Progression and instrumental music learning-a guest blog by Nick Beach

Nick Beach is a music education consultant, writer and musician.  He took his degree at Dartington, following this with orchestral training at the National Centre of Orchestral Studies.  Nick successfully mixed playing and teaching, working for Berkshire Young Musicians Trust as Head of Education. He joined Trinity College London in 2002, becoming Academic Director in 2011, a post which he held until early 2018.  He now works on a freelance basis and has recently completed a three-month project in Australia. ​Nick was also a guest presenter at Musical Futures International 's 'The Big Gig' teacher conference in Melbourne in June.

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Progression and instrumental learning - is there a natural pyramid in musical development and opportunity?  

Do a web search on “why learn a musical instrument” and you will get thousands of hits telling you that playing a musical instrument will make you smarter, improve your memory, make you more organised, make you a team worker, make you better at maths, co-ordinated, resilient, the list goes on and on.  Few children, however, consider these things when they put up their hand and volunteer, or ask their parents for instrumental music lessons.

Look again at the web search and you will see that most of the sites listed are music teaching organisations and the information provided is really there to help convince parents that the money they spend on instrumental lessons is an investment in their child’s future.  

Whilst some of the claims made on such sites are stretching credibility somewhat, most of us as music teachers would agree with the general principle that learning a musical instrument has benefits that go beyond the purely musical. However there is a danger amidst all this parent-targeted noise that we lose, if we had it in the first place, any sense of the child’s view. Why do children want to learn musical instruments?   What draws them to a particular instrument? What do they think will happen in lessons? To what extent are those expectations met? And perhaps most critically of all, what is the sequence of experiences, events and decisions that leads them to give up – sometimes all too soon?

A primary school head teacher in the UK, in a discussion about introducing instrumental lessons in his school, once told me: “I’ve seen it all before, 10 children start instruments at the beginning of the year and by the end of the year you have 2 or 3 left – what’s the point of that?”  In the ABRSM Making Music report, 50% of 8-10 year olds said they had lessons on an instrument, and amongst 16-17 year olds 61% used to have lessons but have now given up.

Whether or not the Making Music survey is reflective of the wider population, this represents a huge number of children and young people who have had the opportunity to learn a musical instrument and have, at some point, made the decision to stop.

So does this matter?  Is there a natural pyramid in musical development and opportunity?  

The Key Data on Music Education Hubs 2016 report shows that UK Music Hubs delivered beginner classes to over 650,000 children in 2015/16, along with over 500,000 taking ongoing instrumental lessons of some sort.  

​The Association of British Orchestras 2016 report suggests that 2,411 musicians are engaged in permanent or long-term positions with UK orchestras. Roughly extrapolating from this figure suggests that there are 27 professional orchestral vacancies for violinists each year, 3 for oboists, etc.  

Clearly it is absurd to base a pyramid on orchestral jobs – the music industry is a significant employer across a huge range roles, most of which are not performance – but is preparation for work what we are offering when we offer instrumental lessons? It may not be, but it is probably fair to say that much instrumental teaching is delivered in a way that suggests that there is an end point or goal in mind – if not in the mind of the pupil then in the mind of the teacher.

Much is made of the term progression in instrumental music teaching, and this is probably most widely understood by reference to external scales.  The graded music exam is ubiquitous in many countries around the world and has become synonymous with musical progression. Parents are possibly the most aggressive in their use of the graded exam as a benchmark for their child’s speed of progression – too often used as a means of comparison with other people’s children!  

The graded exam is a wonderful assessment model – you can take it at any age, it celebrates musical performance and it is assessed live by experts. However, like any educational tool, it can be misused.

“The candidate struggled through his Grade 5 trumpet exam and when the last test was over he eagerly asked the examiner: ‘Have I passed?’.  On being told by the examiner that he would have to wait for the results his face fell. ‘Why is it so important?’ asked the examiner. ‘Well,’ answered the candidate, ‘My dad says that if I pass I can give it up.’

