Dave Wish (Music Will): The Kids Are Alright … With Music Education

(This transcript has been edited for clarity.)

LP: There's a lot I want to learn about Music Will. I would love to hear the origin story of you and how you came to hold the beliefs around the power of music.

Dave Wish: I'm happy to share. Some of my earliest memories are of music. My father had a collection of 45s. Your younger listeners may not remember, but there was a time when records came with just two songs on them. Each one had some sort of magical sound that would come out. And some of those sounds came from people like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and Big Mama Thornton.

I remember that the energy in our house would change when those discs were put on. We would dance and sing. When Little Richard would scream, I wanted a lot more of that in my life. I remember my father dancing in the house I grew up in.

And ever since then, throughout my whole life, music has been central. It's the soundtrack of my life. It's the emotional first responder anytime I have trouble in my life. When you're bummed out and sad, music can really help you wring the last drops of sadness out of that.

But also when you're happy, your joy is increased and made so much more manifest in the world, celebrated with music. That's why I think of music as special for all of us. I came to make music despite my music education, not because of it. I struggled as a kid. Back in the day, they didn't have all the labels they have for people today, but I probably would have been diagnosed as having dyslexia, but I also had ADHD. I was a really active kid and very much a learn-by-doing kid.

Not a learned-by-reading-and-writing kid. And the music that I had in my home and my heart was very different from the way music manifested in school. Like so many kids, I didn't find music classes that compelling. I struggled trying to learn to read all the notes.

They appeared backward and sideways and floating all over the place. The music we were playing didn't really have a strong resonance for me. Not that "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" is not an amazing song, but every person has the song in their heart.

School chorus, orchestra, none of it really took with me. I recently found my seventh-grade report card, and under the music section, the music teacher said I couldn't match pitch with my voice, that I didn't seem very motivated, and that music wasn't for me.

Now, I didn't then say, "Oh, well, I'll show that person." But what I do remember is school never felt like a place that was made for me. It felt like a place that I somehow fit into, and ultimately came to music.

In my senior year of high school, my friend Paul Brill started showing up with a guitar that he could play. I was like if Paul Brill can play guitar, maybe he could show me.

And that's exactly what he did. And the way that he showed me was an entirely different approach to making music. And it started and ended with our shared interests in music.

Class with Paul began with, "What songs do you want to learn?" We liked the same bands: Grateful Dead, Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Prince. He started by showing me how to play a few chords. And when I, you know, just stringing those together, realized, like, "Wait, are you telling me that I'm now playing an Eric Clapton song?"

My life changed on the spot, literally in minutes. I realized that this sort of message I'd received from school, that somehow I wasn't musical, was just not true. I thought of music as one of the big loves of my life. I became a compulsive music maker, learning from friends and people in the back of guitar stores.

I was exposed to two ways of learning music: the way that was happening in school, which felt distant and not connected to my experience, and then another way, which happened outside of school, which was entirely about that.

There are as many different ways of learning as there are of being human. If a child doesn't learn the way you teach, then you should try teaching the way they learn.

So, these categories aren't absolutes. You could look at all music education and determine whether this relies on intrinsic motivation or extrinsic motivation. Is it an internal motivation to make music and learn, or is it extrinsic, motivated by grades or parental pressure, doing it to please somebody else?

Things that are internal and intrinsically motivated. I became a compulsive music maker around the age of 18 and never looked back.

LP: There's a lot in there that resonates. And one thing that stood out for me was when you mentioned that report card. The report card seemed much more a condemnation of the teaching method than of the student. The state of music education and its modalities have changed so much in our lifetimes.

I had very similar experiences, private lessons with a stern piano teacher. Fortunately, it didn't happen for you in such a way that you threw your hands up and said, "I can't do music," because that would be the tragedy.

Dave Wish: Well, I remember that feeling. "I won't be able to make it because I don't have what it takes." I bought that, and so many people do about their creativity, not just music. So, I have maintained a great deal of empathy for people who've had that little light switch switched off.

When someone tells you you're not good enough or you're not the right fit for a younger person, okay, I guess maybe I don't. That's why the messages that we give to young people are so important because they're susceptible to believing adult nonsense.

LP: What's interesting about your personal narrative was your point about your friend teaching you. For lack of a better way to say it, innovation in music education. Kids are now taught in a more hands-on fashion, taught to peck out a melody quickly, to have that experience that you had of like, "Oh my gosh, I'm actually making music."

