Taking Responsibility for Their Own Environment

There are moment in my playing, or when I’m listening to others, that I sit back and ask, “Who’s in charge here?” The poor musician seems chained to the music stand, eyes unblinking under a furrowed brow, as they desperately grasp after the phrase. The problem is that the player is chasing the music rather than leading it.

Most of the time, this is symptomatic of an over-ambitious tempo. But there's another, more subliminal issue: we do not understand our role as a musician.

Music was written for us, we were not made for the music. So often the servants of our circumstances --heeding the bidding of our academic masters-- that we, as students, tend to assume the master/slave relationship of our youth is also the relationship between ourselves and our music (music that is usually assigned to us rather than picked by us). Therefore we humbly genuflect before our piece, graciously beseeching it to “go easy”. Then we start and it’s off to the races.

The bigger problem in this common scenario is that the we're not in control of our environment. We need to learn how to reign in the music’s perceived authoritarianism. That takes time. But in order to develop that confidence in my students, I’ve been engaging in a little experiment.

I don’t know if any of them have noticed, by I’ve been placing the music stand on the wrong side of my student at every lesson for a little over a month. For those of you non-musicians: when a musician plays, they need to face their audience, which means the music stand needs to be on their left. So I have purposefully placed the stand on their right side before they come into the room. My goal for this has been to see which of my students are willing to take take ownership (read: responsibility) of their environment and which of my students just take the environment as it comes.

It’s been fun to watch their reaction. Some will waltz up, grab the stand and move it to where it’s comfortable. Others (especially the younger students) will just put their books on the stand and hardly notice until I ask them to move it.

My goal, eventually, is that all of my students will get into the habit of quickly adjusting their environment until it’s comfortable. It’s a small thing, but a start.