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My nine year old student just about made me cry today. After our lesson I said, “nice work today.” And she responded with, “thank you, you too. you did a good job.” There is something so profoundly beautiful about the acknowledgment of both of us working together toward a common goal. Thank your teachers. It means the world
Teaching Philosophy, Part Two
by Danny Ziemann
Last week, we examined philosophy and its role in teaching. We began with:
“Upon completion of our lessons, I want my students to know all of their major scales with correct fingerings and various bowings.”
... and extrapolated:
“I want my students to be able to play scales in tune with harmonic understanding, aural awareness, varied bowings, and a focused tone. I want students to understand their role in the music they play, seek out and connect with unfamiliar music, and feel empowered to improvise without fear.”
We are not at a comprehensive philosophy yet, but what we do have is a foundation of independent musicianship. My role as a teacher is to help students identify how they learn best and give them the skills to teach themselves after the completion of our time together. As my teacher Jeff Campbell said on our first day of lessons, “I want to become as useless to you as quickly as possible.” The point stuck, and I always thank Jeff for his role in helping me develop musical autonomy.
Now that we have a better understanding of our ultimate objective, we can brainstorm teaching methods that will foster independent musicianship. This is the portion that goes beyond the scope of philosophy and puts our analysis into practice. Here are some examples:
Putting It Into Practice
Reducing fear introduces confidence to musicianship.
In understanding how to turn this talk into action, we need to seek out a common educational link in all of our learning objectives. One clear teaching link that jumps out to me is a foundation of strong aural skills. All of our objectives--understanding one’s role, development of technique, being able to connect to unfamiliar music – are made possible by strengthening the ear. This will be another key part of our philosophy. One tenant of my teaching is to let the ears guide the hands, not the other way around. There are numerous programs and pedagogues dedicated to fostering aural skills--Ed Gordon and Music Learning Theory comes to mind (the Jump Right In series); also Orff and Kodaly. Use of solfege, abundant singing, and learning melodies with accompanying basslines / harmony are all examples of aural engagement that can be practiced daily. You will spend less time focusing on intonation issues as your student will be more apt to hear by how much their intonation is off. Your students will foster musical empathy early on, particularly with ensemble playing, as they have the tools to connect musically with those around them.
Going back to our initial query into scales, why exactly should students be able to demonstrate scales? If it's a means for understanding a layout of their instrument, then we should get creative about how we utilize them. I always teach scales with some harmonic framework, adding the accompanying minor and major triads to each scale degree. (For example: C Major, D Minor, E Minor, etc. in the key of C.) Teaching a major scale as a line of eight notes does not really help students understand a key, if that is your goal. Think outside of the box! Perhaps you can teach a melody and the bass line using tunes with a lot of scalar movement (Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star). You can also improvise with a limited selection of notes (from the scale) and slowly add more in until the entire scale is utilized. As a tenant in my own teaching, I always show at least two or three fingering choices when introducing new scales. Again, the goal is to show how one can really understand a key on the instrument; a skill that is transferable to all keys and scales. Various bowings can be thrown into the mix as well.
Teacher-guided listening of recordings is a great way to help students develop a discerning ear and the ability to identify “good tone.” You can help your students develop critical ears by playing recordings and asking questions, giving them criteria to think about, and adjectives to speak with. For example, you may say “_______’s sound is very airy / focused / thin / round to me. You can affect the sound by adjusting the weight, speed, and position of the bow — what do you think they’re doing to create this sound?” Entire conversations can be based around this, and you can use a number of musical topics: tone, time feel, vibrato, length of note, and dynamics to name a few. This can be a foundation for weeks’ assignments: “For next week I want you to listen to ________, list five adjectives to describe their phrasing, and incorporate elements you enjoy into your playing.” Students will learn to listen to music actively. This gives you a chance to share what you love and forces YOU to be very clear in expressing why.
