By Noelle Reda

My first thought when I heard that I would not have school for a while was how much I was going to miss band and then I wondered if I would still have my lessons at Encore! I take lessons with Lea, who is kind and whenever I have a lesson, I always end up laughing and walking out with a smile on my face. Even if I am stressed about District or honors band auditions she knows exactly what to say to make me feel better and help me focus. She always pushes me in the best way and believes in me. I always want to improve and work my hardest. Every Friday is my favorite day because I know that even if I have a bad day at school I will have my lesson with Lea and I will have fun even if we are doing a lot of theory work. 

So, when I heard that I might not have my lessons for a while, I was so sad until I heard that we were doing lessons online! My first online lesson with Lea was this past Friday. At first, I had to get used to the software but everything went pretty smoothly. I had gotten my wisdom teeth out less than a month ago and my jaw started hurting a day before my lesson. I told Lea and she knew exactly what to work on to help me and not hurt my mouth. In my lesson, we worked mainly on scales and how many sharps and flats were in them and then we worked on hearing and seeing if I could identify the notes that she was playing. Five minutes into my lesson it felt like we were in her office in Encore and it was normal. The benefit of having my clarinet lessons online is so I can still work on my music and have guidance on where to improve. It is so important that during this crisis everyone stays healthy and safe which is why it is nice that we have the ability to use the internet to communicate. 

By Penny Wayne-Shapiro, Guest Blogger, Director – Wayland School of Music

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a child saying that….Wayland School of Music would be housed in a custom-built, state-of-the-art facility with Steinway pianos in every studio. 🙂

Joking aside, though, I know just how these reluctant practicers feel, because sometimes I don’t like practicing either! And you can bet that all professional musicians have had that same feeling at one time or another.

So why do we keep doing it anyway? And how can we encourage students to do it too?

“Well,” you might say, “we all have to do things that we don’t like doing. It’s character forming.” But that argument doesn’t go very far even for an adult musician, never mind when you’re hoping to inspire a child to learn and love music long-term, rather than see it as drudgery to be endured!

Should we point out that there are also things that we enjoy doing sometimes but not always – such as exercising, studying, taking care of a pet? We keep doing these even when we don’t feel like it because we understand the benefits, and we trust that in a day or two we’ll be more into it again.

That’s an improvement, but it takes maturity to keep that long-term end in mind, and most young children are not yet at that point developmentally.

In fact, this blog post was inspired by a 7 year old student who had her lesson a couple of days ago. Like many students, she’s enthusiastic about lessons and has made a great start, but she’s just getting to that point where the initial excitement has worn off and the long-term benefits have not yet been experienced.

What she actually said was profound: “I don’t like practicing, but I like playing!”

And right there, we have the seeds of a solution. If we can keep an age-appropriate balance of work and fun along the way we’ll keep students engaged, and much more willing to practice regularly.

I asked this young lady what other activities she enjoyed. She mentioned soccer so I asked, “When you go to soccer practice, what’s the first thing you do?” As I expected from my own experience as a soccer mom, the reply was “Drills.” Does she enjoy the drills? “Not particularly.” But she agreed enthusiastically that the drills help you play better, giving you skills that make the game itself more fun.

But drills are not the only way you learn skills, and they shouldn’t be too heavy. You also get better at soccer by actually playing it, and the same is true for an instrument, as long as you’re doing so with reasonably good habits.

Playing an instrument really is fun….and it’s more fun the better you can do it. How can we maintain that balance of drill and pleasure for our young developing musicians, so they can find that out for themselves?

1) Make sure drills don’t take up too much of the practice session.

Just as in soccer, it’s best to do some “building work” first – scales or other exercises before pieces, and prep work on new material or tricky passages before playing a piece through. That way you’re setting things up right.

But there should be plenty of time and stamina left over for the enjoyment of actually making music: trying new pieces through, and revisiting old pieces for fun and the pleasure of mastery – “This piece used to be hard for me, but now I can play it easily!”

2) Help the student to celebrate the intrinsic rewards of the drills.

There are immediate benefits that can be enjoyed right away. For example: “Did you notice how the third time you played that part slowly, your fingers almost seemed like they were doing it by themselves because they knew what was coming? You didn’t even have to think about it! How cool is that?” Realizing we’ve just achieved something feels good, and makes us want to repeat that experience.

3) Find ways to make even the drills fun!

Here are a just few suggestions to liven things up:

a) Roll a die to see how many times to play a tricky measure.

b) Divide your piece into short sections and number them. Using regular playing cards or Uno cards, pick a number to see which section to practice next.

c) Play the practice lottery: write each scale, exercise or piece on a small piece of paper, shake up the folded papers in a jar, then close your eyes, pick one out and do whatever it says.

d) For a variation on c), write silly instructions such as “turn around in circles while playing”, “play with your eyes shut”, “stand on one leg”, etc., and pull one out for each repetition of an exercise.

e) Turn the drill into a competitive game of “ding the bell”. Many of my students love this! Set a challenge, such as playing a scale with correct fingerings, or maintaining beautiful hand positions for a section of a piece. If the student forgets or makes an error, the adult can “ding the bell” by tapping a pencil on a glass; the student wins if s/he completes the task correctly without the adult getting a chance to ding (or only dinging, say, twice). As I tell students, “You win if you can keep me quiet.” It’s amazing to see how intently they focus on the task at hand for the satisfaction of beating the adult!

