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On Community

I will be updating the blog every month with some thoughts about the school and music education in general, please feel free to leave suggestions and ideas for future topics in the comments section.

 To start the ball rolling I will write a short series of articles focussing on teachers, students and prospective students respectively. This week, it being the first week, I will focus on the teacher.

For the teacher the question is: “How can the school help me to achieve the best possible teaching environment and what can I do to help other teachers?”

For me, the answer is in the question. A community of teachers is built on just that: A community. As a teacher myself, I recognize how defensive teachers are about their methods. The last thing any teacher wants is for an “administrator type” to interfere with techniques and methods honed over many hours of focussed attention.

Yet, we each bring our own talents and skills to the lesson environment and we can all stand to benefit from sharing ideas, even if that only involves sharing a wish-list. Even if your ideas are pie-in-the sky, you never know if there are other people with similar ideas or who know of ways to implement them. After all, some crazy schemes only require a critical mass of people to work and without a sharing of ideas that critical mass can never occur.

The idea is not so much to have a suggestion box as it is to open up some lines for discussion.

One thing that the school is planning for this year is to institute regular concerts as well as a combined year-end concert event. The regular concert series has in fact already kicked off and is being held in the large room of the Bukit Timah branch on some Sunday evenings at six, they have so far been a great success. So far, these have been limited to my own and Jaclyn’s students, but the idea is to open them up to other teachers as well to provide a regular performance platform for their students.

Given the size of the venue the concert is limited to five students (and their families) each performing two pieces. So it is a short, intimate programme on the order of 30mins. I would like to encourage and invite any teacher who wants to have their students benefit from this platform to let us know, so we can include them on the list for future concerts.

On a related note I can offer my own services for typesetting/transcription/transposition of any music you may need in your lessons. I use the LilyPond engraving programme and can assist you with most reasonable, timely requests in this regard.

Finally I would like to encourage anyone who would like to share some their ideas in the newsletter to let me know so I can include it in future editions.

 Resource

music school in Bukit Batok | piano teacher in bukit timah

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What should I do to get the most out of my piano lessons?

How should I approach my music lessons?

 The first edition of our newsletter focussed on the needs of the teachers in our musical community, now, as promised, this second edition of the newsletter will focus on the student.

For the student the question is: “What should I do to get the most out of my piano lessons?”

This question is not as simple as it first appears, each student will certainly get something unique from their lessons, be it simply the joy of playing an instrument, the discipline of working on highly technical material or even the self confidence gained from performing or participating successfully in examinations. Certainly, the reasons for studying an instrument are as many as there are students, or even more, because some students enjoy music lesson for more than one reason.

Whatever it is that brings you to music lessons, there are some things which you can do to get the most of your one-on-one time with your teacher. Playing music is only fun when you can successfully express yourself on your instrument, and gaining that expression requires the discipline to work on technical material. Success in music exam is a function of both, you need to be able to demonstrate technical proficiency and show that you are “having fun”, which in music means expressing yourself.

To achieve this state of affairs there are some simple things, universal things which you can do:

1) Practice. Yes unfortunately spending any amount of time with a teacher will require you to have something prepared to avoid having the lesson degenerate into a practice session. While “practice” lessons are not necessarily a bad thing, they are not the best way to spend your time with a teacher.

2) Pretend to have practiced. No matter how much self-disciplined we are, sometimes it is hard to find the time or motivation to practice. While this is normal, it is important to recognize that it is not something to be desired even if you are only playing an instrument for fun. Often though, we can for short periods of time get away with concentrating really hard in the lesson and trying to play as if we had practiced. While this may be stressful, it is a good habit, since the easy way to reduce this stress is simply to practice. This is not to say you should lie to your teacher, although they will more often than not know full well whether you have practiced or not, but simply that you play trying to sound as good as though you had practiced.

3) Be disciplined. Arriving on time, paying attention, preparing everything that needs to be ready beforehand, all these things help you get more value from your time with the teacher. Your teacher’s skills are best utilised by getting as much music in as possible. Also, learning from a teacher one-on-one has a lot to do with mutual respect, and respect for your teacher’s time is an integral part of this relationship.

