Interrupted Cadence – How Can We Change The Ways We Teach Music?

One of my more rewarding education projects in Beijing has been working with the No. 80 Middle School, helping to coach its wind band.  And one of the high points was when the band won division champion at the Singapore International Band Festival back in 2018.  I was thrilled with this outcome: thrilled for the kids, and also for the music teacher at the school.  This was a validation of my very non-local approach to running the group.  Some years before this competition, I had persuaded the school’s music teacher away from the standard China practice of rehearsing only one or two pieces for the whole of the school year, an approach that can produce a gold medal performance at a local competition but leaves the players musically underdeveloped (drastically so, in my view).  Instead, I persuaded the school to adopt a hybrid approach that combines Chinese institutional discipline with experience of a varied repertoire, the development of sightreading skills, and the injection of social significance into music making.  I won’t go into detail here, but to the extent possible we transferred responsibility for the ensemble to the students themselves through the student-led creation of an ensemble charter: things like individual practice, attendance, library work, responsibility within sections and even some programming got devolved to the students.  The approach worked, and while each new intake of students felt some initial pain at having to take responsibility for the sounds they made, the musical results, once they got used to a new style of rehearsing and our mentoring system, were heartening, and fun.  The 2018 Singapore competition result was a complete validation of my ideas about combining the strengths of the Chinese style of school music making with the best of a UK style approach.  We didn’t know we would be taking part in the competition until six months before, and once we had firm permission to go, I just said to the band that we would rearrange our usual rehearsals to spend slightly more time on the two competition pieces while continuing with the repertoire we were already rehearsing for our school concert commitments.  For the 18 months after that competition result, I found myself working with some truly motivated kids.

And then came Covid.  Three years lost, and with it pretty much all sense of music making.  In Beijing, music ensemble participation can still make the difference between a place at a good high school or university and a not so good one, so the kids still show up and play, but without any motivation to do more than make a noise and get the certificate (the Chinese call it “lying flat”).  And it seems that, for various reasons, there is no way to withhold a certificate once a child has enrolled in the ensemble.  Something curious has happened in the Beijing post Covid school band world too: quite unable to play even simple rhythms, somehow these post-Covid students have become unrealistically self-confident, and feel their musical offerings are already very deserving of accolades.  The shock of one group when faced with playback of their performance was something I will never forget.  But I have found that the system we put in place back in 2015 is robust: slowly the band is growing green shoots again, and this in the face of greater challenges than I can set down here.  So in a more important sense, this has been my real satisfaction: seeing the band begin to recover its sense of identity and pride, not led by me (though I do point the way a little), but by the students’ own sense of their relationship with the music and each other.