A Grammy Nominee Says AI Just Made the Case for Music Class | Tony Mazzocchi

Transcript

Introduction

Mason Pashia: You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Mason Pashia. In an increasingly technology and AI-powered world, what do schools need to teach humans about being human? I’d wager a lot. As a lover of the humanities and the arts, I think these programs are critical for developing holistic people and perspectives, and unfortunately, they tend to find themselves on the cutting room floor, the first casualty of budget cuts, regularly viewed as more of a nice-to-have than an essential part of schooling.

I want to dig into this topic a bit more today. What should we think about arts education in a fracturing educational landscape? How should we think about the real-world relevance of performance, and how do we move beyond the idea of performing arts as a talent-first place of scarcity and exclusion, toward a place of inclusion that recognizes the talents in everyone?

Today, I’m joined by Anthony, or Tony, Mazzocchi, a Grammy-nominated music educator who serves as president and CEO of the Kaufman Music Center, a distinguished New York City organization that integrates intensive music education with public performance. Tony, thanks so much for joining me today.

Tony Mazzocchi: It’s great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

What Trombone Taught Tony About Being Human

Mason Pashia: This is a favorite topic of mine. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, I always have a guitar in the background, so people know I love music and the arts, and that a former version of myself thought I’d be doing that professionally at this point in my life. But I’m grateful to be here with you today.

Mason Pashia: I want to start with a question that bridges where you’ve been with where you are now, and also how past versions of ourselves stay with us forever. What has playing trombone taught you about the world?

Tony Mazzocchi: That’s a very profound question. The first thing that comes to mind is that almost nothing happens alone. As a trombone player, you spend your life listening. Of course, you have to know your part and develop your own voice, but you’re constantly adjusting to the person sitting next to you, to the orchestra, to the acoustics of the room. You have to know when to lead, and when to disappear into somebody else’s sound. You learn that being excellent as an individual isn’t enough. You have to understand how what you do affects everybody around you. You can’t hide on a brass instrument.

You miss a note, everybody knows it, and the music keeps going. You don’t get to stop and explain what happened. You have to recover, listen, and rejoin the larger thing you’re a part of. So when I think about education now, especially in the age of AI, I come back to those lessons: listen deeply, develop your own voice, recover from failure, know when to lead and when to follow, and do the individual work necessary to contribute to something larger than yourself. Trombone, violin, whatever, it taught me how to play music, but really, in retrospect, I think a lot about how it was teaching me how to be a complete human being.

Mason Pashia: I think that’s a really wonderful answer, and so much of what you just said is what’s so powerful about the performing arts. It’s often a collective experience. It’s a place where failure happens fast and often, and you keep going. It’s a place where you go from zero to being able to play a piece flawlessly over time and with practice, in a really controlled environment, which is really interesting.

Mason Pashia: Hindsight’s 20/20, and that’s a really great answer to that question. But did you know any of that in real time? When you were playing trombone, were you thinking, “I’m actually getting better at listening, and I could apply that in conversation with friends and loved ones. I’m learning how not to take up all the space”? Or is that something you only see looking back, where you think, “I believe those skills helped,” rather than something you were actually able to connect to your everyday life as it was happening?

Tony Mazzocchi: Great question. No, it’s all in retrospect, but that’s not the way it should be. I had great instructors, but they were there to teach me the skills necessary to perform on an instrument technically, musically, and everything else. When I started teaching, I became very mindful and intentional about making the connections between those life skills and what we were doing in the classroom. There’s no reason I shouldn’t have understood what was happening in real time.

As I spend so much time advocating for music education, I’m also spending a lot of time with music educators saying, “Look, just because you’re teaching this in a classroom in a school doesn’t mean you’re doing all the magical things we’re talking about.” You have to be very intentional and mindful about this and make those connections. There’s a lot of work left to do there.

Tony Mazzocchi: So, no, I did not know it at the time, and yes, I should have known it at the time.

Mason Pashia: I don’t think this is the fault of music educators exclusively. So much of education is the inability to name moments of learning in real time. As a learner, you don’t really know when you’re learning, when you’ve had a transformative experience. It’s always in hindsight that you think, “That was really impactful,” or it shows up on a report card and you think, “I must have learned that at some point.”

