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Music For Young Children - Cape Breton - Marion Bridge Studio

My music studio features:

• Large teaching room with a lot of natural light
• One upright acoustic piano and keyboards
• Variety of rhythm instruments
• Up to 6 students and parents in each class (sometimes more in Music Pups classes)

The studio location:

3704 Hwy 327, Marion Bridge (just down the street from the school and Tigger's, 10 min. from Sydney, Nova Scotia)  Call 371-7369 or email charron.k@gmail.com

Why Music Lessons?  What Will Your Child Learn?

We all know that studying music results in a child that can enjoy singing or playing an instrument, but following are some of the lesser known things that children learn...

Dealing With Pressure

Music students are in the unusual position of having to confront pressure at an early age, and having to confront it often. And despite the encouragement we are given to reduce stress in our lives, this early exposure to pressure is actually a priceless advantage.

Why? It means that when these music students are adults, pressure will feel like a familiar adversary, rather than a terrifying Portent of Doom. They will have faced it – and defeated it – in countless exams, concerts, workshops and lessons.  They learn to have it work for them, rather than sabotaging their best. And they learn to accept it as a natural part of doing things that matter.

Music lessons won’t immunize them from being nervous at an important job interview or presentation. But the skills they acquired in working with nerves for their various music performances are transferable – control your breathing, frame the situation positively, focus on the job at hand rather than the consequences. And don’t go too fast.

Responding to Criticism

Music students learn at an early age to regularly accept advice and feedback from people more knowledgeable than themselves. They experience first hand the value of implementing that advice, and come back each week ready for more.

In so doing, they learn the power of an age-old combination for self improvement – hard work, and acting on the counsel of a mentor.

Why is the process so valuable? It produces adults who are more willing to consider the views of those around them, and who will know when to wisely defer to those who have demonstrated a greater mastery of the subject at hand. They will consult more often, refine their ideas based on trusted feedback from others, and produce better results.

Discipline

Music students have a LOT of preparation to get through in order to be ready for an exam or recital. Half an hour a day is actually three and a half hours a week of practice.  The thing to keep in mind is that there is no way any student will feel like doing that amount of practice all the time.

But with the Big Day drawing ever closer, most of them actually do the work anyway. The reasons may not be noble – fear of making a complete goose of themselves is often a big motivating factor for getting the work done – but somewhere, somehow, a lot of work goes on that the student probably does not feel like doing. 

Coping Gracefully With the Referee's Decision

Music is a subjective game, and the examiner or adjudicator’s decision can be a little bewildering sometimes. But music students eventually learn to live with it, and accept the good calls with the bad.

Why? Because sooner or later, they will receive an A when they deserved a B-, and nature will balance itself. And in the transparent absurdity of that outcome will be the realization that a referee’s decision is not Truth or Reality. It is an opinion, from a person, and is both fallible and transient.

They will still read carefully the piece of paper that tells them why they weren’t even placed in that competition, but they won’t allow such bad news to depress them in any sort of life-changing way.

The first time they are passed over for a promotion at work, they will think of these experiences they have had over the years, and they will also read the feedback on their job performance appraisal carefully - because their years of music lessons have also trained them to do just that – just to see if there is anything they can do better next time.

Performance mishaps end up being metaphors for countless situations music students will face in their later life, and they will experience the same mixture of triumphs and setbacks that we all do.

By the time they have completed a decade of music lessons, they will have had to bounce back from plenty of disappointments. But they’ll also have experienced many more successes, helping them to get a snapshot of a valuable big picture that has become a cliché:

The important thing is not that you fell, but how quickly you got back on the horse.

Project Management and Coping With Deadlines

  There are two types of deadline that music students become very experienced at coping with:

       The long term campaign

An exam or a major recital doesn’t just happen. They are often first planned a year or more before the actual date.

Pieces are chosen, mini deadlines are set, and a strategy for getting it all done in time is established. Quality control checkpoints are built in along the way in the form of mock exams and workshops.

