I’ve struggled to be musical all my life–took lessons, took college classes, did ear training, etc.
I think I finally cracked the code, and it’s surprisingly simple:
- Learn to play melodies by ear (starts with singing)
- Learn only enough theory to:
- know your way around your instrument (scales, arpeggios)
- understand chords
- understand song structure
- Experiment (ie have fun!)
The most anal formal exercise I’d recommend is learning to hear relative scale degrees (two very good apps available for that)–though I think that skill would be developed by transcribing (playing by ear), it’s helpful for your confidence level to have graded exercises you can have some success with.
But my experience with most of my music teachers is they fall into one of two traps:
For classical music, it’s:
- Learn how to translate written notes into notes on your instrument.
- Go to 1.
For instance: I was taking clarinet lessons and I remember my teacher saying goodbye to his last student–a kid–and the teacher said, “If you bring me the sheet music for it, we can learn to play it.” And I thought what a missed opportunity that was for that girl to learn to hear and transcribe music–obviously not a skill he thought was important to the teacher at all. And I’d understand now wanting to do that for piano, which is really complicated, but learning to play a melody by ear on a single note instrument is a very achievable goal, especially when you have someone that can tell you what key it’s in and what the first note is.
The trap for jazz music is:
- Learn what are the “right” notes to play.
- Play them in any random order.
I used to blame teachers for just being bad at their jobs, but I think students (and maybe parents/administrators) are also to blame.
I ran across a senior guy who was trying to get back into piano. He’d played for a few years and it was clear he had no idea of how to be musical–no idea of how to construct a simple bass line, no knowledge of how to define a chord. So I said, “Hey, I’ll work with you even though I don’t play piano, I think you need to learn this song and just play the root and the five in the left hand, and sing the melody while you play, and use a metronome.” What an amazing exercise I thought: it would help teach him timing, develop his ear, develop his feel, let him be expressive with his voice, let him embody the melody, lear to work the bass, etc. Aren’t I brilliant teacher?
You know what this guy did? He pulled out his phone to show me some recordings he did of him playing the song the way his music teacher had written it out for him; it was what I expected–just haltingly reading the music with no sense of time. I wasn’t sure, but I think he wanted me to praise him for playing such a complex piece.
For him, and maybe for a lot of students (and certainly for parents and administrators), they don’t actually want to master music, they want to impress people. And maybe for the musically disinclined, haltingly playing a complex written piece is more impressive than a 2-note bassline in time with an expressive voiceline sensitive to dynamic; since most people in charge of music education (parents and school administrators) don’t know music, maybe they would promote a teacher who taught the former and fire a teacher who taught the latter…
For jazz programs, I think they’ve got a lot of theory they’ve got to cram into the kids heads, and we can learn theory a lot faster than we can develop musically, so if you’re going to be judged on “performance” of your students, you’ll be rewarded for having them be able to pass essentially paper exams set to music more than for having them skillfully play pentatonic blues.
I don’t know what the answer is, but for some reason, actually mastering music is very low on the list for both teachers and students.
What’s all y’all’s experience with music and music education?
Time I think is the main factor in shitty music education; that is to say, educators ask themselves: what is the most impressive thing I can teach this group of average students to do in the least possible amount of time that will impress their and school administrators the most? I know! I’ll teach them to play a lot of notes on their instrument!
And from that, all the other problems flow…
No, the biggest problem is most of the students won’t practice.
Playing a lot of notes on their instrument would be a massive improvement. Depending on the goals it might even be a good thing to teach.
Maybe even more reason to hook them into music practice that is personally rewarding?
Though I’ve heard ipad kids are quite beyond reach.
That is impossible. Everyone starts with “Twinkle twinkle little star” (or a similarly very easy tune) and that sound horrible. There is no way to make this rewarding, you have to force yourself through it - then the next 4-5 songs. Only after you have done this much can you find practice rewarding - until then you are bad and you know it.
As for iPad kids - while the thing has changed, the complaint has changed, the sentiment has been expressed since prehistory times. Most kids grow up just fine, just like every other generation.
How about teaching kids to sing before you teach them to play an instrument? I think that’s a luxury the system can not afford.
I’m hesitant to be an old men yelling at clouds, but the research is showing that this coming generation is the first to perform more poorly than their parents academically. It also matches with anecdotal evidence from teachers. People are also complaining about programmers graduating from programming schools without knowing how to program because LLMs are doing all the heavy lifting, not to mention how much of music production nowadays doesn’t require any musical knowledge at all–just how to operate software. The window for the dedication required to learn an instrument is getting smaller.
Teaching to sing has the same problem. Other than likely kids have done enough singing before (while learning to talk) that they have got over the worst of it.
Singing doesn’t generalize to any other instrument any more than anything else either. If you want to play piano you have to practice the piano.
That doesn’t match my experience at all.
If I can’t sing it, I can’t play it–or I shouldn’t play it because pushing buttons in the right order is not what music is.
If you can’t match pitch with your voice, you’re going to have a harder time on an instrument.
Singing arpegios and scales against a drone or chords helps me internalized the sounds in a way playing on my instrument never did. You don’t need any musical knowledge to play G B D over a G chord–a monkey can do it. That’s what I used to do in my jazz theory classess–played ii-V-I obsessively on the guitar, but it never helped a damn. I had to sing it to really learn it (and even still, it’s a work in progress).
Edit: Even if someone can sing and play a melody doesn’t necessarily mean they understand how it works on the instrument, because they might know how the songs sounds and also as a collection of abstract finger patterns without ever making the connection between the sound and the instrument.
So, humor me, assuming a beginner can sing Mary Had a Little Lamb, what would happen if you taught them: a) a scale b) the first note of the melody on that scale
Homework: c) figure out the rest of the melody on your own?