Children Choose Music

This arti­cle by Joseph Plam­beck is about how retail­ers such as Best Buy are mak­ing up for the loss of CD sales by offer­ing musi­cal instru­ments for sale. As such, it’s about busi­ness and mar­ket­ing, not music cre­ativ­ity. And yet, this para­graph really pops out:

So far, said Can­dace Hoyte, a super­vi­sor at the Man­hat­tan store, the instru­ments have drawn a steady stream of atten­tion, espe­cially from chil­dren. They skip past the video game sta­tions and head straight for the instru­ments, bang­ing away at Roland elec­tronic drums or tap­ping on one of the dozen or so key­boards, she said.

What–passing up video games?! Per­haps par­ents might now start to serve up a musi­cal instru­ment to their child rather than a new video game system.

And what might it sug­gest about the human condition–and about music–that the desire to express one­self through music is so appeal­ing and such a draw?

I find myself won­der­ing what kind of music edu­ca­tion, if any, these chil­dren receive. Will they ever learn to play an instru­ment? To read music? To com­pose? For the sake of our shared human­ity, I hope so!