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When Chris Cornell died, I had a tough conversation with one of my bass students. He’s about 12 (he might have been 11 at the time), really good, really into music. He said he was bummed, and asked me what happened.

I carefully told him the truth. I told him that Chris was sick for a long time, and he had one heck of a life and made some great music, but that not all sickness can be seen on the outside, and he just couldn’t go on anymore.

The same thing happened this past week while I was teaching rock band camp. “How did Kurt die?” “How did Freddie Mercury die?” “What happened to (insert the name of musician here)?”. The kids asked, over and over, about the deaths of their heroes. It’s only natural – one kid yells out from the back “He’s dead. He died.” and another kid, curious, asks how. Then, the whole room waits raptly. Kids can be a bit morbid.

I struggled after these conversations, wondering if I’d done the right thing. I wondered whether they would be traumatized, whether I should have passed the buck to their parents. But their parents weren’t in the room and they didn’t ask them in that moment, they asked me. The best I could do was tell the truth, as gently as I could.

From my perspective, both as a music teacher and someone who has struggled with mental illness my whole life, not telling the truth disrespects the lives of the people in question. It won’t do to pretend that Cornell (or any number of other equally troubled artists who achieved mainstream success) died of an accident. Even worse to turn them into cautionary tales where mental illness and substance abuse get unsympathetically turned into othering tools to warn children against becoming “that kind of person”.

Some of the kids at band camp had a hard time understanding even the existence of things like depression, substance abuse or chronic pain, to the point where I wondered if they’d ever had a significant conversation about any of those things with an adult caregiver before. This, for a thirteen-ish year old kid studying music, is not ideal.

Music history is full of untimely death and misery. The common wisdom goes that artists are a different bunch, plagued by mental illness and substance abuse that often leads to their death. The pantheon of rock ‘n roll (which is what a lot of kids are learning to get started in music) is a prime example of this. Almost every artist that kids walk into music class already knowing has a sad story. I just wish their parents had used that music as an opportunity to have a conversation about mental health with their child.

Whether it’s themselves or a friend, kids might come into contact with mental illness sooner than their parents would like to believe possible – both the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in the US and the Canadian Mental Health Association (as well as other mental health organizations) specifically acknowledge childhood depression as a clinical problem. Some research shows it to be on a worrying rise. The more tools we give kids to cope, the better off we’ll all be. Music can be a great tool to talk about these things, both when we look at the content of specific songs and the lives of the songwriters.

I hope that the kids I teach walk away feeling that they are understood, supported, and taken seriously, and that if they or a friend starts to feel depressed, they know they’re not alone. For the chance of that, I’ll risk the hard conversation – and other adults should too.

Today’s post is a quick update on last week’s post, in which I got very upset with Alfred’s music for beginner piano teaching materials that are pretty insensitive at best and racist at worst.

I got a response the day after I sent that, and thought I would share it here:

Alfred_Response

I’m glad they responded, but I still won’t be using their books until they fix these issues, and I look forward to seeing how they continue to improve in the future. Although I can tell this isn’t a form letter, I also don’t have any way of knowing how seriously my complaint was taken. If you’re a music teacher and this also annoys you, I encourage you to write your own letter or feel free to use mine as a template and include as much of it as you like. The more complaints they get, the faster they’re likely to make more serious improvements.

So here I am explaining to yet another 6-year-old that using the word “Indian” to talk about Native Canadians is not OK. Gee, thanks, Alfred’s Basic.
I started using these books very recently because they were more freely available than the Faber and Faber ones. They were on the shelf, and I needed books for my new students. So I sent a bunch of kids home with these (and their parents paid good money for them). As we went on, we stumbled every once in awhile on a culturally insensitive and poorly-written piece, which I would skip, until eventually we got to “Indian Song”.
Picking up those books is the biggest mistake I’ve made as a teacher, and I’ve told the parents and the kids that we’re switching back to Faber and Faber ASAP.
I don’t know how a multinational company whose job it is to make teaching materials has managed to be so gigantically thoughtless in their production, but I’m sure they have the resources to do better.
The material is so blatantly racist that I can’t in good conscience expose a kid to that in their lesson. But Alfred’s isn’t the only one — another music teacher and blogger posted a similar rant about the Bastien series in 2012.
The long-standing fight for respect and dignity for Native Americans and other marginalized groups in the media and in sports seems not to have reached beginner piano method books.
This is such a problem that I couldn’t even grab a book from a widely-used publisher off the wall and assume that it wouldn’t contain racist slurs, stereotyping, and insulting illustrations. I should have checked. But out of all the problems I could imagine (not introducing flats and sharps soon enough; repetitive or boring pieces; dumbing down the theory too much), this was not one of them.
This needs to change. I teach kids whose parents are from all over the world, and this shit confuses them. They need to feel like their cultures are being treated with care and respect. Music is more than just notes on a page, it’s a record of our various heritages.
I am not only switching my kids to Faber and Faber (which has its flaws but is mercifully free of slurs and offensive caricatures), but I’m going to see if there’s anything I can do to get Alfred’s (and hopefully Bastien) to change. To that end, here’s the meat and bones of this post:

