Should music teachers be experts in folk and jazz music?

I think one of the most important characteristics of a good music educator is that they should be well rounded.  This isn’t to say that all music educators have to be experts in every type of music.  Every music teacher has his or her own musical background.  A music teacher could be a classical pianist, a jazz trumpet player, an opera singer, a composer, or a songwriter, or any number of other things.  The music teachers I had in school and the ones I know today have a wide variety of strengths.  My high school orchestra instructor was a conductor first and foremost, and he was also a cellist.  My middle school music teacher was a blues guitar player.  The music teacher at the elementary school where I’m currently interning is a singer and pianist with a classical background, and the music she enjoys most in her spare time is Christian rock.  Another elementary school music teacher I met recently had a career in the 70s as a rock guitar player/singer/songwriter.

Everyone has his or her own musical tastes, strengths, and tendencies.  In this case I don’t intend for the term well “rounded” to mean that a music teacher should be good at everything.  Instead I’m using it to mean that a music teacher should be interested in as wide a range of musical genres as possible, and be a good enough musician to be able to teach them.  A music instructor could have a completely classical background and have no experience really playing anything else, but he or she could still like and appreciate folk, jazz, and other types of music.  Obviously the more a music teacher knows the better, but it doesn’t take them being an expert to want to teach music that’s outside their comfort zone.

Both jazz and folk music are important for kids to learn about.  When I was trying to make a list of songs that all kids should know, it seemed that most of the songs I was coming up with fell on either that jazz or folk spectrum.  This is my list so far:

This Land is Your Land – Woody Guthrie

The Star-Spangled Banner – John Stafford Smith and Francis Scott Key

Heal The World – Michael Jackson

It Don’t Mean a Thing – Duke Ellington and Irving Mills

            Everybody’s Talkin’ – Fred Neil

            Simon Smith and The Amazing Dancing Bear – Randy Newman

I Got a Name – Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox

Wouldn’t it be Nice – Brian Wilson and Tony Asher

The Time They Are a Changin’ – Bob Dylan

Lean on Me – Bill Withers

Blue Skies – Irving Berlin

Rain Drops Keep Falling On My Head – Burt Bacharach and Hal David

Embraceable You – George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin

I Just Called to Say I Love You – Stevie Wonder

Somewhere Over The Rainbow – Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg

All The Things You Are – Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein

Reflection on trumpet lesson

I know very little about the trumpet, so I was quite nervous before I started my five-minute lesson.  In fact, even if I had been teaching an instrument I know how to play I probably would have been nervous.  I’ve really only taught a handful of “first” lessons before.

I made the decision to show the student how to hold the instrument right at the beginning of the lesson.  I thought that it made sense to do this because since the student is there for a trumpet lesson, then that’s what he would want to do right away.  I suppose everything went according to how I expected it to go, so any bad part of the lesson was because of my poor plan.

One little thing I wish I had done was not ask what the student’s name was when I walked in.  Clearly it’s a private lesson and I would have known what his name was.  Another thing I wished I had touched on was posture.  A few other people did this, and I realize it's very important.  This seems like something that should be taught when teaching how to hold the instrument.  I also could have done a better job of laying out the expectations of the lesson.  I’m sure I also could have made better eye contact.  This is constant struggle of mine not just in teaching, but in life in general.

I’m sure there were many other things I did wrong, and if I think of them later I’ll add to this post.

On "Creating Musical Flexibility Through the Ensemble" by Brandt Schneider

Brandt Schneider's article   on creating musical flexibility promotes the idea that band students should be learning how to be well-rounded musicians.  He makes the point that because of the way band and orchestra are usually taught; students end up being limited in their musical skills.  The typical high school band conductor is only interested in giving a piece of music to the students and having them read it and learn how to play it.  Mr. Schneider points out that there’s a lot more to music than just playing the notes on a page.  He argues that students should be learning not only how to read, but how to transpose, play by ear, and compose.  He focuses on four specific skills, which are musical discipline, technique, theory, and composition.  The way he defines these skills in the article however, makes me believe that they could almost have been simplified even further into one skill:  theory.  If a student is to develop into a musician that can learn something by ear, know many different tunes by heart, transpose a piece of music on the spot, improvise, and compose, then they have to have a strong foundation in theory.  The student actually has to know why the notes she is playing work and the piece sounds like it does, as well as how all of the different parts fit together. 

            This is something that I certainly never learned when I was in school playing in the orchestra or in my private cello lessons.  It’s kind of amazing how little theory “needs” to be taught when teaching someone an orchestral instrument.  I thing what Mr. Schneider is really saying in his article is that classical musicians should learn the same skills that jazz musicians usually learn.  A jazz musician is expected to know a bunch of standards by memory, have the ability to transpose, improvise, and have the ability to learn music by ear.  A classical musician, especially one at the high school level is really only expected to be able read music and play his instrument.  It’s quite a discrepancy, and I agree with Mr. Schneider that it really shouldn’t be this way.  Learning these skills would help a high school band student have a greater understanding of music and be a better musician.

            This isn’t to say that just reading and playing your instrument isn’t incredibly important.  I actually think that the technical aspect of playing an instrument is the most important thing in determining whether someone is a “good” musician.  Someone could have a lot of theoretical knowledge about how music works, but if she doesn’t have the ability to get a good sound on her instrument, then she can’t be considered a good musician.  Learning the skills that Mr. Schneider discuses in the article certainly can make one a much better musician.  In fact you can argue that to be a great musician, one needs to be able to do all of those things.  However, I think the baseline for just being “good” is the ability to be technically proficient enough to play the notes on the page musically.   

Everything is both complex and simple

One of the amazing things I realized about teaching is how much I actually learn myself from doing it.  As soon as I taught my first bass lesson, I found that just the act of explaining a concept to someone else crystallized it in my mind.  A lot of it has to do with the technical details.  There’s been so many times when I’ve explained why one needs to execute a certain technique in order to get the right sound, and I’ve thought:  “I never even realized I did that before.”  When faced with the challenge for the first time of teaching someone to use the bow when playing cello, I was amazed at how complicated a motion it is.  Even though I had been playing cello for years, I had never had to actually show anyone how the forearm, hand and fingers work in conjunction with each other.

In “Teaching Music with Purpose”, Peter Boonshaft briefly discusses how everything is complex and simple at the same time in regards to conducting.  Teaching bass and cello lessons has helped me understand how this idea also applies to playing an instrument.  There are so many details that go into playing even the simplest music.  The flip side to this however, is that once all of the basic techniques are internalized, even complex music can seem simple with just a little practice.