When I stopped taking piano lessons, I realized that I didn’t consider myself to be a creative person.  I was not necessarily breaking through barriers and conventions and making something new.  I was, however, using my skill and my training to express myself through the music that other people wrote.  Perhaps it’s a bit narcissistic, because sometimes playing piano served me more than anyone else.  This is especially true because I wasn’t sharing “my” music – I was sharing myself with other people through the medium of music.  And of course, perhaps that is the  point – in everything we do, we really express ourselves, whether it is through music of our own creation, or music that others created.  When playing a piece, I always imagined some sort of narrative so that the piece has personal meaning – that way, the piece became a part of me.  Is that act, that of creating a narrative to a piece of music, creative?  Of course, compsers seem to do the opposite – create music in terms of a narrative.

As a student teacher, I observe that so much time is devoted to doing what someone tells us to do.  Teachers always say that children love boundaries and restrictions because it makes them feel safe.  However, do we need ot provide students with those restrictions?  That “safety net”?  Of course, when creating music, the worst that will happen is that someone will forget about it, which happens to perhaps 99% of musical ideas anyway.  Why put these restrictions on children and students if the consequence for taking a risk is so slight?  How can we encourage them to take these risks?  To be creative?

What then, is a way to be creative while teaching?  It seems to me that so many of our instrumental methodology rely more on skills first, and then creativity second.  is there a way in which both can be honored and honed at the same time?  I have yet to see it.  Hm.  Perhaps I can “create” it.

Whenever someone asked me the same question in the past, especially in my undergraduate days as a Piano Performance major, I always referred to my love of music, and the power of music, all of the stuff that they would expect you to say in a commercial. I would say these things in a confident and definitive manner so that no one would actually probe any further, because in truth, I couldn’t articulate at the time exactly why I was pursuing music. Granted, I was considered a good pianist, not necessarily someone that would rise to the ranks of Marta Argerich, but someone who could make music that people would enjoy, and get paid for it. No doubt that music inflated my ego (and also deflated it at the same time – no wonder musicians are sometimes known to be mentally unstable!), and this also contributed to my decision to pursue music.

However, after graduating with a piano performance degree, it dawned on me that unless I would dedicate countless hours to this particular form of music, I would not progress the way classical pianists are expected to grow. When it came time to decide, I discovered that my musical curiosity was too great and my devotion to classical music too weak to stay on the road I was on. The next several years were spent searching, not playing piano, and discovering a way of being in music that was so vast and different from how I was trained to be. It was fascinating, learning about House music (I was in Chicago after all, you can’t get away from House if you live there), and the culture surrounding the music, and learning and listening to the musical geniuses who created this type of music. I learned about music form Brazil (thanks to training capoeira), and began to play instruments from the region. I also discovered how people are so ready and willing to connect with music, and to use music, both as a force and medium for expression. Lastly, I discovered that no matter what kind of music I would study, that there would always be something new to discover, to learn, and to enjoy.

I’ve also seen that music is not simply

It is with this sense of discovery and optimism that I “return” to music, although I never really “left” music. I’m now just paying money for formal classes. However, almost every day both in and out of the classroom, I learn more about music, about myself, and about the world. And as I am about to emark on a teaching career, I see nwo that it is truly the teacher that learns the most.