 Finally, lest this entire newsletter be filled with do’s and don’ts, don’t hesitate to contact the school with queries or suggestions either in person or through the e-mail address given at the top of this newsletter.   Everybody has unique reasons and expectations from music and by voicing them we can sometimes recognize those which may otherwise have gone unfulfilled. The school has many projects in the works for the future and your needs may be met by one of these already. We may not be able to assist in every request, but we will try our best to improve your musical journey where possible.

 Resource

music school in orchard

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music school in Bukit Timah

[ph04th-blog]

Why music?

Why should I, or my child, study music?

 As a music teacher it always strikes me that it is very difficult to come up with a coherent answer for this question and I suspect many music teachers feel the same or are unable to reach a consensus with one another.

  Sure enough, as music teachers we have gone through the work of mastering our instruments and understanding the inner workings of musicality, but what do we have to show for it? What benefit, if any, are we bestowing on our students?

 Some possible reasons that people may want to learn music include:

- For fun

- To become a competent singer or instrumentalist

- To improve marks in school

- To improve cognitive abilities in some area (i.e. math, memory or concentration)

- A need to express oneself

Each of these reasons can be problematic in isolation:

Why would one want to do music for fun? It is hard work to master an instrument and the technical demands are unforgiving in the extreme. Surely fun can be had at a much lower price at the cinema?

What does being a competent singer or instrumentalist bring? In today’s marketplace even a virtuoso is hard-pressed to make much of an impact without a substantial marketing budget, and some very incompetent musicians do make an impact mostly due to substantial marketing support.

Music is quite a difficult subject to undertake for school, in many ways it is by far the most difficult subject at this level, requiring not only individual teaching but hours of dedicated self-study, much more than is required for even “hard” subjects like math and science.  It seems that a better way to improve marks would simply be to do some other subject instead of music.

As for cognitive abilities, it is certainly true that music does enhance cognitive ability by affecting moods, enhances brain mass in certain areas and indeed has a small but measurable effect on general intelligence as measured by I.Q. tests. But is this really enough, indeed other things (such as playing computer games and eating fish) have similar impacts.

Finally, the musicology profession is divided not just on what music expresses, but even on the issue of whether it expresses anything at all. Surely painting or drama is a better route to self-expression?

 The answer, I would venture, is that learning music is all of the above and more. Music is not something we do, it is something we are. It is a fundamental part of our humanity, so by studying it we are not so much learning a skill as learning about ourselves.

In music we can find every possible aspect of life reflected and related to one another: The visual logic of notation is connected to the language of a certain musical style and enhanced by social interaction and feedback as we play a piece for a teacher, and so we can continue. By mastering these skills we can learn what our strengths are, how to enhance them and how to use them to mitigate our weaknesses.

When we achieve this, music becomes fun, we become competent at our instrument, our confidence (and with it hopefully our marks) begin to improve, our cognitive abilities can be put to full effect and we can express ourselves not through music but by the very act of doing music.

 That is my answer, please feel free to add a comment to our blog page and say if you agree or disagree or if you have some other idea about why it is that we do music.

 Resource

cello teacher in Singapore | flute teacher in singapore

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On Exams

Practical exam season in upon us and we would like to wish all of our candidates for this session the best of luck in their final preparations. It may be worthwhile at this time to reflect on the nature and value of music exams in the Classical music education environment.

 The primary function that these exams fills is providing a framework of firm medium term goals without which the long time horizon of learning music may seem an endless expanse. As such these exams should be seen as a chance to look back at and apply what has been learnt and achieved rather than an end in itself.

 Secondly, playing exams offers an opportunity to showcase your skills in front of a genuinely independent third party who has no particular vested interest in reporting only the good. This unbiased opinion can be invaluable in establishing clear and meaningful milestones in the path of development.

 Finally, music exams offer the chance to focus on technical elements like scales and aural training that can very easily fall by the wayside in the absence of such structure and can be very difficult and disheartening to pick up at a later stage of development. These ancillary skills often make the difference between a mediocre and a good amateur musician.

