Simpedia

Neil Moore

It’s good if students sing and play, and it is no issue whatsoever if they don’t. I request it, I encourage it, I never require it. I heard a statistic once (don’t quote me!!), that on people’s list of things they feared most, singing in public was rated consistently more frightening than dying itself. Frankly, I am not the least bit interested in exposing people to that stuff, so I ask, and I encourage, and if they resist, then I love them just the same.

At a teaching level, it goes deeper than the fear (of which resistance and embarrassment are just expressions). Having a student sing and play requires the introduction of an additional thought process. Even if you have a fully willing student, the introduction of singing warrants the same degree of ‘controlling the events’ as does the bringing together of the LH and RH.  And if you really want to achieve this outcome successfully, with every student, it will take you down another path, and the early years of our lesson framework and architecture don’t really allow for that to any great extent.

Regardless, if you request any singing whatsoever from the student, and if you don’t manage this successfully, and the student has a less than ideal experience with this, then they will quickly make decisions about singing and playing; they will tell you that they ‘don’t like it’, and they will subsequently close a door that you should never have opened in the first place.

Of course, instinctively, all human beings crave to sing. It’s in our design, but the current culture of music education has taught us not to. Like everything else however, some people have easier access to doing this than others.

When I do accompaniments, I usually ask the student if they want to sing along. If the parent is there, I ask the parent to sing and to provide the voice (melody) at home during the week. I always ask if the student has a friend who plays another instrument. They usually do – a trumpeter, a clarinetist, a flutist, saxophonist, violinist, whatever – or a friend who sings and likes to sing.

I manage the process so that my student agrees to get together with their friend, the friend learning and playing the melody whilst my student plays the accompaniment. If you manage this well, and choose some cool pieces (Beatles songs for example), and the buddy plays trumpet, then on occasion, I ask that the friend come to the lesson as well, and they do a duo performance.

When an accompaniment has its melody played, then it really does have a whole life of its own. In the absence of a melody, it is often about as interesting as a blank canvas with no painting on it. In the absence of a melody, having the student play basic accompaniment rhythm sections and basic triads often gets boring for the student, and usually gets really boring for the parent. This soon translates to the parent actually questioning the accompaniment process and its value in the first place. This is amazing in my view, as I say that our Accompaniment Technology is one of the most powerful tools with which we can equip a student. It just needs to be done properly.

It’s all in the set-up conversations, and you need to be fully resolved about its extraordinary value. Students ALWAYS mirror the unspoken, unresolved issues of their teacher (in spite of their teacher’s best efforts to communicate otherwise.)