In which I discuss why music teachers need to stop hating fun

Tonight I went to a performance of a play in which one of my voice students was participating. The production was very well done and much of the acting was excellent--which is pretty impressive for young high school students. The play (The Ballad of the Sad Café) took a bit to draw me in and was unfortunately one of those works of art where the whole theme is "Life is nasty, brutish, and short", but I'm still glad I went.

But! That's all just set-up for the conversation that formed the genesis of this post. After the show, I got to meet my student's parents and talk with them a bit about her progress. I asked them at one point about other instruments that she had studied and they mentioned that she had taken piano for about 3 years with an IU music education major. While the girl had enjoyed her lessons and her teacher for quite a while, she became disillusioned with piano when her (assumedly well-meaning) teacher had declined to let her practice and play jazz--instead wanting the student to stick with "the standards", i.e. Classical music.

The result? She quit.

Another music student lost because of this, frankly, ridiculous notion that only the traditional Western Classical canon of music is worthy of study.

Sigh.

Now, I realize that I don't have the whole story here and there may have been other factors that led the girl to stop taking piano lessons, but still. This anecdote bespeaks an attitude that makes me absolutely furious.

As far as I can tell, this student has no intention of majoring in music. She just likes music and performing in plays and musicals. Why on earth would you squelch a student's budding love for music by refusing to let her play a genre that she actually loves and has an interest in? It was even JAZZ, for pity's sake.

It is this kind of narrow-minded nonsense among some classically-trained musicians and teachers of music that I think underlies all the hand-wringing about the always-imminent death of Classical music we often hear about. While I think a lot of that rhetoric is seriously overblown and alarmist, I DO believe that it could be a very real scenario if we as musicians continue to insist upon teaching our students nothing but the canon, especially if all they are is amateurs interested in music-making.

So, music teachers. Get off your high horses. Letting your student play or sing jazz, pop, etc. isn't going to kill them or their technique. It is not beneath your dignity as a pedagogue. Music is about expressing emotion. Music is about fun. And your obligation to that student is letting them do just that.

In which I envy the music of other religions

In church yesterday we watched one of those videos from the '80's that, while having some great and worthwhile messages, hasn't aged particularly well. Sure, the hairstyles and clothes are kind of embarrassing now, but what really got to me was the music. It was, to use my voice teacher's term, "Je-zak" (Jesus + Muzak), the pop-ified style of music I've heard in countless Church videos and special musical numbers during meetings. It's usually accompanied by piano and sung with as much breathiness or pressed phonation as possible. While I certainly don't fault the folks who sing it, seeing as how most of them have no vocal training, sometimes I really envy the other religious denominations with their long-standing musical traditions and trained singers.

I actually wrote a paper this semester about music education in the LDS Church and was able to briefly mention the amount of singing that accompanies our worship (group singing in almost every type of meeting, both formal and informal) and the huge amount of discretion allowed to local leadership to determine how strictly to interpret the directions from Church headquarters on proper music in worship. Because of this discretion, in a given geographical cluster of wards (congregations) in a Stake (like a diocese) you might get a bishop in one ward who will only allow music or arrangements from the hymnbook right next to a ward like mine where my friend M played the "Meditation" from Thaïs in Sacrament meeting. (Which was awesome, BTW.)

But vocal music is especially thorny. Instrumental music from outside the Church you can often get away with much easier, since it doesn't have any words. Vocal music, on the other hand, has to have a text that is doctrinally accurate and in the language of the congregation (not that I mind), but that tends to eliminate a lot of the music from non-LDS composers. In addition, music in the Church needs to avoid drawing attention to the performers themselves and away from the service.

Thus, when you combine the guidelines on appropriate music with an untrained laity who typically volunteers to do solo singing you tend to hear a lot of Je-zak in LDS Sunday meetings. No wonder I'm treated like such a freak when I visit my home ward.

In which I wonder how the heck I got to this point

When I was in fifth grade, I remember telling my homeroom teacher Mrs. Noble that I was going perform on Broadway when I grew up. It was a sure thing and I was very serious about it. I think she expressed some good-natured skepticism about this idea which I promptly shot down.

My love of musicals continued unabated until high school when my mother got the brilliant idea of taking me and my friend C to a touring company's performance of Puccini's "La Bohème" in State College. Opera quickly displaced the musical as my genre of choice.

I entered my undergraduate years at Oberlin fully intending to have a performing career as an opera singer. I had many a thrilling experience there (including enough weird anecdotes about Obies to write a memoir) and some great performance opportunities. However, by the end of undergrad, and as I transitioned to grad school at IU, my singing technique was in shambles, my confidence was shot, and my performance anxiety had become almost intolerable.

With my arrival at IU, I still clung to the idea of having a performing career. I abandoned my up-until-then usual course of auditioning for everything in sight in order to get my technique back in working order and diffuse the performance anxiety. Still auditioned for cattle calls (the big open auditions for the university's six mainstage productions), but was only cast in a small role after three years (Although I did get to wear the BEST. COSTUME. EVER.) and an ensemble part almost three years after that.

Somewhere in all of this, I decided that what I really wanted to do was teach. The idea had actually been percolating in my head since my senior year at Oberlin, but I think I was in denial about it for many years. I had identified myself as a singer--as a performer--for so long that it was a very difficult and slow process to reconfigure what I viewed as a core aspect of my personality.

A few weeks ago, I was having a conversation with another singer friend in which he stated that he felt "called" to the profession. That sentiment struck me for some reason, perhaps because I rarely hear people outside of the Church use it in that way. But I finally realized that I did at last feel "called" to my profession as a teacher and that I was satisfied with that. Part of me thinks that all those years of angst over being a performer may have been necessary for me to realize that it wasn't for me.

So hey, I guess I finally know what I want to be when I grow up.