SO WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?:

I  realized that in order for Natasha’s lessons to work, we would have to share the same agenda. In this case... I had to find a way to help Natasha with what mattered to her. 
          The next time she jumped up to pace and sing, I abandoned all thought of getting her “back on track.” Now able to be fully present, I realized that Natasha’s real needs had nothing to do with becoming a pianist. What she wanted and needed was to learn how to use the piano in some way that would support her passion and source of inspiration: making up songs. I began to think of ways to help a budding songwriter. Because Natasha was interested in finding accompaniments for her songs, I showed her how to form chords at the piano and configure them to different rhythms and styles. She of course took this a step further, and invented her own chords and variations, learning a lot about harmony, tonal relationships, and accompanying in the process.
          Now that we shared the same agenda, Natasha had a reason for working with me. I explained to her parents that her creativity would be the seed from which her future music learning would sprout. They thanked me for the explanation, adding that Natasha’s enthusiasm was a clear enough indication that her lessons were working! Had I not approached her learning this way, I would have lost Natasha as a student, reinforcing the idea that music lessons are by nature irrelevant for creative individuals.

CONSIDER...

We hold great artists and thinkers like Beethoven, Einstein, and Chaplin in the highest regard, and are grateful for their contributions to humanity. Yet as children, these creative geniuses and many others had a miserable time of it both in and out of school, utterly unappreciated for those very qualities that eventually led to their achievements. When young children display creative inclinations that lie outside the bounds of adult expectations of what children should do, those inclinations are often ignored or discouraged outright. It is only when the individual is later recognized as a success that we might look back and acknowledge the significance of those childhood behaviors.

          What are music lessons for? More to the point, who are they for? Are lessons as we know them designed to help children develop their musical potential? No! The purpose of conventional music lessons is to help certain children develop a certain type of musical potential: mastery of a particular instrument. This model excludes the great many musical individuals whose initial musical spark—that feeling that inspires them to connect to music at all—is to compose, improvise, sing, dance, move, conduct, study music history, experiment with sound. How many of our musically insecure, musically inactive adults started out as musical children whose spark was snuffed out in their music lessons, because the teacher’s convictions about how music learning should look took precedence over the real needs of the other person in the room? What might their contribution have been?