When asking students at a conservatory what words they associate with improvisation, the most popular answer was “fear” or some variation of it. Students explained that they didn’t feel armed with enough knowledge to do it well – not knowing the scales or chords and creating music without notation made it most daunting. By empowering students with aural skills and the ability to develop a clear sense of phrasing, improvisation became less fearsome. Reducing fear introduces confidence to our musicianship. There are many ways to incorporate improvisation into teaching: students can improvise with a select few pitches, over the chord changes of simple folk tunes, using varying rhythms on a single pitch, or even embellishing familiar melodies. You do not need to be an expert to start introducing it into your teaching!
It's easy to see how one objective can create many learning opportunities. These examples just scratch the surface. With all of these thoughts in mind, let's move towards constructing our final philosophy.
Creating Our Philosophy
We began by brainstorming what skills we wanted our students to have, revising our initial objective after deep questioning. We found a common theme in our revised learning objective and brainstormed appropriate teaching tools to accompany those tasks. Without further ado, here is a short teaching philosophy based on fostering independent musicianship:
“My teaching philosophy is to foster independent musicianship at the highest level in each of my students. Independent musicianship can best be achieved by honing strong aural abilities, which becomes the catalyst for developing freedom on the instrument and musical expression. Arming students with these skills empowers them to face familiar and unfamiliar music with confidence. Through this process we help the student identify how they best learn, providing them a lifetime of musical learning opportunities, far after the completion of our formal studies.”
Danny Ziemann is a D'Addario artist, a contributing writer for Behind the Bridge, and adjunct professor of bass and cello at SUNY Oswego.
Teaching Philosophy, Part One
by Danny Ziemann
I’d like you to think back to your private lesson experiences as a student. What do you remember working on with your teacher - executive skills, etudes, pieces, for example - and how did you go about it? Dig even deeper—what was the first thing you remember learning? What is the first thing that really clicked with you; something that guides you even today?
Let's talk teaching materials. Did you primarily work through a book? What was the process--linear (you must finish page 13 before attempting page 14), or were you able to skip around freely? Did your teacher create their own learning materials? What about your relationship with your teacher—did you connect well or was each lesson pure drudgery? Were you happy with your overall success? Was there any sort of teaching sequence or methodology that you could discern; maybe even a teaching philosophy of some type?
Hopefully this trip down memory lane wasn’t too traumatic! Chances are that your private lesson teacher had some sort of philosophy or framework that they were guided by. And if you plan on doing any type of teaching, crafting a philosophy is an excellent way to help organize your thoughts and provide an underlying structure to your methods. You may even have something similar already! Philosophy has always played some role in music education, stemming back to Plato in Ancient Greece with the Quadrivium. Philosophy first helps us justify “Why should we study music?” without resorting to misguided claims like “music makes us smarter at math.” Philosophy can also help educators understand the big-picture goals, objectives, and inherent themes that exist in our teaching methods.
Always be thinking about your students’ musicianship after your formal musical relationship is over.
A philosophy of music education can be rooted by something as short as “I want to foster _________ in my students,” or it can also be as detailed as Bennett Reimer’s aesthetic A Philosophy of Music Education and David Elliot’s praxial Music Matters. Philosophy is indeed a useful tool, but the role of a philosopher is to ask “Why?” and not necessarily “How?” Your job as the teacher is to put the rubber to the road and put philosophy into action! In the next two posts, we will go through the process of crafting an effective sample teaching philosophy and discuss putting it into practice in your own teaching life.
The first step
If this seems overwhelming, fear not! The first question you should ask is:
“What do I want my students to know and accomplish upon completion of our lessons?”
Notice that the question is phrased with terminal language. Always be thinking about your students’ musicianship after the formal musical relationship is over. For the sake of our example, let's aim for a fundamental skill that is often the focus of beginner instruction; something like…
“Upon completion of our lessons, I want my students to know all of their major scales with correct fingerings and various bowings.”