 At the same time music exams are not without their flaws. Chief among these is the simple fact that the examiner has very little real time to examine the deep technical aspects of a student’s playing, so the testing is necessarily at a very superficial level both of musicality and technique. This can mean that a student who has an unusual (or indeed especially insightful) sense of phrasing or musicality, what separates the great from the good, can be severely penalised on occasion. From a technical point of view the superficial nature of examinations can result in technical “shortcuts” being rewarded because it sounds better now, even if it will result in a worse product later. From a teacher’s point of view this can be highly problematic because technical shortcuts cause enormous problems later on that may undo whatever was gained in musical training.

Music exams should be seen as a minimum, not an end in itself. Although everyone loves receiving a shiny certificate to celebrate their achievements it is hard to say that having a distinction in grade 5 piano means anything much in the greater scheme of things. Even a grade 8 certificate only shows that one has successfully learnt the basic techniques of playing the instrument and not much besides.

 With this in mind it is very important that one approaches the music exam as theatre, and not as an exam. In a sense it is a show, much like a stage performance of a play, and part of that show is some scenes with pieces, some with scales and some with aural training. Examiners will almost invariably mark based on their enjoyment of the performance as a whole, despite the marks being sub-divided into categories.

 At the same time music lessons are not about putting on a good show in exam situations, they ultimately about learning to play and master music, which is at once a more specialised discipline and a much broader field of study.

Resource

music school in Singapore

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violin teacher in singapore

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Gesture and expectation in music

One of the key features of my philosophy of music is the idea of gesture. The simplest way to understand a musical gesture is to think of the difference between a letter, phoneme and a morpheme in language: A letter being the smallest unit of written language, phoneme the smallest unit of sound and a morpheme the smallest unit of meaning. We can divide music up in a very similar fashion: Between notes, motives (figures) and gestures.

 By explaining gestures in this way I am making a subtle but distinct statement about the nature of the fundamental unit of musical meaning, what Phillip Tagg calls “musemes”. You see, a gesture is not musical in the usual sense of the word, a gesture doesn’t sound like anything at all. Instead, it feels like going forward, pulling back or simply staying still. Gestures are, in the words of Robert Hatten, “the energetic, significant shaping of time”.

 Beethoven is using the little note patterns to express gestures which in turn allows us to read meaning into the music. Each gesture being used here falls into one of the three basic categories (advancing, withdrawing or holding) and yet in the hands of a skilled composer an infinitely complex scene can be woven in the musical texture by using them.

 The advantage of interpreting music in this way is that simple elements like gestures are perfect for doing logic with, and indeed gestures can be shown to perfectly logical in their interaction: When a musical phrase goes forward and is followed by another musical phrase that goes forward we cannot help but conclude that the combination of the two phrases will also go forward.  In fact the logic of gestures is a little more complicated than this, but not so much that we need to concern ourselves with it here. So instead of music being some amorphous lump of feeling, it suddenly becomes a clear and distinct concatenation of unambiguous motions which move us to emotion not by some mysterious and inexplicable force, but by analogy to motion which we experience in our daily lives. Something which does not move much reminds of sadness because that is how we feel (and move) when we are depressed.

 Unfortunately the story is a little more complex than just gestures, because the problem with things that are perfectly logical is that they are also perfectly (in the strict sense) meaningless. We cannot learn anything new by doing logic; we can only learn something that was already implied (again in the strict sense of entailment) by what we already knew. So while gestures explain how we perceive music and why we are moved by it in the basest sense, they don’t really explain why we experience music as meaningful and important. To understand that aspect, we will need to investigate expectation and enculturation.

 After listening to that one may simply dismiss it as a musical joke, the kind of thing Haydn was always fond of. But there is more than that going on. Why do we find that sudden chord a humorous but not frightening? Unsettling but not horrifying?

Let us see what Haydn has done: He draws us in with the simplest of simple melodies, the kind of melody a child might sing, but when the resolution approaches he jars us in a very particular way. This is not some random loud chord; it is a chord we would have expected to be a forward gesture in any case, to signal the continuation of the melody. So the surprise is not that it is loud, but that it is VERY loud, completely inappropriately so. This forces us to re-evaluate everything we have heard before; suddenly it wasn’t a simple melody, but a ruse to lull us into a false complacency. What’s more, he could do it again! And he does. But not often, just once or twice more, because he is not trying to make us scared , just trying to get us to sit up and wait for the next shock, and by the end the joke is that it never comes again. We have sat on the edge of our seat listening to a banal children’s tune.

