just because you’re a great artist does not mean you’re a great arts teacher, or even great articulating your own great art to others
we need less artists “settling” for teaching careers after burning out their own creative practices and losing hope.
what we need more of is more teaching artists who have amalgamated both a social and personal creative practice from the get go.
if you’re not interested in learning to *socialize*, both as speaker and listener, as part of your *social* creative practice, then you should stay out of the classroom.
this includes approaching both your own creative work as well as that of those in your community with humility.
if you’re not willing to continue being an arts student *yourself* amongst your community of both colleagues and students, then you’re willfully choosing not to grow.
having a social practice, whether it be teaching, collective organizing, mutual aid, etc, is the artist exclaiming to the world “i don’t know everything, there is always something new i can learn, can we teach each other?”
furthermore, you do not need to be embedded in academia and arts NGO world in order to maintain a strong social practice.
on the contrary, rent parties, lofts, rec rooms, and DIY art space cultures have all proven themselves throughout the 20th and 21st century to be just as effective, if not more so as the big institutions, when it comes to being fruitful arts incubators.
TLDR i don’t know shit and arts education should be just as much about the teacher learning something new from their community as it does the student.
the ability to not only improvise but improvise *collaboratively* is a means of demonstrating emotional intelligence through sonic expression
your ability to read your partner’s next move during a set is on par with holding your own and articulating yourself in conversation, in other word’s it’s essential
very few conservatories teach improvisation skills outside of specific contexts (i.e. jazz performance, ethnomusicology), which is dumb because “conserving” musical traditions would include improvisations even in western classical settings.
it’s truly important to always k*ll yr idols to some extent. it’s weird when you come to the point in your artistic career or whatever you wanna call it and you realize half the shit youve learned to do right was through seeing horrible mentors do it wrong.
case in point my high school music teacher taught me exactly how not to foster creativity in a young artist aspiring to get their foot in the door of higher music education
i never did well in music theory class in high school, i ironically failed AP theory one semester cuz i often skipped class to go to auditions and testing programs for music composition bachelors programs
music doesn’t need to require active engaged listening in order for it to have merit, there is joy in leaving something on in the background while completing other tasks
while on the other hand, we can all benefit from actively listening to the # menial sounds that surround our day to day. does your personal acoustic ecology have a noticeable noise floor? what about a noticeable pitch?
it’s almost as if the recorded sound media is incredible because it allows us to *choose* whether to engage with it directly or allow it just to exist in our surroundings while we go about our day
critical music education is the music teacher holding a mirror up to themselves and asking the question “am i being aesthetically dictatorial?”
a music teacher should never allow their aesthetic biases to become the basis for the concepts they are teaching. we can talk about four part harmony without focusing solely on baroque, just like we can talk improvisation without focusing solely on jazz.
it’s almost expected that the conservatory setting will be dictatorial to some extent, the job is to “conserve” “art” music, and in the western world that means almost exclusively concert music from the 1500s-1800s