When writing these articles I often “quote” teachers. Actually, I try very hard to disguise the original question. In this case, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t. There’s nothing I can leave out or change that isn’t pertinent to her anguish as a teacher. So I got her permission to quote it in full. Here it is:

“Have you noticed this, too? When I first began teaching many moons ago, I was working with advanced violin students. They were all quite motivated, set up beautifully by a previous teacher, and were passionate about playing. At the same time, I was starting little ones whose parents had been trained in violin through the marvelous program I had grown up in. Certainly, they valued the training as much as I did, and they wanted their children to have the same experience. What I quickly learned about many of these parents was they had an extremely conflicted, antagonistic relationship with music because it had been based on their having been “good” at it, and when they moved on with their lives, they no longer had that. They felt like failures, and they passed that on to their kids. Similarly, my advanced kids, with the exception of one, matured and moved on into their lives and they, like the other parents, had not continued with music in any way: going to concerts, playing in the community orchestra, and the like. They just stopped. It made me feel like I, as their teacher, had let them down. So, I’ve been really interested in sparking that passion of making music in a child and seeing it through so it becomes a part of them. I’m not talking about majoring in violin performance at some major music school. I’m referring to it being so much a part of them that it is in their lives in some meaningful way. That’s the gift. What has been your experience?”

Wow, has she hit the nail on its very sore head. Here we are all teaching something that we love, that we must love—why else would we have spent all those hours practicing, years at lessons and in conservatories or music programs, many of us running up large student debt in a profession notorious for not making anyone rich, lots of money and time spent on teacher training courses? It’s either love or severe masochism. I would vote for love (although the other may sometime appear to be the case). Love is what sustains any relationship whether it’s your marriage, your relationship with your children, your friends, your job, or even your hobbies. So our teacher here is worried that she has failed to transmit this love to her students and thus has failed them.

First of all, I am going to reassure her.

Just because you may not see certain friends or even speak to them for donkey’s years, doesn’t mean you don’t love them. I have just reconnected with a friend I hadn’t been able to find for 50 years. We picked up right where we left off. The feeling is still there. So, if your ex-students get busy with life, families, small children, further university training, career building (outside music), it doesn’t mean they don’t love music. It just means they’re too busy to participate in community orchestras or go to concerts (which can be quite expensive) at this point in their lives. It also doesn’t mean that they don’t listen to music and that it isn’t an integral part of their lives which you, the teacher, can’t possibly know about unless they tell you. It also doesn’t mean that you, the teacher, have not had an enormous impact on the aesthetic and spiritual lives of your students. They won’t tell you this either when they’re in their twenties; they’re too busy and too close to the experience to appreciate it. Wait until they’re in their forties and all of a sudden you may start getting some startling feedback. Besides, it isn’t for us to judge by outward appearances how, what and how much someone loves.

However, she and the rest of us do have an excellent reason to be concerned. Note the part where she talks about the parents’ antagonistic relationship with music. She’s right to worry about this. Here’s an example: just out of curiosity, I googled the reasons to play a musical instrument and lots of lists came up — the following is only one of them but they are all similar:

1. Playing an instrument makes you smarter
2. Your social life will improve
3. Playing an instrument relieves stress
4. Playing an instrument gives you a sense of achievement
5. It builds your confidence
6. Practicing a musical instrument improves patience
7. It helps improve your memory
8. It increases discipline and time management
9. Playing music makes you more creative
10. Playing music is fun¹

Other sites did come up with a few others reasons like “increasing emotional perception”  and “decreases age-related hearing loss” (this was news to me!).² We might as well be talking about how good fencing or needlepoint is for you. Yes, all the lists concur that the study of music is good for you, like taking vitamins. While you may appreciate what vitamins do for you, you don’t love them.

And this may well be where we could fail our students. Notice also that all the reasons for learning music on the list above and on others I have seen are to get something else besides excellence in music whether it be intelligence, sensitivity, or better college applications. The one thing none of these lists say is that an advantage of learning to play a musical instrument is that you learn about love and a great way to express it. Love is the one thing that all of us want during our whole lives, although the kind may differ according to the situation and where we are in our life’s journeys, but we all want love and never lose interest in it. It isn’t a hobby. Music, like love, isn’t something you do, it’s something you experience. Music is love, If you don’t believe me, look at almost every single popular song from time immemorial and see what the subject is. Not convincing enough? Look at some of the songs of Schubert, Fauré, even Beethoven’s Ode to Joy (brotherly love) and practically every classical opera. They’re all about love. People respond to love. If they don’t see something as being love, then it’s an object: an activity.

Not on one list did I see another primary reason that we should all play music: because we love it. Never in decades of teaching has any parent brought me her child and said: “I want you to teach or foster in my child the love of music and how to play with love.” (I had to get to that last one all by myself.) Learning music has become business-like. It’s something you do to reach a goal of some kind, usually outside music; if the teacher happens to inspire in her students an enduring love of music, so much the better; but for the student, the parents, and perhaps even the teacher, that isn’t so important as getting into the all-state orchestra, winning local competitions, and eventually getting into the right college or university, which was probably the principle but unspoken goal all along.

Music isn’t something to get good at—like getting good at loving your husband, wife, significant other, parents or children; there is no measure for love and certainly no competitions that I know of that can rate it. So we teachers have to talk more forcefully (in a gentle way) than all the parental and societal pressures that our students are being subjected to. It’s no longer enough to set the stage, present everything beautifully and hope love will flourish. All those other factors may well be talking too loudly for our excellent work on the spiritual side of music to be even noticed, much less heard or listened to.

