There’s something rather wonderful happening with some of my pupils lately. They’re starting bands.
Not because I’ve suggested it, or because the school has organised an ensemble. Nobody has decided that collaborative music-making would be beneficial to their personal development. They’ve simply got together with a few friends and decided to start a band.
Some of them have barely started learning their instruments. They’re still getting to grips with the basics, can play a few things reasonably well, and have already decided that what they really need is a guitarist, a bassist and somewhere to rehearse.
And I think it’s brilliant.
They Don’t Have to Be Any Good
One of the most refreshing things about these fledgling bands is that the pupils don’t seem particularly concerned about whether they’re any good. They’ve got songs they like, friends who play instruments and ideas about what their band might sound like. Whether they can actually play those songs is another matter entirely, but that doesn’t seem to be putting them off.
They’re doing something that can be surprisingly difficult to encourage in instrumental lessons: they’re making music because they genuinely want to.
Nobody is giving them practice targets or telling them which page to work on. They’re listening to music, choosing songs, trying things out and discovering what happens when you put several instruments in the same room. They’re also learning to negotiate with each other, compromise over song choices and work out how to get through an entire piece without everything falling apart.
And presumably making an absolutely dreadful racket in the process. Wonderful.
It’s Not Always the Best Players
Something I’ve noticed over the years is that technical ability doesn’t necessarily correspond with enthusiasm for playing with other people.
I’ve taught some extremely capable pupils who have little interest in joining a band. They’re perfectly happy learning their instrument, progressing through grades and playing on their own. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, of course. Not everybody wants to be in a band, and musical enjoyment comes in all sorts of forms.
Equally, I’ve taught pupils whose technical progress has been fairly modest, but who suddenly become enormously enthusiastic when there’s an opportunity to play with friends. They might struggle with something relatively straightforward in a lesson, yet happily spend an entire afternoon trying to work out a song with their bandmates.
The motivation is completely different. They’re no longer practising because their teacher has asked them to. They’re practising because their mates are expecting them to know the song by Saturday, and nobody wants to be the one who holds everything up.
That’s a rather powerful incentive, and one that even the most carefully constructed practice schedule can struggle to compete with.
It’s another reminder that a pupil who doesn’t practise regularly isn’t necessarily a pupil who lacks musical interest. Sometimes they simply haven’t found the thing that makes them want to pick up their instrument.
The Pupil I Got Completely Wrong
Years ago, I taught a pupil who wasn’t particularly technically accomplished. He wasn’t especially interested in playing with other people either, and nothing about his lessons suggested that he was destined for a particularly exciting musical future.
His progress was steady enough, but I rather unfairly put him into what I privately thought of as the plodder category. The sort of pupil who would probably carry on learning for a while, make reasonable progress and eventually move on to something else.
A few years later, he was playing in a signed band and appearing at major music festivals.
So much for my powers of prediction.
I’ve remembered that ever since, partly because it was such a spectacularly inaccurate assessment, but also because it reminded me how little we really know about what goes on in our pupils’ musical lives outside their lessons.
We see them for half an hour a week, often in a school practice room, working on whatever happens to be on the music stand that day. We don’t necessarily know what they’re listening to at home, what they’re experimenting with, what their friends are doing or what might suddenly capture their imagination.
And we certainly don’t know what they’ll be doing in five years. Teenagers have a remarkable capacity to surprise us, and sometimes the pupils we least expect to do anything particularly remarkable turn out to be the ones who do.
Sometimes It Takes Years
It’s not just beginners who are discovering the pleasure of playing with others. I’ve also got pupils who’ve been learning for several years and are only now beginning to explore making music with friends.
For some, it’s almost as though they’ve discovered an entirely different reason for learning their instrument. Suddenly, the things we’ve been working on in lessons have a purpose beyond the next exercise or exam piece.
Keeping time matters because somebody else is relying on them. Listening matters because they’re part of something bigger than themselves. Getting through an entire song without stopping becomes considerably more important than getting every individual note absolutely perfect.
These are all things we can explain in lessons, of course, but experiencing them is something else entirely. There’s a world of difference between understanding why you should listen to the other musicians and actually having to do it because the guitarist has just wandered off into an unexpected solo.
And when it works, even briefly, there’s a satisfaction that you simply can’t replicate by playing along with a backing track.
It’s also a rather good example of why I prefer practising until something is achieved rather than watching the clock. When you’ve got a song to learn before the next rehearsal, the objective is obvious. You practise until you can play it.
Perhaps We Should Get Out of the Way
As teachers, we’re naturally inclined to organise things. We arrange ensembles, suggest repertoire, recommend practice routines and encourage pupils to participate in performances. All perfectly worthwhile, and often enormously beneficial.
But there’s something particularly satisfying about pupils taking the initiative themselves. They don’t need us to form the band, choose the songs or decide when they’re going to rehearse. And they certainly don’t need us standing over them correcting every mistake.
They might ask for help with a particular part, or bring a song into their lesson because they’re struggling to work it out. That’s where we can be useful. We can help them develop the skills they need without taking over the whole enterprise.
I think there’s a temptation, particularly when we see pupils becoming enthusiastic about something musical, to immediately turn it into a teaching opportunity. We want to help, naturally, but perhaps sometimes we need to resist the urge to organise, improve or otherwise interfere with something that’s developing perfectly happily without us.
After all, the enthusiasm belongs to them. It would be a shame to accidentally turn it into another piece of homework.
You Never Know
I have no idea whether any of these new bands will last. Some will probably fall apart before their first rehearsal, others might manage a couple of songs before somebody decides they’d rather play football, and a few might keep going for years.
Perhaps one of them will end up playing major festivals while their former teacher wonders how on earth they managed to miss that possibility. It’s happened to me before, after all.
But whether they become professional musicians, play a handful of gigs or never get beyond rehearsing in somebody’s garage doesn’t really matter. They’re discovering something that goes beyond learning an instrument: the pleasure of making music with other people, entirely on their own terms.
And that’s worth celebrating.
We spend a great deal of time teaching pupils how to play their instruments, measuring their progress and helping them improve. But what they eventually decide to do with those skills is wonderfully unpredictable.
Sometimes the best thing we can do is give them the tools, stand back and see what happens.