On Music as a Serious Subject of Study

Oftentimes, people are taken aback when they find out I am pursuing undergraduate studies in Music. After all, while it's quite normal to find out someone is a "Science Major" or "Business Major", there is definitely an underrepresentation of "Music Majors" in the general population.

Why is this?

I've informally summed it up into the following categories, those who:

1. Didn't know one could study music in university
2. Don't consider music a worthwhile pursuit of one's life, and
3. Are surprised that a person of Asian descent is pursuing such a field

You can study music in University?

A common misconception, yes. Many people associate universities as institutions of higher learning – places where one can achieve one's full potential in an array of applications, all of which will benefit mankind at large.

But of course, while it's easy to include "Physics", "Mathematics", "Engineering", and the like, "Music" is never among them. I'm not saying that Universities are stooping lower in order to accommodate "lesser" subjects (and I put those in parentheses specifically), but quite the contrary, I consider the study of music to be on par with any of the other subjects one can study at university.

Specifically, of course, there is no comparison between differring fields of study. One cannot compare "pre-med" students with "software engineering" students just as one cannot compare apples and oranges – after all, each have their own specific applications and contributions to the world. Similarly, one cannot objectively compare "music" with other subjects, and expect to understand why music is a field of its own, rich in historical, theoretical, and practical application.

The most common misconception is that music stops at a certain point. Many people don't bother to realize that there is more to music than playing an instrument. More to music than just taking piano up to an arbitrary RCM level. More to music than attending school to gain a couple of credits to raise your high school average (more on that later). To put it mildly, the music a person learns in high school all but scratches the surface of what there is to know. Even the best music courses can't possibly aim to teach anything more than the bare minimum, simply because everybody enters musical study (in high school) at varying levels. Some may have much performance experience in their belt, while others may have a firm grasp of theory and harmony... still others may have no concept of musical study at all, but only a sincere wish to learn what there is to know. Given this limitation, it is nigh on impossible to teach the "real meat" of music, but instead, more prudent to spend time bringing everyone up to speed.

Given these limitations, and the impracticality of an unbalanced learning paradigm, it's only natural for students to assume that past a certain point, the law of diminishing returns kicks into gear. The style of education today discourages independent learning, and when a curriculum must appeal to the lowest common denominator, you can begin to understand why a problem exists today.

I may not be able to name the muscles that control the hand, but I can listen to a piece of music and hear more than just "a melody", and "everything else". Being able to discern between melodic and harmonic elements, and even going as far as to listen for the harmonic sequence on-the-fly, and interpret it in relation to music of other origins, is absolutely fascinating, and this is why I study music.

Why bother studying music? You can't make a difference...

Here's a fun one. Lets say you have a medical doctor and a music teacher – who do you think is making more of a difference in the world?

I'm not going to disagree, the answer is the MD. If we are forced to assign some sort of arbitrary scale of "contribution to society", and compare these two very different occupations, one must come out on top. On the grand scale of things, someone who saves lives is probably going to earn more karma points than someone who teaches kids "do-re-mis".

However, the point I'm trying to make (and have been trying since the previous section) is that music contributes much to society, and is often overlooked in favour of more opaque fields of study, with clearer returns on investment.

In Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Smith talks to O'Brien, who works for the department assigned to the maintenance of the Newspeak dictionary. However, unlike typical dictionaries of yesteryear, these busybodies remove as many words as they can, trimming the book down, many words at a time, condemning the ideas contains within each word to oblivion – down the metaphorical (or literal, I suppose) memory hole. The point of such actions, muses Smith, is that the repeated slimming of Newspeak does double-duty: That of making the language more efficient, as well as stemming free or radical thought in the bud. After all, you can't exactly start a revolution if "revolution" isn't a word, and never was, can you?

The mistreatment of music is similar (although less dystopian, of course) to the aforementioned example. What would happen, hypothetically, if nobody made music anymore? If nobody sang, or played instruments, or amusedly pressed random keys on a piano? We'd lose such a significant part of our culture and history!

Is Music important in our daily lives? YES! If only to keep you occupied while sitting on the subway, or to entertain people at a club. Take all those things away, and you begin to take away a part of the "human" in "humanity".

No thanks, I'll have sugar in my tea.

But you're Chinese...

The third one's simple – stereotype. People of Asian descent are often stereotyped as being bookish, analytical people, who excel in the sciences, maths, and other associated subjects. At the same time, Chinese people in particular are often associated with piano proficiency. It is often (correctly) assumed that outside of piano, there is no serous interest put aside for musical study.

That I am an exception (a Chinese man studying music in University, with minimal piano proficiency) doesn't make me any less of a person, however!

At any rate. This is my opinion, and is likely to change.