The ability to actually name it and claim it in real time is, I think, the next iteration of assessment, measurement, and reflection, and it’s so critical, specifically for some of these dispositions or pathways that we, as a society, tend to view as more of a nice-to-have, as I said in my intro. I think naming them makes them more well-rounded and cements why we need them, because they’re such a good breeding ground for so many of these skills, whether you call them durable, transferable, or human skills.

I love that we started there, and your response made me think about how siloed our education systems are. Our classes tend not to be interdisciplinary, and the arts tend to get pulled out as this thing you can just extract, like, “Oh, we canceled music class, so we just don’t do arts anymore.” Or if you have a performing arts center, which I’m curious how Kaufman Center thinks about, it’s often a place for playing the trombone, but not for thinking about how that interfaces with your daily life in other ways. So how do you think about the arts as something that should be integrated everywhere, versus something that’s a beautiful thing we should preserve and simply have more of in the world?

Excellence and Access Aren’t Opposites

Tony Mazzocchi: That’s a very interesting question. I think the key is rejecting the idea that excellence and access are opposites. We often assume that if something’s excellent, it must be very selective, or if something’s broadly accessible, the standard somehow has to be lowered. I don’t accept that premise. I think the real question is how we create many more pathways into excellence. As far as music and the arts are concerned, that means beginning earlier, providing high-quality instruction during the school day, multiple entry points, and recognizing that students develop at different speeds.

Here at Kaufman Music Center, our Special Music School is the only K-through-12 public school in the nation where music is embedded into the school day, every day. The underlying premise is that serious music education and serious academics don’t compete with one another, they strengthen one another, when the school is designed intentionally. I wouldn’t argue that every school should become a special music school, but the lesson is: don’t make people choose between intellectual rigor and artistic rigor, because a complete education should expect both.

Mason Pashia: I think that was a precise way of answering it. Part of my deep curiosity here is the way in which the arts function as a mindset rather than a skill set. To be artistic is, in some ways, a way of seeing and navigating the world, rather than just being excellent at trombone, which is valuable in itself, but there’s more to it.

I found my way into education partly by trying to build an arts program in college that did some of this in schools, taking a common core curriculum, math, for instance, and inviting an artist in to write a curriculum that invited students to think about math differently. So it’s like, “I’m a potter, and this is how I think about geometry,” or “I’m a poet, and this is how I think about phrasing.” It was a way to invite students into something through a different avenue, connecting it back to the real world.

I have this ongoing internal struggle between keeping the arts as a kind of protected pantheon of excellence, and making it something much more democratized, where we’re all navigating the world artistically in a lot of different ways all the time, and figuring out how we can celebrate and reward that in our schools far more than we currently do.

Tony Mazzocchi: I love that. I think what I talk about is this long-standing, pervasive myth that I’m trying to break everybody out of, one I was guilty of believing myself. I think one of the biggest mistakes we make is assuming that ability, let alone extraordinary ability, is extraordinarily rare. What’s actually rare is sustained access.

If you give a child 10 minutes a week with an instrument, we learn almost nothing about that child’s potential. Give that same child excellent instruction, daily practice, peers who care about the work, meaningful performance opportunities, and several years of sustained investment, and suddenly we say, “Look how talented they are.” Same kid. So for principals and school leaders, the first move doesn’t necessarily require a massive new budget. It requires a mindset shift, from asking which children deserve access, to asking what it would take for more children to have enough time and opportunity to show us what they’re capable of.

I believe there are millions of children each year whose artistic potential we’ll never know, because they’re all artistic, we just don’t believe that. That might mean protecting arts periods from being cannibalized for test prep, creating instrumental ensembles during the school day, using community partners strategically, and so on. If you assume talent is scarce, you build gates. If you assume human potential is abundant, you build pathways.

Scarcity, Abundance, and What AI Changes

Mason Pashia: I love that framing. We’re at a very strange artistic moment, where technology has, in many ways, democratized access to art creation. You can record songs on your computer using GarageBand, which comes standard on every Mac. You can get a pretty decent recording using just your phone’s microphone. We’ve changed the expectation of the ear, so a demo song on your phone is now passable as a finished product in a lot of spaces.

