Beyond Music When the Student Becomes the Teacher
For all the musicians and music teachers in Silicon Valley.
dedication
foreword When I first started this project at Freestyle Academy, I had no idea I was getting into a project about music teachers in the Bay Area. To be transparent, I didn’t know exactly what the premise of the documentary project was, but I knew that I was about to embark on one of the most intense projects of my career at Freestyle. I’ve heard war stories from previous students and current faculty about how grueling the project was, but me being the defiant student that I am, decided that I would have everything under control and be on top of it no matter what. As everyone with half a brain would have guessed, I was safely not on top of it for the majority of the project. I ran into complications with scheduling and coordinating with my partner, meeting deadlines, and tying down my flighty and temperamental work ethic. Nevertheless, I decided that I wanted to get everything done in time of my final deadline, so I cracked down on myself during the last week of film production, essay writing, and book designing. The end result is, I’ll admit, not my finest work and not what I anticipated when I embarked on this Documentary Project Journey, but it is something that I put effort and dedicated months of my time to creating.
The strings sing and dance around their frame, the drum ripples out with the sharp taps of the drumsticks, the metronome steadily taps in the background, faintly moving the musicians with puppet strings. The teacher stands behind a shield of a music stand, calmly guiding the ensemble along a stream etched in sheet music, the baton in their hand more of wheel at the front of the boat. The students follow the river and flow through the path dotted with quarter, half, and whole notes, get caught in the loops of the treble clef, then find themselves back within the bars of the music. The teacher keeps the sharp and flat notes at bay as the students sail onward down the fluid stream of music. They reach a crescendo and the river bends and swells, carrying them down a cascading mountainside. An instructor sits at the helm of the boat, guiding their students towards the shore, the water leaping over rocks and ebbing at the shore. A student misses a step, forgets to steer, falls off the path, but the teacher gently extends a hand. With calm words and a rhythmic tone, the instructor is able to ease the student back on path, back into time, back up the mountain. The orchestra recovers from the small riptide and continues down the path with the teacher at the helm, steering clear of all possible mistakes. As the ensemble arrives at shore they shake their sea legs and walk steadily off the boat, instruments in hand, one foot in front of the other. The set is done, their sheet music flies off of their stand. A final bow, a final curtain call, then the stage is empty, leaving only the instructor behind their music stand shield. Until a new boat rows in.
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introduction
I II III IV
overture crescendo finale outro
contents
overture T
eaching music is not a job that most people imagine themselves embarking on when they launch into music as a career. Most people hope to perform in symphonies or professional bands but learn that teaching the next generation of musicians is actually more rewarding. “Music teacher to music student is a very close knit relationship,” explains Community School of Music and Art music director Carrie ampbell. Carrie has been a musician ever since she was 5 years old and grew up with parents who encouraged her to go into music. “We had a rule in our house that when you started kindergarten, you start piano lessons,” Campbell jokes, reminiscing about
her musical roots. Growing up in a musical household inspired Campbell to go into music education and also music therapy, which is where one uses music to teach people with learning differences or various behavioral and emotional issues. Much like Campbell, Egan Junior High School orchestra and band instructor Anne Spector also has a degree in music education and music therapy. Spector had wanted to pursue music exclusively as a music therapist, but when she moved to California, she found that there was very little work in music therapy available, so she took up teaching. “When it [teaching] happened… I feel like it suits me. I really enjoy it and
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I’m still doing it and I wouldn’t have thought I would do anything for this long.” The musical roots that one experiences is not only important in the classical music world, but also in the realm of percussion and marching band. For Colin Whitcomb, a percussion instruction at various high schools around the Bay Area, he was influenced by his dad and by his friends to join Winter Percussion, an exclusively drumming based marching band style of performance percussion. He has worked hard to become a music teacher as he states that “Becoming a music teacher is a difficult ta sk,
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crescendo B
ecoming a music teacher is not a career for the faint of heart. Throughout these various facets of music, threads of perseverance and hard work shine through which definitely pay off. The most rewarding thing about teaching music is the interpersonal relationships that a student and their teacher create. Some students have been with the same teacher for many years, so the connection runs deeper than just a casual music coach. When sharing something so personal and so vulnerable like art and music with someone, it’s important to have a trusting relationship
with the person you’re communicating with. Campbell explains this as, “We will often have the same student for years as opposed to in a regular classroom where you might have that teacher just for your ninth grade year. I have students that I’ve had for 10 years and they are a part of my family.” The bond that a teacher and student have is one that is hard to replicate so when it’s there, it’s special. Campbell talks about how she has had countless boy trouble, girl trouble, school trouble conversations with her students because they feel comfortable enough to open up to her as a confidant. Part of the reason why people stay with teaching for so long is because of this
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give and take. Teaching isn’t just a one way street, and teachers learn just as much from their students as their students do from their teachers. Spector raves about how her students have taught her about communicating with one another. “I have been finding over the years that everybody learns things differently. Everybody hears things differently… just learning about the differences amongst people has been the biggest thing [about teaching].” Learning about communication amongst different kinds of people is ultimately how one emerges successful from life, no matter the field. In a medium such as music, however, it is extremely critical that one learns how to effectively communication with others due to the fact that they’re not just dealing with words, but a whole new area of expression. Nobody speaks in music and everyone interprets it differently, so having that open line of transparent communication between a music instructor and their students is how the most dedicated and well respected teachers become as decorated as they are.
