Purpose Is My Passion

This week marks the end of my twenty sixth season teaching piano in the community I call home. Children of the children I once taught come to the studio for lessons now. I love each child who sits on the piano bench as though they are members of my family. I suppose this means that my role in many student’s lives over the years has been a natural, albeit pseudo, progression from older sister, to mother, to grandmother.

A heart full of joy and song was once all the fuel I needed to seize the day at full throttle and ignite enthusiasm for making music in each of my students. Today’s students present new pedagogic challenges however, challenges that reflect society’s digital evolution. With each new season of lessons over the past couple of years, I've felt my spark for teaching losing its vitality. The connection I feel with each child has been shifting with the widening generational gap between us.

The rise of the digital era runs parallel to my teaching career. Technology’s expansive presence in every aspect of today’s life is the crux of many of the challenges I encounter in what I am beginning to perceive as student’s eroding relationship with acoustic music making. I purposefully avoided utilizing much technology in my studio until the coronavirus pandemic. Sixteen months of online teaching – talk about a learning curve! - has dramatically changed my perspective on digital learning and, more significantly, online teaching. While I much prefer the sound of pen strokes on paper to the constant drone of a hard drive and click of a mouse, device circuitry certainly outshines mine on many levels.

This first day of my summer break marks Day 1 of revitalizing my studio and teaching style to ensure that excited, self-directed motivation to perform music is the foundation of every lesson. A reworked lesson curriculum will be enhanced with online video offerings to share my evolving teaching philosophies with a broader student base and other music educators as well.

There is little more disheartening than having a student sits at the piano and bemoan being there. An expanse of eighty-eight black and white keys to press doesn’t offer anywhere near the same appeal as a few buttons on a screened device, or so my students tell me. A well-earned shiny sticker at the top of a pencil-marked page of music is far less coveted than earning experience points in a game to reach the next level. The prospect of creating something from one’s imagination is daunting when compared with following a predictable, interactive algorithm. Attaining extrinsic rewards on a screen far surpasses any desire to challenge oneself from within and achieve equally measurable results. Satisfaction comes from bragger’s rights in the school yard with games that are familiar to all, not quiet, inner pride for self-directed accomplishment.

If I seem cynical it’s because witnessing covid anxiety in one particular teenaged student this past year showed me just how addictive the lure of digital devices and the content they offer became for her when no other appealing outlet for stress relief presented itself to alleviate the angst she barely recognized let alone understood. I found myself dreading lessons with this once passionate and expressive performer after, glaring defiantly into the zoom screen one evening, she told me that her lessons were irritating and a waste of time. Careful, concerned questioning led me to discover that she’d become addicted to gaming and social networking forums. She’d lost all interest in any other aspects of her life, her school marks were plummeting and her once beautifully musical soul was expressing little more than hostility and stagnation when she played. The beautiful, vibrant pianist I had the privilege of artistically guiding each week loathed her lessons for several months during this past term, our nineth year working together, and this attitude nearly drove me into retirement. With time, upon reflection,I've come to appreciate that this student beautifully displayed and articulated my escalating discontent with teaching music to digitized youth. Her frustration became my impetus for needed change.

Composing music is my deepest love, teaching music, my inherent vocation. Performing music balances these two creative manifestations perfectly. Sound’s journey from inner conception to external production and performance is exhilarating. THIS is what I want the lessons in Music With Linda’s Studio to epitomize, the expression of individual spirit through music performance.

Purpose is my passion. Without conscious reason to share music, I have lost my purpose.

Like my students, like most anyone I’m guessing, I’ve found myself spending more and more time in the digital world. Living alone during a pandemic and teaching virtually for close to a year and a half sealed that fate nicely. Enforced isolation offers an ideal opportunity for self-exploration and development, something I have always been engaged with but not as all-encompassing as of late. Immersing myself deeply in an isolated cyber cocoon has brought me closer to my inner self than I’ve been in years. Ironic, considering that many rely on digital devices and their pleasures to escape from their living realities.

The desire to avoid spending time alone with one’s thoughts and emotions, whether consciously or not, is precisely what students struggle with when playing a musical instrument. When you play music, your brain is the hard drive and the prompts to navigate playing an instrument come from within. All the circuitry that leads to playing music well is built incrementally within, by oneself. There are no quick taps that give instantaneous results. This is the joy of music making, loving the process of exploring yourself to see what you can achieve, note by note, skill by skill. And this is what few students have a desire – or is it ability? - to do.

Mindful music making is what I want to focus on moving forward. When students develop a genuine curiosity about what they are capable of and how they can achieve these capabilities, then a foundation for momentum has been attained. Spending a consistent amount of time each lesson convincing students that practice is the only way to make progress is tedious and ineffective. Showing students what they are capable of when they have a genuine curiosity about themselves and what they can do is the key to making effective progress and enjoying each moment of the journey.

It’s astonishing how many music teachers discuss ways to get their students to practice. There are countless suggestions and approaches to achieve this golden virtue with students. Rarely, however, do you read about or hear music educators discuss the essence of why we are drawn to music and what it is that drives and motivates musicians to want to attain mastery of an instrument. Technique and pedagogy are not effective means to explore the psychology behind whether a child will practice or not and how a music educator can stimulate and motivate students to achieve their personal best based on a strong desire to do simply that – be inspired, curious and confident enough to sit alone with an instrument and explore their own inner world through music.

This is my purpose, my passion; inspiring and motivating students to achieve their own self-mastery by living what I teach.

So then, here's what on the agenda for my summer revitalization plan:

1. Bringing myself back to a state of mindful wonder and reminding myself what it’s like to learn new pieces and pianistic techniques. In other words, practicing regularly and observing the process, the joy and resistance, honestly and objectively.

Journaling and ultimately blogging about this process for the benefit of other music educators and parents of music students.

2. Creating education videos for students that inspire self-directed music exploration and stimulate a desire to discover more about themselves through music.

3. Being present with each student’s music journey during the lessons; inspiring and motivating each student to set their own learning agenda which I will work with so as to stimulate and empower a student’s inner drive to attain their music goals.

Journaling and ultimately blogging about this process.

4. Research. Lots of research. Intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, self-esteem, meditation … My goal, one I’ve been working toward for several months now, is to publish a book on Mindful Music Making, opening the door to a new approach to music education.

The book will offer innumerable opportunities for expansive discussion through workshops, webinars...

5. Enjoying my own process, being stimulated and excited to share my discoveries with renewed enthusiasm.

Day 1 of my summer build up to September 2021's new and improved twenty-seventh season launches me on a journey of revitalized self-discovery and purpose, exactly the philosophy I strive to enthusiastically instill in my students. This foundation for studying piano will enhance music’s already pervasive capacity to stimulate the soul and inspire others to do the same.