The particular note to pay attention to is the last note of the very first little figure and the last note of the text which it is later set to, the “lis” of “quit tolis”. It feels like the note is too low, and indeed it is it “should” have been a D to fit into the harmony below. Bach plays with this “wrong note” figure throughout the piece, see if you can pick up each time he uses it in this form and when it becomes more insistent towards the end. Finally when Bach does resolve it properly at the end there can be no doubt what Bach meant by the piece, Bach is symbolizing the taking away of sin of that wrong note.

 With Bach it is easy to read things into the music, but there can be little doubt that any careful listener can understand what is going here. What’s more, this is not a culturally specific affect either; one needs no knowledge of the Roman rite or the Christian context to understand the basic gesture of redemption that Bach is making. I use the word gesture here deliberately of course, because I wish to highlight the parallel between the simple museme gesture we discussed spoke about earlier and the complex abstract concept gesture made in this moment.

 Bach has taken an utterly mundane resolution of dissonance, something which so commonplace it hardly bears mentioning, and literally imbued it with infinite meaningfulness, a meaningfulness which the mere word “redemption” could hope to grasp.

 Resource

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second hand piano for sale

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Music Exams (p.1)

The theme for the next couple of month’s newsletters will be: “How to prepare for and succeed in music exams”.

  Music exams in general tend to employ a rubric system of marking, a system which can be effective in objectifying subjective subjects. A rubric, according to Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “a guide listing specific criteria for grading or scoring academic papers, projects, or tests”. For ABRSM exams, the specific criteria are as follows:

 - Accuracy, control and fluency

- Tonal awareness

- Musical character and sense of performance

As a rough guide, students who playing accurately with continuity and fluency can expect to at least pass the exams. Displaying some tonal awareness such as the ability to shape of phrases and control dynamics (loud and soft playing) is enough to earn a merit, but to earn a distinction one must also display the musical character and perform the music, rather than just play it.

 On the surface this seems like a commonsense scheme, and it certainly does make marking more objective. Unfortunately there are also some unintended consequences which accompany the system.

 Firstly, from a student’s perspective the progress is not as linear as it may appear. The first step in learning a piece of music is usually to establish the notes one hundred percent correctly and accurately. Next one can add the inflections and dynamics which make the piece so much more effective, however doing so makes playing all the notes correctly and accurately somewhat more difficult. Similarly, and to a much greater extent, adding drama and characteristic performance to a piece make it much harder to play every note correctly.

The result is that the development process is not linear; the piece can often become worse with more practice, a not infrequently observed phenomenon. The best way to combat this is to stop playing the piece (or at least practicing it deliberately) a few months before the exam for a month or so, allowing the final steps of practicing to recommence afresh. The key here is that this means that it is all but impossible to “cram” for a music exam in the way one could do for something like a history exam. This is certainly a positive consequence of this type of rubric, but the next is not.

 What happens in practice is that inevitably examiners bring their own set of prejudices on style to an examination, and one examiner may merely pass someone who may have received a distinction from a different examiner. This tendency forces a rather conservative style of exam candidates, conditions under which not candidates would perform equally well.

 The third point is that one may observe that no mention is made of technical proficiency. This makes sense when one considers that there is no one correct technique for playing an instrument. However, it does open up the possibility of adopting technical shortcuts which are extremely effective in the short run but require large technical changes later on in the student’s development. One example of this is where pianists are taught music effectively off by heart, virtually foregoing the chance of a good mark in the sight reading section.

 Unfortunately all such strategies have a very negative long term impact, using the above example it will become apparent at grade five or six level that the note reading is not up to par. In these cases it is virtually unheard of for a student to go back and correct fundamental errors, most just give up there and then, something which is completely unnecessary and avoidable.

