Teaching music through an instrument

a basis for instrumental/vocal teaching by Professor Keith Swanwick

Essentially music
We teach people to play musical instruments or to sing. What does this really mean? Unless someone
is learning something we cannot be said to be teaching anything. I want to chase up that idea in the
second paper. Just now, I want us to think about the substance of music itself. What does it mean to
say that we are learning Music? What is this stuff called music that we think we are teaching?

Question 1: What is musical playing?

There are ways of teaching the piano, the trombone or the bass guitar that open up ways into
musical playing and musical understanding more effectively than others. For example, I have seen a
beginning student confronted simultaneously by what must have seemed a complex page of
notation, with a bow grimly held in one hand and a violin grasped in the other. At the same time she
was being asked to play in time, in tune, with a good tone - all this without any idea of what was
expected and completely lacking any element of pleasure. Something like this seems also to have
been the experience of Bernard Levin who - put to violin lessons as a boy - found the experience
decidedly unrewarding and complains that too many children ‘fall into the hands of teachers’ who
have no idea of what music really is.

For two and a half years I laboured at this joyless thing called music without so much as learning the name
of a single composer, or indeed discovering that such people existed.
(Bernard Levin, 1981, page 4)
In happy contrast to this, some of the very best teaching I have been privileged to see has also been
by instrumentalists, people who really understand their art and know how to get into the minds of
other people - the students. This is teaching where everything is motivated by a respect for music as a
meaningful activity. The following quotation is an attempt to get at this meaning. It may sound high-
flown but it is sincere.

Music is one important and universally evident way in which people symbolically articulate their response to
experience and thus are able to share their observations and insights with others. It has something, though
not everything, in common with other arts, in that it is particularly well-adapted to illuminate those elements
of human feeling which are fleeting and complex and universal aspirations which most people seem to share,
whatever their culture. The expressive range of music is enhanced by its strong sense of temporality - like
drama and dance - and is intensified by its abstract nature, the more powerfully suggestive by not being
fixed to a set of designative meaning, thus allowing us great freedom of individual interpretation.

(Swanwick, 1994, page 38)

Learning to play an instrument or use the singing voice is an initiation into a world of meaning. This
is achieved by our regard for and understanding of music and by respect for students as autonomous
human beings. We know that playing music is more that just rattling round an instrument. (From
now on ‘voice’ is subsumed into the idea of instrument’.) We know that musical performance
includes technical control but also much more. The best performers attract us to their work not
through virtuosity alone - if at all. Instead they draw us into a world of musical meaning that includes
but extends well beyond manipulating strings of sound.

Imagine that there are some vigilant flies on the wall of a music room. They are very interested in
music and tend to be philosophical, which means that they really like to think about things. A young
beginning pianist is just starting to practise a new piece of printed music which has been prescribed
during the previous lesson by the teacher. From their vantage point they observe the player intent
on deciphering notation; sorting out the sharps and flats, finding chords, organising appropriate
fingerings. This ability to decode notation - or to write it - is a skill of importance in some musical
traditions, though by no means in all.

Much more fundamental are the necessary aural judgements that go along with the notation
reading process; deciding whether or not what is being played is actually ‘right’. This aural ability to
identify, discriminate and classify sound is the basis of all music making. Also obvious to any
observant fly is that as practising goes on there may be a growing facility to get the piece going, to
manage the instrument, to co-ordinate fingers and articulate keys in a dependable and controlled
way. Or so it is with the pianist we happen to be watching. Lucky flies!

These elements can be grouped together. Together they form one of the layers of musical
knowledge, a strand I call ‘knowing how’ - musical skills.

SKILLS - Ear, Hand and Eye

aural discrimination
manipulative control
notational proficiency
 Question 2: Are all musical skills equally important?

Literacy and fluency

The first two of these skills - aural and manipulative - are essential for all music making. The last -
notation - is of some importance in certain musical cultures but by no means in all. Where it is
important - as in western classical traditions - it is neither the basis nor the crowning achievement of
music. Notation is best seen as a limited means of recording and transmitting aspects of musical
ideas. By itself notation only tells us part of the story. For example, the Viennese Waltz is conveniently
and fictitiously notated with three equal beats in three-four time. In reality the second beat of the bar
is usually longer than the others and the first is shortened to compensate - sometimes also the third.
These syncopations give the traditional feeling of waltzing ‘lift’. Playing waltz notation as actually
written would be awful. Musically sensitive flies would fall off the wall.

The great virtue of written signs is their potentiality for communicating certain details of
performance that would easily be lost in aural transmission, just forgotten. Imagine what would
happen if the production and preservation of any large-scale classical symphonies were entirely
dependent on the collective memories of orchestras. It is inconceivable that many if any of these
works could have been composed at all without the visual maps and designs that constitute the score.

For good or ill, music notation has come to have a strong influence on instrumental teaching and
playing. It tends to shape the process in that what is not notated is never played and all playing is
conditioned by reading ability. Our musical flies on the wall listening to the student practising the
piano from notation may come to the conclusion that the process is something like a European
reading Mandarin from a phonetic transcription, with no idea of what the text means. Some players
rarely seem to get further than ‘ barking at print’, especially in the early stages. If they manage to
keep going their playing tends towards the distinctive rigidity of fairground organs.

