Why does the “Missing Link” in Music Education exist?
In the education of children’s literacy, the first stage we teach is the alphabet, the individual letters used to make words. In the education of music we also begin with the musical alphabet, the pitches and their names.
In the second stage we teach the making of words and their associated grammar (why we must say, “Give it to me,” and not, “Give it to I.”) In the second stage of music education we follow the same pattern, teaching how the notes are used to make chords and the associated grammar (why an F-sharp must resolve up and not down).
In the third and final stage of left brain education we continue with the endless continuation of language function, making sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books, etc. But in music education this third stage is missing. We do not teach the student the following purpose and uses of the chords.
And why do we not teach the emotional meaning and purpose of music in our early music education classes? It is because writing and speaking, our fundamental tools in teaching, cannot describe music. While this difficulty has been recognized for many centuries, we owe our modern understanding on this subject of the separate brain functions to Dr Roger Sperry (1913–1994), who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1981, “for his discoveries concerning the functional and specialization of the cerebral hemispheres.” Today we can understand that we do not teach the use of music to represent feelings and emotions because the language we use in teaching is found in the left hemisphere of the brain whereas feelings and emotions are found in the right hemisphere and these two separate hemispheres are remarkably foreign to each other in their functions. This same physical specialization also explains, for example, why it is so difficult to write a love letter. In attempting to do this we are asking the left hemisphere to use its rational language to write about a subject it knows nothing about!
Due to the trillions of electrical connections throughout the brain, the research on this subject has produced many papers which have attempted to trace more definite routes in and between the hemispheres. But the fact remains that we, together with other species and even some plant life, are by nature bicameral beings. In our case, the left hemisphere of the brain is a library of rational knowledge, in particular language and numbers. This left hemisphere library has two important limitations: [1] it consists entirely of secondary knowledge, things we have read or have been told by other people and [2] it is entirely past tense information.
The right hemisphere of the brain is a library consisting of feelings and emotions based on our own experience. Words like “love” or “fear” have only personal understanding based on our own personal experience. You can read several books on the subject of “love,” but your understanding of this experience will not be changed by other person’s views or experiences. Hence we must understand that the world of the right hemisphere of the brain is the real and present tense us. These personal experiences found in our right hemisphere of the brain cannot be separated from the fact that the right hemisphere is also mute—it cannot write or speak in language! Music is the most powerful and appropriate means the right hemisphere has for communication.
This functional specialization in the two hemispheres is at the foundation of all education as we know it today.