Teachers, too, can be very businesslike in their approach. All private teachers want to give parents their money’s worth and some may think rapid technical progress satisfies this. Some teachers are very worried about how they feel about their teaching; indeed their own comfort is paramount. Others may want to adhere totally and absolutely to the tenets of whatever method they are using, which can make them very rigid about how parents should participate, how much practice is required, how it should be done, and how much progress should be made in a certain amount of time or everyone’s time (meaning the teacher’s) is being wasted. Many teachers are far more accommodating, but may still concentrate on what’s immediately in front of them, very rarely taking three steps back, as visual artists do, to look at the “big picture.”  Where is the love here?

This situation reminds me of catechism classes that children in Italy (where I live) attend from second grade right on through the first year of high school. They have big and expensive parties for their first communions (with lots of presents) and big and expensive parties for their confirmations (ditto but even more so). After all this religious training, you would think these kids would all be going to mass every Sunday for the rest of their lives. Would it surprise you to know that most of them (at least the ones I know) don’t set foot in church again unless for a specific ceremony (like their own weddings)? This doesn’t mean that these catechists don’t love God, but are their catechism teachers primarily teaching love of God or how to be good Catholics (prayers, how to participate in a mass, etc.)? Are we teaching our students love of music or how to be good violinists, hoping that the love will somehow show up on its own? Perhaps it will, but if it doesn’t? How can we expect children to love music when we haven’t made a concerted effort to help them to understand that music is love?

What are the great performers transmitting to us? Emotion. Are they doing this with cold calculation or are they using love to transmit love of what they do, love of the music they are playing, love of transmitting, love of performing, and eventually love of the audience in that moment. Maybe not all will agree with me, but a perfect example is Gil Shaham. When I met him (for an interview for a book), halfway through our talk I felt compelled to check his back to make sure he didn’t have wings. As Ann Midgette of the Washington Post said once in a review, “Shaham has a way of making everything sound delightful.”³ What did that mean? It’s delightful because he wants to make it beautiful and make people happy. He said as much in the above-mentioned interview. If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.

So how can we expect our children to love music and to keep on loving it if we never explain this to them. “Explain,” you say, “but we’re supposed to be teaching them how to play!” Really? Well, teaching technique is certainly important, but music without love is simply mechanics, which a computer can do much better. How do you learn to love another person? Love at first sight? A thunderbolt? Or talking to each other, getting to know one another, which makes you understand the reasons that he or she is important, nay essential, to your life. Isn’t love of music and understanding why it’s important to us all what we should be fostering in our students?

Yes, we teach our students how to be good at music, but not necessarily how to love it. And it’s hard to love someone or something that doesn’t seem to love you or doesn’t give you something back in return, which is what happens when learning music is like a business. We are so caught up in methods, triangles, didactics, competitions, helping our students develop good resumes to get into their college of choice, etc., that actively cultivating love in our students for music may be neglected, if not left out altogether. To a student, the idea seems to be to become good at something, not love it. It’s like an arranged marriage: the conditions may be created for love, but in many of these marriages it doesn’t thrive and that isn’t even considered particularly important.

One thing’s for sure though: if you love music, it will love you right back. It will give you experiences and emotions you may never encounter anywhere else. It will fill your soul, nourish it. But you have to love it first. And this is where we, the teachers, come in.

Can’t we tell our students that the music they are making RIGHT NOW is important? Can’t we explain that they are sending out positive waves into the universe when they make beautiful sounds? That making these beautiful sounds touches people and is another form of love? That you can do that just as well with “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” as with the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto? You don’t have to study for 10 backbreaking years to be able to express love with your instrument. I have had young students reduce their church congregations to tears when they played Schubert’s “Ave Maria” with only one octave in first position. No fireworks, just the idea that what they were doing was important and was an expression of love that would touch people. And it did.

Making something beautiful means putting a certain amount of soul into it. But we’re so busy, quite understandably, trying to convince children and parents to enjoy practicing— we may give out little prizes and stickers, we may make up practice charts and give rewards, the ways are infinite—that we may forget to transmit the reason we practice. Our students surely don’t know unless we make it very clear to them. How to do this? Explain, explain, explain. “Certainly our passion and interest in the subject should be enough,” you may well say. It is for some students, but for others, who have a more intellectual approach to things, it isn’t. They need explanations in words. I know my life would have been so much easier if any of these things had been explained to me at an early age. I had to find out on my own when I was much bigger. How much better I would have practiced and how much more if one of my otherwise excellent teachers had made sure that I understood any of the above!

If we want our students to have music be a meaningful part of their lives, we have to make sure that they understand that it is meaningful (more than helping them to be smarter and get into a better college) from the first time they put their bows on their A strings. We have to talk about it. We have to make sure that our voice, our passion, our love is talking to the student as loud as, if not louder than, all the other myriad problems, influences, distractions and responsibilities that face them in this ever more hectic and stressful world.

No more setting the stage and hoping for the best: it’s a battle and we have to enter the fray or we face the demise of classical music as we know it, and we will then have a world where learning to play the violin, or any other instrument, will become like a subject in school: something to do, get good at to improve your resume so you can then move on and forget about it.

What a pity that would be.

Post author: Eloise Hellyer

¹ https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/reasons-to-play-a-musical-instrument/

² https://pianopower.org/16-benefits-of-playing-an-instrument/

³ https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/nso-concert-stuffed-with-romantic-music-by-zemlinsky-korngold-and-brahms/2014/04/11/a4dcda38-c124-11e3-bcec-b71ee10e9bc3_story.html