Expose your students–and yourself–to as many styles of music as possible. If you are involved in a fixed curriculum, plan some times to step out of it and include something different.
Every style of playing music embraces players of top quality. Find them or recordings of them and let your students listen, and it’s of course educational for us as teachers as well. We need to set the example for students to be exposed to a variety of styles, whether readily available or not.
Nowadays media companies try to control what most people hear in order to sell lots of their own product. They know that people like what they hear the most. Classical music wasn’t elitist when Walt Disney used it for all his sound tracks.
Too often we are prejudiced against a whole type of music without really listening to it, or without listening to good practitioners of that style. For example, many people cringe when they think of bagpipes, because there are very few top quality players of the instrument. There are only 30 Grade 1 pipe bands in the whole world, so that gives an idea of how many top players there are. Think too, about music we may feel we hear too much of: rap, etc. Have you taken care to listen to a good musician in that style? Many have heard or played some version of Pachelbel’s Canon but have you listened to or played the original piece of music? (See my post about this piece.)
Hearing something unfamiliar opens a new world. It might be something that really appeals and intrigues. Or it might be music a person dislikes, but even this is useful, because it helps listeners clarify why they like the music they do like.
Whether classical, folk, popular, jazz, or any category you can think of, there are different styles that have developed at different time periods and in every geographic location. It doesn’t matter whether the music seems simple, or seems impossible to play–it shouldn’t be judged by whether a student thinks he or she could manage to play it. (Ye Olde Joke: How many musicians does it take to change a light bulb? Six–one to change it, and five to say “Oh I could do that!”) The more you listen to one style of music, the more you discover there are styles within that style, based on good players located in different areas, or composers from different backgrounds or time periods.
I played some recordings of Hungarian fiddle music for a class recently and they didn’t understand it. And yet the unadorned melodies were simple and appealing. They just weren’t familiar with or appreciative of the style. One person thought it sounded middle eastern, which is a pretty far cry from Hungarian. Some day I’ll play some Lebanese fiddling for them, to demonstrate middle eastern music in comparison. Or some Gaelic psalm-singing from the Scottish island of Lewis, where the singing sounds far more middle eastern than does music from central Europe.
Listening to a world of music sets students to thinking, activates our ears, and brings our world a little closer.
This is great. Thanks for the insight