If I could have $1 for every time one of my senior students said to me “I don’t want to teach, I only want to play” I would be very rich!
Is it the repetition of teaching that young teachers don’t like or is it the pressure from over-ambitious students’ parents? Do young teachers find it difficult to motivate their students or do they not have enough teaching resources at their disposal?
Maybe it’s all of these things but I feel that many young teachers don’t want to teach because they only want to perform themselves and at this stage in their lives they are not interested in helping others. But it is possible to do both.
I have always tried to have a dual career of performing and teaching which means that I use the holidays to do a great deal of practice which stands me in good stead for the upcoming term time.
As I write this article I am backstage, about to perform two concertos with a wonderful string orchestra made up of seasoned professional musicians. Within the next thirty minutes I will have to concentrate at a level similar to a neurosurgeon performing the most delicate of operations yet at the same time I will need to let my creative muses run rampant. By the end of today’s performance I will be exhausted and hopefully exhilarated. I hope to please the audience and, perhaps more importantly to me, please my fellow performers. In the last week I have already played four concertos and given one recital, so this is the career I craved and worked so hard for as a young player. I feel that despite my busy schedule I am playing better as each year goes by and long may this continue.
However, of equal importance, in the last week whilst I have been busy giving concerts my young student Kristopher who was born deaf gave his first concert at his school assembly. Kristopher played Amazing Grace on his saxophone and it was a triumph. Not only did he play this piece with good rhythm and with all the correct notes but he also played it with a gentle and sweet tone.
To get to this monumental point it has been a long and hard journey for both Kris and me. At the end of most of his lessons I have felt drained and unsure if the things we were trying to achieve together were even possible. I could take nothing for granted as very few of my time-honoured teaching techniques seemed to work. I was stretched to the limit trying to discover the key to open up the next stage in Kris’s progress. If I counted four beats before the start there was no guarantee that Kristopher would even have the saxophone anywhere near his mouth. Together we marched around my studio and up the hallway trying to find that all elusive sense of pulse. We tried clapping, I recorded CDs and we repeated pieces over and over, I would point at the notes as he played them and in the end we discovered that by pulsing everything in semiquavers he learnt the complex rhythm of a dotted quaver followed by a semiquaver which is the feature of Amazing Grace.
So as I wait to go on stage and hopefully entertain my audience I do muse about both aspects of my musical career and I realise that the thrill, challenge and excitement of performing would not be enough alone. I think of the touching email that Kristopher sent me after his performance telling me how pleased he was with himself and I think of the pride his parents felt when Kristopher was asked by the school principal to give a repeat performance at the end of year Prizegiving.
I would recommend a dual career to every musician.
Mark Walton