Music Lessons

[Joseph K]

Today I had my second guitar lesson from one Dr Joel Bell (whose existence I was made aware of by Richard Barrett). While it didn't feel as fundamental in certain respects as the first lesson, which provided the clarity I was looking for in what and how to practice amongst other things, including the kind of exercises that form the basis for any guitarist - or other musician for that matter - learning jazz which is essentially - necessarily - a never-ending lifelong pursuit, it certainly provided a motivation and rejuvenation that's obviously welcome. The first quarter of an hour or so was spent discussing picking technique (with a plectrum) since I've felt that I haven't made the kind of progress in terms of increased speed that I might have hoped - well, I won't go into too much or any detail in fact, but suffice to say being able to discuss things and observe Joel (via zoom, of course) has been psychologically as well as practically beneficial and I've since felt able to pick somewhat quicker. And he's nice and generous with time.

So, I wonder - for the musicians/instrumentalists/composers on the forum - what have been your experiences with teachers? Did you find your lessons, whether private, at university, school or college etc. useful and inspiring?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

This is a massive topic. As one who has been pupil/student and then teacher of music for almost as long as I can remember, it’s difficult to know where to start. The relationship between student and teacher is fundamental. If the two gel, success is much more likely.
Only yesterday, I was asked to teach a 15 year old boy via zoom. Not sure about that. I’d want a whole sea of cameras to check and guide posture, hand positions and other things. I understand many are having success with this and I’m keen to learn more.

[johnb]

So, I wonder - for the musicians/instrumentalists/composers on the forum - what have been your experiences with teachers? Did you find your lessons, whether private, at university, school or college etc. useful and inspiring?

As very much an amateur I've found private lessons (on the classical guitar and, for a time, on the piano) to be absolutely invaluable. Of course it depends very much on the teacher and on the teacher/student "fit" but, in a classical context, what I found is

- a teacher will provide a motivation and encouragement
- a teacher can hear and see things that the student on their own is unlikely to be aware of and can guide a student in developing both technically and musically in ways that they are unlikely to be able to be able to do on their own.
- a student will progress much, much faster with a teacher
- a teacher can correct technique, hand positioning etc before bad habits get entrenched
- a teacher is someone to discuss things with
- etc, etc, etc.

[cloughie]

As very much an amateur I've found private lessons (on the classical guitar and, for a time, on the piano) to be absolutely invaluable. Of course it depends very much on the teacher and on the teacher/student "fit" but, in a classical context, what I found is

- a teacher will provide a motivation and encouragement
- a teacher can hear and see things that the student on their own is unlikely to be aware of and can guide a student in developing both technically and musically in ways that they are unlikely to be able to be able to do on their own.
- a student will progress much, much faster with a teacher
- a teacher can correct technique, hand positioning etc before bad habits get entrenched
- a teacher is someone to discuss things with
- etc, etc, etc.

I agree with all that - as it is now 4 months since my last piano lesson - I have kept up my playing and started learning new pieces but expect much remedial work will be required when I resume lessons.

[BBMmk2]

Strange how with any kind of education, with music teachers, etc, it’s always how they present their subject. I’ve had some very good ones. I think two stand out for me. When I first started at the age of 8, my brass/percussion teacher was very good. He took me on various trips, like Changing of the Guard, etc. He was ex-Grenadier Guards. My last piano teacher has to be the best of all of them, though. She was an FRCO!

[Serial_Apologist]

My formal musical education came to an end on leaving school aged 18 in 1964.

Previous to that, there was my father's collection of 78s, and soon, LPs, and the Third Programme. At age 12, it was at my suggestion that he included "Le sacre du printemps" among a package of stereophonic LPs bought to mark his purchase of a stereo radiogram, although I had only read of the work. My mother - a fine pianist and LRAM graduate, who had broadcast on BBC wireless in the 1930s - had unsuccessfully tried teaching me rudiments of piano playing from age 6. I was then put under the tutelage of a Dr Philip Wilkinson - a fine composer as well as virtuoso pianist who should have been better known - who discovered that my main gifts were in the vocal rather than pianistic department. I was made the main soloist in the anthems presented in school services (high Anglican), and considered the finest treble (boy soprano) voice in memory, teachers who had taught at the school going back to the 1930s claimed. Some voice coaching was necessary to correct a few London vowels and consonants to be able to carry the pronunciation deemed necessary for works by Purcell, Arne, Dyson and Howells, to which end I was recruited to play Pride in a school production on "Dr Faustus", saying the lines starting "I am Pride" in the manner of Laurence Olivier over and over again until all traces of Oi and W had been eliminated. I called these my "electrocution lessons".

