The Purpose of Childhood Music Lessons, Or, How to Figure Out If You're Wasting Your Money

This is part of my piano teaching series. It's really important to read each post in order!

Intro (this post): Discusses what the overall goals should be for music lessons

Part 1: Explains the principles of how piano should be taught to achieve those overall goals

Part 2: Draws upon those principles to list the specific skills that need to be emphasized from the start

Part 3: A compilation of additional insights to make their learning effective and fun

Part 4: Shows how it's all implemented by detailing my lesson structure

Most parents seem to have an interest in their kids learning an instrument. For many of them, this is motivated by a general desire for their kids to be able to use music in their lives. And usually this desire is manifest simply as (1) choosing (or letting the child choose) an instrument for them to start learning, (2) finding a "good" teacher, and (3) paying for weekly lessons.

So they do those three things with visions of great success for their child. Unfortunately, the hopeful start usually progresses through a predictable path of failure: First, the kid starts out motivated and is learning the basics quickly and having fun. Then the initial excitement wears off when the kid realizes learning an instrument is actually a ton of hard work and takes a long time without much apparent progress. That's when the kid stops practicing. The parent, if dedicated, will force or bribe the kid to practice for a time, but it becomes more of a fight month after month. The kid's progress becomes painfully slow. The parent begins to question whether all the money and frustration is worth such slow progress, and eventually they decide their dream of their child being a musician is just not worth it. They let their child quit, and the child grows up to be one more apparently nonmusical adult in the world who "took ____ lessons as a kid but can't play anymore."

Not every child goes down this same path, though. Research has shown that the main factor that determines whether a child will quit is actually the parents. If they are willing to continue putting in the effort to motivate their child to continue practicing, the child will continue to progress, and eventually some percentage of those kids will get to a level where they are playing their instrument well enough that they develop some intrinsic satisfaction and enjoyment in playing. After that, the child will practice and progress without so much nagging or bribing and will ultimately determine for herself how far she progresses with her instrument.

But, sadly, even most of those kids end up using their instrument very little the rest of their lives after their formal lessons stop. They can still play some songs they worked hard to memorize when they were taking lessons, but that's about it.

The fact that so many people "failed" music early on and that even those who apparently succeeded still didn't learn music in a way that allowed them to have music become an important and regular part of the rest of their lives is a pretty grim reality--and even expectation--in our culture. Is music just so difficult that only a few of us can become true lifelong musicians?

No! Absolutely not. The problem isn't that music is too hard for most of us; the problem is that the generally accepted--and almost universally used--methods of teaching music are stuck in the dark ages. In other words, (most) music teachers are primarily to blame. They don't understand how music should actually be taught, and their misunderstandings and faulty teaching methods are so widespread and ingrained into our culture that they go unnoticed and unquestioned.

So what are these faulty teaching methods, and how should music really be taught?

To illustrate (and exaggerate) the experience kids get from most mainstream music teachers, I'll describe to you a stereotypical piano student's experience.

New piano teacher (Highly recommended! An amazing piano player! Has high-level students! Hard to get in to! Fun yet has high expectations! Focuses on musicality and creativity!) takes new piano student and teaches him some mnemonics to remember the notes on the clefs, gives him note name stickers to put on his keyboard, assigns him a couple songs, and then sends him home to play them over and over. After a few weeks, he can finally play them smoothly, so piano teacher assigns a couple more songs that are slightly more difficult, and the student starts the process again of playing his songs over and over until he can finally play them smoothly. This gets repeated again and again for years, and the student slowly learns increasingly difficult songs. Not only is this complete drudgery, but also even when the kid is finally playing some pretty challenging songs and knows how to use nice dynamics and articulations and phrasing to make them sound impressively musical, he's still not understanding most of what he's playing.

If the goal was to learn an instrument, you can check it off! He can play the piano. But we all know people like this--they progressed through high levels of classical piano training and still can't really play anything other than the songs they worked on for weeks and weeks when they were taking lessons.

To understand where that typical experience goes wrong, I first need to explain something very important: Music is a language. Sure, it's different than other spoken languages we usually think of (you know, English, Japanese, Spanish, etc.), but it is just as much a language as any of those.

For example, think how similar reading music is to reading English. Both involve seeing symbols on a page and converting them into movements that produce sounds (one with your mouth and vocal cords, the other with your fingers and piano).

