BACK TO SCHOOL

The Teacher Becomes a Student

By February, after six months of on- and-off practice, my labors begin to pay off. I’m no rock star, and I can see that I won’t be fronting David Letterman’s band anytime soon, but I’m thrilled to finally be able to play some basic chords in tempo. The A major and D major chords have started to come fluently, and even the pesky F major finally seems within reach. People born with the right combination of innate motor and rhythmic skills might have gotten here a lot sooner— it’s taken me six months to do what some people might have done in a week— but I’m positively ecstatic.

Still, I’ve been able to work on music as much as I have only because I had the year off from teaching. I start to panic when I realize that in another six months, my sabbatical will be over. I suddenly realize that the time has come to get a teacher. If I am to seize the moment, I need help!

I head to my neighborhood guitar store and ask for a recommendation. The people there point me to a teacher named Don. Through Google, I discover that Don definitely seems to know what he’s doing; he’s been teaching for thirty years and has written several books about guitar. What’s more, he has a “recession special” going and charges only fifty dollars an hour, eminently reasonable for New York City. Hoping not to reprise the trauma of my childhood recorder lessons, I open my wallet and revisit the world of music education.

Why do we need teachers at all? The most obvious answer is that teachers know things that their students don’t, be it the most efficient fingering for a sequence of notes in Beethoven’s Ninth or the difference between a diminished chord and an augmented chord. Another reason, of course, is that teachers can serve as motivators, either through carrots (gold stars and stickers) or through sticks (mortification, shame, or bad grades). For an adult learner, teachers also likely provide incentive: most of us probably practice less than we should, and then race to catch up when our next lesson is coming up. Good teachers can also impose structure, helping us to know what to practice and when. It is not enough to say, “Go home and practice”; a good teacher says what to practice, and how: the most skilled teachers aim to help their students practice efficiently. But beyond all this, the most important role of a teacher may be to help the students pinpoint their errors and target their weaknesses; beginning students, especially, are often too busy trying to make music. They don’t really hear what they are playing. As one sage academic of music teaching put it, “[Often, too much of a student’s] attention is devoted to the production of the music, not [enough] to monitoring the result of the sound.” Teachers can be brilliant in this regard.

When I first speak to Don, I can see he obviously knows his stuff, and he shares my philosophy, which is to understand the tools of music, how songs are written and played, rather than concentrating on simply memorizing particular songs. Rote knowledge is often very brittle, and from the outset I have tried to gain a conceptual understanding, rather than just learn so many songs by heart. As Don puts it, his approach as a teacher has been “to get people to play, express themselves, and understand what they are playing in order to eventually progress on their own, rather than just ‘parrot’ someone else’s musical ideas”—exactly what I am looking for.

Still, Don adds, some songs do have pedagogical value. “Like a Rolling Stone,” he says, is good practice for chord changes, and it can be played with open chords (none of those nasty barre chords, where your index finger has to hold down several strings simultaneously) in the straightforward key of C. Good for beginners.

I promise to practice that before we meet, and as I hang up the phone, he says, “Of course Jimi Hendrix played it with all barre chords, but that’s a story for a different day.” I thrill at the knowledge I may soon acquire. All he wants me to bring is a lined spiral-bound notebook; guitar optional.

On the day of my first lesson, as I’m leaving my apartment, worrying about whether I have spent enough time doing my homework, I see a silver-haired woman in the elevator—my mom’s age, maybe a little older—with what looks like a guitar case on her back, same as me. Struck by the coincidence, I break the code of elevator silence. “Are you a musician, or going to a lesson?” I ask. The latter, it turns out. The instrument she’s toting— it’s not a guitar but a viola da gamba— is a mystery to me. But it’s nice to know that I’m not the only person over the age of twenty going for music lessons on a Thursday afternoon.