When I first sat down at the piano to take lessons as a child, I was not allowed to play the piano for a year. I had to sit there with the music book and draw notes, and, as a six or seven-year-old, it was the worst thing in the world. Nobody drew the connection between that and music for me.

Music is the thing that is on these big black discs that I'm going home and listening to. Why am I writing in a book? It sours the ability to appreciate education, but it's something I hear a lot.

Even going back to when I was younger, the guitarists I knew who were the most passionate were the ones who had teachers who just taught them how to play. "What are you listening to? What's a song you'd like to learn how to play?" And to your point, that ability to hear yourself play a Clapton riff or the endless kids we see at the guitar center playing "Smoke on the Water."

Like, that thing exists for a reason. And once they're able to do that, then they say, "Well, maybe I can do the next one." It's really a powerful modality. I would love to use that as the springboard for you to explain how personal experience opened up a broader sense of musical education and, ultimately, how it got us to Music Will.

Dave Wish: I love the way you've set this up. Here's how it happened: purely by accident. I like to joke that I'm an expert in first grade, having taught it for ten years, but I also took it for two years as a student myself.

I taught first grade in Spanish for ten years with recently arrived immigrants from Mexico in a bilingual program in California. It's no accident that this had a massive impact on the course of my life and the course of music education as I see it.

It happened organically. I was fluent in Spanish, having lived in Venezuela for three years as a child. I have native-like proficiency, but I didn't have a background in bilingual education. When I became a teacher, I got trained in how second language learners successfully acquire a second language.

What do you do to expedite that? I had a lot of professional development as a teacher. A tiny handful of the training I received was valuable. We studied language acquisition theory through people like Noam Chomsky and Stephen Krashen.

I became a first-grade teacher, and my job was to get kids reading in Spanish while they were acquiring English so that they could translate that reading acuity into reading in a second language by the time they moved to second or third grade.

I learned a lot about bilingual education in the United States. There's a joke among us bilingual teachers: What do you call a person who speaks two languages? Bilingual. How about a person who speaks three languages? Trilingual. Okay, and how about a person who can speak only one language? An American, of course. Now, even the notion of bilingual education is odd because you learn more than one language; otherwise, you're not being educated. Other countries have much higher rates of bilingualism than we do in this country.

At the time—this was 1992—it didn't occur to me that the low rates of bilingualism through public school education and low rates of people playing music after graduation were linked. Inspired one day, I was watching a video about one of my favorite guitarists, Django Reinhardt, who never learned to read a note of music in his life nor to write a word of French.

And they showed children, five, six, seven years old, playing the most astonishing music you've ever seen. They interviewed Django Reinhardt's son and asked him how old people should be when they learn to play. He said, "Well, you want to wait until their hands are big enough, but five is a good age to start."

I was teaching six-year-olds. I borrowed a bunch of guitars from my musician friends and started a free guitar class after school for my six-year-olds. I started teaching them the way I had been taught: no books, no reading, nothing. "Who do you like? What songs do you like?" So, I went to the record store, bought the music, and was like, "Alright, we'll learn that."

Playing the songs they knew and loved, writing their own songs. And when they wrote their own songs, I started recording CDs of those songs and selling them to buy more guitars for more kids. Then, the second graders wanted to be in my classes, as well as the third graders and the fourth graders.

And we started having the songs played on local radio stations. Artists like Carlos Santana and Bonnie Raitt started supporting this music program by this one teacher at this one school in California. It started to occur to me that there was something special going on.

What was special was how amazing kids are when they're given a chance to express themselves. You put a kid down at a table with a bunch of paper and some crayons. What could happen? They're going to make art, and you might look at it and not recognize it, but what do you say? "That's the most beautiful one of these I've ever seen. I'm putting this on the refrigerator." And that kind of radical acceptance of students' creative output gives them the courage to keep going. So, music can be taught the same way, right?

You don't have to put an instrument in a kid's hand and then immediately tell them, "Okay, here's the correct hand position. Here's the proper posture. And here's the notes."

All of that information is valuable, but it's not the right sequencing for most people. My little program became popular because I was teaching classes before school, after school, during my lunch hour, and I had to start turning kids away.