This is a common learning objective and certainly a worthy skill to instill in your students. Let's create a line of questioning that will better help us understand implicit biases and shortcomings in our learning objective:
Does completion of this task indicate anything about the student’s musicianship beyond their executive skills? How are you engaging their ear throughout this process?
What if the fingerings are correct but they can’t hear if the scale is in tune? Have they succeeded if they can play their scales but don't understand how scales work or their harmonic implications?
Does this teach them anything about how functional harmony works on their instrument?
Are playing scales by rote a creative endeavor? What's the first scale you teach? What's the second? When do you teach minor scales?
Will you use notation?
Will you relate this task to familiar and unfamiliar repertoire?
Is the idea to teach a functional layout of the instrument, or are you hoping to talk about intonation, time, and bow use throughout development of this skill?
What does this do to foster a love for music?
One simple statement really brings up quite a number of diverse questions! This line of questioning can get us closer to understanding precisely what we’re teaching and why. Try it within the context of your own teaching and see what you can conjure up! Defining nitty gritty learning objectives (with detailed insight!) allows us to explore our potential philosophy. Now, let's zoom the focus out and revise our previous statement to reflect our philosophical inquiry:
“I want my students to be able to play scales in tune with harmonic understanding, aural awareness, varied bowings, and a supportive, focused tone. I want students to understand their role in the music they play, seek out and connect with unfamiliar music, and feel empowered to improvise without fear.”
Notice the educational buzzwords in our statement: understanding, awareness, thoughtful, empowerment, and improvisation. We started off with a singular skill and are now dealing with larger ideas, building a deeper understanding of what is important to us as teachers. The focus here seems to be on creating autonomy and confidence. Great!
Zoom out even further—what’s the largest single umbrella term you can use to connect all of these terms?
How about creating independent musicianship?
All of these learning objectives—development of harmonic understanding, aural awareness, and especially empowerment—are signs of developing innate musicianship. Empowerment refers to autonomy, defined as freedom from control or influence. Helping students become musically autonomous means they will continue to learn after our formal time together ends--our exact learning goal. This will be the foundation for our philosophy!
In our next post, we’ll dig further into this idea and talk about putting it into practice.
Danny Ziemann is a contributing writer for Behind the Bridge and adjunct professor of bass and cello at SUNY Oswego.
Surviving Audition Day
by Grace Youn
The start of a new year often means one thing for me: audition season.
At this point, I'm starting to lose count of the number of auditions I have taken, whether for admission into schools, music festivals, or professional opportunities, and no matter how many times I have been through this process, I still experience all the feels - stress, anxiety, adrenaline, excitement. Being in the process of applying to school myself, there are things that I do to make this process a little less stressful.
Pack extra supplies.
Strings, rosin, spare bow, you name it. Bring it. I've had a string break and all the hairs fall out of my bow before major performances. Unfortunately, stuff like this happens and you need to be prepared. You'll be happy that you were.
Arrive 24 hours before your audition.
I have found that it is best to get to your destination 24 hours in advance. I do this to allow time to get settled, adjust to a new time zone if I'm traveling far, and familiarize myself with a new place. Arriving early allows you to scope out the area and figure out your practice situation. Besides that, traveling is stressful and to perform your best, you need to be well rested.
Scope out the audition site.
Since you arrived early, you now get to check out the audition site, find your favorite practice room, map your way to the audition room, and get a feel for what the school is like! That way, you will not have to worry about getting lost, especially if the school is big!
Eat well.
I'm definitely that person who does not like to eat before a performance, but I do it anyway. Your body needs energy. You don't have to eat a lot. Just pick something healthy and moderately filling. For me, it's often a snack consisting of bananas and peanut butter an hour or two before audition time.
Know what piece you're going to start with.
With school auditions, I've found that 9 times out of 10 your panel will let you choose what you want to start with! Choose the piece you feel is strongest and will best showcase your strengths.
