Liam O Byrne

Recently a long-standing student and one of my last remaining 'traditional method' students decided to call it a day with the piano. While I wasn't really surprised, I was nonetheless disappointed. Despite my best efforts to guide this student towards playful, carefree expressive playing, the already established playing 'to get it right' and score high on exams mentality was too much to overcome in the end. It was a reminder to me of just how dysfunctional music education can be. Passively...

Traditional music lessons generally follow a widely accepted approach that blocks musical expression. I remember, as a child, how my own teacher would use the same approach for each new piece I learned while preparing for my graded exams. We would spend weeks and months embedding the muscle memory to execute the notes on the page and then when she could no longer find things to correct in my playing we would add in the expression marks i.e. when to play loud, soft, speed-up etc. The concept...

As I go to write this blog post I notice a new feature offered by my website provider...AI blog posts. Simply type in any prompt and bang, a few paragraphs for you to post and call your own. As with AI music, we now have the option to bypass the creating stage and go directly to the end product. But to take this route is to reduce the act of creation to merely a means to an end. Something time-consuming and unnecessary that we can now conveniently bypass. To me this approach reveals a greater...