I shouldn't have to be the one to tell kids they can't be a part of this. So, I started training other teachers to run music classes to take the overflow. I was teaching by instinct, by feeling.

But you can't teach another teacher to teach by instinct. So, as I started to think about why these six-year-old kids were capable of writing their own songs, of improvising, of arranging, of making musical decisions and choices, devoid of all but the most surface amount of theory—only when they ask, only when it's meaningful—there's a drawing of how you put your finger on the chords or how you put your hand on that piano shape. It was like everything that I do in my classroom to make children feel comfortable as they're acquiring a second language, which is what I do in music class.

I keep it a very low-anxiety environment. I'm never going to single out a child and make them feel like they're making mistakes. "Today we're going to learn the verb 'to go.' In Spanish, it's irregular. The verb is 'ir.' Let's start with the present. 'Yo voy, tú vas, él se va,' blah, blah, blah, okay, and now the past perfect. And now you take the test, and nope, that's not right." It's like, okay, you learn the rules of grammar as you're speaking. But that is not how we learn our primary language.

Because we learn our primary language using it for its primary purpose, which is just communication, and nobody cares that much about the grammar, especially when you're getting started. When a kid says, "Mama, mama, milk mama," what does the Mama or Papa or whoever do? They'll say, "Oh, you want milk? Hold on a second. I'm going to go get some."

There's this rich tapestry of communication, and the kids start saying, "Yay." But here's another outcome: "Mama, milk." "I'm sorry, sweetie, that's not a sentence. There's not even a verb in that."

I think what you want to say is, "Mama, I want milk. Let's say 'please.'" You say that to a one-and-a-half-year-old, and they're going to be like, "What part of 'Mama, milk' do you not understand?" Music can be very much the same way. If a child was being corrected every single time they opened their mouth, they wouldn't open their mouth.

We would never do that because that's not the purpose of language. It's not about correctness; it's about communication. How is music any different? Music is the universal language. An educator should be willing to let music be acquired the way a second language or a first language is acquired.

You're acquiring it through use. "If you're doing this one and two and three and four, one and two and three is on a hi-hat, and the two and four is on a snare, it sounds like a drum beat. And if I suddenly start singing some Taylor Swift song over that, or Beyoncé or whatever, this kid is playing this song for the first time." In linguistics, there's this term called speech approximation.

You're approximating what you want to say. "I go to the store because my mommy told me to." And that kid has just had an incredibly successful language interchange. They're going to correct naturally.

We've seen it. All humans are musical by nature. It's one of the things that makes us human. One approach to music education is to draw out the music that's already in that child's mind and heart.

I can prove in two seconds that people acquire huge amounts of music without understanding what they've acquired. So, if I do this for your listeners and I clap, whether they read music or not, if I go, "Okay, now you do it," 80 percent of them are going to get it the first time.

Ninety-eight percent are going to get it the second time. And 100 percent will get it the third time.

So, before I go into how I started Music Will, it was basically about training teachers in this method. Music does not come from music class. Music comes to music class, and everybody who goes brings it. The teacher comes with the music in their heart and their lived experience.

And so does each and every child. Music doesn't need music education. It's much older than education. The most music comes from the most dispossessed members of American society, right? Jazz, ragtime, blues, rock and roll, Latin pop—all these kinds of music come from Black and Brown communities that have the least access to music education in a school per se.

But it doesn't come from school. It comes from people. Music and art are supposed to be individual. It allows you to develop your voice, literally and figuratively, whether you can sing or not.

Because there are as many ways of being musical as there are of being human, so you don't match pitch? Well, nor does Bob Dylan. Do you like the way he sounds? You don't? Find someone else. Like Kanye? You don't like him? Do you want to sound like Aretha?

Fine. What about drums? Arranging? Beat making? Songwriting, piano? There are so many things that go into it. You'll never reach the end. Now, I'll tell you about how I started Music Will. I started training these other teachers, and I started to see other classrooms of kids.

Playing the music they knew and loved in a matter of weeks, writing songs, improvising, and developing that individual set of interests and voice. One of the best ways to prepare people for life in a democratic society is to give them choices.

So, I started training other teachers. They didn't have instruments; they didn't have a curriculum. So, in 2002, I left teaching to found Music Will. We teach this highly student-centered pedagogy, which we call "music as a second language."

