My approach in music schools
I very much believe that music schools can and perhaps should be the laboratories where an education for the future is explored and shaped. To change an educational practice, you need a solid ground. So why not start by continuing to do what you are familiar with? Indeed, undermining the ground beneath your feet is usually not a good idea. But what you can do is allow a different perspective, and let it gently seep into your regular practice.
I offer you different related perspectives that seamlessly connect with your musical intuition and ultimately that of your students — because, indeed, musicality is first and foremost an intuition. From these, you can choose the one that intrigues you most or that you can most easily connect with.
In any school team, each teacher has his or her own affinities, insights and hobbyhorse. From those different perspectives, you can always find a promising clue somewhere. At the team level, that combination provides a diverse and rich set of inputs for initiating fundamental discussions and tentative experiments. These will take your team’s music education practice to another level.
In my approach, the artistic, the instrumental, the theoretical and the educational form one indivisible whole. And they are from the very beginning. The challenge is to keep it that way.
Let’s see if we can find common ground. If so, let’s discuss together how best to start and nurture that process at the team level in your school.