kiss
As a musician and an educator, the one thing that I absolutely abhor is when academic musicians try to exert their knowledge and show the world how smart they are.
I get it. I truly do. At the undergrad level, most of the students think that all we do as music majors is sit around and listen to songs all day. I can’t remember a time where we just sat and listened to a song. If we did have those rare occasions where we got to listen to something, it was for understanding the impact of what the music meant at the time. Yeah, I am talking about the Bassoon solo in the beginning of the “Rite of Spring”. You can’t explain to people that you have to learn Multiple languages, symbology, world history because that directly affects the music during that particular time, Psychology to understand WHY composers wrote what they wrote, plus ear training to hear the minutia that most people will never hear, Anatomy and physiology, engineering, in addition to music theory, your own instrument and everything that comes with that. It’s a LOT. And this is just the music portion of your UNDERGRAD degree.
If I am with some other musicians and we start talking about Tritone substitutions, modal interchanges, secondary dominants, hearing the overtones of the harmonic series or the genius of Coltrane and multi tonic systems. This is where you should check out Adam Neely’s YouTube video on The Coltrane Fractal. It is FASCINATING… I digress. So yeah, if we are hanging out with other musicians then we can just speak and assume that everyone understand our weird esoteric speech.
The problem surfaces when we are speaking to other people about music. Particularly students who don’t have the same vocabulary and knowledge that we do, yet they still have a desire to learn. Instead of breaking it down to a level that they can understand and therefore piquing their curiosity, Most of us either talk to them as a peer and speak in this perfidious foreign language; or we say something along the lines of “Don’t worry about it, that’s too advanced for you.” Either way, it stifles the students curiosity.
If a student asks “Why are instrument in different keys?” some teachers will start talking about bore size and how it relates to the overall amount of tubing in the instrument. How that instruments relates proportionately to the other instruments of that section or family of instruments. They will talk about the overall timbre of the instrument and how it relates to the rest of the orchestra. Then they will go into the history of the instrument and why they are constructed the way that they are, and blah blah blah… Yeah, I stopped listening as I was writing that. Yes, that was an answer; but it’s not an answer that the student can comprehend.
When I switched from trumpet to tuba in 8th grade, I noticed that I was using the same fingerings for concert Bb scale. But that didn’t make sense, because the fundamental pitch for all open valves on the trumpet was a C while the same fingering yielded a Bb on the tuba. I sat on it for years only thinking about it every once in a while; mostly because I refused want to look like I didn’t know something. I finally asked that question when I was a sophomore in high school and I got the whole rundown of esoteric word salad. Curiosity stifled. I figured I wouldn’t get an answer. So I let it go.
Fast forward to undergrad. Still had the same curiosity, but now I had instructors with some serious expertise. So I asked them. Yep, you guessed it: Jargon at it’s finest. My Junior year I had to take woodwind pedagogy and I noticed that all of the saxophones had the same fingerings for the same pitches even though they were built in different keys. The flutes had the same basic fingerings as the saxophones, and the Bb clarinet had the same basic fingerings once you got past the break. This was weird. so I asked my Instructor and he said, “Yeah, well that’s because it’s easier to transpose the music instead of learning a whole new fingering system. What if you are in a small orchestra and the flute player has to play saxophone and clarinet all in the same song? What if they had to switch back and forth? That would be a horrible mess to try to think about the different fingerings for one pitch. So they just transposed the music.” Finally I had my answer. And it was so simple.
From that point on, I decided that with all of the knowledge I was amassing, I would translate it into the easiest possible answer for the student to comprehend. This one thought set me on the path to student lead lessons. What are YOU curious about? What question do YOU have? What do YOU want to know? And I will do my best to answer you in a way that satisfies your curiosity and hopefully leads to more questions. And all I have to do is Keep It Simple, Steven. (I never really liked “Keep it simple STUPID”. Who is stupid? Me or you? I assure you that I am not stupid, and calling you stupid is insulting. Again, I digress…)