At my lesson, Don and I immediately get into a discussion of the sheet music for “Like a Rolling Stone.” One of the things I’ve already discovered in my musical quest is that no two songbooks seem to notate any one song in a consistent way. I’ve brought along the two versions I have at home, and Don looks them over, shaking his head. “I just don’t hear the D minor seventh in this [transcription]. I hear a D minor, but not a seventh.” I wonder to myself whether my ears will ever be that precise.

Don then warns me that he’ll want me to play a simplified version he thinks will be good practice. Sometimes, when teaching beginners, he says, he “takes liberties” in the interest of pedagogy. In the recorded version, there’s a whole band playing—keyboard, bass, drums, guitar, and so forth. Don’s aim, in teaching a beginner, is not to reproduce the guitarist’s particular part but to convey what he calls the “conglomerate,” the overall sound, in a way that can be captured by just a single instrument. I’ve looked at enough songbooks to know that some people want exact transcriptions that sound precisely like the original recordings, but I know I’m not ready for that, and I’m not aspiring to be an exact mimic: if I want to hear Dylan, I’ll put on a CD. Don plays the version he wants me to learn, and it sounds great.

I discover, to my shock, that Don’s overall view of my playing is remarkably positive. He tells me that I “look relaxed” (news to me) and that I play with a light touch. I show him my primitive efforts at playing barre chords, even attempting a dreaded B minor, and somehow it comes out right, each note clean, not a hint of fret buzz. Emboldened, I show Don the other main skill I’ve been working on: playing scales.

All in all, Don likes what he hears. He thinks my sense of time— what I have been thinking of as my biggest weakness— sounds okay; I doubt my arrhythmia has completely vanished, but practice is definitely helping some. Don also thinks that my hands work together well (something I hadn’t even thought about) and says that the position in which I hold my pick is good. He wants me to use my pinkie more— I kind of cheat with my ring finger when playing some distant notes on the minor pentatonic— but overall the news is good, a better report card than I was expecting.

For some people, music lessons are entirely optional. When I asked Tom Morello, one of the best guitarists in recent memory, about this, he told me that he had taken exactly two. Both were when he was thirteen years old. In the first, his teacher taught him to tune his guitar (“What a waste of five dollars,” young Tom thought to himself); in the next, Tom eagerly reported to practice, “all chuffed” that he’d learned to tune the guitar and ready to learn “Detroit Rock City” and “Black Dog.” Instead, the teacher taught him to play the C major scale (“do re mi” and so on, but on guitar). This, too, struck young Tom as a complete waste of time, having nothing (or so it seemed) to do with the music that was meaningful to him. Indeed the gap between lessons and the songs Tom wanted to play was so great he gave up entirely, stuffing his guitar in the closet, where it collected dust for the next four years. Since then, he has been largely self-taught. Some of the other highly accomplished musicians I spoke to are also largely self-taught. Sterling Campbell, for example, is a drummer who has played with David Bowie, the B-52s, Cyndi Lauper, and Duran Duran; he credits his skills mainly to learning to play by ear from record albums, not any formal lessons.

Others give a great deal of credit to their teachers. Doug Derryberry, lead guitarist for Bruce Hornsby (and official guitarist for the television program Sesame Street), fondly recalls Phyllis Dye, the piano teacher he had in a small town in Tennessee as a child. “It wasn’t just like, ‘Learn your piece, play your piece, good, gold star, move on.’ It was like, ‘Learn your piece, play your piece to tempo and whatever,’ but also every week we had a workbook with a theory lesson. So it was like, ‘This is a theory concept [perhaps something about the logic of a particular type of sequence of chord changes], and here is a little quiz,’ and I loved those things. I ate it up. I really credit her teaching method as giving me the first tools that helped me decode whatever else I have managed to decode in music.”

What makes a good teacher, or a good lesson? The science of music education (or music pedagogy) is surprisingly thin. Although over 40 percent of affluent American parents send their children to music lessons, comparatively little is known about what makes music teaching effective.

