I’ve struggled to be musical all my life–took lessons, took college classes, did ear training, etc.
I think I finally cracked the code, and it’s surprisingly simple:
- Learn to play melodies by ear (starts with singing)
- Learn only enough theory to:
- know your way around your instrument (scales, arpeggios)
- understand chords
- understand song structure
- Experiment (ie have fun!)
The most anal formal exercise I’d recommend is learning to hear relative scale degrees (two very good apps available for that)–though I think that skill would be developed by transcribing (playing by ear), it’s helpful for your confidence level to have graded exercises you can have some success with.
But my experience with most of my music teachers is they fall into one of two traps:
For classical music, it’s:
- Learn how to translate written notes into notes on your instrument.
- Go to 1.
For instance: I was taking clarinet lessons and I remember my teacher saying goodbye to his last student–a kid–and the teacher said, “If you bring me the sheet music for it, we can learn to play it.” And I thought what a missed opportunity that was for that girl to learn to hear and transcribe music–obviously not a skill he thought was important to the teacher at all. And I’d understand now wanting to do that for piano, which is really complicated, but learning to play a melody by ear on a single note instrument is a very achievable goal, especially when you have someone that can tell you what key it’s in and what the first note is.
The trap for jazz music is:
- Learn what are the “right” notes to play.
- Play them in any random order.
I used to blame teachers for just being bad at their jobs, but I think students (and maybe parents/administrators) are also to blame.
I ran across a senior guy who was trying to get back into piano. He’d played for a few years and it was clear he had no idea of how to be musical–no idea of how to construct a simple bass line, no knowledge of how to define a chord. So I said, “Hey, I’ll work with you even though I don’t play piano, I think you need to learn this song and just play the root and the five in the left hand, and sing the melody while you play, and use a metronome.” What an amazing exercise I thought: it would help teach him timing, develop his ear, develop his feel, let him be expressive with his voice, let him embody the melody, lear to work the bass, etc. Aren’t I brilliant teacher?
You know what this guy did? He pulled out his phone to show me some recordings he did of him playing the song the way his music teacher had written it out for him; it was what I expected–just haltingly reading the music with no sense of time. I wasn’t sure, but I think he wanted me to praise him for playing such a complex piece.
For him, and maybe for a lot of students (and certainly for parents and administrators), they don’t actually want to master music, they want to impress people. And maybe for the musically disinclined, haltingly playing a complex written piece is more impressive than a 2-note bassline in time with an expressive voiceline sensitive to dynamic; since most people in charge of music education (parents and school administrators) don’t know music, maybe they would promote a teacher who taught the former and fire a teacher who taught the latter…
For jazz programs, I think they’ve got a lot of theory they’ve got to cram into the kids heads, and we can learn theory a lot faster than we can develop musically, so if you’re going to be judged on “performance” of your students, you’ll be rewarded for having them be able to pass essentially paper exams set to music more than for having them skillfully play pentatonic blues.
I don’t know what the answer is, but for some reason, actually mastering music is very low on the list for both teachers and students.
What’s all y’all’s experience with music and music education?
Hard disagree on your point regarding music theory. Learn as much music theory as possible because that’s the path to understanding what you’re playing and why musical sounds gravitate towards and away from each other the way they do.
If you’ve viewed theory as this abstract, academic set of “rules” designed to force you to play and write only in a certain way, this is just straight up wrong. It is not that and was never intended to be. If you wrote or played something that skirts your current understanding of music theory, and it’s still sounds good, great! Carry on. You may eventually come across a theoretical explanation for it, and if you never do, that’s okay too. It’s probably still out there somewhere.
I spent several decades as a professional musician. I can’t begin to count the number of dunderheads I’ve encountered who’d say, “I don’t want to learn theory. I think it’ll limit me.” Those people are morons. There’s no such thing as knowledge that makes you less knowledgeable. If you’re one of those people, I implore you to stop being one of those people. I’m much more impressed by intellectually honest people who’ll say, “I don’t want to learn theory because I can’t get my head around it, but I still love playing.” Then carry on, brother!
