Our Vision
Music education can enlarge a life. A child discovers the joy of singing, playing, and creating. A young person finds a musical voice and a place to belong. Families share music in their homes and communities. Adults continue listening, performing, creating, and learning through changing seasons of life. Teachers have the privilege and responsibility of helping people discover musical possibilities they may carry with them for decades.
Our vision is music education that is connected, creative, joyful, and deeply human. Its purpose reaches beyond the acquisition of isolated skills or preparation for the next performance. Students have opportunities to listen, sing, play, read, create, improvise, compose, understand, collaborate, perform, and communicate through music. As their musicianship develops, they gain the knowledge, capability, judgment, independence, and curiosity to continue making music in ways that matter to them.
This work begins with the student. Teachers seek to understand the person in front of them and to follow the student as learning unfolds, while also providing the leadership, sequence, standards, challenge, encouragement, and professional judgment good teaching requires. Students differ in their interests, experiences, strengths, needs, goals, circumstances, and aspirations. Music education should be substantial enough to offer them something worth learning and flexible enough to respond to who they are becoming.
Teachers are central to this vision. They remain musicians, learners, educators, and professionals throughout their careers, and their own flourishing matters. Teachers need serious professional learning, continuing musicianship, collegial relationships, thoughtful mentorship, professional independence, and working lives that leave room for family, relationships, rest, creativity, financial stability, and continued development. When teachers are able to build healthy and sustainable lives in music education, they are better able to bring patience, knowledge, imagination, judgment, and care to the students they serve.
The world’s musical traditions are part of humanity’s shared inheritance. Students should have opportunities to encounter music from different cultures, communities, historical periods, faith traditions, artistic movements, and forms of musical life with curiosity and respect. They should also have opportunities to add their own voices through improvisation, composition, arranging, interpretation, performance, and collaboration. Music education can help students value what has been handed down while discovering that musical life is still being created.
A lifelong relationship with music can take many forms. Some students will become professional musicians or music teachers. Others will sing in places of worship, play in community ensembles, write songs, attend concerts, make music with friends and family, explore new repertoire, support the musical life of their communities, or simply continue finding meaning and enjoyment in listening and making music. Each of these paths can represent a rich musical life.
The influence of music education also extends beyond the individual student. Musical experiences bring people together in homes, schools, studios, ensembles, concert halls, places of worship, theaters, and communities. They create opportunities for participation, expression, collaboration, celebration, reflection, and belonging. When more people are able to participate confidently and meaningfully in musical life, families and communities are enriched as well.
The Dennis Frayne Approach to Music Education provides the educational philosophy for this work. The Dennis Frayne Association for Music Education supports teachers as they study, apply, and continue developing that philosophy in practice. The Dennis Frayne Ascent gives students a long-range framework for demonstrating and recognizing genuine musical growth. Curricula, certification, coaching, publications, and other programs provide additional ways for these ideas to take practical form.
Together, this work serves a larger purpose: helping more people become musical and build lifelong relationships with music while helping the teachers who guide them build rewarding lives in the profession. That is the vision behind our effort to strengthen music education, because music education strengthens people.