 It is unfortunately the case that many examiners, when faced with a candidate who can express the musical character well enough and deliver a successful performance with a minimum of obvious note mistakes can get the highest marks in a particular exam, even if technical deficiencies are so severe that further development is virtually entirely precluded, possibly on a permanent basis due to the motivational issues cited earlier.

 It is important, therefore, to see music exams as processes and not goals in themselves. Achieving a distinction is certainly great feat and always the result of hard work, but ultimately if it is a question of getting a lower mark for being on a sounder technical footing or a higher one by ignoring fundamental technical and theoretical milestones one should always opt for the former. Similarly, one must have enough confidence in ones style and interpretation that a dissenting examiner giving an apparently wildly inaccurate mark does not have a hugely negative impact.

 Ultimately, if there is a shortcut to long term success and maximum benefit from music examinations it is this: Practice, practice and more practice, but also practice with feeling and, most importantly, understanding.

 Resource

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Music Exams (p.2)

Last month I discussed the criteria for the exam pieces which form the main body of the ABRSM exams. In the next few months I will talk about the other three sections of the practical exams: Scales, Sight Reading and Aural tests because although these tests comprise only 40% of the exam and often an even smaller proportion of the lesson time they are no less important than pieces for getting a good result.

 The first, and arguably most important of these tests, is scales. The importance of practising and mastering scales cannot be overstated, in that they provide the backbone of technique for any instrument. One way to think of it is to consider music as a mechanical series of steps and leaps and then recognize that the most efficient way to ensure that all of these actions can be performed accurately and fluently in various combinations is to practise scales. The other, equally important, rationale for scale practise is that they help establish and reinforce the understanding of keys and chord structures.

 Simply put, practising scales makes everything else you do in music easier and greatly enhances the enjoyment that can be gained by playing a musical instrument. Given this, there is only one truly acceptable mark for the scale section: 100%. And there is only one way to achieve this mark: Practise. Unfortunately examiners can be extremely harsh in marking scales, and they require that scales be not only mechanically and theoretically perfect (i.e. the right notes played well), but also that the scales have a pleasing musical shape. Scales should therefore be played in exams as if they are pieces in themselves.

 This way of marking is actually somewhat problematic from a teacher’s technical perspective, because it allows students to “fake” good technique by employing technical shortcuts. A good examiner will pick up such habits and punish them severely, but this is not guaranteed, especially in less common instruments (i.e. instruments other than piano and possibly violin).  Technical shortcuts are always problematic in the long term though and can lead to severe disappointment if a student later decides to carry on their studies to higher grades or even tertiary and/or professional levels only to discover that they need to relearn their technique from scratch.

 Students, therefore, should practise scales for their own benefit, not merely for the sake of exams. Technical exercises rarely produces immediate tangible results, but typically after a year or so of diligent work it really starts to show in general playing and then becomes enjoyable in their own right.

Resource

piano teacher in orchard | piano teacher in bukit batok

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Music exams (p.3)

Aural tests are often afforded the least attention in the preparation for exams. There are two reasons for this, which I will call the good news and the bad news.

 First, the good news:

 Aural tests are fairly straightforward in comparison to the rest of the exam. There is typically only one correct answer for each question, so there is little or no need to “editorialise”. What’s more, the answers can often literally be guessed on the basis of existing knowledge. Even better, aural ability is something that very readily responds to even a very small amount of training.

 Overall, then, aural tests are hard to fail, but hard to get a really good mark in too. It is important to spend at least some time on them in the lesson closer to exam time, as the extra marks from even a little practice can be invaluable.

 The bad news is that aural tests are a throwback to the now widely disregarded (if not disparaged) phenomenalist school of music philosophy. The basic idea behind this school of thought is that music is comprised of certain sound parameters (such as pitch, loudness, attack, interval and rhythm) and that, in order to be a competent musician, one has to be able to clearly perceive each of these elements.

 From a philosophical standpoint this is problematic because music is not actually comprised of these sound parameters, but rather of the musical effect which they create. It is far from clear how the perception and naming of sound parameters has a direct and measurable impact on the perception of music as such.

