Monthly Archives: September 2013

This morning I gave a student a short canon to learn, and began by suggesting that he clapped the rhythm first, before trying to sing it. His attempt was pretty unsuccessful, and so I set about trying to work out what was going wrong. He could cope with crotchets and minims, but as soon as things moved to dotted notes and quavers it quickly fell apart – he appeared to be considering each note as an individual unit, rather than looking at the whole bar in the context of the pulse. In other words, counting 2 for a minim and 1 for a crotchet is fine, but how do you count 1 and a half for a dotted crotchet, or half for a quaver? I think the simple answer here was with difficulty, evidently!

However, once I suggested that he tried counting the pulse aloud – 1, 2, 3, 4 – and then clapping the rhythm within the context of that pulse, his attempts were significantly better, and he went on to sight-clap (is that a term?) several other rhythms almost perfectly. Instant results! It seems that he has just been missing a tiny but vital hint which has now put all of his knowledge into a much more workable method.

Intrigued, I ran the same test on another pupil later on the same day, and with exactly the same results; she too counted the length of each note in turn rather than in the context of the pulse, and as soon as dotted crotchets and quavers appeared she went to pieces. I asked her how the counting went in her head:
“1-2, 1-2, 1, 1-2, 1, 1 er ….?”

As ever, the same question looms in my mind when I discover pupils with such glaring holes in their skill set – alarmingly both of these pupils are beyond Grade 5. How have they got this far without someone having fixed such an elementary issue?

I’d like to offer two answers to this question. The first might be this: because they disguise their weaknesses, either knowingly or otherwise, learning to navigate their way around difficulties by other means. In my experience, children can show all the outward signs of understanding something when in reality their understanding is far from secure! For instance, if the pupil has a quick ear, and the teacher is kind enough to play the piece first, the rhythm might not be read at all, just remembered. Handy for the student, but unwittingly we might actually not have helped them very much with that initial play through. To learn that piece maybe, but not to develop the skills to learn any piece.

The second answer might be that nobody has taken the trouble to fix it. How often do we ask our pupils to clap the rhythm of a piece before playing it? And much more importantly, if it’s not spot on, do we just ‘put it right’ – “it goes like this, now you try” – or do we actually dig a little deeper and work out how to help them to put it right for themselves. Telling is not teaching, but so often it’s a quick and easy way to get results.

Once again I find that Two-part hearing development, a collection of two-part canons selected by David Vinden, is a truly wonderful teaching resource. If a pupil can clap their way through this volume then I can be sure that I can count on their rhythmic security.

I was very impressed by a recent article in The Daily Telegraph – No one is pulling Nicola Benedetti’s strings. Benedetti is a wonderful ambassador for music education, and the phrase that particularly struck me in this piece was this:

“The benefits of persevering are so much more than what everyone usually obsesses over, which is having fun. Fun is great, but fun is a momentary thing – it’s not something you can fill your life with, or that will sustain you through hardships. I wish this was vocalised in education.”

Well, I heartily agree! This is something which I believe to be a genuine problem in teaching our young musicians; not of Benedetti’s calibre of course, because although she cites her parents as insisting that she practised hard, I suspect that the driving force has always been Nicola herself. But with young people who are learning to play an instrument, but possibly don’t have aspirations to become a world class soloist, setting the sights appropriately is not always easy.

Who is responsible for setting those sights? Teacher, parent and pupil?

“We want his lessons to be fun” is perhaps a line which I hear all too often when parents request music lessons for their child. I like to think that they have just made a poor choice of word, and that “fulfilling” or “engaging” or “challenging” might be closer to what they actually mean. But reading Benedetti’s quote above, maybe they don’t! It worries me that they might actually mean “fun”, that momentary thing which although ….. well, fun ….. doesn’t really change much. It seems to me to be a strange factor to have at the top of the list of desired outcomes, especially when one considers the very real expense of individual music lessons.

Whilst I would hope that every teacher is consistently striving to raise their game, to engage and inspire their pupils at whatever level they are at, there is no question that without hard work and perseverance on the student’s part they are unlikely to make good progress. Students should not be going along to lessons each week expecting the teacher to do all the work, all the inspiring – that’s a pretty passive learning environment, if indeed it is a learning environment at all. I find that the most successful pupils are the ones who take responsibility for their own learning and who bring ideas to their lessons as well as leaving with some. Regular practice and perseverance also play a key part in the process, and these can bring a deep and lasting satisfaction. In short, hard work is where the riches lie!