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| The Pirates In Short Pants |
Now, divine air! now is his soul
ravished!
(Much
Ado About Nothing. William Shakespeare.)
One
of John Holt’s lesser known works, Never
Too Late
charts his struggle to become a musician late in life. As ever with
his work, the reader is given much to contemplate. At one point,
after writing of a child he once helped to play cello, he wrote (and
I paraphrase) that however good or bad he may have been as a teacher,
he never actually put anybody off music. That might seem like a
pretty average achievement. But it is something that few music
teachers could boast of.
Music
is an area of human activity which is least suited to those teaching
models commonly practised in schools – ie a person ‘with
knowledge’ dispensing it to those ‘without knowledge’. Music is
essentially speech of the heart. Appreciation of song and the
creation of it comes from our very centre and is primarily a physical
and emotional experience.
The adrenaline rush of the early Beatles, the wrenching pull of
Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony, the mischief of Mozart’s middle
period piano concertos – such stuff moves and tingles the flesh. If
a child wishes to play or participate in music, it is nearly always
because music has already touched them in some profound and joyful
physicality. They want to be able to speak the language that has
quite literally touched their heart. What a child can most helpfully
learn, is how to develop and pronounce this emotional physicality
that is already inside them. Whilst children do sometimes need
assistance with this, my problem with music lessons is that they
often press a child to sing from a place that has no physical and
emotional meaning for them – ie detached from their heart – and
then music becomes a chore. The first time a child is reminded to do
their music practice they are playing for some other reason than
their heart’s delight and their heart’s need to speak. Nobody
should have to drag their feet towards playing an instrument. In
learning to play, create and experience music, children should not
come to see it as a commodity transferred from the ‘knowing’ to
the ‘ignorant’ like a sack of coal from a lorry to a shed. That
will undermine any sense that they can derive music from within their
own self.
It’s
tempting for adults who think of themselves as unmusical, when they
hear a child say, “I’d like to play a musical instrument” or
watch them tinkling on an instrument, to think – hmm, I know
nothing about music – I’ll send this child to an expert – a
music teacher. Somebody who will be able to direct the child along a
programme in a ‘structured’ way. How easy that is. The
responsibility is then somebody else’s. The responsibility for
finding out what the child might want to do is then the teachers. The
trouble with this is that most teachers won’t really engage with
the child’s heart and where it lies musically. Even if they do,
they won’t do the
little that needs to be done and then leave the child to get on with
it.
They’re being paid to teach and teach they must. Most will have a
pre-set proscribed way of working – a set of steps or curriculum
they will insist the child follows. This will probably not speak to
that place in the child’s soul that is responding to music. And the
child’s part in the process – which is learning about what they
love and how to get more of it and revel in it, will be negated. They
will be deprived of taking responsibility for their own learning.
They will not learn how to learn or how to articulate music from the
centre of themselves.
The
child may like the experience of lessons for a while, but eventually,
usually pretty soon, however good the teacher, a child ends up fed up
of having a teacher calling the tune, and stops wanting to go. Or
they get used to music being detached from their centre and become
unable to live it and truly speak it. The fire goes out. Sometimes
never to be rekindled. I know very few children who have grown up to
be passionate musicians who have been pushed. I know of a great many
musicians who have been pushed who grow up to hate music and drop out
of it, often after mastering high grades and struggling through
degrees in music. I rarely meet a classical musician who has the love
of classical music that I have – and I have virtually no musical
training despite having been a part-time theatre composer for most of
my adult life. Many classical musicians I have talked to have dropped
out of orchestras and talk cynically or bitterly about their
experiences and their hatred of learning music from teachers. Even
the ones that still like playing can rarely compose. They are
terrified of it. Most (but not all) music teaching destroys a
student’s ability to speak musically. Their love of music is
shattered by instruction.
But
if you feel you are not musical, and can hear your child singing like
a nightingale in the nest and wonder should you be doing something to
help, what might that be? If playing an instrument is not something
that happened in your family, it can be a bit daunting when your
child suddenly wants to twang at a guitar or saw at a fiddle. Most
children however, need very little assistance. I have on many
occasions, helped young people play an instrument, or write a song
and given them ten minutes of my time, maybe even less. Often, the
next time I see them, they are well on the way to mastering their
craft and need no more help. There’s no great secret to it. Just
find out what a child would love to do or play musically and help
them do it. Helping them articulate what they want as a next step is
simple enough – only a question: what
would you really like to be able to play?
But it means properly engaging with the child. (impossible in
school.) There’s no-one going to do that location work better than
the child’s parents. A child might have seen a peer playing music
or hear a song that interests or inspires them. It is essential that
whatever caused the spark is traced. It is important because that
will mean a parent can get close to what the child is truly
interested in,
So
say for instance, a child wished to play a song on a guitar, the help
they need is only twofold. Firstly get a guitar. Easy enough usually.
