A Quotable on Music Education
Paul Hindemith had a sense of humor!
Quotable: "Let us assume that a country has, at a given time, five thousand active music teachers in colleges and music schools-a number not too high compared with the number in this country. The duty of these music teachers is, of course, to instruct professional musicians and amateurs, and among the professionals so instructed, new music teachers are produced. Now, if each new music teacher produces not more than two new music teachers each year-which is not an exaggerated estimate-and if no interfering war, plague, or earthquake hinders this propagation, the result can easily be foreseen: after the first year we will have an additional ten thousand music teachers, in the fifteenth year every man, woman, and child in the United States will be a music teacher, and after about twenty years the entire population of our planet will consist of nothing but music teachers."-Paul Hindemith, A Composer's World, Yale University Press, 1952.