“Dear Alfred’s Publishing Company,

I am a Canadian music teacher who has recently stopped using your Alfred’s Basic Piano Library in lessons because some of the materials are racist and culturally insensitive. I started using your books very recently because they were more freely available than other brands, and I had never tried them before. I thought perhaps a new perspective would be useful, but I have stopped after selling just a few to my students, and will be switching them over to another brand as soon as possible.

The multiple “Indian Song” iterations are inappropriate, especially in the Canadian context, as the word “Indian” to designate indigenous peoples in Canada is a slur. I am aware that the word “Indian”, especially “American Indian” has a different history in the U.S than in Canada, and is considered acceptable by some Native American thinkers and activists. However, I have had to explain to multiple small children that that word is considered racist in Canada as they skim through the book and ask questions. Consequently, I skip over that song. In addition, and regardless of our respective countries’ differences in language, the illustrations accompanying that song (usually with teepees and/or with a person dressed in a caricature of traditional indigenous attire, complete with a few feathers) are insensitive at best. They bear a striking similarity to stigmatizing and disrespectful images of Native Americans that organizations like AIM are currently fighting to have removed from media and sports teams.

Second, the various “Mexican stamping dances”, illustrated with pictures of brown people stamping their feet near various sombrero-type hats are impossible to teach to any child without feeling as though some explanation of that imagery is required. It is mind-boggling to think that in a country where there are so many immigrants from Mexico, your company has been unable to respectfully integrate Mexican musical traditions into your beginner-level books. I have also skipped over those pieces for all my student’s sake, but especially for the sake of the multiple students I have who are brown or whose families are from Mexico or South America.

Third, the “Christopher Columbus” song is disingenuous. Although it’s true that Columbus did sail in 1492 and that the voyage brought him fame, any person with even a passing knowledge of colonial history is aware that Christopher Columbus did very little good for anyone who lived on this continent prior to his arrival. The atrocities he committed against native peoples are well documented, even in the most commonly available and uncontroversial sources. These facts led to a growing movement to rename “Columbus Day” to “Indigenous People’s Day”, which has been successful in several states (New Mexico, Maine, and Vermont) as well as many individual cities. I refuse to lie to my students and contribute to historically inaccurate conceptions of who Christopher Columbus was and what he did. As such, I skip this one too.

In short, in turning the pages of your piano books, I have become unable to recommend them to the parents of children I teach. As an educator, I am committed to creating a positive space where my students feel that their cultures are respected and their love for music is validated. Although this is always a work in progress, I don’t think it’s too much to expect culturally sensitive teaching materials that can be used for lessons with students from many different backgrounds.

If you wish to include a broad spectrum of cultural references in your teaching materials, may I suggest speaking with AIM (the American Indian Movement), UnidosUS, or any number of other cultural and political associations in order to ask them how they would like their cultural heritages represented in your repertoire.

Best wishes,

Edith Wilson”

I’ve been waffling around for a bit trying to figure out what this blog should regularly be about. At first I’d planned to make it a collection of random thoughts, but I realized that what’s really occupying my thoughts lately is my day job. So I’m going to write about that for awhile.

I’ve been teaching music outside the school system for a while now. It all started when I was looking for (I think it was a 5th?) part-time job to pay the bills while I was in undergrad, but since I graduated it’s morphed into my almost-full-time job. There are a lot of interesting things about it. The most obvious one is that my job likely only exists to the degree that it does because of cuts to arts education in public schools. This isn’t great, as it offloads costs for arts education onto parents, thus producing inequality in who can access education in the arts. Despite this, music lessons are still a a lot more affordable than other things kids could be doing.

