When Children Become Musicians

A child, who is learning to play any musical instrument, will undoubtably learn at some point that he or she is a music making machine and not actually a musician.  I recently read a blog by my current graduate Music Education professor Brandt Schneider who described how students are becoming "repertoire machines."  He believes that teachers put too much emphasis on the amount of repertoire their students learn.  This focus on repertoire is due to the pressures from performing in concerts and competitive festivals.

If teachers let pressures dictate what our music students are working on in class, then we start to become a factory; churning out people who can read notes on a page.  Being a musician is much more than what someone with a musical instrument can play from sight.  A musician can play by ear, can utilize the full range of all the keys, incorporate different styles and genres, as well as read music.  A musician is like a doctor, we don't want our doctors referring to medical texts for every situation they find themselves in, nor do we want our musician relying on scores and parts to produce music.  We want musicians and doctors to have a full range of abilities that they feel confident in performing.  There is nothing wrong with referring to a text, but overall we want people who can think on their feet and apply all the knowledge they have learned into any situation.  We are not creating line workers to produce musical notes, we are creating musicians, and even more, people.  Mr. Schneider believes that students should focus less on learning repertoire for performance sake and rather focus on the key elements which make someone a musician.  These elements are defined in the national standards for music education and are as follow: musical discipline, technique, theory, and composition.  It is necessary for our students to become proficient in each of these areas and Mr. Schneider described in his blog, many ways for students to begin incorporating these elements into their learning.  I personally agree with this but would like to take it a step further by saying that this should start at a very early stage in a students' musical development.  I think that learning songs and changing them based on key or style opens many doors for students later on.  If we wait too long, say high school, to start this then we can lose a lot of time trying to introduce these concepts as well as lose lots of repertoire opportunities.  I think that students should be able to play various repertoire in their high school classes because by high school, students should have an understand of the pieces they play as well as why they play them.  Starting young music students off with too much repertoire does not make sense because young players may not know why they are playing these pieces nor what they are supposed to be learning from them.

I fully agree with Mr, Schneider's approach to incorporating the aforementioned elements, but I think that this process should begin as early as possible and build into playing and actually performing repertoire through high school.  

I believe that some of the best musicians are the ones who are able to jump into any genre, with any group, understand what is happening musically immediately, and be able to play and create music with this group almost instantly.  This is what we need to be training or students for, to be musicians, not just music makers.  I think that developing students' abilities to hear music and feel music in more than just a repetitive way will move students towards becoming the best musicians they can be.