You know what nobody ever says?
”Learning math is important. It can really help you become a better musician.”
It’s an undeniable fact. Music theory is mostly mathematics. Tone frequencies are spaced logarithmically. Intervals, and the chords they form, are mathematical structures. Scales, keys, and the functional relationships contained within them are set theory. Understanding complex rhythmic subdivisions requires intuitively understanding the process of multiplying fractions. And on a more abstract level, music theory is about symbol manipulation in the same way mathematics is symbol manipulation.
Being good at math will definitely make you a better (or at least a more intuitive, more thoughtful) musician. So why doesn’t that ever come up? Its opposite does. I can’t tell you how many times parents of new students have told me they want their child to learn an instrument because they’d heard it helps with math.
It does, of course. Study after study has demonstrated this, even once confounders like selection bias are controlled for. But why does this motivation always seem to go one way and not the other. The difference highlights an important discrepancy in the way we assign value. Increasingly over the past 70 years (hint: it has something to do with the Cold War, but this is my music blog not my history blog) STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) has largely become the area of study by which the utility of all others is judged. Today, we find ourselves in a position where only the STEM fields, and to a lesser extent the skilled trades, are seen as having intrinsic value. The humanities, and even more so the arts, are seen as largely trivial. And so, to avoid being relegated to complete obsolescence, they have learned to defend themselves as instrumental (pardon the pun) to STEM in some way.
I saw this in my other life as a college history professor as well. Learning about the past is seen almost as a curiosity, certainly not as a social necessity. “Enriching” at best, but certainly not “essential.” History is the purview of majors (who presumably will go on to teach it because collectively we have no other frame of reference for what else history might be good for), and electives (which non-majors take for fun or to satisfy curiosity). And music is no different.
Here’s a thing my adult students DO say, and frequently. They tell me “I wish I’d learned the piano when I was younger.” Or the guitar. Or whatever. And I think that’s telling.
Music is universal. It’s one of the few things that EVERY human civilization we know of has in some form. It is a language for conveying ideas and emotions that is millennia older than the written word and, depending on your definition of each, at least the same age as spoken language. It’s one of the first things babies recognize, and one of the first ways that they express themselves (I know from personal experience as a new father). It expresses and translates feelings that words often fail to capture. It accompanies every major milestone in life, and is often the most visceral and evocative part of what we remember about those times. It can move us to tears either all by itself or in combination with such memories. Music is one of a very short list of things that is universally human. If mathematics is the language of the universe, music is the language of the soul. Or of consciousness, or of humanness, or whatever. Surely that has value.
But of course, that value isn’t monetary. I mean, sometimes it is. It pays my bills. And some people are able to translate it into significant wealth. But this is the exception. Music is not a safe route to financial stability. We intuitively understand that the STEM fields are marketable, whereas music is not. Math is a safe(ish) route to material comfort. But so what?
The number of adult students I have who express regret at having not learned an instrument earlier is indicative of the intrinsic value of the joy and self-actualization playing music could have brought to their lives (and still can. It’s NEVER too late. I promise). Surely giving your children the tools to be happy is at least as important as giving them the tools to be comfortable.
And none of this is to say that the physical world that the STEM disciplines describe doesn’t have its own inherent beauty. In many ways, I relate to pure math the same way many of my adult students talk about music. I wish I’d put in the effort to really get it when I was younger. It reveals, and describes such wondrous, transcendent, beautiful things about existence. And I’ve learned to love it as an adult, not just because learning about mathematics and training my mind to be more mathematical has made me a better musician, but also for all those other reasons. One thing I believe very strongly is that all knowledge is beautiful on its own terms, and for its own sake.
But when you defend music or music education on the grounds that it helps with math, you are NOT defending music. You are ghettoizing it and instrumentalizing it, and alienating it from its own most important reason for being, which is that it is beautiful and wondrous and reveals truth and describes the contours of the human experience in ways that absolutely NOTHING else can. When you defend it on any other grounds, you are conceding the most important point. If the study of music (or any other of the arts or humanities) doesn’t have intrinsic value, then it doesn’t have any value at all.
I guess what I’m trying to say is…you should study math. It will make you a better musician. I’m serious.