We train teachers in that. If they agree to use our methodology, we give them instruments and curriculum, and we network them with other peers to democratize music education. Over the last 22 years, Music Will, which started as Little Kids Rock, went from one school to the largest free music program in the U.S. public school system. We have a presence in over 3,000 schools, and collectively, our teachers bring the transformational gift of music education to over 600,000 students each week.

And in many ways, even though we're 22 years in, I feel like we're still just getting started. If you had told me in 2002 that we would be where we are right now, I probably would have fainted.

But looking back over the last 22 years and all the amazing people who have helped us, beginning with thousands of teachers, arts administrators, donors, and well-known artists, I believe we can come so much further. We can build music education that moves at the speed of music, that moves at the speed of technology, that moves at the speed of industry.

And, you know, you alluded to having seen some of this already, and thankfully it is afoot in the world. A lot of the dynamism you see in music education happens outside of public schools. In places like the School of Rock, private lessons, niche nonprofits, or even niche for-profits that understand give the people what they want.

You want a customer. Give them what they wish to have. But there's now a real understanding in the U.S. public school system that we can expect so much more from music and arts education than we have in the past.

And that access is not the goal. Participation is the goal, right? In other words, if you have access to food but you don't eat it, you will starve. If you have access to medicine that can cure you of a disease, but you don't take it, that doesn't help. If you have access to music education, like I did, and you elect not to participate, you can't really receive all of the benefits that it has to offer, and those are so many.

And why do people frequently not pursue music? I strongly believe that at least 80 percent of the time, it's the fault of the teacher, of the system, of the method, and almost never that of the student.

It's almost like a stereotype. I love asking people this question: "Hey, are you a musician?" "No," says 99 percent of everybody. "I play a little guitar. I play at a gig every once in a while, but I'm not a musician." Okay.

"Oh, hey, are you a musician?" "No. I mean, I took violin for seven or eight years, and I was in an orchestra, but I haven't played in years." So, you're not a musician. And I was like, "What is wrong with everybody?" It's such a high bar to say you're a musician. So, I looked it up in the dictionary.

The dictionary defines a musician as someone who is gifted or talented in music or makes a living doing so. So, you either have to show me your pay stubs to prove that you're a musician, or you've got to be one of those vain people who say, "Oh yeah, I'm gifted and talented."

I've come up with a very simple formula for music education and the goal of music education in U.S. public schools: to make music makers. I define a music maker as a person who makes music either for their pleasure or the pleasure of other people.

Now, by that definition, all of those blocked creatives or people who can't own it are all music makers. Well, what's the goal? The goal is that the most children make the most music for the most meaning for the most portion of their lives, period. Full stop. Nothing else matters to me.

Some of them will go on to become professionals. Some of them will be hobbyists. If you have that kind of expansive view, I think you have a remedy to what academics call "the other 80 percent."

We work with a lot of colleges and universities, training their music education departments to use our methodology in their programs. A famous article called "The Elephant in the Room: The Other 80%" points out that in elementary school, music education is compulsory. That means if you have a music teacher, a hundred percent of the kids will have music education, but the problem comes in middle school and high school, where music education becomes an elective, and children vote with their feet.

From elementary school, participation drops off a cliff from 80 percent to something like 30 percent at middle school, to 20 or 15 percent. Children of that age, middle and high school, are probably listening to more music and discovering more things about their world and their passions through music than they ever will again in their lives.

And at that moment, they're saying, "This music class thing is not for me." We can do so much better. I've experienced it. It doesn't need to be that way. And thankfully, it's changing. People say that change happens slowly, very slowly, and then all at once.

And we've lived through things like that, whether it's the civil rights movement and hundreds of years of enslavement, or the Summer of Love, the year that Loving v. Virginia came out and was like, "Yes, if you're white and black, you can actually get married without going to prison," or gay marriage suddenly becoming the law of the land. These efforts at being the best America we can be, and these struggles for really the inclusivity that I think we long for, sometimes feel like they'll never get there. And then all of a sudden, boom, it arrives.

And I love working with other forward-thinking educators. I would like to see music education in America look like America. In the United States, the global majority, people of color, are about 50 percent of the population.

In education, the teaching staff of the country is about 33 percent, but ironically, about 10 percent of all music teachers are from the global majority.

It doesn't make a lot of sense, except for the fact that I think we're sleepwalking through music education as it was. Music education began in the 1870s in Massachusetts, but it wasn't like it happened, and suddenly, it was everywhere.

