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New music education chair wants everyone to play

By Hope Green

When school districts are forced to trim their budgets, music is often the first casualty. That troubles André de Quadros, who recently joined the College of Fine Arts as a professor and chairman of the music education department.
"The old theory of education was that the child must be nurtured in a complete sense," he says. "If that's the case, then we must advocate for the teaching of music and art as vigorously as we advocate for mathematics, football, and language."

	André de Quadros Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

De Quadros hopes to reinvigorate CFA's role as a leader in music education, and in that regard, he's already made some progress: in January, in collaboration with MIT, his department ran a conference attended by almost 70 elementary music teachers, high school band leaders, and college professors from around the country. "One of the presenters, who has been teaching for 30 years in Massachusetts, told me he had never seen a conference so well attended," de Quadros says.

He plans to initiate more conferences, along with workshops and summer courses that will increase CFA's national profile. The department also needs to think globally, he says, and he hopes to create exchange programs with institutions abroad.

Cultural crosswinds
A conductor and musicologist as well as educator, de Quadros lived for the past 27 years in Australia, working most recently as an associate professor and director of performance in the School of Music Conservatorium at Monash University. He has conducted throughout the world and is a member of the editorial board of Music Education International, the new journal of the International Society for Music Education.

De Quadros grew up in Bombay but is ethnically rooted in Goa, a district in western India ruled by Portugal until 1961. Trained in the violin from an early age, he studied conducting, music education, and composition at several universities in Europe and Australia, including the Universitat Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria, and the Victorian College of the Arts, where one of his teachers was the distinguished Romanian conductor Robert Rosen.

In graduate school, de Quadros became familiar with the work of German composer Carl Orff, who in the 1920s and 1930s was known for unconventional teaching methods that allowed children to improvise with drums, tambourines, xylophones, and free-form movement. The approach appealed to de Quadros.

"What Orff did was to get people moving around the room," he says. "I found it particularly enchanting because I was a bit of a hippie in the early 1970s. It was a more democratic, more culturally focused, freer kind of approach to music education than I had known."

Although he continued to pursue a conducting career, learning and performing the standard classical repertoire, de Quadros also studied dance and launched a music program for children in an Australian school. He drew on the Orff methods for inspiration. "It was a formative experience for me," he says. "I started the program from scratch. It was pretty free and experimental."

He went on to teach music in other schools and colleges, eventually becoming the national president of the Australian Council of Orff-Schulwerk, one of the largest music education groups in the country. At the same time de Quadros rose to prominence as a conductor, making guest appearances with choirs and orchestras on several continents. Meanwhile, as a musicologist, he became a leading expert in Asian choral music.

His eclectic background serves him well at CFA. "For a long time I've been an advocate for multicultural music education," he says, "and I'll continue to do that here. Our music education must reflect the fact that the population and the culture in the United States have changed."

Banding together
De Quadros recently conducted two concerts of the school of music's BU Chamber Orchestra and is likely to appear in other campus performances. He also manages Boston University Music Organizations (BUMO) -- the administrative office in charge of community ensembles such as the Symphonic Chorus, Marching Band, Jazz Workshop, and All-Campus Orchestra. Auditions for BUMO groups are open to the entire University community, and de Quadros welcomes the chance to bring lapsed musicians back into the fold.

"The moment I became a music teacher, people I met would say things to me like, 'I used to play the piano but I don't anymore,'" he says. "The world is full of people who were somehow disinspired or disconnected from the world of music, or they started to play an instrument but were not nurtured properly."

He observes that in other countries, playing in organized music groups is a much more common pastime. In Estonia, for instance, a third of the population belongs to a choir, and in Hungary, a large percentage of citizens know how to read music.

"If the entire country weren't able to play a sport or go to a gym or do anything athletic, we'd say we were a nation of couch potatoes. If 80 percent of the country couldn't read, add, or subtract, we'd say we were linguistically or mathematically disabled. But the fact that we're a musically or culturally disabled society is not something most people seem to care about. So music teachers have to see themselves as modern-day crusaders, ardent advocates for their profession. That's part of the reason I'm here."

15 February 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations