Rethinking Genius

I'm almost ashamed to admit this but it wasn't until recently that I really got  the purpose of review pieces.  It only took me seven years to figure it out but I guess better late than never, right? To clarify, I have always had all my students do review pieces.  I warm up with review pieces in every lesson.  I would use review for exercises and drills.  I would have my students do review pieces only (never current) when performing at our solo recitals.  So it wasn't as if I didn't understand the value of review. What eluded me up until recently was why a student should really maintain all  her review pieces.  When a book three student came into a lesson unable to remember book one's Happy Farmer, I didn't ever sweat it.  I would tell the student to clean it up at home and maybe the student did and maybe she didn't.  The end result of this was an entire studio full of students reviewing only the pieces they liked and remembered how ...

There are two different teachers present in a young student’s private music lesson environment: the parent and the teacher. While the private studio teacher is there to offer expertise on the instrument, the parent will be the one that has the most lasting impact on the child’s musical career. Consider that the teacher usually only sees the child once a week while the parent will be there for the young student the other six days. Learning a musical instrument is no easy task. Besides the obvious physical challenges there are a great many emotional hurdles to overcome. This means that the parent must play an active role in the child’s learning if he is to become successful. The parent must learn how to observe the home environment objectively since this is where the child will be doing most of his playing. It is also the area where the teacher has no hand in anything that goes on. If issues crop up then it will be up to the parent to report back in order to figure out a soluti...

I've reached an interesting point in my teaching career.  After nearly seven years of teaching I finally have a batch of book 4-becoming-semi-advanced level students.  From a teaching perspective it means that I am finally faced with the task of producing an artist rather than just someone who plays with a very basic level of control. This is a daunting prospect. It's one thing to start a beginner.  The worst I could do is render the student frustrated and unable to play.  It's quite another thing to try and explain to a twelve-year-old how this sonata she is playing needs more emotional depth.  Where does one even begin? I ask these questions rhetorically, of course.  Like just about everything else in teaching there's never  one  clear solution to a problem.  But as I explore different ways to help a student learn musical depth I've noticed that it's actually starting to change my  playing. Like every other twelve-year-old on t...

It is a cornerstone of Suzuki Method philosophy to teach a child with the "one point lesson" in mind.  In other words, information and technique adjustments should be given in small, able-to-master bits.  This is why sight reading is taught as a separate skill.  The task of understanding the value of a dot on a page is removed from the task of producing a sound. It is with this idea in mind that Suzuki teachers tend to size a student down rather than up on instruments.  The teacher's goal is to give the student the tools to play fluently or, as Shinichi Suzuki used to always say, "with beautiful heart."  This does not happen if the student is struggling to support the instrument itself. Fractional instrument size should imitate how the instrument is held by an adult with a full size instrument.  This means that wrists should not have to be hyperextended or torsos twisted into painful shapes in order to produce a sound.