Specialist tuition at South West Music School

A key component of the South West Music School (SWMS) model is that students are provided with access to specialist tuition and a tailored learning programme to suit the individual requirements of each student.

This practice write-up comes from an external evaluation of South West Music School (SWMS), 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.

 

The highest quality – and appropriate – instrumental tuition is of course a key element in supporting the development of students. Where a young person already has a good tutor, SWMS does nothing to disrupt this, but might fund additional time if that makes a positive difference.

A common feature among some of the case study students 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 can enhance 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.

SWMS tutors appreciate the model of identifying and supporting the development of their students’ individual needs and aspirations, rather than trying to fit them to conventional pathways. It’s all about ‘journeys you didn’t know existed’ and ‘every pupil is allowed to be different’. They see how much this model benefits students, with one tutor’s explanation of SWMS’s ‘virtual’ nature being ‘it’s about the individual, not the organisation’ – a home that ‘every student feels is theirs’.

Tutors feel confidence in knowing they are chosen because of a specific skill and knowledge set ‘match’ with their student. They enjoy the learning they take from working with such individual talents, which widens their musical experiences and can inform the development of their own practice.

 

From the case studies it was possible to see how integral specialist tuition is in the development of the students' musical ability:

Simon (non SWMS) and Janine on tutoring BEN

Talent identified and supported

Seeing Ben perform, Simon immediately recognised his talent, gave him a trial lesson and they’ve been working together ever since. ‘In my head, he’s not so much a teacher as a best friend,’ says Ben. ‘He tells me straight if something is rubbish and I practise it more.’ From Simon’s point of view, Ben is diligent and very receptive to following advice to improve his playing.

Simon’s first role was to work on how Ben held this drum sticks, developing flow and losing the bad habits acquired through the earlier teaching and enabling Ben to move around the kit more easily and much faster. Simon has introduced Ben to a very wide range of genres (Latin, funk and much more) and prepared him to take his Grade 8 after just two and half years of teaching. This has supported him in developing a range of skills and abilities to increase his musical and technical ability.

Here we can see Ben rehearsing for the exam, reflecting on this and then sharing his thoughts after the ‘real thing’.

 

 

And here he talks about the result – a merit – showing just how much he’s developed his reflection and evaluation skills.

 

Simon points out Ben got a distinction for every playing element, and not knowing his drum history let him down. Knowing where the drums came from, how they’ve developed and who have been influential players will be part of becoming a professional musician.

Recently Simon’s been teaching Ben working from a 16 bar interpretation sheet that’s helping him with coordination, sight reading, interpretation and improvisation. Here’s a clip from one of the lessons.

 

Learning about the musician’s life

Simon is keen to ensure Ben understands that it’s vital to be able to play a variety of styles in order to be a working musician. As he says, ‘There’s no metal played in a hotel lobby’. Simon introduced Ben to a 20 piece saxophone orchestra with the idea that Ben would take over from him as the drummer in six months time. In fact, after accompanying Simon to the first rehearsal, Ben has been going on his own ever since. Simon hoped this opportunity would be part of encouraging Ben to overcome the lack of confidence he still sometimes has, feeling he’s ‘going to be rubbish’, when actually he’s developing all the skills to be able ‘to turn up and play’, whatever the situation. He’s been proved right. Ben has been required to sight read drum parts, play with and accompany a great array of instruments, and work with musicians of all ages and backgrounds. He loves it; the orchestra are really pleased with him; and the experience is really boosting his confidence.

A year or so ago, Ben spent two weeks on work experience with Simon, following him in his daily routine of gigs and teaching. Helping him set up at gigs and watching him perform different sorts of music in different venues under different contractual arrangements gave him a greater awareness of the music industry, and the need for versatility. Ben recalls that observing how Simon interacted with his fellow musicians on stage and how he dealt with making mistakes was also useful learning. Simon knows that experiencing what it’s like not to see an audience because of the lights and what happens when the smoke machine’s turned on will all be very useful practical learning for Ben.

Ben also had the opportunity to do some teaching himself. He found it really interesting to learn how to deal with children, not get angry and to ask questions in the right way. The experience of not understanding why one particular young person couldn’t do something was a key learning point for Ben, as he used to get angry with himself for not being able to do something. Asking himself how he would feel if he was the young person, helped him give appropriate support. The experience also taught him to how to calm himself down and consequently learn to ‘do stuff’ quicker. This is one example of Ben supporting himself and another young person leading him to develop, and put into practice, reflection and evaluation skills.

Bringing on the theory

Ben is also very pleased to be progressing in his theory lessons with SWMS tutor Janine, working towards the Grade 5 exam. He wrote on his spring term report: ‘I am enjoying music theory a surprising amount more than I thought. Janine has been an excellent teacher and has encouraged me to enjoy the lessons. Every week I look forward to my lesson and enjoy every minute of it. Thanks for finding her!’

Janine recognises theory can be somewhat daunting for someone like Ben who does not play a tuned instrument, and says: ‘This means he has more work to do than someone who plays the piano for example, with regard to learning scales etc, but I am more than happy with his progress so far.’