It isn’t exactly clear, for example, how being able to correctly name a perfect fifth (for example) outside of a musical context has any bearing on the ability to actually correctly perceive and contextualise the effect that a perfect fifth has in a piece of music.

 Much like I.Q. tests, these tests typically test for something that only has a real significance on music perception if there is a significantly deficiency, something certainly which is not the case for the overwhelming majority of students.

 They do form a part of the knowledge that every well educated musician should have though, but the payoff is so distant and so abstract that most teachers are understandably loathe to devote too much time on something that has so little direct bearing on the musical product here and now.

 Having said all that...

 ABRSM methodology does focus more on the musical side of training as well as having a marked penchant for singing at sight. Sight singing is a very useful skill for musicians, but for those without a natural ability to do it easily it can be a fairly difficult skill to pick up. Because of the amount of training required to get really good at it in return for a paltry few marks in the grand scheme of things it is unfortunately this section which teachers often decide to forego, opting instead to focus on more obviously valuable marks available elsewhere.

 This is certainly not an ideal state of affairs, but the solution awaits a more systematic philosophical treatment, the solution to which is not immediately obvious. Yet aural tests will remain in exams because being able to distinguish musical elements clearly is something that musicians should be able to do to some extent, even if testing for it leaves a whole lot to be desired in practice.

 Resource

music school in Bukit Batok | piano teacher in bukit timah

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Sight Reading

Sight reading is one of the most difficult sections in the exam both to practice and to teach, yet it ultimately forms the basis of the whole of classical music. Learning classical music isn’t about learning to play a couple of songs; it is about learning to read music.  One way to think about it is that in the entire progression from grade 1 to 8 the total amount of pieces combined amount to little more than two or three Beethoven sonatas, no more than 10% of his output of 32 sonatas (by some counts 38 if you include the early unnumbered sonatinas). When considering that this itself represents but a fraction of his piano music, and that is but a tiny fraction of his music that includes the piano (like lieder and concerti). To think of it another way: If you only want to learn to perfect reproduce music in a certain way, there is no need to learn to play an instrument. All you need is to learn to press the play button on an mp3-player.

 But how does one approach reading? The only real way, ultimately, is to read a lot.

 For pianists the difficulty in reading is with getting a geographical sense of the keyboard (i.e. playing without looking down at your fingers). The best way to practice this is to read four part harmonized hymns and chorales.

 For single line instruments (like the violin, oboe and flute) the problem is learning to maintain a steady beat, especially in contexts where the correct way to interpret a phrase is not immediately obvious because the player has got an accompaniment figures interspersed with melody line. The best way to practice this is to play contrapuntal music.

 I highly recommend watching this video  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aASBNbeREEY  in this regard. In it Ms Fabrizio argues the distinction between reading and decoding. This is certainly a valid point, but this is one of those cases where reading is nothing but decoding accurately at a given speed, unfortunately there is no way to systematically bridge that gap, except practicing until you can do it. In my estimation both reading and decoding are important skills to practice and the one informs the other.

 There is very little that I can add to Ms. Fabrizio’s advice though, so taking the time to review that video is well worth the effort.

 Overall, the best way to think of sight reading is that it is the heart of classical music. Learning to read music is what classical music is ultimately about, everything else is just ways to improve the ability to interpret music from a score. The ability to sight-read is the reward for practicing all the other things we practice.

 Resource

music school in orchard

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music school in Bukit Timah

[ph04th-blog]

Music and Motivation

There is a wonderful study, conducted at St Andrews University, which highlights the sometimes counterintuitive nature of human motivation. It is laid out as follows:

 A group of children and a group of chimpanzees are shown a box and a complicated series of actions required to retrieve a treat from it. Both the children and the chimps are able to replicate this ritual to reliably get the sweet with similar skill. The difference comes in when a panel is pulled back to reveal that the ritual was completely unnecessary and that the treat can be retrieved directly. The surprising outcome of this experiment is that the chimpanzees forego the ritual at this point, skipping directly to the treat they were after, but the children (despite being told that it is not required) continue to act out the entire sequence before retrieving their reward.