All that being said, music is, at its core, a uniquely human way of expressing the human condition. And we are all allowed to use it in any way we like for whatever reasons we choose, selfish or otherwise. We’re allowed to excel at it. We’re allowed to suck at it. We’re allowed to love that music that everyone else hates. Every musical sound is meaningful. And if a music teacher is failing to make that the core of their instruction, then that music teacher is failing, period.
I absolutely do appreciate theory, but I think the theory should follow the music. That is to say, the musician should have an aural appreciation of what the sound is.
For Jazz, that means being able to transcribe a solo before worrying about the analysis. There’s a huge difference between being able to do a harmonic analysis and actually being able to hear the changes. And I feel like music theory-heavy types assume that learning the theory will teach you the sound, and for a lot of people it doesn’t.
Which feeds into another theory of mine of why music education sucks: the people who thrive under it are actually people who excel DESPITE the education; that is they have good ears and are willing to experiment and learn how the sounds work. That’s much harder to teach and if a student doesn’t “get it”, they’re discouraged and quit.
I’m proposing a musical system that focuses on developing musical SKILLS before developing knowledge. Ultimately you want both, but I see way too many teachers willing to teach knowledge INSTEAD of skills.
I think this is the Suzuki method–kids don’t learn to read until they can play by ear.
but I think the theory should follow the music.
My friend, it does. That’s has always been its purpose. That’s one of the points I’m trying to make. If your teachers never made that clear to you, they owe you an apology. And yes, I’m fully aware that there are musicians who place theory above practice. You don’t have to take them seriously.
I get it - if I’m reading you right you’ve come to the conclusion that ear training isn’t being given the focus it deserves. Which may be your experience but I feel like in the larger musical world aural skills are highly valued. Yeah, I’ve seen many “highly trained” kids who can sight read their ass off but freeze when you take their sheet music away. It’s common. Their teachers failed them. The music education system at large is a very fragmented thing. It’s filled with microcosms created by short-sighted instructors who value X over Y. In the performing world that I lived in, we were all ear people. We had to be. That was the way you survived on our stage. There’s lots of that happening out there. If you think you can devise a system that doesn’t currently exist that hammers that home, I’d be the first person to encourage you to do so.
I went to a party with a paid piano player who could play any sheet music you put in front of him. He played all the notes correctly but it sounded like absolute shit to me. Since then, “You played all the right notes,” is the highest form of insult I can deliver to a musician. I feel like that’s the end goal of a lot of music education.
Your suggestion that I create a competing music education system is kind of hostile and defensive and weird. I’m just a middle-aged guy playing some songs on guitar and wishing he had more time for clarinet. If you’re an educator, I’m glad you’re out there creating musicians and not trained monkeys; we’re on the same side.
But, since I have you here, I’ve been listening to a lot of samba and bossa nova lately and it’s got a lot of stuff I don’t understand. Any good resources for understanding what’s going on with all that random b5 stuff? I think it’s tri-tone substitution mostly, but I’m having trouble absorbing it.
Your suggestion that I create a competing music education system is kind of hostile and defensive and weird.
I probably misread what you were saying up there. No hostility intended.
I’m retired out of music now. I work in the industrial sector and do music on the side. And I’ve learned a lot more about music since escaping academia that I’d never have gotten, and encountered people who have similarly broken away from the formalized, conservatory educational attitudes and grown as performers.
Regarding your question about samba and bossa nova, I’m not very experienced with those styles. You’d likely find instructional videos or articles out there that can explain what’s going on harmonically better than I could. I’m mostly a rock guy lol.
A few years ago I had what I affectionally call my “psychotic break” where I started to realize that society is largely in service to systems that benefit themselves at the expense of individual happiness and diversity.
Music education is just one of many institutions out there squelching the human spirit.
Thanks for the conversation. I’ll keep learning theory alongside music.
Rock on brotha. 🤘🏻
One of my kids started to play the piano at about 13. By the age of 18, he was playing pieces that were Royal Conservatory grade 10 level, and he was accepted into several universities.
He only had one hour of lessons a week during those 4 years of high school, but usually practiced 2 to 3 hours a day, without any pushing on my part. In some of his lessons he wouldn’t even touch the keyboard, they would just analyze a piece of music or discuss the theory behind it.
In university, the professors sometimes told other students to watch him play. His technique, they said, was not great (he himself admits that playing scales early on would have helped), but his feeling was superb.
