Getting Past the “Intimidation Factor”

Recently, I have been struck by so many wonderful ideas that have profoundly changed my attitude towards both music and teaching. In fact, I still haven’t had time to fully digest them all! From the idea of “non-formal teaching” and “informal learning”, and Lucy Green’s research on How popular musicians learn, to what Brad Fuller said about not making yourself the main character in your teaching, these perspectives have very much shifted the way I think about education. Even though I haven’t yet delved deeply into these areas, as we discussed in conversation with another education legend, Nicole Mockler, knowing where to look for information is itself a very important step.

I also wanted to write specifically about my experiences working with music technology. However, I still feel somewhat distant from it, probably because I simply haven’t had enough time to explore it properly and at my own pace. Still, the fact that I am no longer scared of it feels like a good place to be. These sentences from Will Kuhn and Ethan Hein’s Electronic Music School: A Contemporary Approach to Teachingcapture part of the changes in my views beautifully:

“This project is technically simple, but it entails a big conceptual leap: the idea that you can create new music simply by combining pre- existing recordings. The conventional view of musical creativity, originating in European Romanticism, is that ideas come from “nowhere” and that they take shape through a quasi- mystical and unknowable process. The act of auditioning and combining loops does not feel very much like our image of Beethoven writing notes with a quill pen.” (Kuhn and Hein, 2021, p. 69)

I wish I could write more about all this. But that’s all I can say for now. As Kuhn and Hein also say, once you get past the “intimidation factor,” the rest becomes much easier (Kuhn and Hein, p. 70). I feel that I have now moved beyond that intimidation factor in many aspects of music education. I’ll write about it more soon.