We hear potential...parents hear noise.

Take a moment and hear this sound in your mind – beginner brass band. If you can’t, try conjuring that up a beginner wind band, beginner percussion ensemble, beginner guitar group or beginner string players.

Whatever you hear, make sure it is that first few rehearsals where new players are working to get sounds out of their instruments at the right time, on the right note and making close to the right sound.

I chose beginner brass band because it is inevitably very loud, very harsh and often misses the mark and we get amusing raspberry sounds.

What astonishes me every time I hear this sound is that I, and the music teacher taking the group, here’s the potential in the sound. We hear when I student tries to get the right sound five times in a row, and then finally by some type of miracle, the sound just seems to pop out at the right time and in the right way.

We are willing to sit through minutes, sometimes entire rehearsals, of undeniable headache-inducing “noise”, with the faith and knowledge that each student will eventually get it. We problem-solve with them, we correct embouchure, posture and airflow, and we tell them to just keep trying, with the deep belief that they will get through the first hurdle, and then we can get them through the second and the third.

Parents hear noise

What interests me is that, if we didn’t have our music teacher's ears activated, we would be hearing unintelligible and, in all honestly, quite painful noise. With our unwavering belief in each of our students, we then send our students home with this pain-inducing weapon to be unleashed on their parents, siblings and household pets.

This type of sound can unsettle a home enormously, and can even make the student feel like they bring unwanted disruption into their otherwise safe home environment. There is also a mismatch between what the parents think they should be hearing and what they are confronted with when their child begins to practise.

When they signed the form to indicate they understood that their child was going to learn a violin, what sound did they hear in their minds? They heard the sound of a professional violinist they heard yesterday on the radio. Then what comes home with the beginner violinist? A sound that is nothing like a professional violinist, and more like a screeching cat.

Furthermore, if the student’s parents have never had the opportunity to experience music learning themselves, they can’t hear the potential that we as music teachers can hear. When we add all these factors up, getting beginner players to practise at home can be much more complex than just activating the student's motivation to pick up their instrument and play.

Bring parents into the learning process

I have heard several different solutions to this issue, all of them with the aim to prepare the parents for the sounds they will hear, and to familiarise them with the journey of beginning to learn to play a musical instrument.

A teacher, who had a beginner brass band of 10-year-old boys, shared with me that each week she would record about 8-10 seconds of the rehearsal and send home an audio file to the parents. She would explain to the parents what the group was working on and reassure them that their child was progressing as expected.

She also did a very clever thing next. The band had a performance at the end of the school term, and they were going to play, among other things, Hot Cross Buns. Every week she sent home an audio file of the same four bars. If you have your music teacher's ears active, you will know that it didn’t really resemble Hot Cross Buns in the beginning. But each week she sent home the same four bars, and each week she gradually taught the parents to hear the potential and small improvements in their child’s playing.

When it came to the performance, the parents were ecstatic. The applause went on and on and the parents even called for Hot Cross Buns to be played again. The most common feedback was “I can’t believe you have done this, at the start it sounded nothing like Hot Cross Buns, and now I can hear the tune and that my child has worked so hard to get it all right.”

What this clever teacher had done was give the parents an insight into the music learning process. She taught them to hear the potential, to understand there are ups and downs, that the music learning process is slow and cumulative, and that consistency and persistence are the keys.

Those students went learn their instruments for years, and the parent support was beyond anything she had ever experienced before. Along these same lines, another school that had a beginner strings program recorded a beginner violin sound from their class the year before and made a series of 1-minute videos about the sounds they were searching for.

Simple stuff such as starting the note together and putting the right pressure on the string with the bow. It was very much based on teaching the parents what to listen for. Then at the first concert at the end of the semester, they put aside time for the parent to sit next to their child in the ensemble. The student's task was to teach the parent how to play the instrument.

The parents started by being attentive and following instructions. Then they made their first sound and they heard the screeching cat. Understandably the parents were a little confronted to start with because there is often a perception that they should be able to do it easily. Then they try again, and it is still bad, and the realisation dawns – this music-playing thing is actually very hard.

This is a different way to approach the same problem and has the same dramatic conclusion. Parents are included in the music learning journey, they are up-skilled to understand what they are hearing and introduced to the idea that consistency and persistence, not talent and age, develop a musically trained person.

The common element in these two examples is that they were experiential. Parents were given the opportunity to hear and experience the music learning process, and it was done in a way that changed their perception and challenged their preconceptions.

One of the biggest mistakes we make with parents is thinking we are just teaching their children, and not them. We need to view our parent communities as our students too, and help them join in on the process that their children are going through.

Not it’s your turn, how will you include your parents in the beginner music journey?

Written by Dr Anita Collins for the August 2024 Fireworks magazine.