Without connection with aural traditions expressive and structural shaping is likely to go missing.
Imagine the consequences of relying on notations of jazz, rock, a samba improvisation or almost any
folk music. Such a superfluous exercise impedes fluency and stifles creative thought. Yet in
instrumental teaching within the western classical tradition, notational ‘literacy’ is thought to be
essential and thus notation is often central to instruction and frequently becomes the starting-point.
The observant flies on the wall noticed that the young student was beginning with notation and
hoped that she was working towards fluency. In reality many pupils rarely if ever play fluently, at least
in the early years. As Suzuki noticed, this is the reverse of our childhood acquisition of language. We
speak fluently and understand our own language long before notating it. Which comes first then?
Music teachers agree that an important goal of music education should be to help people to develop
what is sometimes called the inner ear, to discriminate carefully and develop a dynamic library of
sonorous images which can be drawn on in performance. At a conference I once chaired in London,
several eminent jazz musicians extolled the virtues and essential nature of jazz improvisation. The
collective wisdom of this group can be summarised as follows:

• everyone can improvise from the first day of playing;

• the basic principle is to have something fixed and something free, the fixed including scale, riff,
chord, chord sequence and beat;

• it is possible to make great music at any technical level;

• use systems but beware of fixed, rigid teaching strategies;

• imitation is necessary for invention and copying by ear is a creative effort;

• improvisation is characterised by problem-solving and a high level of personal interaction;

• there is no consensus as to how people can be helped to practise

improvisation - commitment leads to self-tuition and the motivation is ‘delight’;

• improvisation is self-transcending not self indulgent and the product matters, we make contact
with something beyond our own experience,

• it makes demands upon our the way we listen;

• the secret of playing jazz is the aural building of a ‘dynamic mental library’.

There is no mention of notation here. The emphasis is on developing the inner ear through
listening, forming musical images.

Question 3:
What can we learn as teachers, performers and listeners from musicians who rely less on notation?
Musical Understanding
When the philosophical flies on the wall were observing the student playing, they wondered whether
the choice of tempo, accentuation and other articulation was communicating any sense of
expressiveness. Musical expressiveness is not a matter of our personal feelings reacting to or being
somehow poured into music. Musical expressiveness is to do with particular feeling qualities that can
be discerned in the musical performance itself. In a very real sense, these ‘feelings’ are objective,
embodied in our experience of music. We can talk about them. They constitute expressive
character, feeling embodied in the playing. For instance, does the pacing of a particular
performance of a piece give sufficient time for dissonant or chromatic chords to make their
expressive point, yet not be so slow as to lose the forward flow that characterises the melody? In the
case of a traditionally notated work any variation of interpretation will be within certain limits
beyond which we would say that the character of the music has been lost or perhaps transformed
into something else altogether. But within those limits there is great scope for interpretation: not
putting our feelings into the music - ‘play it with feeling’- but discovering the feeling already
potentially present in the musical gestures.

However, expressive playing by itself would not be enough to convince the musical flies that the
young player is playing musically. There are also internal structural relationships in any performance
that need our attention. For example, if we think of a phrase as a gesture, does the succeeding
phrase pick up this gesture; does it contract it, expand it, or does something else happen? If a
musical performance is to be more than an evocation of a general mood or a string of disconnected
emotive events, there will be a sense of relationship between phrases, an awareness of the impact of
repetition and change, an acknowledgement of restatements, transformations and contradictions in
musical gestures. So the flies on the wall become very alert at all times of transition, at the musical
‘joins’. They are very interested to see whether or not a little ritardando leads back into the main
theme, whether ideas are being deliberately contrasted or carefully fused together and whether the
articulation of a particular musical gesture stays the same throughout - as in a fugue subject.

It is possible to think of musical form not in fixed macro terms of blocks or sections but in the fluid micro
sense of continually arousing our expectations, sometimes fulfilling them, sometimes not.
(Meyer, 1956)

Musical understanding:

expressive character (feeling)

internal relationships (form)

Question 4: Do you agree with the statement “It has been said that all music is virtual movement”? How
could this idea influence our teaching?

If a musical performance fails to suggest degrees of movement (or stillness) then is something
adrift? When the student leaves the fly-blown practice room and comes for a lesson, maybe we might
try for fluency, for expressive flow. We might also ask if the piece works as a whole or is in
disconnected pieces. Is there any sense of internal coherence, of good form? Perhaps, if these
qualities are missing a remedy might be to leave notation alone for a time?
Finally, the thoughtful flies notice that the young student quickly abandons the set piece and sets off
on something else which seems important and enjoyable, music that engages the player at every level.
The flies certainly approve of this.

After all they say, isn’t it what music is all about, what makes it so valuable for these funny humans?

On the 27 February, 1668, Samuel Pepys went to a performance of wind music - ‘which is so sweet that it
ravished me and, indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick just as I have
formerly been when in love with my wife... and makes me resolve to practice wind music’.

And perhaps a man brought out his guitar to the front of his tent. And he sat on a box to play, and everyone
in the camp moved in slowly toward him, drawn in toward him. Many men can chord a guitar, but perhaps
this man was a picker. There you have something - the deep chords beating, beating, while the melody runs on
the strings like little footsteps. Heavy hard fingers marching on the frets. The man played and the people
moved slowly in on him until the circle was closed and tight, and then he sang Ten-Cent Cotton and Forty-
Cent Meat. And the circle sang softly with him. - - - And now the group was welded to one thing, one unit,
so that in the dark the eyes of the people were inward, and their minds played in other times - - - And each
wished he could play a guitar, because it is a gracious thing.

(John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, page 183).

Complete these questions and discuss your response:

Question 5: The main aim of music education is . . .

Question 6: Why do I teach?

Question 7: What do I teach?

Question 8: How do I teach?