On The Topic of Creating Love for Music and Performing

“How can you create a love for music and performing in your program?”

Truly, the million dollar question. And in response to all the other million dollar questions I’ve been presented with over the course of my life, I’ll start off by answering the same way: “I don’t know.” I really don’t. I don’t even have a program yet, let alone a well-developed game plan for cultivating what is arguably the human being’s most powerful and perplexing emotion: love. But, in my attempt to provide a decent answer to the question, I need to begin by talking a little bit about my experiences with music at a young age.

I didn’t always love music. Actually, I didn’t even like it, not even when I was forced to take piano lessons at age 4, nor during the 9 years of weekly lessons thereafter. No kid likes being forced to do something, I suppose – they like to choose their own adventure. I guess my parents started to see that when I became a teenager, and though they still insisted I take some sort of music lesson, they allowed me to switch to guitar. I enjoyed playing guitar about halfway through the first lesson, and then I didn’t really enjoy it anymore. My parents struggled to get me to practice. They set a strict timer every other day, reluctantly letting me go after I sat there nonchalantly and unpassionately strumming the three “Smoke On The Water” chords for 20 minutes straight.

I think about my childhood every time I hear a fellow colleague tell me about their early love affairs with the world of music, and how they knew from the start that this was their passion, their future, their dream. I thought about it as I was watching the movie, “Chops.” There were interviews with kids who were 11 and 12 years old, and they talked about how much music meant to them. They brought up names like Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Wynton Marsalis when asked who their heroes and idols were (I think my hero when I was 11 was either Mike Piazza or Pikachu.) They cared about practicing, and about honing their craft, and the thrill of performing with others, and personal success, and they were light years away from being able to buy a beer. I’ll go ahead and say it – I was jealous. I kind of still am.

Granted, over the years of taking piano lessons, I had become relatively decent. But being good at something isn’t quite enough to inspire passion towards it. I mean, I’m pretty good at riding a bike but never in my life have I aspired to become a competitive BMX rider like Dave Mirra. I remember going to high school, and how I wanted to join the marching band because my older sister was doing it and she told me how much fun they had at band competitions and whatnot. The problem was, I didn’t play anything that a marching band requires, so naturally, I was thrown into the Pit. My years of piano lessons made the xylophone seem like an old friend, and I was easily able to figure it out and start making some music. The other kids in the Pit, especially the upper classmen, were impressed that I picked up mallet percussion so quickly. After about only a week or two into the band season, word got around that I was a “Freshman Prodigy” which of course was hardly the case – I had simply taken piano lessons and they hadn’t.

I think it was the social praise and attention from my peers that first made me start to take performing music seriously. It made me want to get better, to “show them a new trick” as I started mastering more advanced percussion literature, a lot of it in my spare time. I sought out new pieces and started listening to more marching band literature, which eventually took me into the world of concert band literature, to orchestral pieces, to early classical music, and so on. By the time senior year rolled around, it was a no brainer that I wanted to go on to study music – it was one of the only things in school I got enjoyment out of.

This is where the original question gets tricky, because for me, I didn’t acquire the love for music and performing from my teacher. Truthfully, none of my music teachers growing up were anything special, and certainly none of them inspired me to develop my personal sense of musicianship or to seek out exciting musical opportunities. I didn’t go to an Arts high school like the kids in “Chops” where the faculty were recruited solely for their devotion and contribution to the field of music, art, dance, or drama. My private teachers were just elderly, retired people who knew a few tunes and could get beginners by – none of them had degrees in music or a sterling reputation for greatness. No, I didn’t get it from them – mostly, I had to find it myself.