And so this idea of marching band and jazz band and orchestra and chorus as the way of doing music. Those are antiquated ideas. They reach a certain number of kids, but so many other kids will not resonate with those things. And so, with 90 percent of all music education majors graduating being white, and the majority of music that all Americans listen to...

So, this is another statistic that shows this disjuncture between music as we live it in our lives and how that's experienced in music education programs in schools.

If you look at the top five genres, you've got rap, rock, pop, R&B, and Latin; country's been up there; it's around there. That accounts for over 73 percent of all music that all Americans listen to, period. If you look at the music that is most favored in traditional school music programs—jazz, classical, children's music, folk music, and the problematic "world music," like whatever that's supposed to be—you're talking less than 7 percent of all music. And people wonder why American children find music education culturally distant. It's all of that combined.

The time is really here to reexamine that, and I believe people are. I don't believe that this is a deliberate problem. However, systems are very good at reproducing themselves.

And I've been trying hard to disrupt that system for the last 27 years, and it's working. I think the system wants to be disrupted. You go into it because, whatever the meaning of life, the life of meaning, there's something so meaningful about putting things of lasting value in other people's lives.

That's why people are called to become teachers. And as music teachers, boy, it's almost like cheating. You've got something everybody wants. If you can get that right, you can reach almost everybody. Wouldn't that be a beautiful, beautiful thing?

LP: Something that wasn't clear to me in reading about the organization is if Music Will provides a curriculum that school systems are adopting. Or are you running programs, and are they Music Will educators, or are they adopting your system?

Dave Wish: It's the sandwich of what you said. It's the former and the last thing, not the middle. So, yes, we don't place educators in schools. We leverage the human capital that's there and provide them with professional development in the pedagogy, the approach, and the curriculum. And then they offer that to their students. We have an elementary program, a middle and high school program, an out-of-school time program, and a program that we work with colleges and universities with music educators. And this is something we're known for in the music education world.

We've invented a new category of music education, and it was done deliberately. So, if I say "jazz band" in a school, can you picture it? And "marching band"? "Orchestra" probably got that, too. "Chorus," yeah, I can picture that. General music is elementary, ta-ta ti-ti ta, and then you do that, or we're going to clap blocks together. So, where in that world does all of the popular music of America live? And I would say mostly it doesn't. Yes, you can play "Crazy Train" with your marching band, but it's not actually authentic to the way that music was conceived.

So, I invented a new term. I called it a "Modern Band." And Modern Band is a type of school music program that focuses on contemporary popular music. I called it Modern Band deliberately because it's a boring-sounding name. There used to be something called "stage band." The stage band is a synonym for jazz band. So, okay, why didn't they just call it "jazz band" then? No, it wouldn't have been so much easier. In the 1960s and seventies, when jazz was first brought into public schools because of racist resistance to it. "Oh, this is music from black people, and they talk about bad things." You watch an opera, and you want to talk about people talking about fratricide and matricide. But then, at a certain point, it became, oh, we can say "jazz." And now, people look at jazz, oh, it's the great American art form. Well, that's nice of you to say now. We were not saying that in our schools 30 or 40 or whatever, 50 years ago when jazz was first introduced; in fact, people were resistant to it.

So Modern Band is me emulating the success of past educators who wanted to expand the franchise and make music education more inclusive. And what is taught in Modern Band classrooms? Rap, rock, pop, R&B, country, all of those other kinds of music, right? We are the progenitors of the term. I invented it, but luckily, our advocacy and our deep partnerships with public schools around the country, many of the nation's largest school districts, have written Modern Band into their coursework. For example, the Dallas Independent Public School System, LA, and the Los Angeles Unified School District also have Modern Band written into their coursework, Chicago, and other places. That is another one of our programs, Modern Band programming at the middle and high school level.

I think of myself as a social entrepreneur. I'm not really interested, per se, in the success of the nonprofit that I founded. Of course, I love it, and I want it to succeed, but there's such a thing as a Pyrrhic victory. For example, if I was running a homeless shelter, what pride would there be in saying I run the largest homeless shelter in the United States? Wouldn't you rather just there not be homelessness and try to address the root causes? Alright, so right now, we run the largest nonprofit music program in the U.S. public school system. Well, okay, but we, as a little teeny nonprofit, and our budget is just like, six or seven million a year, we're not going to be able to bring music to kids everywhere. That's a societal priority. We've got to do it in a way that will reach all kids. So then you have to start thinking like a systems change entrepreneur.

