Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Individual Instruction

The primary purpose of music instruction is to establish basic skills for those students who do not have them. Unfortunately, an awful lot of guitar lessons are not particularly musical, in the sense of dealing with musical problems. An analogy would be if one took drawing lessons only to the end of being able to draw pictures of kitty-cats, and never once grapple with problems of perspective or tonal harmony.
With that in mind I see these as the basic skills in music:

Listening closely for structure: understanding the role of melody, harmony, rhythm, and space
Creating melody
Playing basic chords on guitar and piano, especially understanding the role of minor and 7ths
Playing basic rhythm

From there, one proceeds to basic technique in guitar. This would be developed much more significantly by Vic during his visits to TAS

After basic skills, come basic composition, teaching compositions to others, performing with others, and basic improvisation with others. These would be mostly dealt with in the workshops.

A third part would be for students who desire to play in public. A goal could be performing at the winter fundraiser and at an end of the school year event.

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