At the same time, we have AI that can make a song in 15 seconds. So there’s this really interesting place where abundance has almost been taken to the Nth degree, in terms of people’s ability to make things, and we have an almost infinite supply of songs in this strange moment. That doesn’t mean I think they’re good, I have a very stubborn perspective on music and what I like. But I’m curious how you hold this whole scarcity-and-abundance tension, because in some ways we’ve never had so much access to the arts, and in some ways it’s getting cut, appreciation for the arts is going away in some ways, the money doesn’t follow it, and we don’t have enough teachers to teach it.

Tony Mazzocchi: That’s a very interesting way to put it. I’d say it’s abundance in some ways, but not in others. Yes, GarageBand, yes, we have more music producers than ever before because the technology is at our fingertips, but that’s not the same as actively singing, actively learning to play an instrument, actively dancing, actively creating art in an analog fashion. It’s different. There’s no real tension there, there’s a lack of the thing itself.

When we’re talking about school, I think AI is forcing us to ask a question education has avoided for a long time: what is school actually for? For the last quarter century, much of our system has been organized around acquisition, standardization, and measurement of knowledge. There were good reasons for that, particularly around accountability. But now AI can do all of that. So knowledge alone can’t be the endpoint. I believe the differentiator, I don’t like calling them soft skills, but is increasingly going to be what we do with that knowledge: judgment, curiosity, imagination, and so on.

The arts and music, performing in them, spending real time in them, are extraordinarily powerful environments for developing those capacities, because students aren’t simply receiving information. They’re making decisions, interpreting, listening, responding to other human beings, and creating something that didn’t exist before. Yes, that can also happen with technology and GarageBand, but we’re hearing a lot of bad music out there too.

So I wouldn’t redesign schools by adding a class called “human skills.” I’d redesign them so students spend substantially more time doing things that require human capacities: making music, creating art, building things and ideas, collaborating. Technology shouldn’t replace human development, it should amplify it.

Pathways Beyond the Professional Musician Track

Mason Pashia: It’s hard to get a fully paying job in the arts if you go to school to study trombone or music production. There are a ton of skills tucked into that experience, but they’re often not very visible or communicable. I’m curious how you all at the Center talk about pathways. If somebody comes in wanting to do something in the arts, how do you talk with them about taking that and doing something with it, in a way that both shoots for the moon, if you’re a trombonist, you probably want to play in a group at a professional level and get paid to do it, while also acknowledging there’s a limited number of spots, which might mean thinking outside the box or applying those skills in a more transferable context?

Tony Mazzocchi: I think you’re asking some amazing questions, but I have to go backwards for a second, because one of the real problems we’re finding right now, especially with arts in K-through-12 schools, is this idea of specialization and this protracted workforce game. We have people in the 21st century saying, “Well, why are they playing clarinet when they’re not going to be a professional clarinet player when they grow up?” That’s very damaging to everything we’re talking about, and it happens every single day. We haven’t turned the corner on this, and that’s what I’m trying to help us do.

Every single child is born creative, and we’re doing them a disservice by teaching the creativity right out of them if we don’t offer the arts as part of the school day, every single day. Offering it one day a week, as a peripheral, for all these years, has created far more problems than it’s solved.

Let’s look at graduates of our Special Music School. We have 100% college placement. 30% of students go on to the best music conservatories in the world. 70% go on to completely different things, and every single one of them would say that if it weren’t for a life steeped in music as part of their daily education, they wouldn’t be able to do any of that. Why is that? It has nothing to do with me telling a student, “Hey, I know you love orchestral music, but you’re probably not going to be an orchestral player because there’s only one job a year.” The music conservatories can have those conversations in college. But that’s not what this is about, because I’m invested in making sure the world knows we’re denying most students a life in music at the earliest ages. We shouldn’t be spending K-through-12 time telling them the realities of jobs in music, because actually producing professional musicians is a byproduct of what we do at Special Music School, not the point of it.

The human beings graduating from our program have amazing outcomes. Our test scores just came in from New York City, if you care about those things, we have the best ELA and math scores in the city. I still think those are old metrics, and I hope we move beyond them, but let’s use them for now. There’s that. There’s the 100% college acceptance rate. It’s about developing human beings, and developing excellence, so that if they do want to go into the field in some way, they can. And while we do that, we’re not stuck on just classical music. We’re expanding genre, bringing in record label executives to talk about different aspects of the music world. The creative industries are alive and well, and sometimes we just put blinders on and assume, “Well, I want to play trombone for the rest of my life.” You can, but maybe that won’t be your primary salary.