You have to start thinking about these problems that manifest in school music programs, their lack of representation, and where they begin. Well, they begin upstream in colleges and universities that have music programming that teaches music education in a certain way. And they begin with admission policies. Who gets even to be a music teacher? If you're an extremely good flute player, even if you can't play any other instruments. And that's the only thing you've got: you're a great flute player, and you can read music. Now, let's say you're a great pop musician; you can play drums, bass, guitar, keyboard, sing, you engineer, you produce your own music, but you don't read music. The ironies are delicious, in a way. The flute player, even though they've only got one area of real expertise, they'll be able to grow into being that generalist. But the people who've already proven to you what incredible generalists they are play many instruments. They can improvise. They can compose. I've worked with thousands of music teachers, art supervisors, and Dr. Lala in Passaic Public Schools across the country. She talks about how when she was getting her degree, she was not allowed to use gospel music as part of her entrance or her final.

And I don't want to oversell it, but unexamined practices are keeping many people from expressing themselves musically to their detriment and their professional detriment. What do I mean by that? California just passed an incredible ballot initiative called Prop 28. Prop 28 is putting 900 plus million dollars per year into music and arts education in the state of California. His name is Austin Beutner. He was the superintendent of the LAUSD. He did this because he's a music maker. He understands it in his heart, but that's not the only reason he did it. He also did it because the entertainment business is the number one employer in the state. So, look at a chart of all of the myriad careers that a child born today can go into in the music industry. In that case, the vast majority of them align with popular music: songwriting, arranging, video games, placement, improv, live venues, licensing, and so many different areas. If you look at what a traditional music education will give you, there are a lot of careers, but many of them are teaching careers or professional careers within a range. You could become a studio musician; you could become first, second, or third chair in an orchestra, etc. And there are others as well, but when you put them side by side, one of them is a multibillion engine of growth in the largest.

So, I like all the meanest musician jokes. I collect them, actually, like a kid says to his parents, "When I grow up, I want to be a musician." And, of course, they say, "Well, honey, you know, you can't do both. You can't grow up and be a musician." But the truth is a New York child, if they have music in their lives right now, is eminently more employable, especially if they have it in a way that comports with popular music education. We live in a time where children who are born today are going to go into careers that haven't even been invented yet. Where someone had told our parents when we came out, "Hey, he's going to be a web designer." They probably wouldn't have been like, "He's going to work with spiders? Like what? Or he's going to make apps? He's going to be a chef, appetizers?" No. These things were nowhere when I was born.

The world that we're preparing our children for is going to be infinitely different than the one we're in right now. The research shows that people are going to have a series of careers, multiple careers. And take that person: I play guitar, I play bass, I play drums, I'm in a band, I know how to promote the band, I manage our website, I also do this and that, book our gigs. That person is going to be better prepared for the workforce that they're going to encounter than the person who is the best violin player at their school. Not to diminish that, of course. Those things are all wonderful, and art should not be motivated based on its financial return on investment. And yet, even by that measure, that clinical, hard cash measure of the stereotype of the parents saying, "You're not going to become an actor, you're not going to become a musician, you're going to get a real job." That's antiquated thinking. And it's not in the service of even the financial interests of people who are so motivated and moved by music and art and theater and all of that. There's more upside to just feeling great about being alive on planet Earth, feeling consoled when your heart is breaking, writing a song about a person you love and sharing it. Being the life of the party isn't enough; it also makes great hard-dollar sense to have art your way in your schools, not just music, but the arts in general.

LP: As we approach the end of our time together, I'm curious. What should listeners take away from this conversation? Is there an action you're looking for people to take? What should they do next?

Dave Wish: So, three things that I'd ask your listeners to do. First, if this sounds like something you'd like to see in your school or community, go to our website, musicwill.org, and introduce us to school districts near you and to teachers you know and love. And if you're a teacher yourself, we're here to support your incredible work. Teachers never get all the support they need and deserve, and we love being part of the counter-narrative to give you everything you deserve, or at least as much as we can.

