese is. You are walking down the street when, suddenly!, you are the unwitting victim of a strange bearded man brandishing flash cards with Japanese writing on them. “What's they say? WHAT'S THEY SAY?!?!?!” he cries, shoving card after card in front of your face. Confronted with what is clearly gibberish, you find yourself unable to answer and flee out of embarrassment, tears of ignorance streaming down your face. That or you flee to call the police to report the dude. Please do. That guy's been causing a ruckus for weeks.
The point I am trying to make is that learning to read a language without having a basic knowledge of what the symbols are attempting to convey is almost impossible. And yet, in classrooms across the American Public School System, many teachers are faced with just such a problem. They stand in front of a group of kids who have hardly a handful of familiar tunes in their head, and the teachers have to somehow guide the students towards musical literacy. Oh, and they have to help the kids learn to play immensely complex and often unintuitive musical instruments at the same time. Good luuuuuuuuck!
It's no wonder so many people come away from those classes feeling like they can't music. To be sure, Suzuki Shinichi, of Suzuki Method fame, recognized this problem and solved it by creating a system in which children are literally raised as if music were a second language in the home. The students learn by ear before they are asked to associate music they already know to musical symbols. I'm less familiar with Zoltan Kodaly's Method, but I have read that he came to the same basic conclusion: teach the concept before the notation. Teach the speech before the reading.
This approach is possible in music classes today, but we teach at a disadvantage. The issue we face comes down to the increasing atomization of musical experience. People today are more likely to engage with music by listening than by participating. Sometimes, a song becomes widely popular and fans will sing along at the band's concert, but we're a far cry from the days when whole communities knew a range of tunes which were familiar to more or less everybody, or when mother's sang to babies as a matter of course (they still do, I assume, but such an activity doesn't seem widely represented in popular media). Musical participation is so low that it has come to feel awkward, even strange, to express oneself musically with others... unless one is a musician already, of course.
So what do? Changing cultures is often a fool's errand because social inertia is such an overwhelming force. But we can change classes, when and how they are taught, and we can convince people to give music and other arts more of a priority in the classroom. There are, of course, other challenges. The Suzuki and Kodaly Methods are both great at what the do, but they require specialized training and participation is often costly, both in time and money. I don't know how to pull those barriers down, but it starts at the roots. Maybe if enough of us teachers can grow fast enough, the weeds will one day become the lawn.
