The Humanities in Decline, What about Music?

A link that recently caught my eye was to an article in The American Scholar titled “The Decline of the English Department: How it happened and what could be done to reverse it.” My impression is in music we are still doing OK but author William M. Chace cites statistics from 1970/71 and 2003/04 that show that “In one generation … the numbers of those majoring in the humanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than 16 percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from 14 percent to 22 percent.” What made me think of music a bit as a reader is what he proposes as to why this shift has occurred.

What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.

So while if we are not careful we could also distance ourselves from those interested in good music, over at Rate Your Students we get another view on this topic that is less PC and quite a bit more direct:

The reason people are majoring in business rather than English these days is not because anyone has failed to champion literature.

There are two reasons: 1) Most students have very poor reading and writing skills, and 2) there is no money in English.

Again, I don’t think the enrollment shift is as notable in music, but a combination of all the elements above has driven music programs to pursue a greater emphasis on the business of music and building a career. I actually started my undergraduate degree in music business and switched over to performance. We certainly do have to focus in not only on being for example the best horn player we can but also have to be ready to be a bit of an entrepreneur. And back to the big picture of music study, music education and music therapy are professional programs designed to prepare you for a career in fields that have a number of openings every year, options to consider if these fields are of interest to you.