I know there’s a lot there, and I didn’t lay it out in any particular order, but I think the core of it is this idea that the K-through-12 arts experience has everything to do with “making a living doing this,” and that’s a narrative we really need to ditch. The better question is: what kind of education are we trying to provide, and what human skills do music and the arts cultivate that translate into better outcomes for future-ready students?

Mason Pashia: I want to follow up in two ways. First, you said “a life in music,” and I think what we’re maybe ultimately pushing for is “a life of music,” or “a life with music.” Music becomes a companion, not necessarily the whole constellation you end up living inside. I think that’s a genuinely valuable orientation for everybody. If everybody could go through life having a relationship to art where they feel accepted by it, empowered by it, welcomed to make it, a real sense of belonging in that world, I think we’d have done everyone a real service, because personally, art has changed my life many times.

I do want to push you a little on the professional component. I went to school for songwriting, and was very much on that path, and what I wish more than anything is that I’d had an entrepreneurship class in high school that said, “To be a musician, you’re going to have to be entrepreneurial, it’s basically the gig economy,” and ran some real numbers: “If you do this, you’ll make roughly this amount of money, you’ll be busy this many nights a week, and here’s how your life might feel. How does that feel to you as a 16-year-old?” I think the more exposure people have to those kinds of questions, the more grace they give themselves, and the more ease they find navigating that world.

So I totally agree that “Why are you taking clarinet if you’re not going to be a professional clarinet player?” is a damaging way to frame the question. But if we can present the actual lifestyles of people doing these things, with real visibility, and pair that with entrepreneurial skills and the ability to name what they have, I think that’s genuinely beneficial in high school and even earlier. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I am gently challenging the professional-skills framing a bit.

Tony Mazzocchi: No, I actually think we’re saying the same thing. Look, I’ve been a college dean, and I run two multi-million-dollar nonprofits, and I had no idea I would do any of that. There wasn’t one iota of a glimpse of it when I was younger, and that’s educationally unsound. So yes, absolutely to all of that.

What I was trying to say is that we need to open people’s world, because honestly, a lot of the students I went to conservatory with felt like it was “win an orchestra job or bust,” which always confused me, because we all loved music, but felt like there was only one path, all our eggs in one basket. People like me, who ended up making a living in and through music in all kinds of different ways, just had fewer blinders on, and found that path for ourselves. But that’s not how it should have to happen. We should be exposing everybody, in real time, to all these aspects. If you’re playing clarinet, you should also learn how to start a nonprofit, maybe you’ll build one someday, maybe you’ll have a chamber ensemble, maybe you’ll build a community music school. We don’t even give people a glimpse of what that could look like, and that’s a disservice.

Specialization Versus Generalization

Mason Pashia: I was recently listening to a conversation about why there are so many more injuries in sports now. The numbers have gone up significantly, some of it’s people playing longer, some of it’s star power, people trying to play every game and then getting hurt. But the leading explanation is that people overspecialize early and stop playing other sports, so they never develop certain lateral muscles or tendon strength. If you only play baseball, certain muscles develop and others don’t, and you get hurt the moment you do something adjacent to baseball. But if you play soccer and baseball, you likely develop different hamstring structures, more balanced overall.

I’m curious how you think about that within music and performance, or the arts in general. I know music is your domain, but how do you think about specialization versus generalization, and how that can create a more well-rounded person, but also a more well-rounded player?

Tony Mazzocchi: We call it cross-training, and I think it’s very much related to music too. We have a lot of overuse injuries in music, and cross-training certainly helps with that. But you’re pointing at another real tension, because in one sense, if you want to be the best musician, artist, or athlete you can be, you need to specialize, in the most intelligent and holistic way possible, and really put in the hours. You can’t half-ass it.

On the other hand, if you don’t become a generalist, learning how to learn, staying really flexible, you won’t be able to navigate what I think is inevitably going to be humans’ need to reimagine themselves numerous times throughout their lives, probably because of technology. So there’s the tension. I hate to be simplistic about it, but you kind of have to do both.