As young musicians grow in maturity and skill they will begin to develop their own intrinsic motivation to keep practicing for the long-term rewards. Along the way, the principles above will keep them leveraging the short-term rewards – the fun of “playing”, in both senses of the word – to help them get there.

By Penny Wayne, Guest Blogger, Director – Wayland School of Music

Parents often ask on community boards for recommendations for music teachers, sometimes adding “…..preferably one who’ll teach my child at home.”

We totally understand! Life is ridiculously busy, children have to be carpooled to many activities, family and work obligations are competing for your time – and a teacher who will come to your home, leaving you to answer your emails or get dinner started while s/he works with your child, sounds very convenient.

But – that convenience is offset by a number of other factors that you’ll want to consider, as you make this important decision about an activity you’d like to become a rewarding and enjoyable part of your child’s life.

First – kids really benefit from seeing that they’re part of the community of a music school. They meet other kids coming in and out with instruments, and overhear them playing a piece they want to play themselves (or experiencing the same challenges). They perform with them when we take our music out into the community. They learn that playing an instrument is not just something we do in isolation, and begin to understand that they are part of something much larger – a fellowship of young musicians.

Second – the more professionally-established, experienced, and musically successful the teacher, the less likely s/he is to feel that home visits make sense. Without any disrespect meant to younger or less experienced teachers – most of us find, as we become more established in our musical careers, that having all our students come to one studio location is a much better model both educationally and economically. There are many distractions at home for your child, and driving from lesson to lesson takes time and gas for the teacher. So teaching in a well-set-up professional studio with all our music and other tools, and where we can accompany students as they play, makes much more sense for the professionally-established teacher and her students.

These are the teachers we hire at Wayland School of Music. We believe that all students, from complete beginner to developing young artist, deserve to have this kind of successful, inspiring, established musician – one with deep professional experience as both teacher and performer – as their guide to their instrument and the beautiful world of music. (For more on why we feel this is so important, see here.)

Third – students themselves seem instinctively to take their lessons much more seriously, and learn better, when they go out to a dedicated studio or music school rather than taking lessons in their living room. What clinched it for us here at WSM was hearing one of our teachers comment that when he became established enough professionally to stop doing home visits, and transferred his remaining home students to his professional studio – those same students began to progress twice as fast and play much better!

For all these reasons, we think you’ll find it worthwhile to give your child the best possible musical start, by taking the plunge and signing up for lessons at an established professional music school – one where all the lessons take place under one roof.

By Lydia Scanlon, Student at Encore

Encore Music Academy is a great place to play amazing music and instruments. The very nice and caring staff help you find the right instrument and devotedly show you how to play. Also they will give you really helpful techniques on how to play and go through every piece you need help with whether they gave it to you or not. For example, my wonderful teacher, Lea Botta, will go over my band music as well as my personal music for Junior Districts, as well as music for my private lessons and Wind Ensemble. It is nice to know that there is someone who really knows what they are doing to help you with whatever you need to learn.

I have been taking lessons at Encore Music Academy for about three years. That doesn’t sound like a long time, but because I have learned so much in a pretty short amount of time, it feels like I have been studying and improving for many more years. I started playing in the Wind Ensemble about one year after I joined the Encore family. It started out with just four people playing clarinet. Then we added a flutist while Lea played played bass clarinet to add harmony to the group. This was very successful, and then other big changes happened. There was another flute player, and Lea went back to playing clarinet. I took over the bass clarinet and my Mom played the piano. Now we have two clarinets, a bass clarinet, a piano and a flute. We have improved a lot.

Normally when we go to the practice on Mondays we set up and tune for about ten minutes. Once we are all tuned and sound really good, we pull out a piece that we have been practicing and see what everybody knows and work off the weakest spots first. Then we will usually play it again and again to try to make it sound like the composer would have wanted it to.  We do the same with the next piece and the next until practice is over. Or sometimes when we get new music, we will sight-read it and get a general beat and tempo so when we go home we know how to play it. And when we see each other on the next Monday we know what to play and we develop an understanding for the new music we had gotten just the week before. Then we just do the same thing every week. When you join Wind Ensemble,  you get new skills for playing your instrument and it helps you learn to play in a group with others. It expands your horizons and helps you to be better in other groups, such as your school’s band or a personal band.

I thought being in Wind ensemble with my Mom would be embarrassing, but it is actually pretty cool. It is really helpful to have someone that is with you to be a second pair of ears and to help you if you don’t understand. I am even luckier because my Mom is also a music teacher, meaning she is really good and helps me with some of my music. If I don’t understand how to perform a song, I have my Mom to tell me and explain what to do or how to do it. I love being in the same group with my Mom because she normally plays the same bass line as I do so it is really easy to get the beat.  With my Mom helping me along with the same part it makes my life easier. She and I can practice at the same tempo and be able to master each and every group lesson.

I think my favorite piece we have ever played would have to be Clarinet Polka by: Herman A. Hummel because it was a really fun song to play. It was an upbeat song and a very light and flowing song. We had to play this song for a high school senior that played clarinet in the Millis High school band. We accompanied him in the concert and it was really cool and fun to be a part of. If you want to have lots of fun, get better at playing an instrument and become a better musician, then come be a part of the Wind Ensemble hosted by Encore Music Academy.