The vital role of music educators.

"I am a music educator." We believe music educators can play a vital role in society, one that is rich and fulfilling. To do this, we have found it necessary to make two major shifts in our teaching over the years.

From Instructor to Educator

To be fulfilled as a teacher, we discovered that we must be educators rather than instructors. The word educate means "to lead out." An educator is one who welcomes a student's latent gifts into the light of day. Educators strive to cultivate the unique nature of each of their students by offering them a haven in which they can discover and express hidden parts of themselves.

These days, teachers are expected to be instructors rather than educators. We are supposed to stuff information into our students rather than lead gifts out of them. We are expected to efficiently impart information, motivate students, teach them to precisely perform piece after piece and prod them to accomplish standard goals.

The educator's motto is different: teach people, not pieces. An educator cares more about her student's inner desires and gifts than climbing a ladder of accomplishments. As a result, an educator teaches each student very differently. The goal is not to create competent performers but creative, confident human beings who are doing what they are called to do. The world has many instructors, but the need for educators has never been greater.

From Notes to Music

Most of us were taught to make music by reading notes and translating them into movements and sounds. As a result, we teach our students the cognitive process of deciphering musical notation and try to ensure they execute the notes and markings correctly.

Yet, music is not notes. The poet Wallace Stevens said, "Music is feeling, not sound." To be a music educator is to lead out feelings. In the modern day, children are taught to memorize, analyze and conceptualize. When and where are feelings cultivated?

Music educators in their highest role are awakeners and explorers of feelings. A private music lesson may be the only chance our students have all day to explore their inner lives. We offer them a chance to be guided by feeling and inspiration. We offer a chance to be guided by feeling and inspiration. What is life without feeling? A person can have everything, but without feelings, he is poor. What is a virtuoso musician without feelings? We think of feelings as something that occur naturally. Yet, if they are neglected, they are like seeds never given water.

The everyday sorts of feelings are hardly rich or complex enough to embrace the profound music of Chopin or Beethoven, men with extraordinary ranges of emotions. How can we fathom Chopin's feelings when he created the G Minor Ballad if we do not have feelings of similar depths? As modern children become smarter and more efficient, they seem less aware of their deeper feelings and unable to produce music from them.

How, then, can we cultivate feelings? We can do it with literature, but literature places a tremendous cognitive burden on most students and usually leaves little room for feeling. For a student to focus on feelings from the beginning, we must teach music without notes as well as with notes.

We give our students simple music patterns to create with. The patterns, though simple, are rich enough to awaken impressions, imagination, memories and feelings. We create with our students in each lesson, making musical conversations. We strive to create music with them, not merely sounds. Then they learn to do what is possible in other forms of art--spontaneously create something profound that can only emerge from the deepest feelings. Then, if and when they play Chopin, they are more inclined to feel the depth of his music because they have made music from that profound place.

Creating music in this way can release chronic physical tension, smooth out stilted playing, and generate a lifelong desire to play. We don't have to worry about making mistakes, or being competent, or being someone we are not. We can finally just be ourselves. Once we are allowed to truly create from our own feelings, we start moving more gracefully, and we are naturally drawn toward our instrument.

Being an educator and an awakener of feelings is not easy--it's one challenge and adventure after another. There is no program to follow because each student is so different and feelings so elusive. Educating must become an improvisatory art. Yet, this is how we play our most vital role and where we find fulfillment and joy.

Akiko Kinney teaches improvisation and literature to all of her 40 private students. She earned a master of music in piano performance and is now working on a master's degree in psychotherapy.

Forrest Kinney is an educator devoted to reviving personal creativity in the classical music tradition, He is the author of the Pattern Play series on improvisation and Creativity-Beyond Compare.