Mason Pashia: I think this comes back to the first point we made, about being able to name and claim skills. Another brief anecdote, I feel like I’m giving way too much personal narrative in this conversation, but I thought I wanted to do songwriting, and at a certain point realized that probably wasn’t the lifestyle for me, the vision I had for it was different from the reality of it. So I asked myself, “What do I actually love about this? Is it performance? Playing in front of people? What’s the actual thing I love?” And what I realized I loved was telling stories, and I could do that in so many different ways, it didn’t have to live in just one domain.

There was this ability to diagnose the actual thing, which let me realize I could flex that muscle in a lot of different ways. As performers, when we overspecialize, it’s both a bodily commitment and a mental one, and that mental commitment can put the same kind of blinders on that you’re describing. So I think the work of these programs going forward needs to be not just about developing excellence, but also developing the ability to recognize within yourself why you’re doing something, and figuring out how to apply that in other domains, maybe to make money, but also to genuinely love it. Because I know a lot of people who’ve gone on to do something close to what they wanted, but not quite what they wanted, and they’re not happy. Using transferable skills in a new domain doesn’t automatically mean you’re happy in that domain.

So that feels like an interesting analog to cross-training, but it’s more about cross-dimensional skill recognition or naming. I don’t know if that resonates with your own journey, but what do you think it is within trombone or performance that makes you enjoy leading two nonprofits, or that made you enjoy being a dean of a college? That’s assuming you enjoy it.

Tony Mazzocchi: Oh, I absolutely enjoy it.

Mason Pashia: You seem to.

Tony Mazzocchi: But I have to tell you, there have been almost two lives that I’ve lived, in order to really answer this question. I loved the first one because of striving for excellence, the specialization I went through, and the gift of having played trombone at the highest level with some of the best players in the world. That’s a gift, and you can’t unhear what you’ve heard. That level of excellence just stays with you forever.

Then I found myself teaching in a public school in Brooklyn, starting students from scratch, a Title I school, and over the years the music program became excellent, the school was transformed, the students were transformed, the community was transformed. I realized that what I thought was only for a few people in my previous life is actually for everybody. And once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it. So I toggle between these two conversations. When we talk about professional musicians and how they should be taught, that’s one conversation. At the same time, we’re leaving so much human potential and artistic potential on the table, because we treat schools as if people like me were an anomaly, and we’re not.

We have to stop defending music as something nice for children to have. That framing has hurt our nation. Music education is education. Historically, civilizations understood this clearly, music was part of the formation of an educated person long before modern schooling existed. So I have to answer these questions wearing two different hats.

Mason Pashia: Do you think there’s a thread connecting both of those lives? I think it’s possible to live differentiated lives with different driving factors, but I think it’s more common for people to have a single underlying purpose that they find across different avenues and domains. Do you think developing excellence in yourself, then in the classroom, and now at a more systems level, is the thread? Or is it more about the love of playing with others, being on a team, listening together to make something? Is it possible to distill that into a common thread, the meaning of Tony’s life, so to speak? Or do you really think of them as separate expressions of you? Feel free to lie down on the couch if you need to.

Tony Mazzocchi: I’ll have to bring that up with my therapist this week, that’s exactly what I was about to say. I don’t know how to answer that right now, but if I had to distill it, I’d say that much of what I’ve done in my life, especially during K-through-12, should be for everybody, and it was just for a select few. I was seen as special, talented, different, and that’s why I got access to it. My own lived experience bringing that into public schools has shown me that’s wrong, that far more students have ability and talent across many domains, and we’ve ruthlessly squandered that, year after year, because of the way we schedule and organize schooling.

Mason Pashia: I definitely agree with that. Let me know what your therapist says, we can add that as a little post-call follow-up conversation between us.

Tony Mazzocchi: Friday. We meet on Fridays.

The Teacher Shortage and the Road Ahead

Mason Pashia: Okay, great, feel free to FaceTime me in on that. I want to end with maybe my last messy question, and this is really about the supply of arts teachers, because I think that’s genuinely interesting, and it’s both an opportunity and a challenge going forward.

From our perspective, the education landscape is changing pretty dramatically right now, especially the public education landscape. Depending on what state you’re in, it looks pretty different, but there’s a rise in ESA-type programs and scholarship tax credits, which means people are going to have more choices, it’s not always going to be the public school. There are private schools, microschools, some of it funded through the state. It’s a democratizing presence in the sense that people can choose, and it also means public schools are going to lose enrollment, and a lot of these other institutions are going to be figuring things out too.

