The four basics for beginners

As I discussed in a previous post, I don't teach beginners to read music. So, if we are not reading music, what am I teaching?

1. Tone production. A musician's most valuable asset is the quality of the sound he or she produces with their instrument. Developing a sound that people actually want to listen to is one of the most important tasks a young musician undertakes. There is a reason why Louis Armstrong became world famous. His tone, both as a trumpeter and singer, is instantly recognizable for its unique beauty. To be sure, any great musician is sure to have a great sound. It takes time and work to achieve a great tone, but the effort is worthwhile. It's also a reason why I encourage my students to discover and listen to great musicians. What they hear will determine how they create their own sound. One of our main goals in beginning band is to learn how to produce a beautiful sound on the instrument.

2. Breathing. Having a great sound starts with taking a good breath. In band, we learn what's called the "backswing" breath in which we compare breathing to bringing a tennis racket or baseball bat back before the swing. The lungs fill quickly and easily with air, and the resulting sound is fuller and more relaxed. Retired New York Philharmonic first trumpeter Phil Smith, who was famous for his beautiful sound, produced music on his trumpet as rich and full as cheesecake. His first step in everything he played: a good breath.

3. Hand and body position. I teach my beginning students how to sit and hold the instrument properly from the beginning. The best players "make it look easy," and that's because they play in a relaxed way, using only the amount of energy needed to achieve whatever effect they are after. Watch a video of virtuoso musician Rafael Mendez and you will be struck by how easy he makes it look, even as he races through "The Flight of the Bumblebee." He achieved that virtuosity by having a good physical relation to his trumpet. In beginning band, we learn how to play in a relaxed way.

4. Tonguing.  As a private trumpet teacher during the past 20 years, I have encountered the following scenario too many times when meeting a new student. I begin by asking the student to play me something so that I can assess his or her level. Whether it's "The Saints Go Marching In" or an exercise from their school band book, the new student—almost without exception—plays their instrument without employing their tongue properly. They do something I call "puffing." Puffing makes it virtually impossible to play anything fast or smooth, so students who have this problem face an insurmountable obstacle in their path to mastery. With this bad habit, each note is produced by a separate puff of air, like speaking while pro-duc-ing each syl-la-ble with a sep-a-rate ex-hal-a-tion of air. (If you found that hard to read, then you understand the problem of puffing in music.) Rather than flowing, the music starts and stops.

I am puzzled that so many young musicians learn to play without knowing about the proper way of using their tongue. (Maybe it's because their band teacher is a violinist and doesn't know what tonguing is.) In my band program we practice correct tonguing ad nauseam with the goal that everyone should know by the end of the year how to tongue correctly.

Speaking must come before reading

We speak before we read. And so should it be so with music. Despite what most of the well known music instruction books teach, I believe that beginning musicians should learn to play their instrument before trying to read music. For me, this belief follows from the same natural logic that children speak before learning to read. Just as written words are a representation of speech, so musical notation is representation of music. To teach writing before speaking or, in the case of music, musical notation before playing the instrument is to reverse the natural order of learning that the brain has been hard-wired for.

Many, if not most, students struggle to read musical notation. Turning splotches of ink on a page into music requires years of training, and even fluent music readers make mistakes. Advanced musicians who can read music fluently may miss this vital point when working with beginners. The experienced musician, having now mastered music reading, may not remember what it was like to learn to decipher musical notation. It's a kind of "expert blindness," in which a person takes for granted something that he or she learned long ago.

I used to teach music reading to beginners. But here's what happened. A good portion of the students, many of whom were obviously musical, didn't return for a second year of band. I grew tired of seeing talented young beginners give up after the first year because they couldn't read music. It occurred to me that I needed to make a change. That's when I decided to revise my method books and began a new way of teaching that has proven successful and popular among my students. The proof lies in the fact that almost all of my beginners now enthusiastically return for intermediate band.

In the first year, instead of learning to read music, my students learn to play songs on their instruments based on a system of fingerings and singing that I developed. All students can begin to play music as soon as they have learned to make a sound on their instrument. They can focus on playing songs rather than on deciphering musical notation.

To those who say that reading music is essential, I agree, but I would say that it should not be the focus of the first year of learning. I do introduce my beginners to rhythm studies, but we do so away from the instruments, using a system of counting, clapping, and hand motions to represent the rhythms. During the second year of band, we learn to read music while continuing to work on the skills acquired in the first year of band. By the second year, students have learned how to breathe, tongue, and produce a good tone, and, most important of all, play and enjoy actual songs, so we can then add the challenge of music reading.

Once a student has completed several years of my band program, he or she will often have reached a playing level equivalent to or even better than students whose band programs meet daily rather than weekly as ours do. In other words, Owl students who go on to play in their high school bands find that they fit right in with other students from public schools where band classes meet daily. And this level of achievement occurs despite the fact that I meet with my students only once per week for 40 minutes at a time.

From Bach to Bieber

Music is everywhere in our lives. With just a couple of taps of the thumb, you can listen to virtually anything from J.S. Bach to Justin Bieber.

Not too long ago, if you wanted to listen to music you either had to listen in person to someone making it or to make it yourself. When my grandparents were young, music making was an essential part of everyday life, and every family that could afford it had a piano, because music had to be made by actual people in the moment. Before LP's, cassette tapes, 8 tracks, CD's, mp3's, and streaming music services came along, if you wanted to hear music, you or someone near you had to make it.

The downside of technology. The advancement of technology has allowed us to hear anything anywhere anytime. Bach on the beach or Sinatra on the sidewalk? No problem. That's been wonderful, but it also has a downside. We may be taking music for granted. We may have lost sight of the value of music in our lives because it's so easy to access. Music may be fading into the background.

