a new way.

Music, she tells me, is a language.  Why do we teach it like it’s not?

When a child, in all wonder, breaks words up syllabically, we are filled with the same wonder.  Here is real learning.  A learning of necessity, reward, and pitfalls perceived as progress.  There is continual repetition.  Da becomes dada becomes daddy; coos become syllables become resemblances of words become words.  At first there are no books.  The written is a hindrance rather than a help, so we jettison it until the spoken becomes second nature.

She continues.  Music is aural.  Why do we teach it like it’s not? 

Let the student listen to aural patterns, recognize them, duplicate them, create them, sing them, chant them, move to them, internalize them but by God, let music be just like language.  Fluid.  Dynamic.  Pulsing.  Away from the piano.   And, above all else, burn the books.  Music teachers have gotten the process all backwards and we have to, with equal amounts gusto and humility, relearn teaching.  We’ve catered to the mind and not at all to the ear.  So what do we do now?

This is how you can teach, she says, as her students arrive, one after another.  You can relearn patterns.  You can get uncramped, stand up, and stop repeating a history of musicless notation.  I devour every word, lean forward, and say, Make me a native speaker.