There’s a huge opportunity for people to think about schooling differently, stitching together their own web of mentors, teachers, and instructors in a genuinely unique way. And the way it used to work, maybe a public school partnering with an organization, might look different going forward too. I’m curious how you think about advising public systems through partnership. What are some existing models that work to embed arts more deeply in a school without requiring huge investments in new facilities and infrastructure? And how can we move forward in a way that actually gets students exposure to all of this, as some of these previously centralized, trusted entities start to fracture a bit, in what feels like a moment of rediscovery?

Tony Mazzocchi: Let me unpack everything you’re saying. The first thing you’re talking about is the teacher shortage, which is an enormous issue, because access means very little without qualified teachers. As you noted, districts can partner with cultural institutions, share specialized teachers across schools, there’s a lot of room there. But we need qualified teachers at real scale, and I think there’s an opportunity here, though we don’t have time to get into the full higher-ed funding and student loan crisis, which is disproportionately affecting schools of the arts.

There’s an opportunity to work with music institutions in the higher-ed landscape and get great musicians interested in entering the teaching workforce. I think we need to spend real time opening people’s eyes to that possibility, because there could be a renaissance there. If everybody said, “Tony, we agree with you,” and tomorrow every school got music, we still wouldn’t have enough teachers to make that happen. So that’s a real problem too.

As far as partnerships go, the first question I’d ask an organization partnering with a school, and I do ask this, is: what’s going to be different in these children’s lives on Tuesday morning because of this partnership? Because if the answer is only that an artist visits twice a year, we call that an event. It might be a beautiful event, but it’s not infrastructure. The strongest partnerships become part of the daily life of the school, involve all the stakeholders, and aim at capacity building. What excites me about Kaufman Music Center’s work in public schools is the possibility of integrating sustained musical learning into the educational experience, rather than adding periodic cultural experiences around the edges. It’s the difference between exposure and immersion.

But the deepest question you asked was at the end, could you repeat that part?

Mason Pashia: There’s this fracturing of the public system, and an increasing number of options for families navigating it. I think there are probably more families who genuinely believe the arts would benefit their kids, but they just don’t want to pay for it, or don’t know how to pay for it. If they thought, “We’re going to do programming at home, we know creativity’s important, let’s figure out how to get arts into our home for the 10 neighborhood kids who come by every day,” how can we ensure that these smaller pockets of students, rather than the big 2,000-student public schools, actually get access to these programs going forward?

Is there a version of this where you see a more decentralized artist community forming, people willing to say, “I can teach, I’m happy to come in and do this”? How can we connect these different approaches to learning with the arts world in a genuinely meaningful way? Maybe it’s not personnel, maybe it’s curriculum, maybe it’s using YouTube, and I know that’s imperfect and pretty varied. But I’m curious if anything comes to mind for you there.

Tony Mazzocchi: I don’t think you mean to do this, but the way you frame the question suggests the arts are peripheral to the core educational experience, and the question becomes how we bring that in, whether people want it or not. I’d say the arts are core to the educational experience. Here in New York City, we’re scaling our work to a school in Harlem that spends less money per child than other public schools, using funds they already have during the school day to bring robust arts programming five days a week. This is all about a value system, about what we see as core to the human experience. It has nothing to do with crowdsourcing or cost-sharing. It’s about values, and how we get there. And frankly, at the youngest ages, it’s not that expensive.

Tony Mazzocchi: I don’t think you mean to do this, but the way you frame the question suggests the arts are peripheral to the core educational experience, and the question becomes how we bring that in, whether people want it or not. I’d say the arts are core to the educational experience. Here in New York City, we’re scaling our work to a school in Harlem that spends less money per child than other public schools, using funds they already have during the school day to bring robust arts programming five days a week. This is all about a value system, about what we see as core to the human experience. It has nothing to do with crowdsourcing or cost-sharing. It’s about values, and how we get there. And frankly, at the youngest ages, it’s not that expensive.

I was on the Board of Education in New Jersey, and I saw schools spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a piece of software, and I said, “You could fund the arts in these schools four times over for what that one piece of software costs, and it’ll come and go.” So I’m not particularly interested in being creative about how to deliver this when I believe it should just be delivered alongside everything else, and I’ve seen enough schools doing it that this isn’t a pie-in-the-sky idea. I’m reticent to offer clever workaround solutions when I think the best solution is: schedule it every day, and figure it out. You already have the money. You can afford it. You just have to value it.

