by Author Mary Schwarz

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Increasing the musical and technical ability of students at South West Music School

Increased musical and technical ability is not just restricted to a young person’s particular instrument, style or genre. Through providing a range of high quality musical experiences, SWMS encourages students to ‘think beyond’ these and develop a broad musicality, as well as benefit from high quality teaching that improves technique. 

This practice write-up comes from an external evaluation of South West Music School, which looked at what SWMS achieves with its students, and how it does so. It is part of a resource collection: How South West Music School supports musical ability.

 

At SWMS, increased musical and technical ability is achieved through a combination of different elements of the SWMS model:

a)    Mentoring, while not usually instrument based, offers ways of reinforcing students’ learning from their specialist tuition.

b)    Specialist tuition is a significant factor in increasing the case study students’ musical and technical abilities. A common feature is the tutors’ need to address previous poor teaching, or lack of teaching, to ensure students have the correct posture and technique so they don’t damage themselves. Also, knowing their instruments better in conventional ways enhances the composition and playing of their own music. Learning theory and notation are other useful additions for many of them – increasing their abilities to play with others.

c)    Residentials provide new contexts in which students can develop existing skills and abilities and new challenges which develop additional skills and abilities.

These ways of working demonstrate the importance of the ingredient of Developing appropriate skills and abilities. 

 

Supporting evidence showing how the SWMS model delivers the outcome of increased musical and technical ability through this ingredient is extracted from the case studies, as below.

a)    Mentoring

THEO

Mentor Nicola reinforces what violin teacher Hilary is doing, especially when Theo questions why he has to do something or why he has to play a certain sort of music, when that doesn’t fit in with the way he sees the world. Nicola comments, ‘I’ve helped him understand there are other ways – he doesn’t need to be defensive about himself or his music’.

b)    Specialist tuition

ALFIE

Mary, Alfie’s bass teacher, has worked with him on increasing his musical and technical abilities. This has focused in particular on bow control, stamina, intonation (which has ‘improved immensely’), sound production (in terms of variety, quality and quantity) and managing his complex instrument. She’s ‘thrown lots of boring scales, arpeggios and dominant sevenths at him’ – the basic ingredients – and ‘he’s lapped it up...enjoyed the challenge’. As Mary says, ‘good string technique is good string technique...a good bass player is a good bass player’ and Alfie has used and exploited what he’s learnt to benefit his own music.

Alfie knows Mary knows he doesn’t want to be a classical musician and is glad she’s ‘cool with that’. However, he knows he really benefits from being taught classical pieces that improve his abilities and extend his comfort zone. He learns lots of useful tricks for practising and improving his playing that he would never otherwise have thought of and is using all his learning in writing his compositions. He says his latest song is ‘the hardest piece to play I’ve ever written. I had the courage to do this because of Mary.’ He feels strongly that Mary’s teaching is tailored to him and really appreciates this – and the fact she enjoys working in this way!

BENI (as in Ben & Alfie) 

Katy has been Beni’s violin teacher and hopes to continue working with him post SWMS. She recognised his ‘innate musical ability’ straightaway and has really enjoyed teaching him as he’s interested in so many things and is open to saying ‘I don’t understand...’ and ‘Can you show me...?’ Beni came to Katy ‘well set up in technique’ from the teaching he received at a specialist music school and needing both to develop his skills for his A Level performance and also move forwards with his own compositions, as he was used just to ‘writing material he could play’.

Katy has helped Beni work on aspects such as playing high up on his violin, learning three octave scales, using the whole bow, becoming more aware of different positions and generally ‘getting around the instrument much better’. Here’s them working together in a lesson.

 

She’s encouraged him to think about the different colours of sound he wants to create and then learn how to do this. Beni feeds back to Katy what he’s done on residentials so she can ‘connect up’ her contribution to developing his confidence with his range of playing within his ‘lovely easy way of performing’.

Beni talks about Katy teaching him ‘technique not just techniques’ which has enabled him to play what he wants to write. She’s also helped him work on his fundamental posture, ‘opening up’ more. The A Level performance, particularly in terms of having to play solo pieces, was a challenge, but one to which he rose and found led to significant improvements.

BEN & ALFIE

Jazz musician and tutor Al was initially brought in by SWMS to work with Ben and Alfie on their ‘more general musicianship’ and to ‘find holes in their learning’. Being young, talented musicians who were working together and used to receiving lots of positive feedback, they also needed to understand where they needed to develop an appropriate range of skills and increase their musical and technical abilities. Composing from jamming together, they’d not had formal training in notation, structures and chords amongst other things.

JOSIE

Josie talks about her singing and guitar lessons together, because Laura (her singing tutor) and Karl (her guitar tutor) shared reflections and plans about her, gave some joint sessions, and both supported her at gigs – helping her to ‘breathe and believe’. Their input meant ‘everything’ to Josie, covering the wider aspects of performance, not just vocal and instrumental abilities. She recalls one joint session on microphone technique, with Karl and Laura rather unnervingly ‘both staring at me’, but making a great difference in helping her get her performance ‘together’. Laura and Karl also supported her in a very direct way – and still do – in terms of providing backing vocals and playing guitar in her band respectively.

Josie feels it was important Laura and Karl had conversations about her as this supported her in working through how to sing and play the guitar together as part of her increased musical and technical ability. Achieving the right balance between voice and guitar means Josie now feels ‘it all just happens’: she’s ‘in the moment, performing, not panicking as before’.

THEO

When Theo first joined SWMS, he was having just 15 minutes of violin teaching each week, so the first thing to happen was that SWMS funding was used to increase this. Hilary sees it as her job to encourage him to ‘play normally’, developing his technical ability ‘to play the violin as a violin, not just a sound tool’. While Theo has a high degree of musicality and is ‘completely amazing at his own thing’, she has seen him recognise over time there is also ‘more to musical life’ than a particular specialism (although that’s what will always ‘fire him’) – and that it’s really important to have a greater musical context. Learning the things that mainstream musicians do is really helpful – such as reading music or knowing keys – and Hilary has also worked on physical aspects such as getting Theo to stop swaying, as it’s not an ‘efficient’ way of playing. In this way, he’s understanding and developing an appropriate range of skills and abilities, to increase both musical and technical assurance.

Theo now appreciates that the classical training Hilary is giving him is addressing key elements such as correct posture and hand positions, as if he had continued in the way he’d originally been taught, he would have actually harmed himself. Getting his posture an positions right also frees him to play well. As Lisa explains, learning technique is also important in enabling him to communicate what he wants, as he can develop more colour and texture and take his playing even further.

c)    Residentials

JOSIE

Of all the nine residentials Josie attended, ‘not one was aimed at me – they all took me out of my comfort zone,’ she says. But she sees this as a good thing, as every time she had something new to take back, such as being able to write in a different time signature, increasing her musical and technical ability. She had to cope with being given notated music for the first time and although she had the melody on a CD, this was very difficult to deal with.

THEO

Theo finds residentials a ‘challenge’ and even when he doesn’t like the music, he knows he’s developing his skills (such as sight reading) and gaining confidence in new aspects of music. As he wrote after the July 2011 residential: ‘I have never really done much singing before – so that was a really good thing for me as I gained confidence and enjoyed singing more’.