Now think about how we teach children to read. Early on, they sound out letter by agonizing letter, but with practice and learning more rules, they are soon reading short stories (written only using the sounds and words they've learned thus far). Each day, we teach them new sounds and words and give them new stories to read. They enjoy hearing the new stories each day while getting used to seeing the sounds and words in different contexts. Eventually they get faster and can soon glance at a whole word or even a whole line and read it all at once. It's incredible! How can mere children perform such a feat?

What if we taught children to read English the same way we teach them to read music? First we would teach them only the most basic of rules and assign them to read something way above their reading level. We wouldn't allow them to move on to the next story until they've read that first story over and over so many times that they can finally read it fluently with all the correct words and intonations, which they were eventually able to accomplish by just memorizing all of the too-difficult words and phrasings (which they probably wouldn't even recognize in a different context). Their reading level would only be marginally better than it was weeks ago when they started reading those stories over and over, so their progress in learning to read would continue at a snail's pace. Nearly all children would hate reading because there's no fun in reading every new story over and over thirty times! And many would probably never even learn to read, each of them thinking their entire life that it's too hard for them.

That seems pretty ridiculous, doesn't it? It's no wonder so many students never learn to read music very well and are therefore music illiterate their whole lives despite years of training and practice. Everyone knows you don't teach a child to read by making them read (over and over) only a couple different stories per month. Instead, you give them new material every time they practice. And you add in new elements each time, teaching them the rules and then immediately getting them to read a bunch of stories that incorporate those new elements so they can see them in different contexts. Occasionally you might have them spend some extra time learning something above their level so they can perform it, but this is more an exercise in memorization and performance skills than it is in reading improvement.

So, when you set out looking for a "good" instrument teacher for your child, you need to recognize that you're not actually looking for an instrument teacher. Instead, you're looking for a "music teacher"--someone who will teach your child to be fluent in the language of music. Of course, you can't speak in the language of music without an instrument, so they will, of necessity, also be teaching your child an instrument. But their primary goal will be to develop your child's fluency in the language of music.

What do we call someone who is fluent in the language of music? We call them a musician. It's someone who has the world of music opened up to them. They can play at least one instrument at a fairly high level, and they can learn any new instrument relatively quickly. They can read music so fluently that they can sight read songs for any occasion, whether it's for personal catharsis or for a Christmas party sing-along or to accompany a church congregation. They can compose their own music. They can make sense of the chords in the music they hear on the radio and play them for their friends to sing along. They can join a band and play along with any of the songs using simple lead sheets and minimal preparation. In short, through their fluency in the language of music, they are a lifelong musician, and playing music in many different situations is a regular part of their life.

I want to make sure I've been clear up to this point. Do you see the difference between learning to play an instrument versus learning the language of music through an instrument? Anyone can learn the right finger movements to play some songs on the piano passably well without any knowledge of the language of music. All they have to do is take lessons from pretty much any piano teacher. Or, cheaper still, they can watch song tutorials on YouTube. This is worlds different than what parents actually are looking for when they start their children in music lessons.

So what are these mysterious and magical teaching methods that can turn anyone into a musician by helping them become fluent in the language of music?

True fluency in any language, including music, requires 4 skills: listening comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing.

Listening comprehension. To be able to hear music and understand what's happening, it requires lots of ear training and a thorough understanding of musical theory.

Speaking. To speak well with your chosen instrument, you first need good instrument-specific technique. Additionally, you need to learn all four ways of  "speaking" using an instrument: (1) sight reading, (2) playing by rote, (3) playing by ear, and (4) improvisation. Let me elaborate a little bit on these. The first two, sight reading and playing by rote, rely on music with all the notes written in for you. Sight reading means being able to play through a whole song from beginning to end the first time you've ever laid eyes on it, and usually it requires you to play without rhythmic interruptions and at the proper tempo. Playing by rote means you learn to play a song well by just playing it over and over, so you've basically memorized all the parts of it that were too difficult for you to sight read. Notice that, with regard to those two skills, the higher one's music reading abilities, the more songs one is able to sight read and the fewer songs they have to learn by rote. The last two, playing by ear and improvisation, are the opposite of the first two in that they do not use music with all the notes written in for you. Playing by ear is figuring out/imitating a song that you've heard before, and improvisation means making up your own stuff on the spot. These also require ear training, lots of musical theory, and practice doing them.

