Thomas J. West Music

Over the past four years as I have written articles for my website, I have given long and careful thought to just about every aspect of music education. I have shared things from my own experience in the inevitable on-the-job training all music teachers go through as they start their careers. I have also shared many articles on practice tips and the mechanics of successful repetitions. All of that thinking and writing has really helped me solidify my own understanding of music education and what it means to be an effective teacher.

In a previous article entitled Instrumental Music As Physical Education, I discussed how most traditional band and orchestra programs spend the vast majority of their time training students to be physically capable of performing the complex motor skills necessary to play even the most basic musical demands. Most secondary performing music programs do this part of music training very well. The physical part of performing a musical instrument is a set of skills that take about a decade of dedicated work to become proficient in.

Vocalists do not go through the same rigors physically in terms of training that instrumentalists do. That is not because their instrument is any easier to manipulate - it is simply because their instrument is part of their physical make-up, not a mechanical extension of their bodies. In some ways, vocalists have to have even stronger training in the mental aspect of music-making in order to truly achieve.

Training The Musical Mind

Many of the mental skills necessary to perform music is taught early on and then forgotten about. Once students are taught to read basic rhythms and understand time signatures, rhythm reading is a means to an end - play your part in the ensemble. The same is true for tonal literacy in learning the theory behind major scales, arpeggios, and chord progressions. Again, many schools never get to step one with these concepts because they don't directly service the need to crank out yet another public performance.

The other kind of mental training necessary is the ability of the student to audiate pitch and perceive rhythmic structure. These skills are often referred to as "talent" and something a student either possesses or does not possess. As with mathematical understanding and proprioception, the individual student's aptitude levels in tonal and rhythmic perception are merely a starting point. 

Training the musical mind, both the intellectual theory concepts as well as the ability to perceive pitch and rhythm, is as much a part of the decade of training as the physical training of the student's fine motor skills. Training in music theory concepts, ear training, and rhythm reading are aspects of music education that should be scafolded and built upon as soon as a student begins their education. It certainly should be a part of every instrumental and vocal music curriculum from day 1.

Major scales and arpeggios for instrumentalists should be learned first by rote as mechanical representations (fingerings) of the written letter names before they are read in notation. This links the physical training of performing on the instrument with the mental training of understanding the music theory and decoding the written music notation.

Ear training should occur throughout as well, either with ear trianing resources or simply by having students perform without the written page.

To become well-rounded, independent musicians, all performing music students must be trained on both the physical and mental aspects of music-making throughout their years of instruction.

This article (c) 2011 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.

Subscribe by RSS Subscribe by email