Music Lesson: Help!

I believe that when many people start to decide to have their first music lesson or first musical instrument study with a music teacher by themselves because their senses of music have been activated by hearing a beautiful song or a particular tone of an instrument from a live concert or radio, etc. This is a very important reason to allow those people to make their first step enter the music world.

The following tasks obvious turn to those music instructors that they should lead those people, who are interested in studying music, to walk into the deeper place of music world in order to allow those people to know more about music, to make them enjoy more what music has brought to them, even to encourage them to create their own music.

In many ways, as an instructor to give a music lesson to students is not a difficult thing as long as the instructor know what goal he/she intend to approach for a lesson. However, the difficult part from a music lesson, which may challenge every instructor, is that whether the goal, which an instructor tries to approach, really makes students feel that they are taking an enjoyable, helpful and encouraged lesson, so that students want to study more by themselves in the field of music study.

There was a report with a title: “Music lessons 'not good enough'” that appeared recently on the BBC news board, which straightly pointed out an issue that half of school music lessons in England needed to improve, because students who were in those music lessons were not positively making progress in music.

In my opinion, this report actually gives a strong emphasis to music instructors that their teachings seriously affect the future development of music. I would like to share a story from my teaching experience. Two years ago I got a chance to teach a student who want to continue her cello study with me, because she planned to prepare some standard musical repertory for auditions. In general, she was a good student, she practiced hard and she follows most of my suggestions about her playing. However, I still had a feeling that her playing was not nature enough, because I did not feel enough about her own thought to the music which she was playing, I only felt that her playing sounded simply like a collection of some other people’s ideas. So I tried to shared my opinion with her about how my feeling of her playing was and I tried to encourage her to train herself to think independently, but she unexpectedly told me that because her previous teacher said to her that she should follow all the suggestions which that teacher gave to her, so that she assumed that I was using the same rule as her previous teacher’s in her lessons.

The story is finished, but I think that as a teacher, particularly in music teaching, to simply ask student to follow his/her suggestion is not a good enough way to help student to make music, because as a music teacher who not only is responsible to deliver messages about the music to students, but also should lead students to their own artistic way.

I have a feeling that many modern classical musicians’ interpretations of the music, which compare with those who came from last generation, are quite similar although they have brilliant technique. Therefore, I still prefer to listen to those old recordings, because through music playing I strongly feel those old musicians’ own stylistic thoughts to their music. Here are some video examples of those last generation musicians, through listening to different tone color and style of musical interpretations on same type of instrument but different players, I want to display how all of them has their own unique thought to their music: Jascha Heifetz, David Oistrakh, Isaac Stern, Fritz Kreisler (only music track), Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman.

There many reasons may cause our modern musicians have similar music tastes. One of the reasons is because of development of modern multimedia technology. It is very convenient to listen to music from radio, television or Internet. Consciously or unconsciously, many modern musicians start to imitate what music they have heard. So this reason makes our music have a very slow development. To tell the truth, I rarely hear some people have some really fresh idea to the music or some new genre music in our current life time. The second reason is that many music teachers, even some teach students to a professional way, are not really teach students to develop students’ own music talent, instead, those music teachers just teach some musical pieces which they have learn from their passed teachers. Consequently, students are not able to independently analyze, present and interpret their own thought when they get some new music pieces. I have experienced this type class when I was in high school. I remembered that when teacher came to our class just told us how many pieces we should finish for a semester, and then, we just followed the teacher’s requirement to finish those pieces one by one. As last, we played a lot of music pieces, but we still had no idea how to analyze and present a new music piece by ourselves.

Obviously, music teachers play a very important role of training students in order to keep and develop students’ own individual musical talent. First of all, music teachers are musical artists, and they are leading more and more people to the way of artists. I truly hope that under our music teacher’s intelligent leading, our music will be on a vivid, spiritual and significant way.