At age 13 I was put in for a Choral Scholarship - without it being explained to me to what end. This involved not only singing prepared parts and sight-reading, but piano playing and a written music theory exam. I remember the examiner playing a note on the piano and asking me to say what it was. He would then play another note, and so on, interposing each note with a succession of chords to "put me off". These chords became ever more unrelated and chromatic as a sequence, but by that point I had been able to retain the last chord in my head, and could quickly run up the intervals so a to know what the relationship was, and state the note correctly. The theory consisted, among other things, in transposing tunes presented in score, knowing all the key signatures, note duration values and subdivisions, but one had to write an essay on "The piece of music which has impressed me most" or some such title - for which Dr Wilkinson had pre-prepared me an essay on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony - giving me a lasting grounding in such formal terms as counterpoint, sonata form, rondo, variation, fugato and scherzo. Unfortunately the piano playing part included sight-reading too, always (to this day) my weakness, and I struggled halfway down the page before realising the piece in question was "The Skater's waltz" - which I could have fluked my way through "by instinct", had I realised. Because passing required passing in every category - like the driving test - I failed. Instead I appalled my snobby family by going into industry and involved in class struggle, to get my own back. Ineluctably that gave me the set of principles to which I've adhered since, and which in my experience have always made sense of "the world". It was only some 20 years ago that I discovered, on interviewing a contemporary modern composer for a magazine, what passing could have gained me. The composer in question, the same age as myself, gained admission to Cambridge on the strength of passing.

Luckily the school record library contained a good many recordings of what I then considered "modern music" - indeed I had been tempted to write my essay on the subject of Sibelius 2 rather than the Beethoven; in retrospect of course, I had nothing to lose. On the other hand that proved to be step one on the journey of musical self-education on which I have been travelling since - acquainting myself with what indeed turned out to be the more reliable critics' choice in regards to the most salient developments, figureheads and trends of 20th century classical music, and of jazz and associated musics, in tandem.

That's about it, really. My confessional.

[Joseph K]

Thanks for the replies - and especially to S_A's. I come a family where no one is particularly musical, a few like rock and pop and a couple of grandparents like or liked classical music, that's about it.

None of the teachers I've had have been too inspiring up until taking these jazz guitar lessons, but before these I'd say my best experience was at university in Bangor, where I encountered a few lecturers I liked, who led by example, while a few weren't so good (some had decided that students wanted to be entertained, as well as learning about the topic).

I remember being told, as a 11 year old when I asked the guitar teacher for some chords to learn, to look online - this must have been 1999. Much of my favourite music was various kinds of jazz, not necessarily featuring guitar, though a few guitarists were heroes from mid-to-late teens onwards. But while at uni I sort of rejected the guitar for a time in favour of the piano, which culminated in what could have been my last year there which I failed. This was a year where, in my zeal for piano instead of guitar, I didn't bring the latter with me at all! (I was still playing classical guitar at this point) I realised that a central reason for that being such a miserable year was the lack of guitar. The following year was much happier thanks to guitar, being round nice people more and getting heavier into jazz and as I've mentioned before, smoking weed which, while it served a very real anti-anxiety and pleasurable purpose for the duration of the year, also turned on me in an unpleasant way in post-university life.

Since then, although I got somewhere in subsequent years on the jazz guitar, I ended up giving it up in 2016 with a sense of defeat, owing to unpropitious mind-set and social circumstances and returned to classical guitar. I did have a few lessons with a classical guitar teacher, though after the second when I inquired after a third lesson, he never replied to me - I assume he felt I was doing everything right and he had nothing more to teach me! Anyway, the rest is history, since a few months after those lessons with him, I gave up classical guitar and returned to jazz, with a newly-found sense of discipline and zeal. I wouldn't say my time playing classical guitar was entirely wasteful, for, while the technique, mainly right-hand technique, is quite different, some of the principles are the same e.g. the main, nay, the only movement for classical guitar right-hand technique should come from the fingers themselves (if the arm should move at all, it should only be to move the hand to produce either sul tasto or sul ponticello tonal characteristics) so a 'bouncing arm' is something I did for a while in the process of improving my technique until I managed to get most the movement from the fingers; by the time I was getting somewhere in this area, I quit! Likewise, the main movement for plectrum technique should be from the wrist and I now know that the bouncing arm is a necessary stage that I'll go through in the acquisition of good technique.

Well, sorry for this rather technical digression but: I think I've learnt most from myself, and books. Even the lessons I'm now taking, I recognise what he's saying from things I've read and books I've got (which is quite a lot). However: the lessons are good because they provide focus and motivation, and because we are social creatures. People like Mike Stern and Oz Noy continue to take lessons throughout their lives, despite how formidable they are!

[Serial_Apologist]

Indeed, Joseph - Tony Benn used to say that education should proceed throughout life, because there's never nothing new to learn. However, I have to hand it to yourself, or anybody else taking up guitar, that unless one is restricting oneself to the simple matter of strumming chords - which was what persuaded thousands of teenagers to take up Skiffle in the late 1950s - it's a most difficult instrument to master even the simplest rudiments. I bought a steel stringed guitar in the early 1980s in the belief I would never get my own keyboard instrument, paying some £50 for a large-bodied instrument of the type used by Country 'n' Western musicians, and after struggling with just moving from single tone to single tone and starting to get callouses was later told I would have managed better with a nylon-stringed Spanish classical type. The only thing I learned (and how now forgot) was the jazz definitions for chords, which were on the accompanying handbook with diagrams showing finger positionings. Ah, so that's what a C sharp diminished minor (of whatever!) sounds like! Then I picked up a little battery-operated Casio keyboard for a few hundred quid, and it stands leaning against the bookcase by my sofa, within easy reach when the TV ads come on. And the class struggle has never looked back.

