Music is essential to most people and, indeed, to most children. In our culture, music usage has never been more widespread than now. Still, fewer and fewer in modern western societies learn to play an instrument during childhood. Music schools experience a decrease in students, and public schools have problems recruiting educated music teachers. On top of that, newly educated music teachers have fewer instrumental competencies than the generations before.

Given this decline, who will create and perform music in the future? Who will have the skills necessary to make music of high quality if not a significant part of students acquire the competencies to be musically creative and get the chance to show their abilities?

We meticulously crafted The Electronic School Concert programme to deal with the pedagogically challenging music creation field of the Danish school curriculum. However, our approach also deals with a democratic problem: That music-making has become a specialised competence for a diminishing number of individuals. Our vision is to give rights for every kid to be musically creative and expressive, and we believe our five-day intensive teaching format is a step in that direction.

Moreover, standard music rooms in schools tend to invisibly reproduce cultural norms established in mass media and popular culture. Some instruments might be viewed as more masculine or feminine, boys and girls pick specific roles in the groups, or performances are perceived to require particular looks or behaviours. Using iPads as musical instruments in a regular classroom gives all students the same starting point and removes the cultural straitjackets. Also worth mentioning about music rooms are that some teachers have to pick students with preliminary skills for specific instruments to make a song work. Is that democratic?

Students have different abilities. However, we want to question the idea that music-making is exclusively reserved for those possessing what is known as ‘talent’. Our course repeatedly proves that nearly all students are musically innovative when provided with the right tools in a focused, engaging, and equal learning environment.

We also want to provide a way to make music teaching less reproductive. It is, of course, okay for a school class to reproduce their version of a classic song or the newest hit. However, stepping up on that stage on the last day of The Electronic School Concert – not to reproduce – but to present your very own music in front of classmates and parents is something else. It is creativity in raw form. It is an empowerment of the class and its individuals that seems to leave a positive trace for years. It is democratising music education.