Is Honesty Kindness? (Does Musicality Matter?)

I've been learning a lot about teaching music from my University, and we talk about "teaching to play musically". It's kind of a self-recurring idea, "playing musically". If you're playing music, surely that's musical, right?

It's something I've wrestled with as a teacher who wants to keep my approach to students really accessible and understanding of their various backgrounds. I believe they all have potential, I know they can all attain it, but I come from a very courteous mindset of "let's make sure every one gets a chance to play" before I consider how to give a meaningful challenge to students who are excelling in the field.

So when I was hearing other classmates talk about how they're getting their students to achieve good tone, good embouchure, good phrasing, I realized something...

I was never taught any of that on my instrument! I was only ever taught how to play in time!

And I think this is a fault of my instrument and my teachers over the years; Percussion is a pretty "do it well enough" kind of instrument. Growing up in middle school the band teachers would always be way more focused on the 1st flutes, 1st trumpets and trombones, the french horns, just anything that would stick out more noticably if they weren't playing with musicality. And it gave me the impression that Percussion was a range of instruments that simply did not need to be musical. Playing it on time was good enough and not worthy of inspection.

Except now I'm training with really good percussionists, and I realize there's no reason to sell ourselves short and expect to clear a lower bar. We are all responsible for making the best sound we can out of our own instrument.

So why don't I teach "musicality" to my own drum students? Well, because this was never an aspect demonstrated fully to me by any of my teachers. It was always about beats and making good choices for fills. It was about hitting the right kinds of notes at the right time, and how you did it (deadstroke, downstroke, upstroke) was not at all the focus.

My own teaching lead me to really hyperfocus on students' execution of time. Because I always noticed it immediately if a student wasn't counting, or if they were counting but hadn't practiced to a metronome. I got everyone counting "1 e and a 2 e and a 3 e and a 4 e and a" and never bothered with alternatives. And only once in a while would I hit a wall with something like Dotted Quarter Notes or syncopated rhythms over the barline, where I'd realized that my students never totally understood how rhythm works as a unit of measurement. I tell them to think of the grid but they never get to see it. I tell them to count out loud and check for mistakes but I can't prove they know what the real rhythm is, short of them showing me it and guessing or copying what I do overtime.

And something I've really noticed while observing other teachers' work is that they're not nearly as picky as I am about these things. Wrong notes are a problem but they don't point them out. They point out things like "where is this line going?" and "what emotion is trying to be conveyed here?", generally things that feel more ephemeral and emotional than measurable. It seems like for teaching, sometimes, you have to overlook poor technical execution if what you got out of it was great expression. You have to honour the emotion and expression that someone puts into their performance and lure that out because it's so difficult to speak to it directly.

Trying to get musical playing to happen from a student who doesn't know what musicality means feels like trying to make an offering at a shrine, in hopes that good fortunes find me in the future. I really should be taking more risks on my students that if I convey this immeasurable idea, they will get it in time after drawing their attention to how it manifests in other people's playing. I've certainly felt this kind of buddhist energy surrounding "tone" and how it manifests in the Timpani. Going from "I'm playing the same note over and over and not noticing the changes that my teacher is" to "ouch, I hit the wrong playing zone" in a few weeks has really shown me that. And it's astonishing to me how long I've been playing music without noticing this. I've been teaching private music lessons for almost 10 years now.

Before, when r a student played a note with incorrect timing, but the result sounded nice, I really could not help but mention that the time was "just a bit fast" or "slowed down toward the end". I always would point out any poor technical execution to stay honest. And I think this muddies what my role is as a teacher. They can take videos and check that themselves. They can get feedback from layman audience members.

I remember hearing once from my aunt that kindness is honesty, you wouldn't hide things from people if you valued them as individuals who can make their own decisions.

Teaching I think is a bit different, because there's a lot of things you could talk about regarding technique, your expertise, what the student is doing right, what the student is doing wrong. And I think the aspect of this that doesn't quite hit the same intent as living your life honestly is that teaching is always time-constrained. You're always fighting to have better flow in your lesson with a student. If the student feels like they had a meaningful, cohesive lesson within the allotted time they chose to spend with you instead of learning the skill themselves, the resulting time should feel like it has purpose as a focused, directed period of time. And here is where I don't think this kind of total honesty is appropriate. Technique is easy to teach and correct, but musicianship is the god I'm giving a coin to now and hoping to see results with later. A note can come in a bit late if it sounds nice. But that nice note has to come from giving it the opportunity to come out through the instrument.

Honesty is maybe a bit much. I'd say it's more like guiding someone down the path they can barely see, knowing they have many other paths to go down in the future. Anyone can go down those paths themselves, but my expertise is the thing that's going to help someone grow the most. Perhaps that, if not honest, is still kindness.