Reading. To read music on a page fluently (whether you're playing through it out loud with an instrument or just silently in your head), you need to know what all the symbols mean, and you need to be able to look at the notes and understand what they're saying. That understanding means being able to hear in your mind generally what it will sound like and being able to recognize the chords and patterns and such in the notes. The key here is a thorough understanding of music theory and lots of practice reading music.

Writing. We usually call this composition, and it again requires a solid understanding of music theory and lots of practice trying out different ideas to learn what expresses the emotions you're trying to convey.

This doesn't even get into such things as understanding different styles of music and how they ought to be played, music history, and so forth. But that list above is the basic list that will give someone a solid foundation of musical fluency to build upon.

(Sidenote: I already mentioned that a child's first instrument is simply a conduit through which she can learn this language of music, but I want to share the implications that has on switching instruments. I would recommend having her stick with that first instrument until it completes its job of helping her attain a fairly good level of fluency in music. Otherwise, if she switches to a different instrument before that, she will be spending a lot of time back at the beginning learning instrument-specific technique and having to figure out how to play simple music that she has already learned to read well, so her progress in becoming fluent in the language of music will be halted for quite a while, which makes it less likely that she will have progressed to the point of fluency before she is no longer taking music lessons. Instead, it's better to accomplish the primary goal of becoming fairly fluent in the language of music first and then switch instruments after, although there may be circumstances where it's wise to switch to a different instrument before that if you find that your child's first instrument is somehow completely at odds with her tastes or abilities.)

Comparing the requirements for fluency described above to a typical kid's experience with piano lessons (from pretty much any teacher), the kid will get almost no ear training, only a little bit of theory, a fair amount of technique training, minimal new reading material each week, a crazy overwhelming annoying amount of rote practicing, almost no experience sight reading or playing by ear or improvising, and probably no composition experience.

It's harsh, but I would liken the usual experience of taking piano lessons to trying to teach a kid Japanese by making him spend hundreds of hours memorizing a bunch of pre-formed paragraphs without actually teaching the grammar or how to make his own sentences or giving him the opportunity to listen to (and try to understand) real Japanese or giving him any chances to actually converse with a native speaker. How effective would that be? He would visit Japan thinking he knows Japanese, but he would struggle figuring out how to apply his memorized sentences properly and would never get to truly communicate with and have the language and culture of the incredible Japanese people come alive to him and be understood by him. What a travesty of a cultural experience. This is what we are doing to most kids when they take instrument lessons.

So, consider your child's music lessons. Are you paying for something that's going to be a complete waste, or is your child learning the language of music to become a true and lifelong musician? You can tell based on what your child is being (or, in actuality, not being) taught. Is there a significant amount of deliberate ear training and theory teaching going on? And how would you break down how much time your child is being asked to spend on rote learning versus the other three ways to use their instrument? I would hazard a guess at 90% or more being focused on rote playing, which is the least useful one of the four. And how much new material is your child getting practice reading each week?

In summary, if your child's instrument teacher is not teaching them the language of music, your child is traveling down a path of almost certain musical illiteracy that generations of parents have watched millions of times. You're wasting your money and effort.

I'm writing this because it's something I've come to realize over the course of figuring out how to teach my kids piano, and clearly I've become passionate about it, especially because if it weren't for my efforts to figure out how to teach them, I'm pretty confident they'd be traveling down the same path!

So find a teacher who focuses on teaching the language of music through your child's chosen instrument, and then make sure you have the grit to make your kid stick with their instrument until they are fluent. If you do that, your child will become a lifelong musician and will reap all the incredible benefits that being fluent in the language of music has to offer, especially in this world where true musicians are so rare. My guess is that, taught properly, a moderately dedicated student can achieve fluency in the language of music in about 5 years. That's all! A 5-year commitment to learn the most important second language in the world, one that they will use their entire life.

And if you can't find a good music teacher, consider doing it yourself and learning along with your child! To help you, I've written a series of blog posts (the index is at the top of this post) that explains everything I do to accomplish the goals described in this post. They are applied specifically to the piano, but the principles apply equally well to any instrument. Leave a comment on any of the posts if you have questions and I'll make sure to respond.