Music teaching problems addressed by Music at First Sight

Of the people who begin musical instrument study at least 90% drop it and most never become classical musically literate audience members. In spite of the skill and passion of conscientious teachers, beginning instrumental technique music,by itself, is too boring for todays students. Technique method music is not great music. It is intended to train fingers with little or no musicality. Dexterity becomes the main objective instead of musical understanding and communication. If technique pieces were derived from and tied to major monuments of great music with which the student could spend a lifetime of growth, then method work would feel more justified, lessons learned would last longer and find wider application in the living of a good life. Most traditional teaching materials leave very little residue of the greatness of music, BUT you can't play without technique. Methods pieces are necessary but they won't support or sustain interest in good music all by themselves if the student must interrupt study because of the shifts and changes of everyday life.

Music At First Sight (MAFS) not only is based on great works, it provides roughly graded parts, Beginning through Elementary levels, that accept your level of playing and provide a legitimate role for you in ensemble with the worlds finest artists. Working with world class artist recordings as accompaniment to your first beginning notes infuses everything you play with musicality. That piece of great music becomes a part of your life, creates the need to hear it in concert, and if you must drop playing for a while, strongly persuades you to return again as soon as possible. You know you haven't gotten all there is to dig out of it - repeated hearings in concert and recordings prove it. Each phrase of a piece becomes a familiar landscape you have visited and want to know more about.

The music teacher who is not a regularly performing artist can provide only limited musical role modeling, and is, after all, only one point of view. Interpretation, intonation,dynamic shadings, energy levels, dialogues between voices in the parts, imagery: this has to be described in WORDS. Between lessons the student is isolated with only his own playing. Finally the annual contest and recital comes with its competitive aura and the student may come to believe that success means
winning -instead of communicating digested musicality, which can't be tacked on after the notes are "learned". With winners come losers, and God must have loved them because he made so many. I'm one of them. I had talent to perform but too many contests left me worrying about wrong notes, distracted me from a goal of learning to share my love and took all the fun out of what I really wanted to do with my life. This is my attempt to help others avoid that outcome.

MAFS provides you parts having phrases that test your skills, imitate other voices, echo little figures, all of which lets you imagine yourself as a soloist with the entire recording as accompaniment. You hear an arching, soaring phrase and you get a chance to imitate it, and if you want to edit or improve your part, there is an enlarged blank staff with each part, calibrated to easily write down your ideas, try them out and revise them. Your own arching, soaring melodic line can come to life here, provide tangible evidence of your musicality and give you something of value to repeatedly return to, edit and improve.

Music notation is published only in a "one-format-fits-all". The composer wrote down what he wanted the audience to hear. It's the performers job to interpret those printed symbols . The same piece of great music has been performed in many different ways over the many eras of its lifetime, reflecting changes in taste, style, the ethos of every era. But notation is so imperfect a record of all the tiny performance details of a composers intention that there will always be an eternal search for the definitive performance. Factors like original authentic instruments, purity of style, flaming
romanticism, and the age old discussion about ornamentation all have oars stirring the soup of interpretation; some like it hot, some like it bland,some like it in between - each style going around -coming around - a never ending orbit.

MAFS gives you a MELODIC CUE: a digest of the important melodies you will hear in your earphones. Use this cue to find your part and play along in synch with the recording, and to help develop skill in speed reading. Then you have a LONG TONES part to play while keeping the miniature Melodic Cue in your peripheral vision. This part comes in three forms (A) With the Cue; (B) By itself; (C) both your part and the Cue in miniature- and an enlarged blank staff for you to
write in your own ideas. It's a lot of paper but you don't have to print the C part until you are ready to be creative. There is a large set of free blank music staff templates in all the clefs, some with staff lines divided into measures. MAFS gives you 3 or more different parts- and each part comes in those three formats-A,B,C. Each of the three parts emphasizes a slightly different point of view or a set of slightly more involved technical suggestions. You could take one figure, adapt it to the changes in the music and write it in frequently if you wanted a technical drill to practice.

Slavishly imitating a recording is no way to study music performance.

True. MAFS strongly encourages you to get as many different recordings as you can, as well as making your own recording. Hearing a variety of ways to play the same passage proves that there is room for your own ideas.

Earphones have proven dangerous to some young peoples hearing.
True. Prolonged exposure to loud noise will cause loss of hearing. MAFS cautions you to adjust volume level in your earphones so you can listen to your own playing clearly above the level of the recording. It's possible that focussed listening keeps you aware of volume levels, whereas simply hearing background sounds while you are focussed on something else-may subject your hearing to damaging levels.

Reading music is very hard. It's a totally different language.
Reading music notation is one of the hardest jobs for the beginning student. I remember asking my teacher to play a piece through, then I would reconstruct it by ear - instead of reading the notes. She finally caught on, but I had developed work-arounds to avoid actually reading which might have then developed into speed reading. I was struck by Glenn Goulds remark that he always memorized a piece before sitting down to play it. MAFS can, and will try to set music typefaces so the notes and the layout help you read those symbols more easily. That is what computers can do
today. Students of all ages should benefit from this flexibility.

What really grabbed my interest in reading music as a teen-ager was the miniature score: following symphonies, operas, concerts while lying on the rug in front of the radio. Later I used the miniature scores of Bach cantatas to accompany Sunday morning broadcasts on NPR - with my cello: exciting because I was getting inspired from several directions at once. MAFS lets you follow the general contours of a melodic cue which approximates what is on the recording. Before you play, follow the notation several times with the recording. Then add your 1-A Long Tones part which has the cue in
miniature above your own notes. You are hearing an increasingly familiar piece, learning the notation where you really need it, and seeing the rest of the notation as a locator, a picture of a group of sounds, a cue to where you should play. The long notes which you do play become shorter and shorter as the piece progresses. It's just a different combination of several ways to learn to read.

I believe Music At First Sight has some useful approaches to each of these problems and invite you to explore the free samples on this website.

Bob Wood