Music house

overview

The Music House approach is based on the following principles:

• Every one of us is born with some type of musical potential.

• Musical potential comes in many different forms.

• Valuable music learning can be tailored to any type of musical potential.

• Everyone who has ever yearned to develop their musicality has the right to be mentored in a way that is relevant to their needs.

There is no one “right” way to do music! Everyone has the potential to be musically engaged, and everyone’s way of doing that is different. Some people are, by their musical nature, more inclined to create; others to develop instrumental skills. Some individuals find their musical connection through learning about composers and their music; others by discovering that they can play by ear. Some people take to string instruments; others to winds or keyboard. Music learning becomes exciting and meaningful when it is tailored to the needs, interests, and readiness of each individual. The prospect of discovering one's inner musician is an exciting one! 

Music House facilitates musical self-discovery by aligning music learning with the interests, learning style and natural musical inclination of each individual learner. Through exposure to a variety of instruments and musical activities such as playing by ear, improvisation and musical problem-solving, children and adults are able to discover their innate musicality, understand how music works, and develop the competence and confidence to pursue a personally gratifying, sustainable musical path.

mission

The mission of Music House is to support all music learners in their journey to find and maintain a personal connection to music making. Everyone is born with some type of musical potential, but musical potential can take many different forms! Music House is committed to aligning music learning with the needs, interests, and natural inclinations of each individual. Through the Music House methodology, learners are able to discover, celebrate, and develop their particular musical inclinations in order to make musical engagement an essential part of their lives.

pillars of the music house methodology

Exposure
Music House offers exposure to a variety of musical instruments and musical activities. Instruments represent each of the families: keyboard, string, wind and percussion. Activities include playing by ear, songwriting, learning pieces on one or more instruments, music history, conducting, and orchestration. Through this comprehensive exposure, students are able to find the most appropriate, personally gratifying musical path to pursue.

Choice
Music House students are encouraged to choose which musical activities to pursue, whether to try something all by themselves or with the teacher’s help, and for how long they would like to do a particular thing. Having a say in one’s own learning keeps the learning relevant and meaningful. Relevant and meaningful learning leads to long term musical engagement.

Individualization
Everyone has some type of musical aptitude, but each of us is musical in a different way. Different individuals need different things, and become ready to learn them at different times. Music House is committed to meeting learners where they are, and aligning the learning with each individual’s needs, interests, aptitude and readiness.

Contextualizing
Rather than teach skills and concepts as separate entities, Music House integrates them into a holistic learning experience. Music literacy is introduced through singing, playing, writing, and reading. Learning a piece is integrated with ear training, understanding how chords and melody work, and the background of the piece and its composer. A holistic approach leads to empowered musicianship.

Guidance
The Music House approach is based on trust, both of the learning process and of the child as a natural learner. While students choose their activities, the teacher observes their preferences, learning style, readiness and inclinations. Through these observations, the teacher infers other possible activities that might be appropriate and valuable for the student, and makes suggestions accordingly, knowing that when the time is right, the learner will make use of those suggestions.  In this way, students’ learning develops and expands organically, in keeping with their interests, readiness and learning styles.

Agency
Agency means caring enough about something to take it out of the learning environment and bring it into your life. At Music House students are encouraged, empowered, and motivated to own their learning. Rather than practicing being a chore and assigned expectation, our students bring home puzzles, challenges, and stories to share. Inspired by what they learn in their session, they become the teachers for their younger siblings and families. As a result of learning being relevant and meaningful, students forge long term musical connections.

the story of music house

One day in 2000 when I was working as a music teacher at the Little Red School House in New York City, the father of Charlie, a second grader, asked to speak with me. He seemed quite upset as he described his son's private piano lessons:

Charlie really wanted to learn the piano and was so excited when he began lessons. He even got into the practicing. But after a while, he just lost interest. He says lessons are boring, and it's almost impossible to get him to practice. Now he wants to quit. His mom and I are feeling so disappointed and confused. What do you think we should do?

Having heard many versions of the same story, I was becoming frustrated—appalled. A music learning experience should help a child like Charlie connect to music—not send him away from it! Now another distraught parent? It was too much. I blurted out an idea that must have been cooking for a long time.

I’m not a pianist or even a piano teacher really, but if I were teaching piano
to a beginner, it wouldn’t be about black dots on a page or hand position or
proper fingering. It would be about using the keyboard as a map of music,
experimenting, noticing the patterns of black and white keys, becoming
familiar with tonal relationships, discovering what happens when you play
two notes together far apart or close together, learning how a chord is built,
and how to play by ear.

Unaware that I had been thinking about any of this, I was surprised to hear myself go on and on. When the lecture was over, my heart was pounding; I was out of breath. Dad held out his hands in a gesture of supplication. “Take him,” he said.

What? Actually do this? While the opportunity took me by surprise, I felt ready to give it a try; after all, this had been a subconscious work in progress, probably for a very long time. I would figure out how to squeeze a keyboard into my tiny apartment, and, as described to Charlie’s father, I would encourage Charlie to explore it his way, drawing from his own inner impulse. I could offer ideas, but whether or not to take them would be for Charlie to decide. I got a keyboard and was happy to find the perfect spot for it, but then I began to wonder: Why just a keyboard? Suppose Charlie wants to do more than the keyboard; shouldn’t there be other things he can try? I got ahold of some instruments that might lend themselves to experimentation: an autoharp, a glockenspiel, a few hand drums, a recorder. With no ideal place for all these things I would need to be generous and share my living space with my new roommates. My apartment became a Music House.