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drum sticks from the Mountain View High School band room
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fInale M
usic is able to shape people’s lives, even when they’re not explicitly learning how to play music. In the book How Music Works by David Bryne, he argues “According to Mark Katz, many teachers believed that recorded music would encourage children to take up music. When the phonograph was new, and schools were a little leery of adopting it, several prominent pedagogues argued in its favor. J Lawrence Erb, for one, asserted that ‘the total effect of mechanical players has been to increase interest in music and stimulate a desire to make music on one’s own account.’ but if there was such an increase in the percentage of amateur musicians, it soon subsided” p. 293. The invention of the phonograph, mobile music players, and eventually digital music brought about a
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boom of music lovers and interest in music. This was thought to inspire more and more students to want to become involved in music, which it did… for a while. The spark of music soon died as music became less of a delicacy and more normalised, with people taking it for granted and paying less attention to the subject. Music teachers who once saw a rise in their class numbers soon saw them plateauing and sometimes even dropping. When asked about the reason why she believes that students take up music, Spector explains that “Music is the perfect storm of everything coming together in a way to help a person develop into being a good well-rounded person.” Spector elaborates that she believes that music has psychological benefits and helps students become more
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organized and emotionally present. Whitcomb agrees with Spector on this front, as he presents “It teaches you to be very persistent as a person and to continue your high work ethic regardless of successes because you should always aim for a higher goal than what you already accomplished.” Whitcomb has spent years as a competition drummer, but hasn’t let his success marching with highly esteemed percussion group, Blue Devils, sway his work ethic. He believes that persistence is key in order to find value within music and that it not only benefits your work ethic as a musician, but as a person. These are ways in which music education overlaps with those of regular education, and the standard of goal setting, attaining, and surpassing is one of them. Music teaches persistence in a way that math or literature classes simply don’t: music is a physical, kinesthetic representation of progress and improvement, one similar to that of sports and athletic progression. Setting goals is ultimately about building off of those you have already accomplished, not just plateauing once you accomplish those goals. After all, true success is defined by improvement, not achievement.
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Students are constantly on a boat: rocking and taking unexpected turns and twists. They continue to float down their own river as their mentor takes the steering wheel. Music is a flowing facet of inspiration for most students which allows them to grow and prosper not only as musicians but also as people and members of society. Teaching is not just a one way street, but a two way highway filled with opportunities at every exit. Teachers and students together undergo massive growth throughout their careers as musicians, whether they realize it or not. Music is one of the biggest influential force in our society today -- people even take up music therapy as a profession to treat troubled children who can’t articulate their emotions. Music can exist both for the sake of sounding nice, but for the sake of influencing a generation of creators and musicians down the line. Through music therapy and also music education, teachers are able to shape their own river of education and watch as their students grow along the way.
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outro
faces of tenor drums
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student playing tenor drums
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“Why Do You Teach? Inspiring ‘Why I Teach’ Stories.” Concordia University-Portland, 13 Nov. 2017, education.cuportland.edu/blog/teacher-recognition/why-i-teach/. Ball, Philip. “Future - Will We Ever... Understand Why Music Makes Us Feel Good?” BBC, BBC, 19 Apr. 2013, www. bbc.com/future/story/20130418-why-does-music-make-us-feel-good. Byrne, David. How Music Works. Random House Digital, 2017. “What Makes a Great Music Teacher.” NAfME, 25 Apr. 2018, nafme.org/what-makes-a-great-music-teacher/. “Music as a Teaching Tool.” Edutopia, www.edutopia.org/blog/music-teaching-tool-maria-alegria. Brown, Laura Lewis. “The Benefits of Music Education.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, 25 May 2012, www.pbs. org/parents/education/music-arts/the-benefits-of-music-education/.
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works cited
Amanda is a junior at Los Altos High School who currently longs to be freezing to death in the icy tundra of the East coast studying dramatic and playwriting. She is an ESFP on the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator Test (MBTI), a Gryffindor, a gemini, and is far too obsessed with personality typing. Recovering from her theatre performance days, she hibernates on the couch drowning in Netflix and writing short stories, the quality of which are questionable. Studying film at Freestyle Academy is shaping up to be quite the workload for her, but she’s working to use it as a platform for when she ships out to college.
about the author
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