The beauty is, it’s already in the national standards, if we care about those. We don’t have to lobby Congress. Music is a core academic subject in schools. The more granular you get, the more you realize principals have the power to turn a school around and say, “We’re offering arts five days a week starting tomorrow.” Nobody has to give them permission for that. They could also cut it down to nothing, and nobody has to give them permission for that either. So it really comes down to the individual’s, and the community’s, desire for it. When parents make these choices, I don’t think they’re weighing that as much, because they were all raised in the same system we were, where the arts sat on the periphery.

We really need to change minds, and I think AI gives us a real chance to do that right now, because, as loosey-goosey as it sounds, what the arts teach is exactly what humans actually need right now. We just need more of us speaking the same language about that. I’m not sure if that was the answer you were looking for.

Closing Takeaways

Mason Pashia: I wasn’t looking for any specific answer, so that’s great, I appreciate it. We’re coming to the end of our time, so let me give a super quick set of takeaways for listeners from today’s episode.

One, the obvious takeaway is that talent is everywhere, and we’re just missing it with our systems. There’s this ability to really let people lean into the places they’re good at, and our current systems often exclude them from that, or simply don’t give them enough time, resources, or sustained engagement for that to flourish.

Two, there’s so much tucked inside an artistic experience that we leave invisible, to ourselves and to the world, those are skills, things you’re learning along the way, and we have to make them more visible.

And maybe a third, interesting one: it’s actually not as hard as we think. Maybe you already have the funding, but also, as an adult, I’ve been in rooms with just 10 cheap instruments, and the craziest things happen when you pick up 10 instruments. It’s like Talking Heads doing “Naive Melody,” where everyone plays an instrument they don’t really know how to play, and they make a hit song anyway. It’s this intuitive moment. You’ve seen someone hold a guitar, you can make a sound on it, and if everyone makes a sound at the same time, you’re playing music. There’s something beautiful in just the invitation itself, in removing barriers to touch. So the third takeaway is that we make it harder than it has to be. Exploring is learning, and we should let people explore. We need good instructors, but we also just need occasions for gathering, playing, and being human.

Tony, I really appreciate you bobbing and weaving with my questions today, and thank you for being maybe more honest about your own life than you expected to be coming in, based on what I sent you. I’m grateful for you taking the time.

Tony Mazzocchi: I’m grateful too. Those were easily the hardest questions I’ve ever been asked on a podcast. Congratulations.

Mason Pashia: I’m so glad. Well, if anyone wants to find out more, you can check out the Kaufman Music Center, and we’ll put a link in the show notes. Thank you so much.

Guest Bio

Anthony “Tony” Mazzocchi is a GRAMMY®-nominated music educator, arts leader, author, and advocate who serves as President & CEO of Kaufman Music Center in New York City and Executive Director of Kinhaven Music School in Vermont. A nationally recognized voice on the role of music in education, he argues that music education is not enrichment but essential human development. His writing has appeared in amNewYork and The 74, and his work has been featured by The New York Times, The New Yorker, ABC News, CBS Sunday Morning, People, and The Today Show. A performer, speaker, and TEDx presenter, he champions the arts as a catalyst for creativity, collaboration, empathy, and innovation.
GRAMMY®-nominated music educator, author, and accomplished trombonist, he has dedicated his career to the belief that music education is not a secondary “extra,” but a fundamental component of human development. His professional background includes serving as the Director of the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University and Executive Director of the Kinhaven Music School, roles in which he focused on expanding access, diversity, and immersive learning experiences.

Mazzocchi is a staunch advocate for equity in arts education, frequently challenging the myth that musical talent is a rare trait reserved for a select few. He emphasizes that with proper resources, time, and belief, students from all backgrounds can achieve artistic and academic excellence. As a leader, he champions the transformative power of the arts to build essential “human” skills—such as empathy, collaboration, and critical listening—which he argues are increasingly vital in an age shaped by AI and automation. His work focuses on building sustainable, innovative school models that bridge the gap between rigorous artistry and accessible community engagement.

Guest Links:

• Tony’s LinkedIn
• Kaufman Music Center
• The Scene Room Podcast Interview