What Makes a Good Musician?

After reading Brandt Schneider's article "Creating Musical Flexibility Through the Ensemble" I have a flurry of ideas and questions about whether or not it is truly possible to foster individual musicianship in a performing ensemble. Mr. Schneider claims boldly that the answer is yes, and after reading his proposal I am inclined to agree- but only after a great many conditions are met.

The premise of Mr. Schneider's argument is that we can use the performing ensemble to increase our student's individual musicianship. This is an idea that I find enormously appealing for two reasons. First, increasing musicianship is (or at least should be, in my opinion) the absolute primary goal of music education. I could go on and on about the secondary goals of music education, because the list is infinite. Music helps us lead better lives in a myriad of ways and we all know it. But the primary goal should, of course, be to develop our student's musicianship. This is how they receive the vast benefits of those unmentioned secondary goals. Second, the large performing ensemble is lying at the core of almost every music program in America. Therefore, without complete institutional overall, these two concepts (developing musicianship and the performing ensemble) must be married or we can hardly claim that our field is valid.

Mr. Schneider outlines many of the qualities he believes his students should possess as musicians. I think that he tends to work backwards in his reasoning- listing a few things that a great musician can do (change keys, change genres, play the melody, etc.) without providing a full examination of why great musicians can do these things at the drop of a hat. I think that while Mr. Schneider's method will undoubtably increase his students musicianship, I wonder if the answer doesn't lie deeper than practicing those skills. Sure, student's must be able to play in all of the keys and to "play by ear" but I think that these skills come easily after laying the proper foundation. Great musicians- that is, truly great musicians, understand music. They hear functional harmony in everything- and comprehend the relationships that they hear. A true musician hears music like an average person hears another person speak- as distinct parts (words, sentences) arranged in a structure so as to make a complete thought. The larger that one's english vocabulary is, and the more they hold conversations and read and think, the more they understand others when they hear or read what they have said. Likewise, a comprehensive harmonic vocabulary and constant practice using it are pre-requisites for students to begin to understand music. With the right skills in this area (what Dr. Gordon would call audiation), there's no reason why every student in a music program shouldn't be able to do this:

With detailed knowledge of harmonic function and the ability to hear it- students could not only arrange medleys like this- but they could perform them on the spot! With or without instruments.

To be more concise- I would be less interested in students playing songs in all 12 keys, and more interested in how or why they can play the songs in all 12 keys. Do they know the harmonic language of the tune? Can they definitively recognize tonic and dominant and other functions? Can they reproduce those sounds? Mr. Schneider touches on this in the article, and I completely agree with his notion that band class should be theory class. How ridiculous that theory is separated like it's something different!

That said, you can't have a theory class with 80 kids in it. Truly dedicating the time and effort required to teach these essential music skills takes smaller classes that are not performance based (though there would certainly be a performance component.) Mr. Schenider mentions the National Standards and my first thought is how odd it is that we have band directors all across the country trying to invent ways to incorporate these standards into the existing system. Why aren't we changing the system? Couldn't we come up with a music class that promised to teach every one of the standards to its full capacity? One that doesn't look like this:

Standards

PERFORMING

Composing

Improvising

Singing

I think that Mr. Schneider's method is a truly admirable effort to teach these skills in an existing band setting. Like I said earlier, we have to start integrating these skills however we can in the current system. But I can't help but wonder what we could do if we were able to teach music like any other subject.