Reminiscing On A Musical Odyssey

Limitations & Innovations In Musical Education

A Prelude In Pressure

Have you ever been caught in a situation at a family friend’s – maybe you’re young and you’ve been taking music lessons for a while and — what do you know? There’s a piano there! And after some tense parent-child negotiations back and forth, you’re voluntold to go play something for the benefit of all. You acquiesce out of filial piety. Then you feel the building pressure of the moment – and you remember – aha! I can’t play because I don’t have my sheet music with me.

Or perhaps the stress of finding oneself in the middle of a performance when – *gasp* – our memory fails us and we find ourselves flailing and floundering in the middle of a piece that we’d played nearly perfectly dozens of times prior.

For those with a classical musical background, does that sound familiar? Isn’t it remarkable that we could study for years but when an impromptu opportunity is presented, our talents are rendered useless without the props of meticulous preparation and arcane symbols scrawled upon reams of staff paper, like some wizard’s grimoire and reagents about to invoke an incantation during the lurid light of a full Blood Moon.

Tragic, to say the least.

Tradition: Curses, Gifts & Reformations

As a musician and educator who began his musical journey three and a half decades ago, I feel several core musical elements are underserved by traditional music education: time & rhythm, deep listening, improvising & self-expression, playing with others, mastery and mindset.

Put another way, these are overemphasized: learning to read music too early in musical development, repertoire incongruent with the taste of the student, a bias towards performative perfection over conversational self-expression and composition, insufficient performance preparation and opportunities, and a bias towards individual over ensemble playing.

I would instead propose an approach that encourages early-stage exploration, placing rhythm front and center, emphasizing proficiency of aural and technical skills prior to the appropriate introduction of musical literacy, and fosters more opportunities to play with others in unconditionally encouraging environments. This, in my opinion, would be far more fertile for the blossoming of talent.

That said, there’s no disrespect to the teachers or tradition. It has clearly stood the test of time – on the contrary, I’m incredibly grateful to my piano teacher, Gary Burns (he’ll always be Mr. Burns to me) – I’ve become musically literate and had early exposure to the richness of the Western musical oeuvre from the Baroque to the Romantics and beyond. I’ve also acquired the benefits of theory and technique (when I decided to give it proper attention a decade after beginning), learning and mastering my keys, scales, chords, arpeggios and so forth, with the discipline and patience of learning something gradually over months of sustained effort and the recurring humility of beginning a piece anew. While the transition to jazz and contemporary styles was challenging, a classical foundation was germane to its development.

Rhythm Is King

It is humbling to admit that rhythm and time have been a consistent musical weakness of mine over the years. I recall on one cruise ship contract my cabin roommate Julio mentioned off-hand how German drummer and educator Benny Greb’s work The Language Of Drumming transformed his ability to sight-read as a percussionist.

It is a systematic breakdown of rhythmic permutations that happen in groupings of two and three, assigning them letters in a rhythmic alphabet. How the simplicity of this elegant approach eluded me still confounds me to this day. More recently, I’ve stumbled across and begun rudimentary explorations of konnakol, a rhythmic language that originates from Southern India’s Carnatic tradition. Here’s a traditional display of the art form while here’s a virtuosic display in a modern context.

As my primary instruments were piano and guitar, it is somewhat understandable why rhythm and time was underemphasized, though every ounce of effort I’ve put into developing my rhythm has improved my musicianship across the board. Learning how to play the drums casually over the past few years has been a delightful experience of beginner’s mind.

While the piano is appropriately called the “king of instruments” with its uncontestable range, breadth of expression and relative technical accessibility, each instrument we learn lends a unique perspective and portal to the dimensions of music, including time, rhythm, pitch, timbre, dynamics, etc. As piano and guitar are among the most common and accessible instruments with harmonic capacity, that is where they shine most readily. In my middling days of jazz exploration, that is the dimension I found the most enthralling – playing with the newfound (to me) world of extensions, alterations and voicing. To go beyond right and wrong notes and sounds and instead hear the dance of consonance and dissonance like yin and yang. It is a liberating paradigm shift that allows for childlike experimentation and joyful discovery without the stifling criticism of internalized and rigid standards prematurely applied. As Rumi muses…

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there.”