Thankfully few graded exams are used in this way, but we should perhaps ask ourselves whether the expectations of progression that are common in instrumental learning match those of learners.  Does it matter how long a learner takes to get to Grade 1, 2 or 3? Indeed does it matter if they never do?

This brings us back to the issue of giving up.  The statistics from the ABRSM research above bear out the conversations we all have when someone you meet learns that you are a musician.  “Oh, I used the play the xxxx at school, but I gave it up”, often followed by a rather wistful look reflecting an opportunity lost. So does it matter – or is this level of attrition just the way of things?   I would argue that surely it does matter. If we believe all these good things will stem from learning a musical instrument (and we haven’t even touched on the lifelong love of music that can flow from it) then it is vital that we understand the reasons students give up, thus denying themselves all of these benefits.  

The student will arrive at their first lesson with great excitement and hope, from pupil, parent and teacher.  And although none of these three (apart from maybe the pupil!) will admit to prodigious expectations doesn’t every parent harbour at the back of their mind the fond hope that their child might “have talent”?  

Similarly the teacher will often be on the look-out for students that show that special potential. Are the danger signs here already? The teacher sets the student off on a path of progressive mastery, where skills are accumulated and progressively harder pieces offered.  There may be occasional sideways forays (often at the end of term) when the relentlessly increasing challenge is relaxed, but for the most part there is a constant expectation that the next piece the student learns will be harder than the last.

Most of the material that teachers will offer students will reflect this incline: tutor books with ever harder pieces, graded repertoire, and of course graded exams.  The bar on the instrumental learning high jump is inexorably heightened, with the increasing danger that the student will crash into it rather than fly over it. This is often the point where the student gives up.

In a study in 2000, Gary McPherson considers the reasons children give for giving up instrumental lessons under the headings of motivation, quality and quantity of practice, parental support, enjoyment and satisfaction.  This is an analysis that most teachers would recognise, as they would his categorisation of the students after 20 months of learning into the three groups: still enthusiastic, keeping going but waning, and already given up.  However these second two categories do beg the question we asked earlier: what were the students expecting when they opted for lessons, and was it a failure to meet those expectations that resulted in them giving up?

Perhaps these questions might be the subject of further research, but as teachers we might also experiment in this area.  Are there other models of instrumental learning than those described above? Perhaps it is time that we challenged some of the assumptions that have underpinned instrumental music learning for generations, such as:

• Progression means playing ever harder pieces
• Parental support is vital for success in instrumental learning
• Regular practice is key to fulfilment on a musical instrument

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We could ask ourselves what instrumental music teaching might look like if we removed these assumptions and replaced them with something like these:  
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• A musical experience is about what is happening now – it is not concerned with how much better it is than last week or how much it will improve next week.
• The musical experience is about meeting the needs and expectations of the student – no-one else.
• Practice, if it happens, is something the student decides to do, and the teacher has no view on whether this is a good or bad thing.

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In an environment underpinned by such principles the weekly lesson might not be so much a lesson as a musical event where an expert musician (the teacher) spends time engaged in musical activities with less experienced musicians (formerly known as the student) each bringing something of their own musical character and personality to the session.  

In such a session the teacher might meet the students where they are, not where the teacher would like them to be. Some of the music performed would be pre-existing, but much would probably be composed, co-created or improvised by the teacher and students. Perhaps as the opportunities presented by the instrument emerge the student might want to develop new skills to harness these, or perhaps not.  Technical progress would therefore be on a needs basis, not on the basis of an externally imposed gradient.

There are huge challenges in approaches such as these, not least the demands they place on the teacher.  There is something comforting about an instrumental lesson structure based on warm ups, ever more difficult pieces, ever more difficult scales, etc., where the teacher’s role essentially involves giving tasks to the student and helping them to overcome them.  The designing of engaging musical activities appropriate to the needs of individual students is much demanding and time consuming – and potentially risky and uncomfortable. But if we really believe as educators that learning a musical instrument is a worthwhile thing to do then we must find better ways to help more children learn for longer.