Many teachers, especially of adults, have relatively little training as teachers: many music teachers are musicians who never quite got famous and who need the money; no license is required. Anyone who knows how to play a piano or a guitar can put up an ad on Craigslist or a hallway bulletin board. An aspiring student, especially a young student, may however not be in a position to pick a good teacher. For all I know, my third-grade recorder teacher may have been the greatest recorder player in Baltimore, but in hindsight she had no clue how to teach beginners. She lacked two of the most important traits that any teacher could have: patience and the ability to diagnose problems. It didn’t take her long to see that I wasn’t making progress, but she didn’t have the inclination to stick with me, nor the perspicacity to see what it was that I didn’t get. In retrospect— and this was what Dan Levitin immediately recognized, years later— I simply didn’t understand the nature of rhythm. I knew that “Mary Had a Little Lamb” had notes that were sequenced in a particular order, but I didn’t realize that the notes were supposed to vary systematically in duration. A skilled teacher would have seen that, urged me to set “Little Lamb” aside for a week or two, and come up with some simple games to increase my sensitivity to rhythm— all without letting on how inept I really was. With support and a proper diagnosis, I might have made progress, rather than giving up in despair.

A good teacher is not just a good diagnostician, of course, but also a good motivator. Had my teacher urged me to go home and simply practice alternating short notes and long notes, I would no doubt have been bored out of my mind, as annoyed with that exercise as Tom Morello was with the C major scale. The truly talented teacher diagnoses the problem and then proposes a treatment that is both fun and rewarding. In the larger literature on teaching and training (not just in music, but in any domain), studies consistently point to the abilities of teachers to motivate their students, to understand their particular needs, and to come up with exercises that are neither too easy nor too hard (shades of the principle of proximal development that I mentioned earlier).

As I began immersing myself in music, I sat in on all kinds of lessons, some as student (in everything from guitar to singing to songwriting), others as spectator, many aimed at children (of all ages, as young as twelve months old). The differences in the approaches and capacities of the teachers were mind-boggling. I saw some great teachers and saw, or at least heard about, some terrible ones. The worst was an über-macho type who told a friend that “capos [ clamp-like tools that temporarily shorten a guitar’s strings in order to change musical key] are for sissies”—not quite realizing that capos can not only change key but also add extra resonance to notes that would otherwise need to be played in a less resonant fashion, in ways that have proven useful for everyone from Dylan to the Eagles, Johnny Cash, and the Beatles.

The single most gifted teacher I encountered was a jovial woman in Brooklyn named Michele Horner, who got her first guitar at the age of two. Michele is a devotee of the famous Suzuki method, which emphasizes (among other things) learning by ear rather than learning from sheet music. Michele herself is world renowned, often invited to teach workshops around the globe. When I first saw Michele, she was giving a small private lesson to two kids, one of whom was named Shiloh, the six-year-old daughter of a friend of a friend. Suzuki is probably best known as a technique for teaching violin, but there are in fact Suzuki curricula for a range of string instruments, including not just orchestral instruments (cello, viola, and so on) but also my instrument of choice, the guitar. As young Shiloh sat attentively, Michele subtly got her students to focus on their posture, by telling them, “Your mission is to keep your thumb [up] where everyone can see how great it is. Okay?”

Different sections of the day’s song had fun labels like “bread” (for the first section of a song) and “cheese” (for the second section), hence a song with the form aba would be a “bread cheese bread” sandwich. Rhythmic variations were taught with entertaining syllables: straw-ber-ry for a set of triplets, Jell-O for a pair of eighth notes, wa- ter-mel-on for four sixteenth notes, and so on. Shiloh played a short passage, tentatively but almost perfectly. Michele gushed, “You did a bread, you did a cheese, you did a cheese, you did a bread—you get four stamps for that!” Shiloh was thrilled. By the time Michele turned to me and said, “We try to make everything fun. ’Cause if it’s not fun, who wants to do it? Not even me,” I knew I was in the presence of a master teacher.