We'd love for you to bring us into your community by introducing us to art supervisors, music teachers, etc. Our program is very inexpensive. It costs us about $35 a year to bring an entire year of programming to a child in school. It costs us about $6,500 to start a school program with one of our teachers, the instruments, the lessons, etc. If they're reaching, as they do on average, slightly north of 200 students, you do the math; it's not that expensive. So, you can be a modest donor. If you have the means to be a very immodest donor, we accept enormous donations as well. Sometimes, people will say, "I want to bring you into a city," and we'll donate a few hundred thousand dollars to make it happen.

And then the third thing I want to ask is, I'm talking to you about you. We're not different from children. We've all experienced what it's like to have a person believe in you, in your vision for yourself, in your creativity.

And I do a visualization exercise a lot of times. I'll say to people, think about a time when someone said something nice to you about your creative output, whatever it is. "Oh my gosh, I didn't know you were such a great writer. I didn't know you played piano; that's so beautiful. You're a wonderful dancer," whatever. When you hear that, you think, "Oh, I guess I am." You feel that lift. But I also ask people to remember the opposite. I want you to remember a time when someone denigrated your creativity. I'll do this in a room with 30 or 40 educators. Everybody has that memory. It's almost always from childhood. You carry that stuff around like unwanted luggage for the rest of your life. Those people are not necessarily your friends or have your best interest at heart. There are as many different ways of being musical as there are of being human. Find a way, either through YouTube, a store, a teacher, or a friend, to have someone draw that music out of you if you have yet to find a way to do it, not drum it in because they don't need to. You are musical, and if you need someone to believe in you, I do. And if I'm ever fortunate enough to hang out with you, we'll make music, and I'll show you. It's one of my favorite pastimes to sit around with anybody who thinks they can't play.

And you're like, "Oh yeah? Well, let's be in a band now. Let's make music right now." And it never really takes more than 30 seconds or a minute to get it going, like it would be impossible. So, I don't need to do anything very special; I recognize that I don't need to teach somebody to be musical. A quicker path and a more satisfying path for me as an educator—and I have found with my young students, first hundreds and then later thousands of teachers—is let's do this. One of the things that I would like to say is, back to the part where I was talking about people not wanting to say they're musical. "I'm not a musician." We have, as a society, imposter syndrome around this. My philosophy is that I would divide music programming into two paths. One is music as math, where there's always one right answer and an infinite number of wrong answers.

But then there's music as a language. There are so many different ways of saying something. If I'm playing this song, how many different rhythms could I play on the electric guitar? So, the classical world is taught through this sort of Western conservatory music as the narrow margin of what's right, and everything outside is wrong.

They feel like imposters. Many of them. When do people who can play the most unbelievable passages with such a facility feel like imposters? When they're asked to play "Let It Be" at a party, and they don't have the music. "Well, if I don't have the music, it's not there. I know how to do that."

And then the people at a party, you can play "Let It Be" or the Taylor Swift song or whatever, because they can't do what that orchestra person does. They feel like imposters. And neither of you is an imposter; please stop feeling bad about yourself. Your musicality stops the false dichotomy that one way is somehow better or worse.

Break down the silos. Kick out the jams and jam with each other. If you feel you would be more satisfied, you could learn to read music. Great. Start learning to read some music. And if you're on the opposite side of that fence, "I could never improvise. I would never," that's not true. So, that radical inclusivity and dedication to not being dedicated to one musical dogma over another is what I believe and try to manifest through the work that we do because it's best for people. I think it's best for our democracy. It's best for our kids, and we'll get more cool music out of it, too.

LP: Dave, thank you. Thanks for all the work. Thanks for a lifetime really dedicated to this.

Dave Wish: I'm very grateful for the opportunity. Thanks for giving me this forum.

LP: Well, that's what we're here for, to let people express ideas and connect the dots.

Dave Wish: Yeah. I'm very grateful for it. I'll leave you with a favorite quote from Charles Mingus: "Making the simple complicated is commonplace. Making the complicated simple, profoundly simple, that's creativity." I love music education that, from the learner's perspective, feels like falling off a wall. Simple. And fun. Gratifying because playing that song, doing that thing that made you feel so energized, inspired, or consoled. You got this. You're crushing this. You really are. Keep going, and you'll have a lifetime of happiness that comes from this. You'll have a lifetime companion.

LP: Amazing. Thank you.

Dave Wish: Thank you, man. It was great to meet you.