I’m going to say something at the beginning of this post which I think has been the one defining thing I believe it’s my job as an educator to get my students to understand.
Here it is.
No one can teach you to play music.
Having gone down the rabbithole of doing the whole pedigree music school experience, and even today being charged to create musical training programs for institutions and with teaching tertiary level professional musician hopefuls, I find that the longer I operate as an educator, the more I find this to be true.
From my own experience, growing up I pretty much devoured every drum instructional book there was. It seems silly to say it now, but honestly it seemed like a more efficient way to learn. I didn’t have to bother myself with actual music. All I had to do was complete the book, and I would have the technical expertise to be able to play anything I wanted.
When I got to music college, I went even deeper with approach. 6 hour practice days every day of the week were like nothing to me. And the harder I worked, the more proficient I got at my instrument ... well kind of. I could play anything I heard in my head. The problem was I honestly didn’t hear anything.
I wanted to play with the best. The guys who were playing all the gigs and the obvious top dogs in school but unfortunately they didn‘t really want to have anything to do with me musically. Thinking there was some method to the madness of being a Musician I didn’t understand, I went to teacher after teacher trying to find the answer to the question
”How Do I Play Music”.
All answers that I could craft actionable plans with quantifiable outcomes often yielded unsatisfactory results.
It wasn’t until I met Bob Moses that I was challenged to think of my approach to this whole journey in a different way. He said to me :
“Music students come to an expensive music school, buy all the most expensive instruments to get the most expensive curriculum money can offer. But they forget that the janitor cleaning the rooms of the school, doing it with his own feeling of dance and rhythm that comes from his culture, more often than not is in that simple act creating more actual music than the whole school combined”.
Over time I learnt to trust that the way I learnt as a child who knew nothing was the best way. That the love for the sound I was hearing and the desire to be part of it and really get to know it was the crucial first step many of us forget.
The older I get, the more I realise there’s a trend amongst the musicians I most love playing with. They’re all extremely studied and conversant with the academics of music. But all of them actually had built a relationship with music completely made up of chasing a sound before the academics came into place. It wasn’t academia that taught them how to play music, but music itself.
Everything that we can plan in a music syllabus, and communicate about music in any language other than music itself is actually only a pale reflection of the truth but it’s the best we have when trying to explain it to someone else. Music academia is helpful in helping us gain more flexibility with the information that we glean from the source and helping us to crystallise our impressions about music - but confusing the tool for the source has dangerous ramifications for the student who is earnestly looking to pursue a life in music.
I’m not here to trash music school, or even trash taking a pedagogical approach towards the pursuit of music. And please don’t mistake me to be saying that simply listening to music is enough to be able to play it at a high level. It’s not. All institutions are made up of a mixed bag of educators who all have different approaches and outlooks and it’s the student‘s job to make the call on what is important to their PERSONAL process. A great music school is like a membership to a world class gym, you not only have to lift the weight yourself, you also have to decide which exercises and diet strategies will help you achieve your goals. Some people are powerlifters, some people want abs. Some people honestly just want to say they have a gym membership
What I am saying is that whatever pedagogy can offer is at best tools to help us grapple with deeper much more important questions in building an approach that allows us to have a musical output that reflects out aesthetic ideals.
Most music schools and institutions are first and foremost businesses that have P/L statements that they need to answer for, if not to shareholders then to the teachers themselves who are employees of the school. Given that it’s a business, it makes the most sense to understand that businesses profit not from trying to convince customers that something has value, but from simply packaging and selling products to willing customers who are already looking to buy those specific products.
Most music students don’t want to learn music. They just want to be able to be feel they are getting better at music, and to buy the hope that through the transaction that they make through paying for a syllabus that they will have access to a secret code that will give them they way to “growth hack” their musical learning.
This opens the door for academics who really operate more in the world of academia than the actual world of music to create whole universes where the pursuit of the word count of the thesis is actually more important than the pursuit of a beautiful sound. This also means that it’s completely possible to build a career as an educator without actually even being a competent performer as Long as you can create and package a system and syllabus and be willing to believe it’s the musical equivalent of Bible truth. That‘s all fine and good ... in the end all students always buy into and develop in the way they truly want. Not what they say they want, but what they deeply want.
The inherent problem with this though, is that part of the marketing strategy involves convincing the student that compliance with the package is a guaranteed means to success. What’s worse is that it breeds a cult of students who believe that the metrics of the system they‘ve bought into HAS to be the universal metric of valuing a person’s musical ability.
All examinations are created with examiner bias and the only thing they can always be Counted on to measure is the student‘s compliance to the exam. Anyone who believes that aceing an exam should mean anything in the real world should also be able entrust their Dad’s required quadruple bypass to a med Student who finished the theory exam but has never held a scalpel in his life and has never been in the observation ward during a surgery.
Correlation is NOT causation. Most great musicians have it all, a strong aesthetic sense, great ears AND an analytical approach towards their study of music that allows them to expand and explore all possibilities and permutations. The last is easier to make into a syllabus and the first two can definitely be learnt but can almost never be taught. The reason institutions keep banging on the last of the three is because out of the three, the last is the only one that can be sold for a buck.
To those who choose to pursue music, I urge you to ask yourself questions that will lead you to answers that you will come to know for yourself on a deep level but that you will never be able to fully express in words to another person.
”Why do I really want to play music, and what does it mean to me”
”What does this sound mean to me”
”What is it about great music that makes me want to pursue music on the same level”
The deepening of our understanding of our answers to ourselves will naturally lead us to seek out the heroes who have set the path before us. We should not seek to merely play the vocabulary of our heroes, but to expose ourselves to their process and investigate their relationships with music which will teach us much more than any book can.
Academia is a powerful tool and ally in this process of having a life of music. But we must never mistake the tool for the source.
Because in the end if we spend years and years practicing, all we do is build the ability to clearly communicate the beliefs and aesthetic ideals that shaped our process. Those who have bought into the ideal that true learning can be outsourced to a teacher will end up communicating music that sounds like that, and teaching in a way that reflects that.
It is my belief that the distance any musician has to walk in the pursuit of excellence is the same - a teacher is there to help the student to not take unnecessary twists and turns and to act as a guide more than an oracle. In the end, even if it’s a completely straight line - the student who wants a deep relationship with music has to walk it alone.
Just remember, in our pursuit of music, we all actually always get what it is that we truly, deeply want.
