To celebrate the latest episode of the Piano Inspires Podcast featuring Scott McBride Smith, we are sharing an excerpted transcript of his conversation with Craig Sale. Want to learn more about Smith? Check out the latest installment of the Piano Inspires Podcast. To learn more, visit pianoinspires.com. Listen to our latest episode with Smith on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or our website!
Craig Sale: What impact do you see music having on our world now?
Scott McBride Smith: Yeah, that’s a good one, isn’t it? Well, there’s something magical about the combinations of sounds, isn’t it? There’s something special about being around beauty that just elevates your life. The worst piano student, at least, is there to experience beauty. You’re not around violence, you’re not around suffering. You and I, because we’re professionals, spend our lives around people that actually want to do it. That’s really kind of a gift.
So why doesn’t the rest of the world see that? I don’t know. That’s a good question. Do you have an answer? I just don’t know why they don’t value it. It seems so valuable to me. So you know, as a department chair at KU, I have to understand the decisions these days and universities are made for financial reasons.
CS: Right.
SMS: Again, I’m not criticizing because if I were provost of the University, I would have to too because “who’s going to pay?” So you have to make financial decisions. But I sometimes wonder, don’t they see how good this is for the school, and how much the marching band means? I wouldn’t say they don’t see it, but I don’t think it says value to some other things with higher dollar sign numbers on it.
CS: That’s how they’re trained to look at it, is the dollar sign rather than the impact on those kids’ lives.
SMS: So I have to be a big boy and understand that and make sure that I’m doing my best to justify what we do on [a] financial basis, which isn’t really my belief as [to] what the importance of it is. But anyway, since that’s the way the world works, I have to live in the world the way it is, not the way I wish it were.
CS: Also, I think [on] music in the world, I find it so accessible for people to get music and experience it passively.
SMS: Yeah. That’s right, and that’s a good thing and a bad thing. There’s nobody in the whole world that doesn’t have music in their life in some way. But maybe it’s a little too easy to just push a button. We’ve lost that belief in participation. We expect it to be delivered to us.
CS: Active music-making is what we might be concerned about, I think. Do you think music impacts the future of our world?
SMS: Yes. I’m not sure we’re going to win, though. [Laugh]
CS: [Laugh] But it could. Yeah, it could shape it.
SMS: Anyway, nobody’s asking a pair of piano teachers what we’re doing. We just got to keep doing what we can do. No one’s asking [for] our opinion.
If you enjoyed this excerpt from Piano Inspires Podcast’s latest episode, listen to the entire episode with Scott McBride Smith on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or our website!
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