Thomas J. West Music

There are a lot of very clever pieces of humor circulating social media right now about the Occupy Wall Street protests.  The image on this blog post was one I collected from Facebook this morning. It lampoons the #OWS slogan by stating a similarity in classical music composing.

Our culture has accepted the paradigm that music composition requires special talent that one is born with. With the birth of the recorded music industry, Western culture went from a society of people who created and performed their own music to a society where specialized music composers created the content for a mass audience of music consumers.

If ever I were going to take up a cause, it would be "Occupy Creativity" or something similar. Obviously we can't say that current commercial music composers are hogging all the resources, though composers, writers, and other intellectual property creators have to be "chosen" by a publisher, and that can be a "who knows who" game. No, my cause would be to turn America back into a land where the common person learns enough about their chosen art form to create, perform, and/or display their own for their own personal enrichment and for the consumption of people who enjoy their work.

I'm nearly to the half-way point of my career as a music educator (that's a scary thought) and the second half will be devoted to teaching my students to do it all - not just learn the 3rd clarinet part to the Holst Suite in Eb, and so on.