On the one hand, my experience as a music student is pretty checkered, at best. Though I might have had music in my mind most of the time from an early age, I was an incorrigible under-achiever in music lessons. The music I was required to study in piano lessons always seemed much more an academic or tactile exercise than an artistic expression to which I could relate. My piano teachers, meanwhile, all took the same tack: 'you will learn the pieces in Western Board Book 2 this year and practice scales in a different key each week. I am here to evaluate your performance in this and choose which tune from the book you will next study.' Oh, such fun.
School Band and Jazz Band added the elements of camaraderie, and even started to introduce repertoire I thoroughly enjoyed playing – but University would introduce a bewildering and somewhat conflicting sea of choice and disciplines. My jazz background wasn't strong enough to get me into the UVic Big Band (Jazz) on guitar, so I found myself playing a lot of French Impressionist and post-impressionist repertoire on saxophone, with some Baroque transcriptions thrown in for variety. While I enjoyed the music and the broadened horizons it brought, I can't say it completely ignited my passions. Perhaps I'd need to live in Paris a while. This was against a background of atonal music as the de rigeur 'legit' compositional style, and pointy guitars, spandex, big hair and keyboards all over pop radio. Very confusing times for a Led Zeppelin fan from Armstrong, BC.
In short, I look back on my pre-adulthood music education and see a lot of wasted opportunity. My teachers could/would rarely see what musical enthusiasm and interest (if not ability) I hid in my state of good-natured under-achievement, and I just thought my abilities were not in the same league as more conspicuously successful students. Worst of all, I'd assumed that what enthusiasm I had for music was, for practical purposes, worthless. If my fascination with Mozart's Symphony 40 seemed irrelevant to my piano teachers, I instinctively knew that my later mania for Kiss wouldn't impress anyone either. Ironically, if one of my piano teachers had helped me get started with “Detroit, Rock City”, piano might be my first instrument today.
Perhaps ironically – or predictably – I'm a music teacher now, and have been for decades. I've done my best to right the wrongs I remember from my own music education, as well as build on what has worked. I've grown aware of how different people have different learning styles, and therefore what works for one student might not work for another. I've even made a practice of matching some of the students' repertoire to their own personal musical tastes. Does it help? It certainly doesn't hurt.
Still, I get a kick out of famous pop and rock musicians who proudly claim they've never had a music lesson in their lives, as though this were unusual. Absence of formal training is far more the rule than the exception among pop musicians, which has led me to some disturbing questions. I've had no formal training on the guitar either, yet it has been my most enduring musical interest; the rock world is populated by musicians with no formal training; could it be that formal training inhibits pop ambitions? Or, worse yet – does formal training kill musical enthusiasm in all but the hardiest and most determined musicians?
I can't say I have a conclusive answer to this. Despite the quibbles I have with my own music education, I don't regret any of my own formal training, and I would hope I've enriched, in some small way, the lives of the students I've taught. Music is a hugely valuable – perhaps the very best - activity for developing the brain's ability to harness myriad cognitive, sensory and tactile activities under one yoke. I've also sometimes encountered unschooled players who have deliberately avoided learning music theory for fear of losing their 'original approach' to music - when in fact theory can help a musician avoid pop-worn cliches. If there's a conclusion to be drawn from all this, it may be that the role of a good music teacher has more to do with utilizing and cultivating – not suppressing – a student's natural musical curiosity and facility. Instilling (rather than imposing) some discipline has its place, but not at the expense of all else. Frankly, I didn't become a disciplined music student until I sat down to learn Zeppelin on guitar – around the time I quit piano lessons. Coincidence? Hard to say. In any case, the number of professional pop musicians who do (or don't) have any formal musical training is probably not all that valuable a yardstick, anyway. Whether music training significantly enriched anyone's life is ultimately the point.
Back to school we go – and I'll watch for the kid who wants to learn Detroit, Rock City.