Breathe and have fun!
At this point, it's all out of your hands. You've prepared to the best of your ability. As hard as this is to believe, the panel WANTS you to play well, so take a deep breath and play your heart out!
Grace Youn is a guest blogger for Behind the Bridge. See the full list of her articles as well as our other blog authors here.
Movies Starring the Cello
by Audrey Williams
I’m always game for a good movie with a compelling story line. While volunteering for this year’s Atlanta Film Festival, I had a conversation with one of the patrons that got me thinking about movies that feature the cello. If the cello is your thing, then below are some movies (or scenes) you might want to check out:
The Soloist (2009)
This movie is based on the book The Soloist, by Steve Lopez, which is a true story about a child prodigy cellist named Nathaniel Ayers who developed schizophrenia while attending Julliard and later became homeless. Jamie Foxx plays Nathaniel Ayers and Robert Downey Jr. plays the reporter Steve Lopez. The two men develop a profound relationship after Lopez hears Ayers playing the violin on the street and is able to get him a new cello and a cellist mentor. This is an emotionally intense movie that will make you cry and smile as you follow this tragically brilliant cellist who had the misfortune of manifesting a severe mental illness in the prime of his life.
Take the Money and Run (1969)
The cello only appears in the opening scenes of this comedy satire Woody Allen movie, but those appearances are memorable and hilarious, giving you an essential understanding of the protagonist: an inept criminal named Virgil Starkwell. Starkwell took cello lessons very seriously as a child even though his teacher never had anything good to say about him, except that he loved his cello very much.
The interview with his cello teacher was probably the worst review one could ever give a student, but it was his deadpan delivery that made the scene so funny. He said out loud what a lot of music teachers are probably thinking in their heads but would never have the nerve to say externally to students or parents. One scene shows the cello flying out of a 2nd story window of the Starkwell household. Another shows Virgil trying to keep up with the marching band. For me, that scene alone was worth the price of the download. Fair warning: the scene when the neighborhood bullies destroy Virgil’s cello is not for the faint of heart. The rest of the movie is dryly funny in that Woody Allen sort of a way.
Hillary and Jackie (1998)
And, of course, there is HILLARY AND JACKIE, which is supposed to be the story of sibling rivalry and dedication between Jacqueline du Pré (who was arguably one of the world’s greatest cellists) and her sister Hillary, who was a talented flute player. It must be mentioned that the truthfulness of this film has been vehemently challenged by Jacqueline’s teachers and others - even though it was based on conversations with her brother and sister. My cello teacher introduced me to some of Jacqueline du Pre’s recordings somewhere in the midst of my high school years. It was very inspiring to hear how great she willed herself to play even though MS had taken away most of the feeling in her fingers.
Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990)
The main character, Nina, is beside herself with grief after the passing of her boyfriend, Jamie, a cellist. While Nina is in deep despair, Jamie reappears as a cello-playing ghost and the couple is temporarily reconciled. Although Nina is ecstatic, we learn Jamie’s true intentions by the end of the film. He wanted to tarnish Nina’s idealized image of him so that she would feel free to move on. How haunting and beautiful.
Love In The Afternoon (1957)
This is an older romantic movie starring Audrey Hepburn as a young femme fatale cellist who gets caught up in some risky business while trying to prevent her eventual love interest from committing a horrible crime. Supposedly, Audrey did the basic cello playing herself.
These are just some of the movies with cello features that really piqued my interest. There are definitely others out there that I’m still planning to watch – starting with this list of recommendations below:
Gauche The Cellist, a 1934 short story by Japan’s Miyazawa Kenji
Micki and Maude (Directed by Blake Edwards, starring Dudley Moore, 1984)
If I Stay (2014)
The Living Daylights (1987)
A Song from the Heart (TV Movie, 1999)
Departures (2008)
Audrey Williams is an associate member of the Recording Academy and a blogger for Behind the Bridge.
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