At least four characteristics made Michele a great teacher. First, she had the eyes of a hawk: the instant a student tilted a finger from a perfect position, or slouched, or otherwise deviated from ideal classical guitar posture, Michele noticed. Second, no matter what a child did, virtually every utterance Michele made was positive, if not downright ebullient. By being perpetually upbeat and never sounding remotely judgmental, Michele helped instill what the psychologist Carol Dweck would call a “growth” mind-set. Instead of making some students feel as if they might not have enough natural ability, Michele helped them all feel as if anything was achievable, so long as they worked hard and practiced every day. Third, Michele was a master at maintaining her students’ attention. Over the years, she’s learned all there is to know about the currency of the six-year-old girl’s mind. From stickers to the way in which she pronounced the word “challenge” (as if it were French, as in “Are you ready for a … shallenge?”), Michele knew exactly how to keep her charges motivated and focused through a forty-five-minute lesson (long even for college students, as I know only too well).

Fourth, and perhaps most important, Michele knew that life outside the classroom was far more serious than life inside the classroom. Like all Suzuki teachers, she knew that you couldn’t learn guitar by playing for an hour or two a week; to be effective, most of a student’s learning needs to take place during practice at home, and she knew that kids would only practice at home if doing so was pleasurable. What most impressed me about Michele was the immense pains she took to make sure her students’ parents were well instructed, especially in the art of making practice a happy and regular part of every day’s routine. The single point that Michele was most adamant about was a rule for when parents should correct a child’s mistake: never, ever, until the child had made that error at least three times. Wisely, Michele saw that her role as teacher was to guide children into developing proper habits; parents who corrected their children could easily wind up destroying their kids’ motivation. If practice with Mom or Dad got to be a drag, the whole game was lost. Michele made sure that never happened, sprinkling her weekly parents-only night classes with sound techniques for how parents could navigate the tension between wanting their children to excel right away and being patient enough to foster a happy learning environment.

Six months after I first saw Shiloh take a class, I sat in on her end-of-year recital and was absolutely floored by the precision with which she (now age seven) played; she had graduated from “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to the “Meadow Minuet.” According to her dad, Shiloh had by this point practiced for 126 consecutive days. Her foundation was rock solid, her posture was perfect, and each and every note was played with perfect tone, in perfect time. A lot of learning is about breaking bad habits, and Shiloh had none.

Although Michele is clearly a gifted teacher, the Suzuki approach itself is not without its drawbacks. It works for many children— any number of famous orchestral players had Suzuki training from an early age— but it also risks losing kids who aren’t steeped in the classical tradition. The basic repertoire of ten volumes (nine for guitar), progressing from “Twinkle” to Vivaldi, Bach, and Mozart, is incredibly rigid, essentially the same now as when Shinichi Suzuki developed it in the mid-1950s, and focused entirely on music from an earlier era, music that may not speak to many modern children. A newcomer might spend a year learning to play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” (in many rhythmic variations), and I could see that a kid who really wanted to rock out to the Beatles or Miley Cyrus might give up and feel (as Tom Morello did) that the gap between what he or she wanted to learn and what was going on in class was too great.

Likewise, the Suzuki method’s noble emphasis on perfect form (Michele has a motto: “It’s better to review than to learn something new”) might be lost on many kids. It takes a special child (like Shiloh) to have the patience to focus on perfection, achieved through a series of almost invisibly small steps. (This is part of why a gifted teacher is so indispensable to the approach. In Michele’s capable hands, the method works; in the hands of someone less patient, tempers might fray.)