If you want the absolute music basics, the kids educational program, GCompris, has a bunch of musical related games and activities:
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=gcompris+music&ia=images&iax=images
(Under the penguin&gears category, and then click on ‘music’.)
One of the absurds things I’ve noticed is teaching how to play instruments to people who do not listen to music regularly — and thus did not develop their musical taste yet — and do not know what to play. In my experience, learning an instrument for the sake of knowing how to play it, rather than to play music that you like is not very productive.
So, we end up with what you described: kids who know how to play the Good Stuff™ because their parents wanted to, but hate it.
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I’ve been playing guitar for decades but I’m also very musical. I’ve never really learned, or even really used musical theory outside of someone telling me what chord they’re playing. But now that I’m older I want to learn more theory as I’m sure it will help my playing.
How would you start to learn?
I think I’d recommend learning how chords work, then the chord wheel, then figuring out the songs you already know how to play. Like when I realized that thing I’ve been hearing in a bunch of songs was the IV-major to IV-minor (playing Fmajor to Fminor to C Major, for instance).
If you want to apply it to your instrument, a very useful exercise was learning scales and arpeggios, but I find it’s best to do it WITHOUT sheet music, figure it out in your head. The arpeggios will teach you where the notes of the chord are.
If you’re super lazy, figure out what the scale degrees are for every string on C A G E D open chords and that will give you a pretty good working knowledge all over the fret board when you can recognize the shapes…
and it goes without saying you’ll need to know the notes you’re playing. Start with the open strings, then where else to find those open string notes (usually on the seventh fret on the next string or the fifth fret on the string above). I find this help you immediately have an anchor between the nut and the 12th fret from which you can get your bearings instead of learning each fret sequentially.
Boy howdy, yeah, I guess it’s a lot to learn, but I’d probably happily trade our knowledge bases because what you know is hard for me to learn and what I know was easy for me to learn.
I think you’re failing to give anywhere near enough credit to formal music education. Lots of Dunning-Kruger going on here.
Maybe you had bad teachers. However, you don’t know the reasons behind their methods either.
Maybe your clarinet teacher was working to the priorities of that student. Maybe that student SPECIFICALLY struggled with reading notation and the teacher was looking to bridge the gap by using repertoire the student would like. Furthermore, you pay a clarinet teacher for clarinet lessons, not for dictation practice. Maybe that clarinet teacher tutors other students on dictation and is being paid by that student specifically for clarinet.
Did that clarinet student understand intervals? Basic fingering patterns on the clarinet? Half step vs whole steps? Did they have literally any of the foundational knowledge to approach melodic dictation? You don’t know.
You might as well say “Doctors focus on all this extra stuff you don’t need. All you have to have to survive is oxygen flowing to your brain.” Or “LLMs are conscious because they form grammatically correct word salad”… Okay that one hits home a bit hard.
Here’s an exercise for you.
Sit down with your instrument and choose exactly one pitch, and then tell me a story with it. Fill 5 minutes, and don’t bore me.
Now explain to me every choice you made about what you did with that pitch every time you played it and every silence when you didn’t play it.
Now justify every one of those choices by comparing it to a similar choice made by another musician - with citations I can verify. Remember that music is communication. With no frame of reference common to both parties, communication is impossible. Spell out that frame of reference.
Now, justify the form of your composition by aligning it to a historical form. If it doesn’t align, start over. Do that at the composition level, then again at the thematic level, the phrase level, and the motivic level.
Remember, one pitch.
When you have the tools to do that, then you can talk to me about the process of learning to do music. Until then, have some respect for the people who know what they’re doing, because right now you don’t.
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I’ve had plenty of music teachers that focused on reading music to the exclusion of transcription. It’s a pretty common problem. I’m not basing this opinion on a one-off exchange with my clarinet teacher, but it’s just my last run in with music education, and I’m pretty confident that little girl is never going to transcribe anything with him.
As for your exercise, it sounds interesting. I might have to try it. The explanation component really is more on the academic side than the musical side. Music is a conversation, but first and foremost from the musician/composer to the audience, though it can also certainy be among musicians.
You sound like you’ll have (or have had) a sterling career in academia.