The end result? Very young students are able to build up to quite epic events one small step at a time, and become used to the idea that what they do today prepares them for tomorrow – and sometimes for a tomorrow that is actually twelve months away.

       The High Pressure short-term deadline

No chance to mount a steady campaign for this type of deadline. Instead, it’s a case of take a deep breath, put your head down, and swim like a lunatic until you get to the finish line. These are the short-notice concerts, the performances they suddenly have to give at school, or the filling in for someone who has unexpectedly fallen ill.

If a manager needs to look around for someone who will cope with a sudden burst of intense work, and a ridiculously short deadline, they could do a lot worse than ask each staff member how many years of music lessons they have had.

Multi-geared Focus

In the course of even a short piece the child will have to closely supervise hundreds of individual decisions: Which note comes next? How loud should I be playing? How can I recover from that little slip I just made? How staccato should the middle section be? How long should I hold this fermata before moving on to the next note? Have I already done the repeat or not? How can I improve my intonation right now?

The room is silent, all attention is focused on them, and all their attention is focused on the moment. It can be quite moving to watch, and makes you wonder what else these children would be capable of.

But what is most exciting is that the concentration exhibited in the performance itself is actually just the tip of a much larger pyramid. For this performance to occur at all, the same child had to be still and focused in dozens of lessons and hundreds of practice sessions. The audience never gets to see these, but we are talking about many, many hours of intense application that would not have happened otherwise. 

They also become used to the idea that focus comes in different gears.  It's not as though they have to be concentrating until the veins stand out on their neck all the time.  There will be moments in the lesson in which they can joke about what happened on the weekend, and others where they will need every last reserve of focus.  This ratio will gently shift as the Big Day nears.

So it's not just that they know how to focus - they also learn when.  This helps ensure that they can not only deliver their best when it's needed, but that they don't get stressed out in the process.

The Power of Positive Thinking

The impact of positive thinking is so powerful that it can help pull an otherwise under-prepared student through a performance. Conversely,  the absence of such thinking can turn performances of even well-prepared students into a hopeless mush of otherwise undeserved errors.

Because of this, much of the teaching in the final weeks before the performance is spent helping students be in the right frame of mind. The teacher reassures, praises, walks them through the whole thing, and paints the performance as a triumph long before the first notes are struck.

On the various Big Occasions that they have throughout the rest of their life, music students will not only be well versed in the importance of positive thinking, but they will be equipped with the strategies to ensure that it happens at the right time.

The Reality of Non-Linear Progress

People don’t always improve at a constant rate, and it’s an essential lesson to learn as early as possible.

How does it play itself out in music lessons? Some months will feel like Golden Ages, where the student will pick up new ideas with ease, and where the notes will fall well for them every time they play. They’ll get more done in fifteen minutes of practice than they would normally achieve in a few days.

Two months later, and they are struggling a little, the midas touch having deserted them as they plod from lesson to lesson.

The idea that some months will be better than others is not a new concept for most students.  In fact they are probably even ready to embrace the flip-side idea that for this to be possible, at other times progress will have to be slower.

What comes as a shock is that sometimes they will actually go backwards. Weeks so unproductive that they are sure that their playing was in better shape a couple of months ago.

“Backward” progress not only ok, it’s actually quite normal. Even within a practice sessions, there can be a ten minute block where everything the student attempts goes wrong.

It’s not really a backward step – it’s just an inevitable part of long term progress. People who don’t have the opportunity to learn this lesson early can sometimes become so discouraged at the first appearance of a backward step that they mark down the activity as too hard, and give up completely.

Being Good at Something

When teachers teach a child how to play a musical instrument, they are showing them how to become good at something. This is the greatest gift of music lessons.

Most of the advice teachers give for them to achieve this has little to do with music itself. Break big jobs into little jobs. Start early if you have a big project to undertake. Stay calm and focused under pressure. Analyze your own work for weaknesses and then target the things that aren’t so strong. Persist in the face of difficulties. Allocate the time that the job requires. Work whether you feel like it or not. Listen to your teacher, and respect your peers.

And enjoy what you do, for none of it is worth pursuing unless it makes you smile from time to time.