Learning music is, to me, a series of benchmarks, each bringing into more clarity the amount of progress that there is to be made. When I sat down for my first piano lesson in Kindergarten, I was not aware of anything but what the keys looked like, and maybe a handful of Beatles songs. Years later, in middle school jazz band, I thought I had music more or less figured out, but was humbled by the difficulty and depth of improvisation. Now, as a third-year college student pursuing a degree in jazz piano studies, my view of music can be reduced to one phrase: an endless pursuit.

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So why bother? Why go through the trouble of practicing for hours each day, just to know that at the end of it, there will always be something more to learn? Well, it all comes back to those aforementioned benchmarks. The incremental improvements are slow, but clear, and they prove that progress is real.

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The earliest memory I have of a benchmark like this is when I was in elementary school, and my piano teacher told me to learn the major scales, and to be able to play them with both hands at the same time. I went home to do it, expecting it to take no longer than 30 minutes, and was frustrated when I wasn’t able to. Progress is real, but at that point I wasn’t sure. For years, when I was unable to play a piano part, it was difficult for me to imagine that I would ever get it right. And yet, by slowing it down and holding myself accountable, I began playing the scales with more accuracy, and after accuracy came speed. 

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In high school, I began playing in a band with my friends. At that time, growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, we all were big fans of The Grateful Dead. And knowing that people would come to our shows if we played Grateful Dead songs, we decided to be a Grateful Dead cover band. We eventually branched out and played other covers, and even some originals, but upon our inception, we were a Grateful Dead cover band. I had been in bands before, but never had I played such improvisation-heavy music. Even my jazz bands were less solo oriented than this. We called ourselves Birdland (because it was the name of the neighborhood I lived in) and rehearsed at our dummer’s house weekly. With the power of hindsight, I can confidently identify 2 benchmarks that I reached during those rehearsals. The first was learning to improvise in a judgment-free environment. A lot of improvising, in music and other areas, involves trying everything to see what works, and this is often frowned upon in live and academic settings. The second benchmark was learning to play music with others. Because I was playing music with my closest friends, it was easy to stop the music and ask how they were improvising, or what techniques I could use to improve my own. This was crucial for the development of my ear. 

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My high school band did pretty well for a high school band, and while it fizzled into nothingness soon into our respective years at college, I was feeling confident in my ability as both an improviser and musician. I declared music as soon as I knew I was going to the University of Denver. As is generally the case with collegiate music programs, one of my classes was a weekly one-on-one lesson with a piano professor. It was these lessons that most challenged the learning style that I had grown accustomed to: a professor lecturing a body of students, usually with little to no interaction. Granted, these lessons were one-on-one, but the pedagogical epiphanies it gave way to can be applied to larger scale classrooms. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, author Paolo Freire discussed this at length. He calls it the “banking method,” and it refers to teachers “depositing” information into students’ brains, without the students playing an active role in the relationship. Throughout my educational career, almost every class I took was formatted in accordance with this “banking system.” That is, until I began lessons. One of the first realizations I made about the lessons was that they were like a “choose your own adventure” book; my professor would teach me the processes by which to go about learning different branches of jazz piano, but because jazz is such a deep and wide area of study, I was ultimately in charge of what I learned. At first, when my professor would ask at the beginning of a lesson: “What do you want to get into today?” I never had a good answer. But as I got used to the format of me bringing in things to learn and my professor coaching me through them, I began to develop a sense of what I wanted to focus on, and what to practice. An idea I constantly find myself coming back to is one from Adedoyin Ogunfeyimi’s article on the writing center as a “storycenter.” In it, he discusses the positive effects that reframing the campus writing center as a place for writers to tell stories could have. In the final line of the piece, Ogunfeyimi writes: “by reimagining our work through that lens, might accentuate writers’ ownership of their work.” Because I have more agency in what is covered in my lessons, I feel that I have more ownership of my work. My piano professor has other students, and I met with them once to talk about our lesson experiences, and I realized that we were all covering completely different topics in the lessons. At first, this made me feel like I was behind for not knowing the things they knew, but as I thought about it more, I realized that it would have troubled me much more to find that they were all on the same exact track that I was. This monotony that is so common in standard classroom settings stifles individualism. Being in control of my journey as a pianist has not only made me better, it has made the path of musical pedagogy much more clear. 

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As for now, I am realizing that I am the best musician I have ever been, and also the worst that I will ever be again. I have committed to practicing at least 10 hours every week, and so long as this progress doesn’t stop, I will continually be learning new things about music, and myself. The most recent benchmark I crossed involved the awareness of the fact that it would be foolish to try and master all of jazz piano. Creative acts are not things to be mastered, they are means by which to find one’s voice. As I continue on my path through music, my voice will become more clear, and with each new revelation, I will become more and more ready for people to hear what I have to say.​



 

Works Cited:

 

Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Seabury Press, 1970.

 

Ogunfeyimi, Adedoyin, “Writing Center as a Storycenter: A “New” Metaphor for Tutors,” Another Word, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2017, https://dept.writing.wisc.edu/blog/writing-center-as-a-storycenter-a-new-metaphor-for-tutors/