So I can’t answer the question like others could: drawing back and thinking about what their cherished music teachers did to inspire them. I have to answer it by thinking, “What do I wish my music teachers had done to inspire me? What would have facilitated my path to music?” For me, this starts with firmly rooting your principles into your program and having a set of expectations that cannot be swayed, and most importantly, I have to believe in these principles with all of my heart. I look at the principles of Wynton Marsalis, highlighted in the movie I watched: “Try to find the best teachers. Listen to the finest players. Be true to the music.” I think how simple they sound, but how fundamentally true they are. Three simple directions that are quick to establish sincerity and suggest a solid reputation. I look at Charlie Parker’s words: “Master your instrument. Master the music. Then forget all that [stuff] and just play.” Within those words are nothing but the truth – the keys to creative thought, the genesis of what it means to be a critical thinker, to think like a musician, as author Robert Duke urges our students to do in the classroom.

I wish my music teachers introduced new music into my life. I wish they told me why they were so significant in a way that a child could understand, not in a way that a seasoned musicologist would understand. I wish I was asked how different music made me feel, and what pictures or feelings came into my mind when I listened to different artists tell intricate and inspiring stories using no words. Because that’s a way that hidden door could be opened – that door, lying dormant in young, impressionable minds, that can lead you down the road to pure creativity, to a world where the teacher doesn’t bark orders, “Sit down, shut up, stop drumming on the table, focus on your book and turn your mind off to everything but pre-calculus” and instead you can stand up and fly out the window with all of your friends to the top of the Statue of Liberty, or to Egypt, or Spain, and take in all the colors, the sounds, the smells, and think to yourself, “What a wonderful world!” Because, that’s what music has the power to do. That’s the reason behind music as entertainment value. Because it takes us somewhere else for a while, somewhere romantic, somewhere exotic, or somewhere crazy, or somewhere perfect.

I want to do all those things as a music teacher. I want my program to be one that teaches that power within music, and what it takes to fully understand and appreciate it. I want them to be able to share that power, and that knowledge, with others around them. I won’t get swayed by the older teachers who tell me that my ambitious spark will die down eventually. I know that not every student shares my love of music, and that’s okay. I know that most students I teach don’t want to listen to any music other than what’s currently playing on the radio, and that’s okay, too.

The real answer to the question is that we can’t create love from nothingness. There needs to be just a little bit in our students already, that we can identify and nurture and grow. You can’t stand over a patch of dirt for weeks and wonder why there’s no garden growing, even after all the rain and sunlight and attention you’re giving it – there needs to be seeds in the ground first, and unlike a garden, you can’t put seeds of music love into our students. You can try and try until you’re blue in the face, but you can’t make someone love something that they don’t.

Does that mean music teachers shouldn’t even try to inspire music appreciation in our students if we know fully well that there’s no prior interest? Of course not! But please keep in mind that when somebody tries anything, there is not always a 100% success rate. You can try and you can fail. I can try my first year to build an ideal music program that fits all my principles perfectly and I could fail hard. And then I can fine-tune a few things and try again the next year, and have a little bit of success. Then I try a third time and have some more. The more we try, the better “triers” we become. And that’s the only way to establish a reputation of achievement that is your own. Students will want to follow a program that has such an admirable reputation – it’s up to you to build one. Success breeds success – a student reluctantly joining a program with an established failing reputation knows he or she doesn’t need to try so hard or dedicate that much time, but a student joining an elite program that has a reputation of talent and success behind it wants to be a part of that, and will do his or her very best to meet the bar that has been set by previous groups. And the individual time that is spent making strides to meet that bar, and the knowledge that is gained in between… THAT can start to create a seed.

“It’s just like when you fall in love,” Wynton Marsalis tells us at the end of the movie. “You see, what you love about it is that ‘man, there’s another one of us, too.’ Now there’s two of us, and the two of us make one. That’s what swingin’ is – there’s 15 of us up there, and we’re one.” That’s the love between a musician and the music, and a musician and his ensemble. Everyone’s on the same page, working for the same thing, playing in harmony, playing in time, acting as one unit. It’s the love I discovered through marching band. It’s the love that can be found in all of our music programs someday.