[Dave2002]

It's many years since I had any formal music lessons, and perhaps I should have some now.

My flute teacher was very good, and perhaps she did know some things about psychology as well as the instrument. I didn't always agree with her about ways to play pieces, but one day I mentioned this to my father who gave me what at the time seemed good advice. He said "She is a very good professional player. You don't have to agree with her, but if you try to play as she advises you to, once you've mastered the techniques you can play things how you like, later on".

I tried to follow their advice after that.

[Serial_Apologist]

It's many years since I had any formal music lessons, and perhaps I should have some now.

My flute teacher was very good, and perhaps she did know some things about psychology as well as the instrument. I didn't always agree with her about ways to play pieces, but one day I mentioned this to my father who gave me what at the time seemed good advice. He said "She is a very good professional player. You don't have to agree with her, but if you try to play as she advises you to, once you've mastered the techniques you can play things how you like, later on".

I tried to follow their advice after that.

There's a lot of truth in that. And the old adage about practice making perfect being true rests on the reality of "muscle memory", which means over time acquiring the technique I feel I need to play the kind of music I do by simple repetition until it becomes automatic.

[cloughie]

There's a lot of truth in that. And the old adage about practice making perfect being true rests on the reality of "muscle memory", which means over time acquiring the technique I feel I need to play the kind of music I do by simple repetition until it becomes automatic.

Absolutely - the laborious scales being a prime example - but I think my aims, though I may never achieve them are to be able to sight read a new piece and be able to play it reasonably fluently and be able to accompany myself in a few chosen standards.

[Dave2002]

It's not only muscles though - and I don't know how it works. I have been playing recorders more seriously for a year or more now - not very good, and I still make lots of mistakes. Recorders have some rotten fingering - but I find that if I'm playing I almost unconsciously adjust the pitch of individual notes, or use alternative fingerings to try to achieve a better result. I do this even while sight reading or playing at speed - and I don't know how this works. Unfortunately this is worse than playing the piano, as different instruments require different wind pressure and different alternative fingerings - for example two different soprano recorders, or trebles.

Obviously I get this wrong quite often - but I'm surprised that quite often I'm doing this in "autopilot" mode. I don't know what brain processes cause the seemingly endless repetitions of music to improve over time, and I'm not sure whether anyone really does. Clearly the "memory" isn't in the muscles, though it may be a combination of effects within the central nervous system.

Repetition does help, though, and sometimes the use of looping technology shows benefits. Also some really boring and difficult exercises do pay off, though they are tedious to do. I'll post some links for other recorder players in a short while.

[johnb]

There's a lot of truth in that. And the old adage about practice making perfect being true rests on the reality of "muscle memory", which means over time acquiring the technique I feel I need to play the kind of music I do by simple repetition until it becomes automatic.

Yes, but with the proviso that practice makes permanent rather than perfect - i.e. it all depends on what and how you practice and is why entrenched bad technique can be laborious to correct.

So much of what we do in general life depends on what we loosely call "muscle memory", whether it typing (as I am doing now), driving a car, even I guess walking.

[rauschwerk]

I showed early promise at the piano, and at the age of 7 I was studying a Mozart sonata (K332 1st mvt) with a Mr Mehta of Peckham. He had had lessons with Solomon but neuritis prevented him from following a concert career. Looking back over nearly 70 years, it seems to me that he had the ideal combination of gentleness and rigour.

Sadly, that came to an end when my family moved abroad. I was so devastated by this turn of events that I refused to go near the piano for about a year. My lessons then resumed with a teacher in Kuala Lumpur, but pretty soon we returned to the UK and I was sent as a boarder to a highly academic but very unmusical school. I then had lessons with a visiting teacher who had been the school's music master and was a local organist and choirmaster. He wasn't much good. Having passed Grade 8, I expressed a wish to learn Bartok's Op.14 Suite. He refused to teach it, and indeed laughed at the music. I have often wished that I had had the balls to say I wanted another teacher!

I was no luckier with my woodwind teacher - a peri clarinettist who had been a professional orchestral player. He was irascible and didn't have much idea about teaching. However, he liked my piano playing and I got to accompany quite a few of his other pupils. That was a pleasure and I learnt a lot from it. For the last 40 years, I have devoted the bulk of my pianistic efforts to the art of accompaniment.

When I left school I had quite fallen out of love with the piano and didn't play at all for a few years. Eventually I re-thought my technique with the aid of books by Heinrich Neuhaus and Gyorgy Sandor (public libraries used to have such books 50 years ago!). But I never had any more actual lessons.

[Joseph K]

I think a central point regarding practice, repetition etc. is that in repeating an exercise or piece of music, one's physical self is being guided by one's ears and through practice physical technique is acquired through finding the most economical way of doing something.