Star Wars without John Williams. If you ever have doubted the value of music, just imagine your favorite movie or video game minus the musical score. Better yet, try turning off the audio on a battle scene in "Star Wars" and you will see what I mean. And that doesn't just go for battle scenes. Try watching your favorite tear jerker without music. Without music, the life is drained out. This is true of virtually every movie every made. Even silent films had live orchestras to pump up the energy and cue viewers' emotions.

In the second decade of the 21st century, we as a society are at serious risk of taking music for granted. By extension, we may also be at risk of taking music education for granted. Music education is the process that underlies all music. It takes many years of patient practice to achieve a high level of mastery in music performance. Behind the music that energizes your favorite movie or video game, there were scores of musicians writing and performing. The greatest musicians you've never heard of–Malcolm McNab or Sheridon Stokes to name just two of many–perform and record music for countless movies, television shows, and video games. These unsung heroes make our lives better. And their lives' work all began one day long ago in a band class somewhere.

Parents, teachers, and open minds needed

A young person setting out to learn a musical instrument will need three things: a skillful teacher, a dedicated parent, and an open mind.

Skilled teaching. The skilled teacher knows the path up the mountain, so to speak, and every musician who has mastered their instrument has had at least one skilled teacher to show them the way. Music instruction that is haphazard is worse than none at all because it leads young learners half way up the mountain in a snowstorm without a compass or map. If your child's music teacher is not skilled, shop around and find one who is.

Parents needed. Most kids lack the ability to get to the top of Mt. Music on their own. They lack the ability to plan for the long term, to organize and execute the daily tasks needed, and to stay on course in the face of setbacks. That's where parents come in. Parents, possessing the longer range vision that comes with age, provide the planning, organizing, and persistence that their children haven't developed yet. The importance of parents (and other parental stand-ins) in educating their children cannot be overstated. It's often a thankless job, but what you do as a parent will determine whether or not your child succeeds at music. If you're not sure how to help your child succeed at music, please let me know. I have plenty of suggestions. You can also see the FAQ page for suggestions on practicing.

Open minds. As the classroom poster says, "A mind is like a parachute. It only works when open." One of the biggest barriers to success that teachers face is the closed mind. The closed mind sabotages the wonderful potential of so many young people, cutting them off from a lifetime of possibilities. A closed mind avoids challenges, gives up easily, sees no point in effort, has no use for feedback, and feels threatened by the success of others. A closed mind soon gives up on music, usually with the excuse "It's too hard."

The open mind, however, loves challenges, persists in the face of setbacks, sees effort as the path to mastery, learns from criticism, and celebrates the success of others. Music provides one of the best environments for an open mind to flourish because it connects people to each other and to cultures, societies, and histories, and it is virtually infinite in possibilities.

Peer pressure. The biggest barrier to keeping an open mind for many young people is simply peer pressure. Students want to conform to what they think their peers are thinking, and no one wants to stick their neck out. Playing a musical instrument involves risk. You might make a mistake, a really obvious mistake, in front of your peers, which is the ultimate embarrassment for many young people. By learning to play a musical instrument, you run the risk of making mistakes, of not looking cool in front of your peers. The closed mind is afraid to make mistakes, especially while other people are looking. All it takes is for one closed mind to make a negative comment about the band to infect the impressionable minds around them. Don't let the closed mind reduce your child's possibilities in life. Do everything you can to fight peer pressure and closed mindedness.

Music and math

Music has a lot in common with math. First, both subjects are highly sequential, meaning that one step leads to the next, and each step is part of a long chain of knowledge and skill that is taught in a particular order. For example, in math we learn addition before multiplication, not the other way around. That's because multiplication is in fact a type of advanced addition. In music, to name just a couple of examples, we learn quarter notes before eighth notes and tonguing before slurring.

The highly sequential nature of both math and music may be one reason why they can appear so challenging to learn. You can't just dive in anywhere and hope to attain a high level of mastery. Playing a musical instrument and reading music require long-term planning as well as the persistence to stay with the plan in the face of setbacks.

Second, both math and music are written in a language of symbols. In the case of music, that set of symbols is called musical notation, which tells you how long a note lasts and what its pitch is. As you become a more advanced music reader, the language gets more complicated, but at a basic level, musical notation has two dimensions: note length and pitch (how high or low a note sounds).

Musical notation may have only two basic dimensions, but mastering the language of music is not easy. Think about a piece of music such as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony with its famous opening: da da da daaaa. How would you go about writing that down on a piece of paper so that musicians could come along later and play it? It sounds challenging and it is. It took hundreds of years for musicians to come up with an adequate notation system. Then, once you've written the music down on paper, how do other musicians learn to turn it back into music again? Learning how to read music, to turn notes into organized sound, is very challenging.

Every year as I teach students how to read music, I marvel at the small miracle that's going on. Students are learning to turn splotches of ink on a page into Music. They are learning to turn musical notation into the organized sounds that accompany us through life from the lowest to the highest of emotions. As your child learns to read music, please know that what they are undertaking is hard. The challenge they face should be respected and supported.

There is one critical difference between math and music, however. Somehow--it's hard to know exactly why--we have come to believe that math education is a necessity, an unpleasant necessity for some of us, but a necessity nonetheless, but we don't give the same status to music. We accept that math is a necessity, but we are told that music is an elective. Imagine touring a prospective school and hearing, "At our school we don't offer math instruction" or "Here math is an elective." This is the sad situation that music finds itself in, relegated to the lower status of an elective.

Plato said that music should be the first step in an educational curriculum. Perhaps it's time we listen to a wise and ancient voice. But that's a topic for another day.