Charlie began coming for lessons, and took to his freedom as a starving man takes to a crust of bread. He struck me as a Renaissance Man, infinitely inventive, moving comfortably among the instruments and learning to do lots of things. Charlie was fascinated with the scientific, emotional, intellectual and aesthetic sides of music, and his experiments were endlessly joyful as he went about absorbing the world. No wonder he couldn’t just sit on the piano bench waiting for the teacher to tell him what to do! One day he would be interested in learning a song by ear on the piano, next time there would be an experiment with the autoharp to determine what effect it has on the strings when you push down a few chord buttons at the same time. Trying his hand at conducting was his porthole to learning about beat and rhythm, and inventing his own notational system eventually led to an interest in learning standard notation. Some days his focus was intense, other days less so. To an observer this might all seem random; for Charlie, it had a perfect logic.

While Charlie and I discussed the possibility of his trying some things at home between our sessions, I never "assigned" any homework or practicing. It seemed that if I were to impose an expectation of practicing, Charlie might do it for me, making it my experience rather than his, and I wanted him to have unqualified ownership of whatever happened. So his musical adventure was allowed to be whatever he wanted it to be, with no clauses attached, overt or otherwise. 

Charlie had been coming to Music House for around two months when the phone rang one evening. It was Charlie’s dad:

I don’t know what you’re doing with Charlie, but he doesn’t stop talking about music. He's constantly at the piano picking out tunes by ear, making up songs and showing me things. Yesterday while he was strumming the autoharp (They found one on Ebay!) he said the F chord sounded green and the C7 is chocolate. Tonight he showed me how to take Mary's Little Lamb to China and how to make “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” sound cross-eyed - What's going on?"

The answer revealed itself as other children came, each to a private session. As I encouraged true individuality to emerge, it became clear that all that was “going on” was children being celebrated for who they were, guided toward musical paths that had meaning for them, and supported on their journey. No two students were alike—I describe it as “teaching snowflakes.” One child wanted to explore a variety of instruments while another preferred to focus on only one or two. A three year-old was fascinated with anything that had strings, and spent all her time with the ukulele, autoharp and guitar, while a boy with natural ease and brilliance at the piano was baffled by stringed instruments—could not make head or tail of them. There were singers, players, movers, creators. The children themselves defined my different roles according to their needs: Guide, Model, Partner. Some liked it when I suggested options while others seemed to want me to follow them around as a silent presence. Staying on the sidelines granted me the privilege of observing diverse raw material: pint-sized musical arrangers, improvisers, would-be instrument makers, tiny sound technicians, musicologists, and several fledgling conductors. A few children were interested in reading notes; many were not, and others came upon it suddenly when they were ready, reading, writing, and playing notes all at once in a glorious epiphany. Some children wanted to keep a log of their accomplishments; others didn’t seem interested in accomplishments. By giving them freedom to gratify their impulses, I got to know who these children were, each possessing a unique brilliance.

The feedback from parents was gratifying. “Lucy gave us a wonderful lecture about Beethoven!” “Music House is the high point of David’s life.” Students gave me feedback as well. 7-year-old Emily, a prolific songwriter, said that Music House is “so inspiwing!” Simon, while comparing how you play a melody on the piano to how you play one on guitar suddenly blurted out, “I'm so unconfused right now!” In terms of “success,” I measured it in terms of eagerness and engagement. We learn music by doing music, so it is all about motivation. Children did not want to leave when the session was over. They would beg to do “just one more thing,” dawdling and fingering various objects on their way down the hall until we finally made it to the door.

I began working with adult students. Those who had never done anything with music before were excited but a bit nervous. Those who had quit lessons in childhood or been told by a choral director that they were “tone deaf” were terrified. They would arrive at their first lesson trembling, often in tears. All it took was framing a few successes that proved to them that they did have musical potential, and music became a nourishing, gratifying part of their lives.

It appears that most students who started with me in the early years of Music House have remained musically involved. Many have found their respective niches as serious pianists, bass guitarists and composers, and some have gone on to careers in music. My former students, now grown up, express gratitude for an approach that allowed them the space to discover their musical selves. In virtually all cases, even in those where music has been set aside, students’ recollections of their Music House experiences are nostalgic and positive. Not everyone stays musically involved throughout life, and there are many reasons for this, but the Music House experiment appears to have achieved a victory: to offer an approach that can remove music lessons as a reason for someone abandoning musical pursuits.

After twenty years, it is still a rare day that I do not run to the phone at the end of a session, eager to rave to a friend or relative about some new revelation or wanting to share an anecdote. This is because the nature of the approach takes itself from the nature of children, spontaneous, authentic, and utterly defying pigeonholing. I document each session in terms of what happened and what meaning can be inferred. I have come to see certainty as the enemy of education, and find that it is from the fertile field of uncertainty that the most sublime seeds sprout. I am thankful for the privilege of doing work that never gets old.