Our Job as Music Teachers

Joseph Bowman

 

A Survey of Symptoms and Causes of Injury in Professional Orchestra Musicians in Bangkok, Thailand: A pilot study

Sittiporn Wisuttipaet

 

Piano Beginners' Musical Development through Music Variation Thinking Activities in Online Music Lessons.

Tarudee Assavanop

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Our Jobs as Music Teachers (TBC)

Joseph Bowman

College of Music, Mahidol University

On my last day as a doctoral student, before leaving to start my first college teaching job, my trumpet mentor David Hickman (Regents Professor of Trumpet, Arizona State University, USA) took me out to dinner and we had a conversation that has stayed with me for many years.  He told me “You will be very surprised, as you spend time teaching at the university level, at how many teachers are not doing enough for their students.” I found this to be a surprising statement, but he continued, “Most college applied lesson teachers feel that their only job is to teach a student how to play [or sing]. But I feel that we need to be giving more to students. We need to teach them how to play, how to get a job, and how to keep a job.”  

I spent the past decade thinking about this statement and its implications, and have used the ideas it evokes to direct my teaching and give my students a foundation that will enable them to succeed.  Let’s take a careful look at this statement and how applied lesson teachers can make their time with students count!

A Survey of Symptoms and Causes of Injury in Professional Orchestra Musicians in Bangkok, Thailand: A Pilot Study

Sittiporn Wisuttipaet

Faculty of Education, Chulalongkorn University

Professional musicians are frequently at risk of physical injury, which can hinder their work and routine during rehearsals and performances. Sometimes professional musicians choose to neglect the early signs of injury or the symptoms and end up suffering from chronic pain throughout their careers. More studies about musicians' well-being and health in Thailand could provide informative details about injury and treatments. In this study, 75 professional orchestra musicians in Bangkok, aged 19 to 60 identified the cause and symptoms of their injury over the last twelve months. The results of this study can be a useful resource to design and develop health and well-being instruction for musicians, and to raise awareness and prevent injury.

Piano Beginners' Musical Development through Music Variation Thinking Activities in Online Music Lessons.

Tarudee Assavanop

Chulalongkorn University

Teaching young children to be musically creative requires both free time of direct experiences as well as well-organized and well-designed music activities. Through steps of interacting and thinking with visual cues in a flower card game, young piano students were able to explore their creative thinking ability and make progress by expressing their ideas in music variation based on the given themes. This study found that by providing proper guidance and experiences using interactive visual aids, young students can develop their musical creativity. Flower card game activities allow young music learners to express their own melodic and rhythmic variations while fitting with the original given theme. According to Swanwick and Tillman (1986), there are four sequences of musical development, namely: 1) