This post was mentioned on Twitter by bryanwegman: wanted to highlight @zeeing #iPhone musicians after wrongly naming UofM as 1st iPhone #orchestra yesterday. http://bit.ly/4RA0kn...

That being said, my question centered around a gripe I have with most music schools, which is their tendency to value musical preservation over musical innovation. We categorize music not just to make it easier to find, but also to separate "art music" from "popular music". For better or worse, many musically-educated folks take that to mean "good music" vs "bad music". The unwritten rule is that a formal music education somehow means that the educatee will create better music than his/her uneducated counterparts. Even though musician often SAY we don't give preference to other trained musicians, the truth is, we do. Such is the case with the iPhone "orchestra", which wouldn't have garnered NEARLY as much publicity if it weren't called an orchestra.

I find the preservationist attitude especially frustrating in light of the way other departments in universities function. Think about degree programs like psychology, mathematics, science, philosophy, business, medicine, etc. They honor, respect, teach, and learn the history of their discipline, but they spend most of their efforts trying to advance the field through research. In most music schools, they have you choose from a Jazz/Popular course of study or a Classical course of study. Either way, 98% of your coursework will be based around looking back on how things have been done in the past.

I know we have a lot to learn from our musical history, but we got to where we are today because people pushed boundaries. From what I remember in MY music history classes, most of the composers we studied had a pretty serious "F-you" attitude towards the status quo. Yet in music school, those same kind of people are often seen as a problem. You'd think by now we'd respect them a little more than our ancestors respected the same. Thankfully, I was a percussionist in music school, so I was involved in one of the most innovative studios at the school. I'm grateful to see so many percussion programs leading the way in musical innovation at their colleges. However, I would like to see even more from percussionists, and I'd REALLY like to see that same spirit permeate the rest of most college's music programs. This is why I first wrote about the iPhone class at the University of Michigan. I wanted to showcase a school who was willing to try something really new and different.

As I looked at ZEEing and thought more about the whole idea of an "iPhone orchestra", I realized that we still have far to go before we no longer need to use words like orchestra to make new ideas seem legitimate. Sure, it's a nice term to use with the general public to drum up publicity, but the same thing goes on when schools use formal language to name jazz, latin, rock, etc. groups. They're innovating by forming groups in contemporary genres, but they can't quite let go of the security blanket provided by words like, "ensemble".

I'd LOVE to see a well-known music school stand up and break away from this.

Thanks again for your thoughts, Bjoern. I hope you appreciate mine. If anyone else is following this conversation, I'd love to hear from you too!