"New" Literacy

When we first talked about literacy in this class, I was skeptical to believe that literacy could refer to anything other than "general" reading and writing. We learned that activities like tagging, blogging, or even tweeting could be vessels of literacy. I think "art" had been swept into the list our table made of means of literacy for adolescents, which gave me a possibly inaccurate image of what we were changing our concept of literacy to be.

While I'm still learning what literacy is in today's classrooms, I had assumed that first day that literacy was now supposed to mean any form of expression, even without reading or writing. I'll talk more on this in my literacy inquiry paper, but the interview I conducted helped to better define what this new literacy could be. My interviewee is a Korean native speaker and English learner. After asking how he bests expresses himself, he responded that he does so with music. I felt disappointed at first, since I wanted him to say something better related to writing and reading. Of course, one reads music in order to play it, but is it the same thing? Does it count as literacy?

This excerpt from our class textbook by Randy Bomer, Building Adolescent Literacy in Today's English Classrooms at first clarified whether or not music would count, then just ended up confusing me.

I said: "This is English class, so you know this class is about reading and writing-- let's call it literacy. English class, you knwo from your experience in school, is all about literacy. But you use literacy in other places besides English class, too. For one thing, you know you use literacy in other classes. You read and write stuff in social studies. In biology, you might read a diagram that shows how a plant uses sunlight, how energy and nutrients flow through the plant. In algebra, even if all you're doing is getting ready to solve an equation, you read it-- you see what patterns you recognize in it, how it's similar or different to other problems you have seen. That's literacy, too, looking at something and making meaning of it." 

If looking at something and making meaning of it is literacy, then playing music should qualify as literacy if the "meaning" is interpreted as notes to play on the instrument. However, when reading sheet music to discover meaning, is what notes to play good enough to qualify music for literacy? Should music count as literacy if it does? Should anything without words, like algebra in the above example, be able to qualify for literacy? I understand the point of it is to make students feel valuable and knowledgable in the classroom, but is it productive enough towards the purpose of achieving a standard of academic literacy?