Another drawback of Suzuki instruction is that it typically tends to teach children little or nothing about improvisation. Much as in the classical conservatory tradition, the emphasis is largely on playing the great works as the great musicians played them, rather than developing a student’s own ideas, and while there is indubitably value in that, there is also considerable value in each individual student learning that he or she can make his or her own music. In my own case, the discovery of the joys of improvisation have outweighed virtually all else, yet many musicians trained in the classical style (be it through Suzuki or lessons at Juilliard) feel that they have never learned to improvise. I can’t help but feel that they are missing out on some of the greatest joy that music can bring. Another common complaint about Suzuki, which worries me less, is that children trained in that method often don’t learn to read music; true, but to my mind not as essential (as I will explain later).

In this respect, I am a big fan of another music-teaching approach that is less well-known in the United States (though somewhat better known in Europe): the Émile Jaques-Dalcroze method. In Scarsdale, New York, Ruth Alperson, dean of the Hoff-Barthelson Music School, is one of the leading contemporary disciples of the Dalcroze method, and she was kind enough to allow me to sit in on several classes, including two that were geared toward toddlers still in (or barely out of) diapers, one class filled with two-year-olds, the other with children as young as one. Here the emphasis was not on playing a guitar with perfect posture, which would presumably be well out of the motor coordination capacities of most of the students, but on simply developing a sense of music, especially rhythm.

Sitting in with the toddlers immediately confirmed for me the fact that for many human beings music doesn’t necessarily come all that naturally: most of the younger kids only dimly grasped the notion formally known as “entrainment,” which is to say moving along to music in synchrony with a beat. Virtually all got the idea of tempo— move faster if the music is faster, move slower if the music is slower. But in the younger group of eight or ten kids, only one— who happened to be the daughter of a professional pianist who worked at the school— could really sway and walk in genuine synchrony with the music.

One clever insight of the Dalcroze method was that with toddlers it might be better for the teacher to come to the student than the other way around. In older age groups, a teacher might set a metronome and ask the student to play in time with it; in the classes I saw with toddlers, Alperson generally let the students set the time. Kids, either individually or with the aid of a hand-holding parent or grandparent, walked or loped around the room, and Alperson played in time with them, improvising a melody and rhythm to match the children’s movements. The Dalcroze method is also sometimes known as eurhythmics, from the Greek roots eu (harmonious) and rhythm (motion), and it was easy to see why. The chief emphasis was on gently encouraging children to connect music and motion. For your average two-year-old, banging on a drum in time with music may be too challenging, but music comes from the body first, even before children can play instruments, and the Dalcroze method seemed to be effective in helping bring out that connection. Annie Lennox, founder of the (slightly differently spelled) band the Eurythmics— most famous for their song “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”—took Dalcroze lessons as a child; I only wish that I had, too.

Another music teacher who impressed me— without teaching a musical instrument at all— was Cirt Gill, a public high school teacher at Weaver Academy, a school for the performing arts in Greensboro, North Carolina. At one time, Gill was a professional trumpeter who had played as “juke joint musician” in the film The Color Purple. Since 2003, he has been teaching a class in music production, which is to say in the art and science of using recording equipment and computer software to arrange, record, and develop music. When he began, Gill’s production class may have been the only one of its kind for high school students in the country. Gill was given little more than a classroom and a modest budget for recording equipment and left to his own devices to figure out what should be taught and how he should teach it.

In Gill’s class, kids compose soundtracks (to children’s books of their own devising), create podcasts, and learn about microphone placement in live recording sessions. On the day I sat in, I saw something that looked completely different from anything I remember from my high school: originality, inspiration, and students who were genuinely self-motivated. No lecturer standing at the front of the room, but something more akin to a writers’ or artists’ workshop. Students worked individually or in pairs on compositions while Gill circulated throughout the room, critiquing their compositions and making suggestions, both musical and technical, about their work: adding some percussion here, or encouraging the student to try out a new tool, Melodyne, sort of like Auto-Tune (a popular computer program that corrects the pitch of out-of-key singing) but in certain ways more flexible.