Ireland must have more guitars per capita than all of Spain and Latin
America combined. Every 2nd
person I see in Cork is carrying one. An electric guitar is actually
easier for a child to learn on than an acoustic. If you’re buying,
this costs a bit more - as a small amp (80 euro) is necessary too -
but it’s much easier to hold the strings down on an electric
guitar, and a learner gets a better (more encouraging) sound. An
classical (Spanish) acoustic guitar can be a problem as the necks are
wide and hard to wrap the fingers around. A steel string acoustic is
painful to play until pads have developed on the finger ends, and
until the child develops strength in the wrist and fingers. The
resultant noise is buzzy and unconvincing which is off-putting for an
under confident beginner. The noise an electric guitar feels powerful
even if badly played - and power is important to people who are not
confident in learning an instrument. Don’t worry, anybody who
learns to play electric guitar, quickly falls in love with acoustic
guitars. Half sized guitars are easier for children to play too.
Secondly,
there’s the learning – and in fact the small amount of
information you’d need is on the net. Find out which song the child
really loves and then google it for chord diagrams, or buy a songbook
(with chord diagrams) from a music shop. Chord diagrams are just
pictorial representations of where to put the fingers on the guitar
neck. They’re very easy read and use. There’s even tutorials you
can follow on youtube. Most popular songs have relatively few chords
and if your child already knows the tune, a song book/chord diagram
will provide the chords that get strummed underneath. I think most
young people need ten minutes to half an hour with someone showing
them how chord charts work, then they’ve probably enough
information to go a long way on their own. I’ve found a Beatles
songbook helps learners alot. (Actually, one other thing – you’ll
need an electric tuner – circa fifteen euro.)
If
a child wanted to play piano I’d follow a similar procedure. If it
was a song, I’d get a piano chord book and work from that. If a
child wants to learn a classical piece then it might be necessary to
work from musical notation, but even this needn’t be too difficult
My eldest son started with the Moonlight Sonata because that’s what
he loved. I got some sheet music of a slightly simplified version of
it (basically the piece in an easier key – with less black notes)
and showed him how to play it section by section. My input was ten
minutes, twice a week, for about a month. I think it was important
that he
really
wanted to know how to play it
and my input stopped when he could. As I was able translate all the
crotchets and quavers for him, the process was reasonably easy for
us. But if you can’t read music, it wouldn’t be difficult to get
a friend (or a friend of a friend!) who can, to do exactly the same
as we did, thereby avoiding a programme of instruction set out by a
teacher. My son very soon learned how to read for himself and so
could progress without help.
From
this small bit of assistance, I’ve found most children can go a
very long way musically. Interest might wax and wane, but the process
of as little interference as possible, just helping when it is
absolutely necessary, means that the child only plays music when they
want to and when they have an inner desire to do so, thereby never
killing their love of music or playing it.
They gradually learn to locate and nurture the spark of musical
creativity for themselves, which is empowering and enables them to
self-structure other areas of their learning.
I’m
not saying one should never ask an expert or teacher for help in
aiding your child towards their goal. But make damn sure it is
going as directly as possible to that goal. And be prepared to check
with quite a few different people whether it is
the
most direct route possible.
Many music teachers would insist on all sorts of ‘preparatory
study’ before allowing a pupil to progress. When I took up the
piano at the age of 30, I desperately wanted to be able to play
Chopin and Rachmaninov. For three months I was playing Three
Blind Mice
and Home
on the Range
in a music school with a very nice teacher, before I gave up and
bought myself the sheet music of Rachmaninov’s C sharp minor
Prelude. A very demanding and difficult piece – so full of flats
that to read a single chord took fifteen minutes of patient study.
Because I really wanted to play it, I was playing it within a year,
without much outside help. I knew a musician who answered my
occasional questions about reading the music.
If
you are interested in helping your child approach music, one of the
best things you can do is play and listen to music yourself without
reference to your children. If you know nothing about music, learn
something. Learning to read music is fairly simple. Much
simpler than it looks.
Let your own love for music be in the house. Learn an instrument
yourself. Listen to the music you love. Not with an aim of
indoctrinating your child with your choices, but if you enjoy the
music you love, you will be creating an environment in which music is
valued. Go out to listen to music, a band you’re interested in or
an orchestra. And have fun with music. If your children are around
someone who plays with music, they will be more likely to be able to
do so themselves.
As
my own children were growing up, pre-teens, I was constantly making
up songs for theatre shows I was involved in. I made these up around
the children, snatching half hours here and there. I never thought
that what I was doing was in any way educational. So I was quite
shocked – astounded even – when my youngest son, at the age of
ten, out of nowhere, never having showed any musical inclination,
invited us to listen to a song he had made up that was lyrically and
musically complete and arranged. By living with someone who often
composed music, he’d drunk it all in subliminally. He never needed
lessons – and in fact went on to teach me more about music than I
ever have taught him.
Helping
a child build the fire of their musical passion, one must go twig by
twig. As slowly as the child needs to go. And often that means
leaving six months or six years before offering the next bit
of help. Grown ups just need to keep out of it until asked, and then
give just as little or as much as is requested – sometimes only a
single word or a single chord might appropriately be offered. The
process, like all real learning, (ie not the battery farm cramming of
school) needs oxygen, space, time. Western civilisation seems to
cause a detachment from what our hearts yearn to say. So although the
heart’s utterance is rarely so profound as in song, we are easily
struck dumb. That is why much gentleness and sensitivity is needed in
helping children speak the most sublime and universal of languages.
