How learning a foreign language made me a better music teacher.
Language is a powerful tool. It can move people to tears, ignite revolutions, or simply allow people to know what you want, need, or feel. Language is also a cultural bridge, and it allows you to communicate with people who you otherwise wouldn’t be able to. Much of the world has fluency in two languages or more, and I was increasingly aware that I was not one of them.
three years ago, I decided I was finally going to reach conversational fluency in the Spanish language. It was certainly not practical at the time, and I found many excuses to dissuade myself, especially the financial burden of hiring teachers and tutors to aid me in my journey. Thankfully for my present self, my past self managed to carve out daily time in pursuit of this newly desired skillset. On the path to conversational fluency, I discovered many principles that have hence aided me in my own teaching of the musical language.
The first principle I learned right away was that IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO START. I hear students tell me all the time they feel behind, or they think they are too old to catch up on technical weaknesses. This can’t be further from the truth. It certainly helps to learn things when you are younger, as you definitely learn faster, but you are constantly learning for your entire life! This means that you can improve AT ANY AGE. Saying that you are too old to learn, or it’s too late to start is a limiting mindset, and it only sets you up for disappointment, or provides an excuse for inaction. Talent is a myth. With a diligent plan of action and focused deliberate practice, you can and will overcome any musical obstacle.
The Second Principle of language learning was my favorite to implement as a teaching strategy. After one year of Spanish study, I got a new Spanish teacher. My new teacher spoke no English, which meant our entire lesson was in Spanish, and there was no safety net for me should I forget how to say anything in conversation. This was when an incredible thing started happening. I found that words that I struggled to recall for more than a second became burned into my memory, and I never forgot them, because I struggled to remember them. My teacher couldn’t just tell me the word in english, so I had to sit there and recall on my own. I knew the word, I had already learned it, but I just needed to solidify the memory pathway in my brain to be able to recall the word on command. I was amazed at how well I started remembering words that had previously remained constant challenges for me in conversations with Bilingual tutors.
The second principle is that struggle promotes growth. If a student is struggling to recall an answer, you should not, in most cases, just give it to them. If you do not work for an answer or a result, it has less value, and your brain will not remember it as clearly. The same thing applies when teaching a student any technique. After I present them with a new technique, each subsequent lesson I try to have the student discover the issues they have for themselves. Only after they have exhausted their ability to explain themselves, or are completely stumped, do I step in and re-articulate the answer. This helps foster a student’s sense of ownership in their learning, and allows them to eventually be able to teach themselves, which is the true and ultimate goal of any teacher.
The third principle I learned from language study is the pareto principle. This is the principle that 80 percent of your results come from 20 percent of your efforts. in daily Spanish conversation, I use the first 20 percent of my fundamental Spanish learning (basic greetings, questions, present tense, Indicative) for 80 percent of my conversations. I only use the harder elements of my Spanish studies (past tense, future tense, Present perfect, Conditional, Subjunctive, ect.) for 20 percent of my conversations. This principle goes to show that while the entire Spanish language is important to master for fluency, the majority of your daily use of Spanish will encompass only the Fundamental concepts.
This applies to musical learning as well. Tempo, Time, Tuning, and Tone (aka the 4 T’s) are arguably the 20 percent of your fundamentals that will get you 80 percent of your score in an audition or competition. Phrasing is extremely important as well, followed finally by note accuracy. If you think of musical elements as ingredients for a cake recipe, the 4 t’s make up your cake, the phrasing is the flavor, and the right notes are the icing on top.
But wait? Isn’t playing the right notes important? Of course it is. But the ultimate goal of music is to impart a feeling or emotion on the listener. A performance that is easy to follow along with, contains beautiful tone, and has great tuning and phrasing makes it easy to forgive a wrong note or two. A wrong note can also be so much more than just playing an incorrect note. A right note with bad phrasing, sloppy timing, or poor tone is in fact, a wrong note! (more on this in another post).
Students always want to get to the flashy stuff as fast as they can (I know I did when I was. student). It is important to constantly remind students of the fundamental importance of the 4 T’s. Without good time, a drummer can have the fastest hands on earth and no drum line will want them because they cannot keep a beat. Without good tone, a clarinetist will always wonder why their note perfect performance fell short of all region placement. As with anything worthwhile in music, or in life, there simply are no shortcuts.
Try these three principles out next time you are with a student, and let me know what you think. As with learning a language, learning music takes dedication, practice, patience, and a good teacher to show you the way. The fastest way to fluency (in music or language) is consistent daily practice, even 5-10 minutes every day will improve your skills a lot faster than a single one-hour session a week.
Gracias por leer, y hasta la próxima.
Matt