In my high school, we couldn’t wait for classes to end so that we could go outside and play Ultimate Frisbee; in Gill’s class, many students seemed manifestly disappointed when class ended. Instead of being asked to regurgitate some set of memorized facts for a final exam, the kids in Gill’s class build their own projects. And instead of competing, they were collaborating. The most skilled student, a junior with a lovely singing voice, was busy mixing her own track with Spanish lyrics and Brazilian rhythms. I wouldn’t be surprised if she became a star someday— and not the sort of singer who would sit around passively being told what to do, but the sort of total musician who would have the know-how to serve as her own producer.

With computers on the scene, and traditional instruments being replaced (in some instances) or at least supplemented by machines, it is hard to know exactly what shape music education will take twenty-five years from now, but Gill’s classroom struck me as an excellent model.

Another teacher who impressed me immensely, and who takes a very different approach, was Jamie Andreas, a classically trained guitarist who lives in Woodstock, New York, and makes her living giving lessons online (mainly via video Skype). I first discovered her through a classmate from college, Michael Dorfman, who was living in Norway. Dorf man, who had played guitar since childhood, had an accident with his wrist, and that accident had led him to develop an interest in the physical side of playing guitar; he knew the notes and what he wanted to play, but because of the injury his hands could no longer do what his brain wanted them to do. Jamie is one of the few teachers who seems interested in that sort of question, the relationship between muscle and brain, and how to use one’s body efficiently. Swim coaches and golf teachers consider such questions all the time, but it’s decidedly rare in the field of music instruction.

Later, I got to meet Jamie in person, and the more we talked, the more impressed I became. Jamie’s students are often adults who come to her because they get stuck at a plateau that they’d like to move past. Her main emphasis wasn’t on riffs or scales or arpeggios or songs or any of the other things you’d find in a standard guitar book or your average guitar lesson. Instead, her emphasis was almost entirely on the mechanics of proper motor control— on getting one’s muscles to do what one wants, as efficiently as possible, with as little tension as possible (reminiscent, for those who know it, of the Alexander technique, but applied to guitar); everything centers around perfect posture and smooth motion. Although Jamie had never taken a formal class in cognitive psychology, she had devoured a textbook on human motor control some years earlier and developed an excellent understanding of how the brain takes in information, incorporating it into her approach. She’d also spent years closely examining where students tended to get stuck. She viewed guitarists the way auto mechanics look at cars: she recognized a host of common problems, had a set of tools for diagnosis, and had a matching set of tricks for making things right.

Jamie didn’t claim she could teach true inspiration; her goal wasn’t, say, to teach songwriting, and she placed relatively little emphasis on exotic techniques. Her aim was only to teach the basics really, really well. Anyone who wants to be a true artist needs to start with sound fundamentals, and Jamie’s lessons (or her cult-classic book The Principles of Correct Practice for Guitar) would be a fine place to start, maybe the closest an adult could come to developing the kinds of habits that are instilled in Suzuki training.

A final teacher who impressed me in yet a different way was Terre Roche, middle sister in an influential trio known as the Roches; their self-titled debut was the New York Times’ 1979 Album of the Year. Terre, too, had no formal training in cognitive psychology, but she took her teaching responsibilities seriously and thought deeply about where her students might get stuck and how to help them. She herself had learned mainly through playing, rather than through formal lessons (only taking formal training years after she had become a professional). Terre has been playing for so long and with so many superstars (Paul Simon, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Robert Fripp, and so on) that she has loads of techniques to impart, especially for advanced players, but what impressed me the most about her teaching style was a set of flash cards— dubbed Fretboard Vitamins— that she created.