 Perhaps this outcome should not be surprising after all, but it does have profound implications for the understanding of why we enjoy listening to music, an act which has little apparent direct benefit at all. For human beings, it would appear, what is really valuable is not the reward, but the puzzle itself. The harvest is at least as rewarding as tilling the soil. What’s more, brain studies of musical appreciation indicate that it is exactly this sort of joy that is involved when we listen to music. This very thing is also the source of the so called “Mozart” effect, it has nothing whatsoever with Mozart’s music and everything to do with mood enhancing properties of “solving the puzzle” of music. People do better on intelligence tests when they are in a better mood, and if listening to Industrial Rock makes you happy it is exactly as effective as Mozart for the purpose of enhancing your score on an I.Q. test.

 If that explains why we enjoy (and hence be motivated to engage in) listening to music, it doesn’t explain why we should go to all the effort of practicing it. Certainly practicing scales for what seems like endless hours is not a rewarding puzzle to be solved, it is an awful hassle.

 Fortunately, psychologists studying motivation have an answer here too. When the task is simple a simple extrinsic reward does greatly enhance performance. The trick is that the extrinsic reward in the case of music is (or should ideally be), the joy of being able to play music well.

 This sets up a kind of feedback loop:  The more you practice, the easier it becomes to play pieces well, and being able to play pieces well is rewarding in itself, a reward that encourages you to practice more.

 Ideally this is how musical education should work, but in the real world the joy of holding a distinction certificate from a recognized exam body also helps to drive practice. In the short term this kind of extrinsic reward can be very useful, and lead to a much faster attainment of key technical disciplines. However, it is worth pointing out that a long deep understanding and involvement with the music itself (as opposed to the competition and exam culture that arises from it) is almost never the outcome of this approach. As a musician I would personally seriously question the value of such an outcome, others may not.

 One thing worth noting, though, is that one sure to destroy motivation entirely is to attempt to do music “for fun”. Practicing music is not in itself rewarding, and no amount of sugar coating will make it so. On the other hand, the reward from practicing music, whether that is the certificate or the intrinsic joy of making music, can only ever be reached through practice. If you go to music lessons expecting to have fun the one thing you can expect not to have is fun. Going to the cinema is fun, music lessons are hard work that makes having fun possible. Unfortunately there is no shortcut.

 Resource

cello teacher in Singapore | flute teacher in singapore

[ph04th-blog]

On the history of music education

So what is so bad about letting music education be based around the Romantic ideals of  spectacle and performance? Surely the fee-paying public have a right to be satisfied? The problem is that it easy to define what a spectacular performance is. The same problem applies to the modern ideal of novelty in music. It is really easy to judge a piece of music and say: This piece of music breaks new ground, therefore it is good. There are two problems here: Firstly our "simple criteria" for evaluating music has turned out to be quite useless for describing what we find to be "good" in music. Secondly, even if that were that were not the case, it turns out to be extremely easy to run into limits for such simple criteria. As Jarred Diamond pointed out in his book "Collapse", the Easter Island civilisation didn't die out because they were no longer capable of building large stone statues, but because they were building large stone statues to stave off catastrophe (presumably instead of doing something worthwhile instead). Is it really possible (or feasible) to have much more monumental music than the Turangalila? To push the human capacity for speed that much faster than Wang? To make music more intricate than Ferneyhough's? Is music a sport? Or is it an art? So when the music exam system rewards and awards those who can play more intricate music, faster and with greater dynamic flourish we have to ask ourselves: What has any of this got to do with training our youth to play music? The problem isn't testing people's ability to play fast or complicated music. The problem is with equating that with a test of musical ability. I would have no objection to calling such exams “technical exams”, but calling them “music exams” puts it in the minds of the examiner and candidates alike that there is some universally accepted standard for what “good” is in music, and by extension that the examiner knows what that entails. I am not arguing for a relativistic approach either, I believe that there is an absolute objective aesthetic reality. But I don't believe that we as the human race knows, or can hope to know conclusively, just what that reality is. I also believe that all exams (not just music exams) must take this truth into account.  We must either test for “goodness” in music, properly defined instead using some arbitrary proxy, or we must test for technical proficiency. Mixing the two is a recipe for irrelevance of the classical exam structure in broader culture.

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