You may have noticed that this site sits fairly idle … for now.
My primary focus for the last several years has been on establishing
Last November, I asked one of my students to allow me to control their computer via Zoom. With permission from her parent, I installed Jamulus on her computer, and I initiated a connection to software that I’d started on my computer. We played together a Christmas duet that she was learning, in real-time. We could follow each other’s timing, and I could hear when she needed help in her rhythm or notes.
It was the first time I’d played a duet with a student since March, when we had started teaching via Zoom. I quietly cried while playing along; I had not realized how much I’d missed performing with my students.
In my last post, I talked of the tools I use to teach remotely, and I highlighted the limitations of audio with Zoom or CleanFeed – the two tools I usually use. I have craved the ability to play collaboratively, in real-time, with my students. Below I highlight some of what I’ve learned during my exploration of tools designed to enable musicians to perform together virtually.
There’s no doubt about it. While better than nothing, teaching music via Zoom is far from ideal.
I am grateful to be able to see my students weekly and safely. But I miss the clarity of in-life audio, the ability to pick up subtle body-movement clues, and the lack of being able to play duets with my students.
In what seems like a part-time job, I have been on a continuous quest to find solutions to improve the remote music-lesson experience. I’ve followed and implemented all of the incremental improvements of the Zoom application, optimized my home network settings, spent hours and dollars with parents to optimize their setups, and dived deep into the depths of experimental software and hardware designed to diminish the distance of distanced, collaborative performances.
Here are a bit of what I’ve tried and learned.
Most of my piano and composition students do not pursue a degree, much less a career, in music. This is how it should be. While I am prepared to take a student to the college level, my main goal is enabling a lifelong joy of music through developing the accomplished learner. Additionally, I coach self-patience, perseverance, and high personal standards – skills useful in any career.
But when the stars align, it seems, I am blessed with a student interested in a career in music. I love the college audition preparation phase, where the literature is necessarily diverse and meaty. I love that the attention to detail is consistently deep. The student’s motivation jumps a few notches higher, and the rate of growth is that much more pronounced.
Getting into a music school is the immediate hurdle. However, I am aware that making a career in music is another hurdle usually not covered at all within the 4 year programs our students take. Thus I also coach how to make a living as a professional musician, or at least to find opportunities to play as a professional musician. More often than not, that means making your own opportunities.
It is a new year of teaching piano. Involved with this is helping students find repertoire for upcoming competitions. One national music organization that focusses on American composers (hurray!) released a new compendium of eligible works for the next four years of competitions. I’ve been going through the listed works, which vary from very early to very advanced musical repertoire.
I am struck that in the Primary levels there are at least two “native American inspired” tunes that cause me to question if it is appropriate to assign these works to my students: The Swinging Sioux by William Gillock, and Apache Braves by Dennis Alexander. Both of these composers are very-well respected. Still, I’m a bit surprised to see these in the repertoire list, particularly after all that has come to our attention in the last decade or two. Both of these works use various stereotypes we’ve come to associate with children’s “Indian” music, and which have little to nothing to do with First American culture.