Flash cards themselves, of course, aren’t remotely new, but Terre rethought how and why they were used. The cards she showed me were aimed at teaching students about the dreaded fretboard and featured two innovations. The first was that the cards themselves were decorated in a way that initially seems goofy but is actually carefully considered. Each card, about five by seven inches, contains a fretboard that highlights a particular musical relationship (for example, the interval of a perfect fifth), surrounded by a fun (and slyly informative) fringe of crazy and colorful tarot-card-like drawings. The student is encouraged to look at a given card for three minutes but also permitted to let his or her eyes wander around freely, within the confines of the card, both on the fretboard diagram and at the surround. The cards allow students to pace themselves without getting saturated, but without zoning out altogether. Proper studies haven’t been done yet, but my thinking, which is based on recent studies about the dynamics of processes by which memories solidify over time, is that the cards may be quite effective, because they allow for a period of consolidation, in which memories firm up, interleaved with study.

The second innovation in Roche’s deck of flash cards is that rather than requiring students to memorize scales as unanalyzed wholes (à la the famous do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do), each card focuses on a specific interval on the scale (for example, minor third, perfect fifth), illustrating the geometry of where that interval can be found on the fretboard (for example, all the places where one can find a major third relative to some starting note). The cards help instill a good sense of relative pitch early in a student’s career and also make it easy for students to begin to improvise fresh melodies, simply by dealing out random sets of cards (major third, minor second, perfect fourth) and choosing among the options that become immediately visible. Because each card illustrates the geometry of a single interval (or, more technically, “scale degree”), students can focus on the music rather than on the difficult-to-remember geometry. The cards aren’t yet commercially available, but the minute I saw them, I wanted a set.

Teachers like Jamie and Terre are great because they take the time not just to figure out the sets of skills their students need to learn but also to anticipate their students’ likely stumbling blocks and help them to avoid them.

In studies of musical achievement (typically done in the context of classical music rather than rock music), the one factor besides amount of practice that consistently predicts achievement is not whether you go to Suzuki school, or study under some other method, but parental support, presumably because most young children can’t apply themselves sufficiently without external motivation.

Ultimately, motivation can come from without or within— from parents or teachers offering encouragement or from an internal desire to control, even dominate, an instrument. Pat Martino, considered by many to be the greatest jazz guitarist of his generation, took up guitar as a way to impress his parents. Tom Morello, starting at seventeen, did it purely for himself, as a way of gaining power over his own life. His parents probably weren’t too thrilled by the heavy metal racket, and he wasn’t doing it for a teacher, either— he didn’t have one. When I asked Tom whether he had instead learned to play for the girls, his immediate answer was “Hell, no!” He then paused for a minute and added, more softly, “Well, maybe, but not in the way you might think. Diving headlong into this obsessive guitar practice was a way of compensating for social lapses. Dating, as the only black kid in Libertyville, Illinois, was harrowing … out of my control. The world of practicing guitar was all completely in my control.” Morello had turned to guitar not because it would lead him to girls but because it led him away from the challenges of interacting with girls, and the social awkwardness and rejection that often came from pursuing them. One of Jimi Hendrix’s biographers writes something similar about Hendrix: “It had not taken him long after his guitar arrived that all [Hendrix] really wanted to do in life was to play guitar. It was his sister, his woman, his muse, his release.” Hendrix, shy and awkward in his teenage years, spent so much time with his guitar that he literally brought it to bed with him. Morello, similarly obsessed, said, “I didn’t choose playing guitar; it chose me.”

Later in his career, as Morello went to competitions known as shred-offs, he began to see the famous racehorse Secretariat as a role model. By the end of college, the goal was not just to win, but to make the other competitors give up and go home. If he was going to achieve this outsize goal, he realized, he had enormous ground to make up. Taking up guitar only at the age of seventeen, Morello had started later than virtually all of his guitar idols (and most of his competitors). To make up for lost time, he began by practicing an hour every day. Then two, then four, six, and eventually eight. In his four years as a Harvard undergraduate (where he simultaneously completed an honors degree in political science), Morello estimates that he missed practice on maybe three days. “If I had a fever of 102 and an exam in the morning, I still got in my six hours.”

I’m not sure any teacher or parent can instill that level of drive in a student— it most likely must come from within— but it is hard to imagine anything of more value.

