My Pet Peeve

I hate how music is being taught nowadays. Children aren’t being taught the proper way to tune their instruments and it’s annoying. These kids get up there twice a year to perform for their parents and parents have to sit there through a painful experience of screeching out of tune music. The chords clash horribly even if the kids are hitting the right notes. I mean Hot Cross Buns which the first song any young musician learns is 3 notes. But those notes all sound different because they’re not in tune. Being in tune is probably the basic key to playing music. Any one of us has sat at a play or performance, completely excited and the moment the person opened up their mouth…it came out flat or sharp…leaving us cringing in our seats! I just had that experience while attending Les Miserables, which happens to be my favorite musical of all time. The woman who played Fatine completely destroyed the song. She sounded like a frog gasping for air as she tried to hit the high notes that resulted in being completely out of tune.

Music teachers are not teaching properly. The first lesson after learning the first scale should be proper tuning. Once the child has the sounds of a scale in his/her mind, the teacher must hammer those sounds…tones…intervals…whatever you choose to call them…into the child’s head so they become close friends with them. There are tuners under 25 dollars at any given music store that are used to aide any musician in learning the proper tone to tune their instruments. Then there is the metronome. One thing I wish I learned to use as a child musician. The metronome is a tool used by any musician…even dancers to keep the time or beat if you prefer. Again, you can find them anywhere under 20 bucks. There are the fancy old ones where the stick moves back and forth and there are modern ones where you press a button and the pace is set for your practicing pleasure. The next thing that makes all of us cringe after hearing an out of tune instrument is one that is constantly behind or ahead of the rest of the band. These tuners may be seen as the cure all to tuning, and then you get those naggers who say “But now they won’t learn how to tune by ear.” Well after working with my tuner for the past 5 years I can pretty much identify the tones I need to tune my guitar and trumpet. Tuning by ear is needed in a symphonic/jazz ensemble. A person you know who is perfectly in tune (or a tuned piano is the alternative tuning device) plays a note and everyone in the band tunes along with it…playing their home note and fiddling with parts on their instrument until they are satisfied that their instrument sounds like the tuning note. Between my handy dandy tune and years of an ensemble setting, I cured my lack of tuning knowledge in my early years.

Now…how about…teaching kids to play in tune and time at a very young age?? It’s like teaching a child a different language. We as children as smarter than as we age…because our brains are putty made to mold and squish. We pick up things quicker in our youth. So if we taught tuning and playing in time in the first year of playing instead of just…bypassing it until high school we may just be onto something.