Music House Background

I started my Music House program in 2000 after realizing that for years, parents had been coming to me with stories of how their children had failed at private, instrumental music lessons. In each case the child had been excited about starting music lessons, but after a period of time had lost interest and wanted to quit. Each story had a slight variation: one child was bored, another was discouraged. In one case a child felt irrelevant, that there was no place to put his “self” into it. The parents were always baffled, both as to what went wrong as well as what to do about it.

Most adults I talked to about their own musical experiences as children told similar stories of failure. As a result, many of them had come to the conclusion that they were unmusical. Something seemed very wrong with the idea that a person who started out feeling enthusiastic about learning music should end up feeling discouraged. I decided that it was the nature of the tunnel vision, “right way/ wrong way” approach to music learning that was to blame.

I began teaching one music lesson “drop-out” in a radically different way, providing a variety of musical stimuli and giving him the choice of whatever he wanted to do. While I had no agenda for his learning and assigned no homework or practicing, his parents reported that within the first couple of months, he had begun to talk about music all the time and sat for hours at the piano experimenting with great enthusiasm. In his sessions with me, the success of this venue was apparent from the joy and intensity with which he engaged in every activity. It was hard to get him to leave when his time was up! By the end of the first year, his parents said that Music House had become the high point of his life.

Soon there were other students, each working with me privately, each choosing his/her own route to musical involvement and in every case showing tremendous enthusiasm for this way of learning. Since this approach was the same one I had used in raising my own children in our musical household, the results were not surprising. Indeed, many people who are comfortable doing musical things were raised in households where music was an organic part of the environment. Music House simply replicated the environment of a musical household.

Every student who has come to Music House has ended up feeling musical in some way. For some, the exposure to various instruments helps some students make informed decisions about what instruments they might want to study later on. Other students who are studying a particular instrument or instruments elsewhere add Music House as the mortar between the bricks, to tie their learning together. Still other students benefit from Music House alone as an experience that satisfies all of their musical needs, and they continue to come for years, doing whatever they do. One eight year-old has declared his intention of continuing until he is 80. Whatever function it serves, each person discovers his/her “inner musician,” feels validated for his/her musical impulses and develops them according to interest and readiness.

Taking this to the next step, it seems that if everyone could experience music learning this way, it would eventually lead to a more musical society. This is the ultimate goal of Music House.