Music Education Ties Innovation Skills with a Desire to Serve

Music education has been shown to increase school attendance, raise SAT scores and lead to greater income over time. Music exposure has also been proven to lower stress, alleviate pain, enhance memory and improve physical rehabilitation and communication skills. We all know that music is uniquely powerful in its ability to bring people together. But the true gift of music education may be that it develops “creative habits of mind” that enable social innovators to birth great ideas and social entrepreneurs to pursue them vigorously.

Eric Booth, artistic director of Julliard’s mentor program, calls these habits the “verbs rather than the nouns” of arts education. These are the raw skills of self-directed learning such as the repeated willingness to take risks; an appreciation for the individual’s role within a team; the ability to manage immediate feedback; focus and persistence; and complex problem solving in the absence of “right or wrong” answers.

Anyone who has ever sung in an a capella group, struggled to write a song, or sat for hours with an instrument knows that these skills are anything but “soft.” And as creative practices become habitual, a deep sense of trust and confidence in the process emerges. The ability to say: “This idea matters and I can get it done” is the common denominator between the artist and the entrepreneur.

Moreover, as Nick Rabkin, from the Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College points out, music and the arts “link cognitive growth to social and emotional development.” Thus, music education ties innovation skills with a desire to serve. This is the recipe for making a social entrepreneur.

Barak Obama’s exciting “innovation agenda” announcement n December 5th came two days after I heard similar themes from Bill Clinton at the Eli J. Segal Citizen Leadership Lecture at Brandeis University. The president honored Eli, founding CEO of AmeriCorps, as “the most effective social entrepreneur” he had ever met because Eli was “better than anyone at taking a vision and turning it into reality.”

As the president named other leaders of groundbreaking social enterprises, I was reminded of Albert Einstein’s response to a question about his theory of relativity: "It occurred to me by intuition,” he said. “And music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception."

America’s core competency and comparative advantage has always been more about creativity and passion than any particular discipline. A “Musician Corps,” like a “green corps” or “health corps” will get things done in our communities. But the great potential for Music National Service and arts education is to nourish a new generation of social innovators and entrepreneurs.

Turning a vision into reality, like democracy, is in fact an art. As we advocate for increased investments in national service and social entrepreneurship, let’s keep this in mind.

Chris (Kiff) Gallagher is a singer-songwriter and Chair of the Music National Service Initiative. He is a past President of Social Venture Network; former AmeriCorps program officer; and served on the legislative team in the White House Office of National Service under President Clinton. You can email him at Kiff@peacelabs.org.