Regrets

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 'executing' notes on a page while relying completely on muscle memory is by its nature boring. It appeals to the ego’s need to sound 'impressive' or 'sophisticated' and gives us only rare glimpses of what it feels like to let go and express ourselves through music.

It's a system that favours the provider by ensuring the learner never fully grasps the fundamental vocabulary of music and so making them perpetually reliant on the 'expert' to show them 'how it's done'. From an economic perspective it's a very functional model!

As with any language we learn to be fluent and free by expressing ourselves and finding our own unique voice. Music should (and can) be no different.