 

Al, Elfyn, Katy and Mary on tutoring BEN & ALFIE

Tailored teaching: Ben and Alfie composing

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 a 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. Al reflects that working with Ben and Alfie was not about ‘planning a course’ but ‘individualising the learning’. It was about a personalised progression route, working with their compositions to tease out what difference a consideration of breath, space and dynamic could make and helping them think about how to shape and structure an hour long gig most effectively.

Beni’s mentor Elfyn has been teaching composition with Ben and Alfie more recently and here are some clips from a couple of sessions.

 

As well as working with them on their own compositions, Elfyn has shared with them specific examples of interesting compositional techniques of composers such as Bartok and Messiaen that he himself found useful during his undergraduate years, providing a greater musical context.

Tailored teaching: Beni and his violin

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.

Tailored teaching: Alfie and his double bass

When Mary started as Alfie’s double bass teacher, she realised he needed some ideas about how he could help himself in terms of how to practise, how to organise practice and knowing what he was aiming for – in other words, being better equipped to direct his own learning journey.

Mary 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.

She’s also focused on getting Alfie to assess his own performance realistically, understanding what is good and what needs working on, and has seen him enhance his reflection and evaluation skills. He can now play a greater variety of styles and has developed tools to change the character of his playing, expressing himself creatively in the way he wants. She says, ‘His confidence has grown beyond measure’ and ‘he’s a better, more all round, accurate player’, being able to ‘do what he needs to do to make the sounds he wants’. She knows he’s not quite sure where he wants to go overall with his music but sees him taking full advantage of all the opportunities for playing currently on offer.

Mary feels she’s learnt just as much from Alfie, having her eyes opened to ‘more folksy, more creative music’. They ‘bounce off each other’ in an ‘interactive way of learning’ and she goes away from each lesson inspired. She really appreciates the SWMS personalised learning model of ‘gearing the teaching around the progress of the student’, rather than ‘getting the student to jump through hoops’. As she says, ‘You can tailor your teaching to the student’s needs and creative direction’.

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!

 

Karl and Laura, tutoring JOSIE

Breathe and believe

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’.

Stretching the voice

When Laura first started working with Josie, she could see she had a talent for song writing and was able to portray her songs well emotionally – but she needed to develop her vocal technique and musical knowledge. In particular, she needed to be more aware of how her voice worked, how to maintain vocal health, to increase and strengthen her range and be able to sustain her singing for longer sets.

Having had no previous singing training, Josie was aware that with Laura she was ‘taken back to basics’, learning to breathe properly for a start! She values time with Laura learning things that she could never do before, for instance developing the ability and becoming comfortable to sing across three octaves, when she’d only sung in one octave before. Josie continues to ensure her material keeps on stretching her voice.

Not being able to read or notate music was holding Josie back in being about to work with others, so she also studied music theory with Laura, achieving a distinction at Grade Five.

Integrating the guitar

Josie feels she’s moved from being ‘someone who plays a guitar’ to ‘someone who is a guitarist’. At first, her guitar playing just involved four chords and some strumming, but through her lessons she gained confidence with chord progressions, explored different ways of playing chords and started to use lots of dynamics. As she explains, her playing became ‘not just what I knew’ and her guitar became ‘part of me’, not something separate.

Karl recalls Josie’s audition tape where she showed ‘a strong way of playing’ but was lacking technique and dynamics. He refers to his teaching of Josie as ‘sharing different approaches’, encouraging her to think about her playing – what notes she was using, how she was playing, the shape of her chords – as well as helping her fully understand how the instrument worked and needed looking after. By focusing on the ‘technical and technique side of things’, he wanted to maximise Josie’s understanding of what she was doing, enabling her to bring out her great ‘ability within’, in the context of developing her sound and sensitivity. When Josie came back from a residential and talked about how one of the other students was playing, Karl used this as an opportunity to help Josie analyse this and think about what she might want to learn, adapt and apply from that playing, into her own practice.

With the development of her guitar playing as a focal point, Karl found himself moving into what he calls a ‘musical mentoring’, supporting her through the difficulties she experienced in trying to pursue her music making at school and nurturing the development of her self-esteem and self-confidence. He spent time helping her believe and take pride in her musical talent and manage the praise she was recieving, by understanding the triggers that could make her feel embarrassed about this. This support was embracing whole child development.

Talking with Rick and Lisa was an important element in how Karl worked with Josie, as it provided a ‘feedback loop’ and a ‘wrap around’ linking the support she experienced through the different elements of SWMS provision. He saw how much Josie benefited from the residentials, being with people her own age who shared the same passion for music, having the opportunity for musical conversations and relationships that would otherwise not have been possible. Her experiences there of diversity in terms of genres and levels of performance fed into his sessions with her, as she worked through frustrations about not being able to do certain things to start with, and explored how she ‘fitted in’ and how she developed her sense of self – and vision – as a talented musician.

 

Hilary, tutoring THEO

Sound quality

Hilary, Theo’s violin tutor, recalls she first came across Theo ‘appearing at Primary School in Year 4, coming in and playing Bach with one finger all over the violin – quite an extraordinary experience!’  She explains he was, and still is, completely involved in the violin for its quality of sound. This video of Theo playing Bach a few years later conveys his continued distinctive approach to this kind of music.

 

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 developing a 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.