Probably in part because of the relative affordability of music lessons, and because I work in a suburb of Toronto, I see a pretty wide range of kids from lots of different backgrounds. Lessons are one on one, so I get to talk to all these kids on a weekly basis. I learn a lot from them, like who BlackPink are, that everyone under the age of 15’s favourite song right now is Old Town Road, and that they’re way more musically savvy than adults expect them to be.

I spend a lot of time thinking about my job and what it means to have that kind of connection to a kid. Some of my students have shared life stories and asked for advice. Sometimes, I’ve been the first person to hear them sing or the first person to see their song lyrics. And I’ve distributed no small amount of anti-bullying help, both to the bullied and the bullies.

I also spend a lot of time thinking about how to teach music to kids in a way that makes sense and serves their educational needs, while respecting the music itself, and the people who wrote it. Music is history, and often a conversation between the living and the dead, so it’s important to me to at least try to do that history justice.

The thing is, us contract workers in local music schools who teach music lessons to kids in after-school programs aren’t operating with any kind of institutional oversight, except for the usual supervision from a boss. I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing, but it does come with certain challenges. For example, what’s up with all the racism in the music books that we use? What can we do as individual contract workers to fix it? Are rock n’ roll and pop ever really “appropriate” for children? How do you teach music they like without lying to them about the content or glossing over important issues? What about differences in music theory? How do you teach western music theory while acknowledging that other theoretical structures exist, without making things too complicated?

I hope that this series will be interesting to parents and teachers alike, as well as people who are curious about what goes through a music teacher’s head. Stay tuned for the first full topic post next Monday ❤

Hi all,

I wrote this article with my thesis advisor Mervyn Horgan based on my research. It’s the condensed version (only 1000 words!) of what I found — check it out! I’ve got a couple independently-authored pieces coming up as well, and I promise I’ll post another blog post sometime this week.

❤

– E

Last Tuesday, I graduated from the University of Guelph. I didn’t get my parchment, though, because I still owe them $80. The bagpipes were cool, and they gave us some free snacks after. I told my family and my boyfriend that we all had to eat at least $80 worth of cheese just to make it even.

Martha Billes, the University’s Chancellor, told us all how she landed a seat on the board of Canadian Tire in her address to the graduating class. This is how it went, more or less: There wasn’t room in the boy’s club for a young woman. After going to University and doing some research for Lever, her father decided it was time, and handed over his board seat to her. The company went on to do great philanthropic things, and all was well. Grab the opportunities that come your way, she said. Because life will throw you curveballs and you never know what great things can happen. If you care to know the fuller version, you can read all about it here.

The graduating class gave a great collective snort of derision, as we remembered that we’re generally making less than previous generations, that average student debt continues to rise, and that the opportunities life offers us will likely not include a seat on the board of one of Canada’s most cherished corporations.

Although I doubt it was intended as such, Chancellor Billes’s address was a bitter cautionary tale against assuming that the privileges that have been afforded to you will be afforded to everyone, or even most people. She forgot that when she was talking to us, and as a result gave a tone-deaf and insensitive speech. I spent the rest of the ceremony thinking about how easy it would be for us to go forth and make the same mistake.

Just over 64% of Canadians have some post-secondary certification, but only 5.1% of Canadians have a Master’s degree. This is something we should remember in case one day we’re invited to give a similar pep talk. The bad luck of our generation is real, even for the most educated of us. Some of us may face poverty. Some of us might not be able to find jobs in our field. But according to Statistics Canada, people with a “university certificate, diploma or degree above the bachelor level” have an average income of $79,010 a year, which is far above the nation-wide average of $46,057, and is $16,647 dollars higher than the average earnings for people in the bachelor’s degree category.

Averages can’t ever tell the whole story, but as we leave school, we should reflect on the ways our families and the positions we’ve occupied socially have allowed us to pursue higher education. We should also think about how we will use the extraordinary privilege that we have. Just as Chancellor Billes didn’t just happen upon the chair at Canadian Tire, very few of us simply happened upon a Master’s degree. Here’s hoping we’ll be able to approach our good fortune with humility and real, practical commitment to leveling the field.