The Episcopal Student Center, an organization I am a part of on campus is in the process of starting a community garden. We have three large raised beds full of soil and compost. This week we are busy planting seeds and seedlings in a grid system in each of our boxes.

As I was watering the newest plants I began to explore the relationship between gardening and teaching. The four essential steps to establish and maintain healthy crops parallels those needed to develop confident and capable musicians.

1. Preparing an healthy environment
2. Planting the seeds
3. Watering the seeds
4. Waiting diligently

The one I will discuss in detail today is setting up a rich environment.

Gardeners, like teachers, are defined by three things — what they look like, what they do, and what they produce. Everything that involves appearance pertains to the environment. This is the toolshed, the raised beds, the bright sun, the coiled hose and trusted water faucet. Along with the richness and aeration of the soil, these elements make plant life possible.

Being intentional about the environment of your student will make their musical lives possible.

The first thing to consider is the place that music teaching and practicing is happening. I seek out settings that are comfortable and consistent. This is a short list of what I look for…

• Small spaces
• Clear boundaries
• Seats so parent and teacher can sit at the same level as their student
• Well lit
• Comfortable temperature
• Minimal visual and aural distractions
• Opportunity to set my teaching materials at arms length

I aim to prepare this space exactly the same way each week, but I understand this is not possible in all situations. In order to mitigate the discomfort inconsistency causes students, I establish routines for students to anchor to. These include an unpacking, tuning, and bowing procedures and the use of one single 8.5X11 practice record each month I expect to see in every lesson.

Just as we curate our physical environments, we must curate our aural environment. The soundscapes of your students’ days are just as valuable as the blank walls in their bedrooms. If you choose to fill the walls with fine artwork you are enriching their visual experience and giving them reference from which they can create. Fill their day with music and you provide a reference from which they can develop their own unique style. It is for this reason that I insist parents routinely curate the playlist of their child’s life.

This music does not need to be limited only to the Suzuki reference recordings. As a child I enjoyed the regular repetition of Suzuki pieces mixed with artists such as Enya, Jimmy Buffet, Nyaz, George Straight, Nickel Creek, and Lyle Lovett. My parents also left the local classical radio station playing during all other times of the day. As book graduation gifts I would receive CD records of the pillars of the classical genre that I would proudly listen to again and again from my alarm clock stereo (Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Mozart’s Piano Sonatas, Bach’s Brandenberg Concertos). As I aged I had access to the complete CD collection of both my teacher and the public library. I started checking out and listening to the names that were familiar (Perlman, Ma), and branched out to Hahn, Shaham, Mutter. It is through this listening library that I discovered the Bach Chaconne, Rachmaninov Piano Concerto, and Bernstein West Side Story — the reasons that I decided to continue my study of the complicated and graceful violin.

Finally, I encourage teachers and parents to carefully consider the people for which your students will be playing for. Any person — may it be a grandparent, babysitter, school teacher, or next door neighbor — who is not solely interested in the healthy development of the practice of mastery is a potentially toxic element of your students environment. Competitiveness, pressure, shaming, enabling, and worst of all disengagement will lead to frustration and doubt. In order to enable the artistry of your students, have difficult but important conversations about why you are doing this work. Everyone in your students’ environment should actively be working to improve the health of that very environment.

In making the choice to surround ourselves in a comfortable and consistent work place with fine music and supportive friends, we show our students what we value. They know that we will provide a safe, reliable learning environment. In addition we care deeply for the music they are tasked with studying and hope to share with them the breadth of ways that music manifests itself in this world. Finally, we are unified in our quest to promote their unique artistry and to develop their ability to master anything they set their mind to. With this environment established, anything is possible.

complimentary soundtrack

Technology proves to be a difficulty for most people. For few do gadgets and devices serve merely as tools for navigating the day. Laptops, phones, iPads, televisions, radios, apple watches, and e-readers consume our days. Though my laptop and phone together help me communicate, research, listen, discover, and write these posts, I am often concerned how compelled I am to stay on these devices far longer than necessary.

It appears as if I am not the only one who struggles with this imbalance. During studio class it is rare for one of my studio-mates to perform to a completely captivated audience, as half of our studio is looking at a phone surreptitiously. From the bright screens of laptops in my Music History class, I see far more scrolling Facebook news-feeds than moving cursors in note taking applications. As I teach private lessons, I will often glance over to parents and discover that they are fiddling with their own phones.

While lessons can serve as a beautiful thirty minutes of collaboration between teacher, student, and parent, the moment can also be ruined by negativity, and worse inattention. I think students crave moments in which their parents are entirely focused on them. I have caught onto students requesting, even making deals and bets, with their parents for a phone free lesson.

For this reason I often consider eradicating technology from my teaching entirely, as I fear our constant interaction with devices isn’t healthy. However, I’ve decided there are a few applications of technology that assist the learning process. They are listed below…

• Email – I use Mail on my MacBook Air once daily to communicate with parents about scheduling.
• Calendar – I use iCal to keep track of lessons.
• Calendly – for easy scheduling. I love the interface but wish it didn’t require a premium membership.
• Evernote – Take notes on student progress, general teaching sequence. (Parent note taking).
• Metronome – the “Metronome” app on my iPhone has been invaluable and I use it with my older students to keep an unbiased beat.
• Video – one of the only reasons I would recommend parents have their phone out in the lesson is to record what we are working on.

In 2014 I had the privilege of co-launching a new, internal project in the String Project community. Our goal was to foster relationships between students and parents across ages and instruments. Operating under the name Buddy Program, we partnered young and orchestra aged students and encouraged inspiration and mentorship through one-on-one meet-ups and check-ins. This year the program is forty students strong and ranges in age from the oldest ensemble to the very youngest.

As I was putting together the materials for the introductory meeting of the Buddy Program, I realized that members of my studio had built informal buddy partnerships as well. The close partnerships we formed led directly to more successful lessons, studio classes, juries, and overall states of mind. Because it has become a natural instinct of students to bond together in this way, It seems this model is a necessity in order to navigate the trials of music school.

I connected with a graduate student my first year of college who, like me, worked very hard to keep up with the virtuosity of most students enrolled at the Butler School. She and I related to each other in our commitment to mastery and willingness to sacrifice comfort and esteem for true development of skills. Our partnership manifested itself in frequent one-on-one play throughs before lessons and classes and exchanging technical advice. But even more significant was the emotional support we offered each other. When development stalled, practice time faltered, injuries and pain cropped up we were available and empathetic to one another.

Furthermore, being accountable to each other made a profound difference in our day to day practice. As menial a task as making it to the music building by 8:00am can prove impossible without another person’s help. In addition to being responsible for getting to the music building, one would also be responsible for dissatisfaction and reprimand if the task is not accomplished. By offloading those negative feedback loops and making a commitment to my buddy, I am now rarely tardy to the music building for practice in the morning. We have also successfully applied this accountability tool to scales, completing assignments, recording lessons, and practicing on weekends.

Find a parter with whom you can relate, communicate, be inspired by, and be accountable with. The measurable effects of this approach reach far beyond the scope of violin practice. Any practice routine, creative endeavor, refinement of skill, daily habit, or daring goal can be augmented by committing yourself to a accountability buddy. Do it today!