A music education for the mind body and soul
how many of you are familiar with this
sound
most of you probably heard it it may
bring back memories of
music class or music lessons did you
enjoy playing scales
probably not or maybe you didn’t mind
them but you didn’t see them as fun
does this still sound like a scale to
you did you ever think of taking a scale
and rearranging it and turning it into
your own idea
probably not a scale is a system much
like the alphabet
let’s see what happens when i take this
scale improvise with it by rearranging
it and changing the order
over the slope i’ve created
now the scale takes on a life of its own
it’s no longer notes up and down
in succession but rather it’s a tool for
making music
my name is leslie d schazer and i am a
freelance musician and educator
i have the privilege of teaching young
minds all over the metro detroit area
or rather i have the privilege of being
taught by smart
energetic young beautiful minds all over
the metro detroit area
and what you’ve just heard is one of
many ways i use scales to help students
better access this thing
we call music music should be fun
creative and innovative but
unfortunately we’ve fallen into teaching
it
with the same abstractness and
inaccessibility with which we teach so
many other subjects
i’m working to change that i want to
emphasize and bring out
the symbiotic nature of the
student-teacher relationship
create an environment where learning to
think new things together is fun
where we can make music and nurture
relationships
and teach the whole person in my many
years of teaching i’ve learned more
lessons than a student could ever dream
of
and in that i’m seeing the need more and
more to throw away convention
think outside of the box and be flexible
because most of the students i teach
have no desire to become professional
musicians they just want to have fun and
see what it’s like to play
fully understanding this has given me
freedom freedom to
take the pressure from the student and
the pressure from myself
focus on a holistic experience one that
will give both student and teacher a
lifetime of experiences
that have yet to show their lasting
impact
i teach and perform a lot and with that
i’m constantly involving
however one thing that never changes is
the joy and the beauty that music brings
to the world
music is so powerful that often the
reason a person wants in
is because they’ve heard a beautiful
melody or a great musician
and they say to themselves i want to
play that or i want to sing that
and then they get the instrument in
their hand for the first time and it
sounds like this
there’s nothing more hilarious and
rewarding than the look on a student’s
face when they play an instrument for
the first time
sometimes they’re thrilled by the sound
under their nose and sometimes they look
like they smelled the most awful thing
known to man
nevertheless they have something they
want to learn and i’m here to teach them
meet felix felix is currently working on
the blues creating patterns on the blue
scale
the theme song from plants vs zombies
and the gevat from suzuki book 2.
he’s 8 years old when i asked him last
year what he’d like to learn next he
said a blues
and i said great but i was faced with a
challenge in that moment
there are not many blues that are
conducive to a young violin player
that will be technically appropriate and
also offer him some new challenges
so i wrote one for him and i called it
blues for felix
he loved it and from that he learned his
a minor pentatonic
his a blues scale 12 bar blues form and
he’s currently learning how to improvise
over the blues
[Music]
improvisation is something that we
typically think of in a jazz context
or more specifically for students of a
certain level proficiency and typically
not for violins
i however believe that it is extremely
vital to the development of all
musicians of all
genres to learn the skill and therefore
introduce it to beginners
like these
[Music]
when this video was taken these were
first-year students and what i love most
about this video is that
these students are doing something that
is generally unheard of and would clear
a room of professional classical
musicians but why is that
it’s because of an education with too
much emphasis on imitation and
perfection
and not enough emphasis on creativity
children are naturally creative
but over time in years being told wrong
wrong wrong
they start to doubt themselves
additionally in my opinion
we measure and pressure students too
much sometimes students are in a
difficult place in life and could use
a slower pace or a change in direction
there’s always room for growth and
always something to learn and this can
be achieved in a less rigorous time
pressured environment
i have a student who was accepted into a
very competitive school last year
she would frequently show up to her
lessons very frustrated before she even
played a note
the student was stressed and her lessons
just represented one more thing to be
stressed out about
i didn’t want her to quit so we
restructured her lessons i gave her one
solo piece to work on and the rest of
the time we spend doing things she wants
to learn
just the other day she was so swamped
with schoolwork she had not had time to
prepare for her lesson
no sweat so i made a loop like the one
you heard in the beginning
it went from a major to a minor we
discussed the parallels between major
and minor
reviewed her minor and major triads and
we improvised on those sounds
it was definitely time well spent
overall the student is enjoying the
ability to decompress in her lessons and
expand her overall knowledge of music
she’s thriving and getting some much
needed time for exploration
and expression in my opinion this
journey can be long and there’s no
reason to rush students into learning
things that they are legitimately not
ready for
knowledge is best acquired through true
desire
or knowledge can be acquired through
good old-fashioned fun in playing songs
that you’ve heard on the radio
[Music]
this was an interesting adventure many
people would look at this video and
think that there wasn’t much learning
involved
however to get these students to play
the syncopated rhythms of a pop tune
fit into a groove and play with the
lyricism of a singer
required a great deal of preparation i
had to write all of the words on the
board
and create a color coded system to help
them know which fingers went on every
string
these students frequently i asked them
if they’d like to learn something as a
class
and as long as they can as long as it’s
age-appropriate
and i can adapt it to beginning violin
we make it happen
i do this for two reasons one is because
it’s just fun but the other reason is
because i want them to see that the
violin is just not for classical music
i try as much as i can to create an
environment
where we learn in many different ways
students become better violinists when
they are developing skills that may seem
irrelevant to violin playing
like when we do eurythmic inspire
movement or multirhythmic patterns on
the body
they improve coordination and right and
left side independence
when we sing what we play or sing and
play they develop better pitch
recognition and ability to phrase
when we do call and response or rote
learning they develop their ears
and become better ensemble players being
a musician requires a high level of
intuition and sensitivity to one’s
surroundings which we can all agree is a
skill
we can take to other social situations
but please don’t misunderstand me
i do value tradition and i do value
convention in some regard
i also have a high level of expectation
for students and expect them to rise to
it whenever possible
however i’m not caught up in the must
do’s and the have-twos when it comes to
learning something as diverse
as music and also i want students to see
that it is okay to choose the unpopular
thing
i’d like to leave you with this most of
us will teach someone something in our
lifetime
and in that we will learn from those who
we teach be open be creative and stay
humble because we never know the true
impact of the knowledge that we impart
upon others
teaching is an opportunity to learn it
is a mutual understanding between
teacher
and student that there will be a
significant exchange of our shared human
experience
the possibilities are endless and all
that i do
i endeavor most to give students
something new to wonder provocative to
ponder
and a whole lot of laughter and fun