How the Pandemic Proved People Value Music After All

It's a story people will tell for decades, how the world ended March of 2020. Well, not really...but things sure became scary and inconvenient.

The story of music's struggle to become a mainstream school subject has been around for decades. They've even made movies about that one.

Put together, this didn't seem like a great outlook for music education.

And then, some miraculous things happened. Nearly all of our students kept coming. Moving to online lessons didn't top them. We also gained some new students, from all over Massachusetts and even out of state.

As we always try to do, we innovated. We created a virtual recital format on YouTube and then another format on Zoom. We created an online discussion board. We started practice challenges.

But, none of this would have been possible without students and families prioritizing music in their lives.

Nearly two decades ago, I recall a college professor explaining why live music was going to be dead in about ten years. So much for that. Live music is still here.

Similarly, like the Scarecrow discovering he had a brain all along, the pandemic has shown us that students and families really do value music. Virtual learning has neither slowed nor stopped it, for the people who want it.

While music is still a long way from becoming an equal to math and science, I believe we all indeed have a future to look forward to in music. Pandemic or not.