Here, almost every parent sends their kids to piano lessons, right up till they achieve the ABRSM Grade 8 certification. My friends have since sworn off the piano, and some have even grown to dislike music altogether. I’m not quite sure whether the certification was achieved for the passion of the music or for the parents to boast about in this case..it seems that over here all that matters is the paper chase. No degree, no life so it seems. It certainly doesn’t help the weak local music scene.

In my own case, I play the electric bass guitar, and went through theory lessons and the like – but I soon lost interest in playing and didn’t see much point. Thankfully, I didn’t stop entirely and a few years later today, I started enjoying playing music again after abandoning everything I had learnt previously and re-applying myself, this time, without the pressures of exams or having to sight read a solo classical piece note-for-note.

I agree that exams are a good thing – but sometimes it makes learning music much too rote, and personally I don’t think that’s what music should be, it should be free and people should be able to express themselves creatively and most importanly, have fun.

Cheers from Singapore!
Weiye

Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts about teaching music with us! You put into words a lot of things I was thinking about for a long time.
I think I owe Kurt Cobain a big hug when I meet him in the hereafter for giving us the hookline of “Come As You Are”. It is an easy to play thing on two strings and it ALWAYS puts a glow onto students faces when they play it for the first time after maybe two or three lessons. The energy of this first momentum can be used to teach technical exercises or theoretical background to help them understand what they are playing and why I sounds so good. But it is always the “emotional link” to the music they love, that makes students want to know more.
Greetings from the Netherlands,
carsten

Before I started teaching guitar and bass again after quite a few years, I went to a local College to study teaching and found a whole range of methods – from being student led to being wholly controlling – all were valid and achieved results in different ways. I think if you stand back and think about the outcomes you and the students are looking for, is that you hopefully then take the most appropriate path.

The syllabus thing is very useful as a map of what might be learnt, but it’s surely shouldn’t be a sort of tourist map of all the things you should visit in lessons and you don’t get the certificate until you’ve been everywhere. That’s very much the domain, in my opinion, of the business of teaching – make it a plan, shedule the plan, check and test the outcomes, grade the student, plan for the future lessons needed – this is great for the business side of creating income for the teacher or a company providing lessons – and it’s big money for organisations to approach teaching like that.

My ‘business approach’ is to borrow some consultancy tools from business and apply them to music teching – what is it you really want to experience with your music? Where do you think you are now? Where do you want to be? What skills, or lack, will help, hinder, you getting there? How shall we get there?

Focus is what gets you to where you want to be and knowing what you want, how to get there and what skills to develop is the method. Of course taking that approach in a formal structured business teaching music would be difficult – so it’s mainly the private teachers who do it. Makes you wonder why we really need big music schools doesn’t it? (Oh of course, it’s a career path for teachers wanting mortgages and steady incomes……contraversial bit.)

Ben, you make a really important distinction, one I should write more about, which is how useful a classical education can be for learning classical music! The problem isn’t really with that as a model for playing that kind of music – and if you learn it like that, many of the skills are transferable if and when you switch to a more creative composition/improv/pop model for playing… the problem is using the classical model to try and teach pop music, that’s bogus.

thanks so much everyone for the comments – it’s a great discussion!

I agree with your post wholeheartedly, Steve. But… I know plenty of musicians who were taught their theoretical knowledge and performance skills as part of a classical music education, and used them to engage with the music about which they were passionate *outside* the system. I know that musicians don’t need the full academic/theoretical/historical side of music, and that it often acts as a set of musical blinkers that keeps talented musicians from applying their skills to the music they listen to at home, but as @sim points out it only takes a small catalyst (ie. @sim trying out the bass, me finding a Beatles songbook in my piano stool, my brother trying out the drums) to convert all of that dry theoretical knowledge into beautiful, purposeful, passionate music.

Your approach integrates the education and the inspirational catalyst, which is great. But there is also loads of value in a full musical education, and I would hate to see that disappear.

Great discussion, as always. ;o)

During a summer holiday which seperated my second and third year at Graphic Design college I was fortunate enough to peddle my wares around some good graphic design studios in London for advice and to get my name about before finally qualifying in the following year.

So impressed was one company with my work that they offered me a job there and then as a junior. I explained that I was only midway through my studies and would complete them first.

When talking to my lecturer a couple of days later about what happened his wise words were: “You go to college, to learn the skills, to get the job”

I’m now Head of Art. Although I’m not officially ‘qualified’ to be one.

Sometimes parents and teachers can ruin the music experience because they focus on their own goals instead of asking the child what he or she wants.

Students will take in the raw data, but it won’t become part of the heart unless it is wanted and truly absorbed. What is music without the heart?

Going back to continue my own musical journey has shown me how much more I get out of learning when I venture down the roads that I am interested in. As with Sim, I am finally seeing the pieces from many years of “formal music education” fall into place. The technical aspects of music are no longer drudgery, because they come with playing from the heart.

All the theoretical info found in the grades, as well as the ‘raw technique’ – especially on an instrument as difficult as cello – is great, but as you say, the good bits of it can be extracted and used to explain the WHY.

Hope to hear more of your story here soon

thanks for commenting – I think the word ‘meandering’ here is unnecessarily pejorative. I draw on every bit of experience I have as a teacher and player, as well as my observation of where the student is up to when devising the ongoing plan. Perhaps ‘adaptable’, ‘relevant’, ‘contextual’, ‘stylistically specific’ might be better terms….

If a particular student thrives on having a series of concrete goals mapped out as we go along, then we’ll do that, based on their desired learning outcomes and the discussion we have that refines what’s driving those outcomes.

Looking at the software on your site and thinking about my students, I can’t even begin to imagine how they’d react if I offered that to them in a lesson. It strikes me as exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about as not working for people who want to learn pop/rock/soul/funk or any other kind of contemporary music with any level of integrity and inspiration. What happens if the student wants to know how Sting got a particular sound, or comes to the next lesson having had their mind blown by D’Angelo’s ‘Voodoo’ album? What if they’ve just seen My Chemical Romance live and want to know how to get that kind of sound? I turn round and say ‘and this weeks exercise is on D minor – here’s the MP3′… and I’ve completely missed the chance to harness that passion and excitement by rooting the lesson entirely in the very that has inspired them!

Your comment highlights, for me, precisely what’s wrong with not rooting the lessons in the
ACTUAL MUSIC that the student listens to on a day to day basis. There’s a huge qualitative difference to teaching from soundalike stuff and exercises written just for practicing scales over, and teaching your students direct from the music they love and are inspired by.