In the world of music education, one of the most inspiring figures is Marienne Uszler, co-author of the widely regarded The Well-Tempered Keyboard Teacher.

When Uszler was first trained— as a pianist, not an educator— the field of music pedagogy scarcely existed; one could study pioneers in cognitive development like Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner, but few researchers specialized in music education.

Until the mid-twentieth century, most method books “had a list of things that you had to memorize at the front of the book,” and they were really geared to people who already knew how to play to some degree; they were guides for what we might now call intermediate students, not novices; someone like me would have been entirely out of luck. As Uszler put it, “In the days of [Carl] Philipp Emanuel Bach, the ordinary kid down the block didn’t take music lessons,” and there wasn’t much thought as to how to ease a novice into a life of music. In the old days, it was a master-and-apprentice model, with virtually everything learned by rote, for music as for so much else in education. What books did exist focused mainly on things like scales, and eventually études and exercises; the notion that a student might be better motivated by compositions that were fun to play apparently hadn’t dawned on the field yet (or indeed on educators at large).

It also took until the 1920s or 1930s before teachers and writers began to move beyond rote memorization to a broader background in the mechanics of music, toward aspects such as harmony (the coming together of multiple voices or instruments), chords, and theory.

Another innovation, driven perhaps by findings in psychology, was the realization that reinforcement of previously learned concepts was important. In one famous book, Teaching Little Fingers to Play (still in use), advertisements vaunted the fact that there was something new on every page— without considering that the human mind needs some degree of repetition in order to fully encode what is learned. “Something new on every page” sounds good in the abstract, but if what is to be learned shifts too rapidly, consolidation may never occur, and too little may stick (hence Michele’s “It’s better to review than to learn something new”). The ideal teacher must balance the old and the new: enough of the old to reinforce good habits, enough of the new to keep lessons from becoming tedious. Uszler is a pioneer in a new generation of music educators, a generation as concerned with the underlying psychology of learning as with the music itself.

The pioneering twentieth-century music educator Edwin E. Gordon has placed particular emphasis on what he calls audiation, or “the process of assimilating and comprehending (not simply rehearsing) music.” The casual listener merely hears music, without any explicit understanding of how that music is constructed, and the same can happen even for many performers, who learn simply by routine, rather than at a deeper level. As Gordon puts it, “Memorizing music on an instrument is [ordinarily] primarily related to fingers and other technical matters,” and not to a more abstract understanding. Gordon’s intention has been to train students to engage more actively, to interpret what they hear in terms of constituent parts like musical scales, chord progressions, and more sophisticated notions such as modulations in musical key, so that they are as comfortable singing a piece— or hearing it on the inside— as they are playing it on their own instruments. In Gordon’s words, “Just as a calculator becomes a crutch for students who cannot multiply or divide, so music instruments [can] become a crutch for students who cannot audiate.”

In striving to help aspiring musicians move beyond mere rote knowledge, Gordon has recommended that students develop audiation skills in a strict sequence of steps that progress from simply listening to familiar and unfamiliar music, to learning to read music, to writing it, to recalling music from memory, and ultimately to creating and improvising music. I have some issues with the de tails— in my view, Gordon overemphasizes the logical progression in the stages; many early jazz musicians managed, for instance, to become skilled improvisers without ever learning to read or write music. But Gordon’s general point— that there is considerable value in understanding a piece of music in terms of its inner structures rather than just as a sequence of notes— is profound. A musician who can merely reproduce what he or she has learned by rote will never match one who understands the logic of music from the inside.

In the final analysis, it may not matter so much whether teachers are trained in the Suzuki method, the Dalcroze method, or others I haven’t discussed, such as Orff or Kodaly; instead, what may be more important is whether they are equipped to listen well and give feedback that is simultaneously constructive and enthusiastic. It’s not about the technique; it’s about the teacher.