When I first started playing ocarinas in 2011, there was an atmosphere among the members of the 'The Ocarina Network' forum of: the ocarina is an instrument that you can learn yourself. The message that came across in people's sentiment in the community was a desire for self-directed learning, and the facility to learn to play music that people themselves enjoyed listening to.
To me, this felt like a direct counter against the dictatorially controlling teaching approaches common for most instruments. Most music education systems are / were based around a 'method', which rigidly defines a set of exercises and music pieces that a student must learn to play.
The problem here is that these systems leave little scope for learner agency. As it is rare to communicate what the function, value, and expected outcome of the exercises is, they can easily feel like pointless and boring work. Also, because everything to learn is being dictated to them, learners are not encouraged to learn music that they already know and enjoy. People may not be encouraged to seek out information for themselves, or be shown how to do so.
I also feel that these method systems hold a too narrow expectation on what the learner's end-goal is. Almost unanimously, these systems expect that the learner's goal is to play in an orchestra, failing to recognise that music is an extremely diverse art form with many genres, and many other outcomes that a learner may be drawn to.. The vast majority of people today do not listen to orchestral music, besides in the context of other media like games and films.
If one were to draw an analogy to relationships, this kind of teaching approach is like a situation whereby one parter is controlling everything the other partner is allowed to do, 100% of the time.
However, the fully self-directed approach held among many members of 'The Ocarina Network' is not an ideal solution either. The process of learning instruments is very complicated and It is easy to fall into learning approaches that will consume years of time, leaving the learner little to show for it. Learning only music that the student has chosen will also limit the scope of things they are exposed to, and thus what they are able to learn.
I think that there is a need for a robust learning approach for neurotypes that reject external control, and i have some thoughts on how to work towards this.
However, I can not offer unanimous solutions for all people for whom the current music teaching approaches don't work. The problems faced are surely more diverse than what I am able to percieve, and a much more serious study would be needed. I do strongly believe that these are things we need to be discussing more.
Moving beyond controlling teaching approaches
I think that controlling teaching approaches have evolved for a few reasons.
- People who are new to an instrument do not understand what they need to practice in order to improve, or know what questions to ask in order to find out.
- A driven and self motivated learner who wants to learn to play well, can still easily fall into a practice approach that will not lead to good results.
- Another factor may be individuals that are not naturally intrinsically motivated. Within this article I'm going to ignore that, because people in the target group seem very driven to learn music they are personally inspired by.
The point is then to guide people towards effective learning approaches, without directly telling them what to do. I would recommend learning about how music learning approaches work, and pay attention to how they are designed.
By showing learners more about how the learning process itself works, they have the information needed to make better choices around learning the music they want to play.
I can see ways of doing this both for a self-directed learning approach, and for approaches that involve a teacher or mentor. This could be embedded with a cultural system around an instrument where people are able to share information about effective learning approaches with new players, or direct them towards relevant resources.
How to know what to practice
Regarding knowing what to practice, I think it helps to realise that music teaching can be split into two separate entities:
- A corpus of skills and information that a player needs to know to be able to function effectively.
- How this information is communicated to the learner.
A method being a static set of rules all learners must pass to be considered 'good enough' is a problem because, due to genetics, some people genuenly can not do some things regardless of how much they practice. Rather, it shod be viewed as a set of guidelines.
Having a clearly defined corpus of what needs to be learned is helpful for directing both teachers and learners, but this information should not dictate how a learner should learn it. Existing teaching approaches like established music grade systems provide a good reference for this, Instead of viewing them as a fixed set of stuff to force upon learners, view it as a source of information to draw from as needed.
It is also important that exactly what one needs to know depends a great deal on the situation that a player wants to play in. Existing music teaching methods often make gross oversights here, such as how a lot of classical method teaching massively de-emphasises ear training and playing by ear, due to the myopic focus on producing orchestral musicians who will always play from provided sheet music.
Instead of pushing fixed plans with expected outcomes, expose to a wide range of things and see what you / the student latches on to or is good at.
Then work from this point to optimise skill in this.
Learning resources need to support skilled outcomes that are not 'orchestral musician'.
As mentioned in the introductory thoughts, many existing formal music education systems for other instruments are designed around an ideology of training orchestral musicians.
However, you should not feel obliged to this end goal, just because you want to play well.
For example, playing an instrument does not have to imply playing on stage. There are many other situations where music can be played, such as the model of Irish sessions where people play in a group for their own enjoyment. Many people also enjoy playing instruments as a solo activity, which must not be invalidated.
Children especially should not be forced into playing on stage, as this may be off-putting and cause them to drop music entirely.
The focus of method systems of creating expert orchestral musicians, creates a very competitive and cut-throat environment, which is itself off-putting for a certain subset of learners.
Thoughts on the role of teachers
Some people really like being told exactly what to do and closely directed, and for those kinds of people the traditional 'controlling' teaching approach would work well for them. However, there are also neurotypes that will intrinsically reject any kind of external control, and anything they did not personally choose to engage with.
Fora teacher, what is the student looking tor? Instead of blindly foisting a monolithic teaching approach onto all students uniformly, it is valuable to be attuned to what this individual student wants:
- Do they want a series of exercises that they can practice blindly, with no awareness of the design choices behind those exercises?
- Do they want a logical / informational approach, where the student first logically understands how the process works, and then uses this information to effectively create their own learning approach?
- Some people will function well in groups, others function better individually.
Listen to what a student is asking for, and act on this. An interest or desire to learn to play a musical instrument often begins with seeing a performance that the learner finds inspiring, and it is worthwhile working directly with this, and showing them how to play this, not getting into technical exercises at all.
Make information exist in the environment of the student, and engage with them when they start to express interest in it by their own choice.
For some people, learning the whys behind the design of exercises is critical for them to be able to learn anything at all. For me personally, unless I understand where an exercise came from and what value it has to me, my subconscious will reject it as valueless
It seems pretty common for a teacher to have a student eagerly wanting to learn to play a given song, then start pushing technical exercises. I think that this is a bad idea dof a student that needs to retain control, because whey want to learn the song and the exercises seem to be pointless in that content.
From this basis, it would be easy to show the student how to extract exercises from this music and as such, they can see clearly where the exercise came from. Showing through practical demonstration is better than telling or explaining.
Child focused systems that are very much fixated on ideologies of creating expert level orchestral musicians. I have ethical objections to this because it is forcing something onto someone before they have the conscious ability to choose if they want to do that.
There are multiple ways of approaching things, and being aware of that and able to adapt is important.