Why Practice?

Should a child be made to practice?  As with everything, views differ.

Some parents see music education as an opportunity for kids to learn discipline and time management in addition to the music itself.  Others hold that learning music shouldn’t involve any pressure, either because it contradicts the spirit of the activity or because they just don’t have the time or energy to enforce one more thing.   Some parents’ goal is to have their children stay in lessons until they become a proficient musician.  Others are content to expose their offspring to music and see what comes of it.

Which approach is best?

In my experience, both approaches can be effective, depending upon the child.   Both can also fail miserably, depending upon the child. However, I believe a child has a better chance of learning to play and eventually enjoying the instrument if some sort of practice routine is introduced.

Because…

•   Although a child may stop lessons after a couple of years, it’s a shame if  they never progress during that time.   Even a brief stint in lessons should show them they are capable of learning music.  If they want to come back to it later on,  they should remember it as something at which they were successful.  Also, they’ll have two years—or six months, or whatever length of time they studied—of skills on which to build.

•   Self-expression usually comes later.   We sometimes make the mistake of believing beginning music lessons are a vehicle of artistic expression. Occasionally they may be, but more often they are putting in place the building blocks for later artistry.   We don’t teach a first-grader how to add and expect him to immediately be able to find a polynomial.  We teach him to add with the understanding that it is the first of many steps that will lead to solving complex equations.  In other words, the good stuff takes a few years; learning music is a gift that sits under the tree for a while.

•   Lessons cost money and parents should get their money’s worth.  When a teacher has to go over the same material week after week, a parent gets less value for their music education dollar.

•   When a student practices, they progress.  When they progress, they learn new pieces, finish books, and  understand more of what they see on the page.  Accomplishment feels good.   This is sometimes what well-meaning parents miss when they don’t push practicing because they want to keep music “fun.”   It’s not fun to do something poorly. It is fun to be able to play a piece that impresses your friends.

All that said, I have heard accounts of  students who for years rarely touched their instrument outside of lessons and yet enjoyed the lessons so much their parents let them continue, until one day the student took it upon themselves to start practicing and then never stopped.   (In fact, we have a teacher with that story.) And sometimes a child gets enough out of the weekly lesson time itself to make continuing worthwhile.   The lessons may still be enriching even if they don’t result in a high degree of proficiency; in some cases, gaining expertise isn’t necessarily the goal.

But I believe most parents put their child in lessons with the hope and expectation that they’ll learn to play.  And rarely does a child stop music lessons because they just couldn’t abide their 20-minute-a-day practice regimen.   Mostly they stop because they so seldom sit down to practice that they’re not learning to play, and so it gradually becomes less important to both them and their parents.   And, the vast majority of our advanced students throughout the years have had a practice routine dictated to them, at least at the beginning.

Practicing for lessons can give children insight into how to tackle something big by breaking it into smaller steps.  It familiarizes them with the emotional trajectory of facing something new:  the initial uncertainty, perhaps some frustration, then focus, persistence, work, understanding, more work, and finally, mastery.   This may end up being  at least as great a gift as the music itself.

Practicing Tips

“How do I get my child to practice?”  The music parent’s eternal dilemma!  The answer varies from student to student and family to family, so I give you here several ideas in the hopes you’ll find the right one for you.

·      Designate specific Practice Times, and don’t let anything interfere with them.  If it’s 4:30 Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays, for example, then the young musician must stop whatever else they’re doing at those times and attend to their instrument.  If it was a scheduled soccer practice or karate class, they’d be there.  Treat Practice Time the same way.

·      Pick a daily Practice Time.  Right after dinner might work, or after snack but before homework.  If you’ve got some extra minutes in the morning, that can be an excellent time, as the student is fresh and morning routines generally don’t change.

·      Schedule in Practice Times.  If every week is different, sit down with a calendar on Sunday night and figure out when Practice Times will be for the upcoming week.  Write them on the calendar and stick with them.

·      Don’t skip out.  No fair missing a Practice Time by promising to do twice as much the next day.  It’s far more effective to practice regularly than it is to cram it all in on the day before a lesson.

·      Stack the deck with loaded choices such as “Can you help me with these dishes or were you about to go practice?” or  “I’d like you to fold the laundry, unless you were on your way to practice…?”

·      A sticker chart, that old stand-by, works well with younger children.  The concept of sitting down to practice 5 Steps Up today so they can know how to play a Mozart sonata in many tomorrows may be too abstract to motivate them. The knowledge that they’ll get to pick a sparkly sticker and that five stickers equals a trip to the park isn’t.

·      A no-screen-time rule until practicing has been done.

·      Practice right after a lesson while all the new concepts are still fresh. Waiting a couple of days and forgetting what the teacher said makes everything harder. 

