Teaching Music as a Skill, Not as Knowledge

An often-erroneous assumption within music education is that learning is the acquisition of information. They read about it, they see demos, and they know the terms — but can’t use any of this in playing real music. That’s because music isn’t simply a subject of intellectual understanding. It is something that must be assimilated through perception and decision making and repeated, meaningful usage.

When music becomes a skill… The problem, or rather the solution is with positioning music as a skill.. Much that is wrong happens when we think of knowledge over doing. “People start to listen, instead of hearing sounds,” she said. Playing can no longer be about matching shapes or following directions, but must take place in response to the sound, while it has agency. Never the less, theory assists this process by bringing to understanding what already sounding in the ear, a circular relationship between comprehension and experience.

Skill-based learning also promotes incremental mastery. Instead, it encourages students to slow down and fortify basic skills (like interval recognition, rhythmic sense and basic harmonic flow) that they might have raced past in the rush to learn “advanced stuff.” These fundaments may not look like much, but they’re what supports everything else. Without them, sophisticated ideas are brittle and quickly lost.

Another important aspect is adaptability. Skills enable a musician to be creative in response to the unexpected, whether that is while improvising, composing or performing. But information by itself cannot. That is why skill development builds an intuitive sense of what to do, so that without a rule, we are free but not lost.

Studying music as a craft, rather than a bunch of magisterial facts to learn, students actually progress. You have knowledge that can be used and practice with a purpose, rather than just blundering around trying to figure out what works. Such an approach brings learning in line with the way people actually do music : playing, singing and dancing; creating new expressions; being human.