Plays Well With Others

Another oddity of private music lessons is the relative dearth of playing with others. My main context of performance opportunities growing up was the occasional exam and even more occasional recital. There’s nothing quite like the pressure of not only being observed but also literally being judged. In many cultures, playing with others is as commonplace as speech. There is no such thing as a private language – what would be the point?

While rhythm is vital for its own sake, it is essential to playing together. Playing in time and sharing rhythm is the fabric upon which ensemble playing is even possible. It is the difference between sloppy amateurism and tight professionalism, though each has their place. I recall one evening backstage before going onstage, the band leader Tim shared an anecdote of a Frank Zappa piece where what each musician played was up to the individual but the rhythm was precisely notated, though I do not recall the name of this composition. For those uninitiated into the eccentricity of Zappa, my colleague Silvio Castelleti wrote a personal and excellent introduction here. 

To further underscore the primacy of rhythm and ensemble playing, a drum circle is a case in point. No pitch is necessary – music can go without pitch and harmony, but not without rhythm, no matter how free. Certainly there is free time, rubato and other ways to play with the strictness of time, but even then some particular sound (or silence) is happening for some particular duration¹.

Listen, Speak, Read, Write

To continue this language metaphor – Victor Wooten in The Music Lesson, speaks about the natural development of an infant in language acquisition. If indeed “music is the universal language” (I happen to disagree on some points²), then we ought to observe its development – babies first absorb the sounds of the languages spoken around them, reinforcing the phonemes of the mother tongue while pruning unheard ones (listen), then we babble, orienting to first attempts at coordinating our vocal apparatus to make our first words (speak). It is not until some years later that we get to the symbolic representation of language (reading) and finally learn to express ourselves with those same symbols (writing).

Similarly to the rhythmic alphabet, learning to listen deeply and fluently to pitch is another core musical competency given short shrift in a classical education. While learning to play songs by ear can be tedious, it is an ultimately rewarding process. Mastering intervals, chord qualities, cadences and progressions lends itself well to jam sessions, improvisation, repertoire and composition - all vital skills of musicianship. In my opinion, reading prematurely stunted this development as I felt like I was catching up in my early twenties.

Even though I have benefited from learning to read music so young, I would say even in my adult years, a major insecurity of mine was true sight reading – the ability to read and perform at first sight. I think this speaks more to a lack of firm foundations in rhythm, listening and technique – deeper roots upon which the skill of reading rests. Don’t get me wrong – musical literacy vastly accelerates and expands the capacity to communicate with other musicians, but a preponderance of reading and learning solo pieces results in a kind of tunnel vision – perpetually preoccupied with “playing correctly” while suffocated from the freedom to simply musically explore and savor the joy of collaborative spontaneity.

Finale & Paying It Forward

While the benefits of traditional music education are many, in my opinion that is despite rather than because of its educational design.

To recapitulate my earlier proposal: a curriculum that observes natural language development – listening, speaking, reading then writing, in that order – featuring rhythm, aural and technical skills prior to musical literacy, combined with performing more frequently in low stakes conversational contexts while inculcating the mindset and standards of mastery³. In my opinion this would yield far more fruition of talent. As an educator, my teaching philosophy has evolved to be akin to the Hippocratic oath to do no harm. Rather, I feel my primary role is to stoke a passion for music and make sure that they do not ever hate or resent it. With passion, anything is possible.

1. John Cage’s 4’33’’ notwithstanding.

2. Like natural languages, music is universal though styles are particular to the instrumentation of the culture e.g. Afro-Cuban and Indian systems have much richer rhythm while Western Europe’s harmony & polyphony shines. Note the primacy of percussion in the former versus the technological development of the organ, keyboard and choral music in the latter.

3. I wrote about mastery here.