·      Lower your expectations.  This wouldn’t be the first thing I’d advise, but if you’re really struggling to get in practice time, it may be that you’re trying for too big a chunk.  Ten minutes a day can yield remarkable results if it’s consistent.  And it’s hard to argue against just ten minutes.  Often the student ends up playing for longer without realizing it.

·      Call it “rehearsing” instead of “practicing.”

·      Request concerts.  No need to wait for the next recital.  On a Friday evening or Sunday morning or whenever the family has some time together, ask your student to play for you. They can perform the pieces they’ve been working on that week plus some old favorites.  This lets them know you value their effort and, most importantly, want to hear them play. Praise them and leave the correction of mistakes to their teacher.  Celebrate their accomplishment…have some cake.   

On Reading Notes

I frequently get calls from parents eager to start their young children in music. I love these calls, because there’s nothing I like to talk about more.  Often the question of reading music comes up, and often the parent would like that to happen sooner rather than later.

The parent’s intention is right on target:  Give their child an opportunity to learn music.  Start young.  Take them to the best place in town.  (I improvised that part.)  But if we’re not careful, such enthusiasm can backfire if not channeled toward the child’s best interest.  Pushing a child under six years to grapple with written notation can frustrate or bore them to the point of  taking a dislike to music.  Or sometimes the parent sees that frustration and decides music is not for them. And if they never try again—as they often don’t—it’s a shame.

I’m not against reading music.  I read music, most of the people I know read music, and it’s certainly worth learning to do well.  Besides being a universal way for musicians to communicate with each other, it gives us immediate access to centuries of music.  Everyone who studies at Musical Beginnings for a reasonable amount of time learns how to read music.  All that said, knowing how to read notes  does not make you a musician.  Both music history and the music industry today are filled with examples of superlative musicians who can’t read a note.  Good music comes from inside.  Even classical players, for whom note reading is integral, have to feel and understand what they’re playing in order for it to be something the rest of us want to hear.   

The past two decades have given us several credible research studies about how the brain—particularly a young child’s brain--learns music.  Here is a quick overview:

Learning music is like learning a language.   Just as we don’t put pencils in  toddlers’ hands before they can speak a coherent sentence, neither do we want to drill  preschoolers on note names before they can feel a beat. By the time a child is introduced to the written note, here’s what we want them to be able to do:

•Keep a steady beat.

•Recognize and execute subdivisions of that beat, and rhythmic patterns.

•Sing in tune and recognize melodic patterns.

•Improvise within a simple harmonic framework.

Sound simple?  Perhaps not to an adult.  But for a young child, it really can be.  Presented in the right way, children under seven years will absorb and integrate these skills naturally and joyfully, with their whole beings.  Then when they start to read music, and they’ll know what they are reading. 

So will a four-year-old will still be learning music even if they’re not reading notes or bowing a violin? Most emphatically, yes.  And what they learn will be more vital to their long-term success than being able to discern the lines of the staff a year earlier than their peers.  When little ones in music and movement classes  begin instrumental instruction in a year or two or three, they move faster, grasp notation more easily, and play more musically than they would if they had started right off on an instrument.

Are there exceptions?  Of course.  There are children who don’t enjoy the class dynamic, although this is rare.  There are children who can intuitively make music from notes on a page despite no previous training.  But, according to research in the field and my own experience with hundreds of children over the years, the VAST MAJORITY of young children benefit greatly from music and movement classes, they enjoy them, and through them they develop a joyful relationship to music that later carries them through the ups and downs of learning to play an instrument.

Remember, these are very little people we’re talking about, whose brains are wired to learn through play.  I say let them have some fun with music first.

For Sally

I’d like to dedicate my first blog entry to Sally Copeland, one of the women who encouraged me to start Musical Beginnings 14 years ago.   Sally lost a battle with breast cancer on July 31.  

Sally and I were in a Mommy and Me class together when our daughters were toddlers.   We wrestled with things like potty training, finding the best playgrounds, and whether or not to dilute apple juice or serve it straight.  We helped our little girls with art projects we chuckled at but never threw out.   We commiserated over how shockingly stubborn a 2-year-old can be at one moment, but how sweet the next.   We went on fire station field trips and sang songs.

Occasionally the talk would turn to local children’s classes:  which ones we liked, which we didn’t, what was nearby, what should be.  I mentioned once my background in teaching music to children, and Sally jumped on it.   Start a class in Westchester, she suggested.   She would enroll her little Emma.  I nodded vaguely.

Then she suggested it the next week.  And the next.  Until my polite murmurs turned into a real consideration of the idea.  Until I finally started one class in a borrowed room of a nearby church.  And true to her word, she and Emma were in it. 

They stayed with me for years.  I have fond memories of Emma up on stage in one of our first “Entertainers” groups, and of Sally rocking and singing to Fiona in Mommy and Me classes. 

We lost track of each other after that, as our girls grew older and into other things.  But I’ve always been grateful for her early encouragement, and know that a little bit of Sally will always be at the heart of Musical Beginnings.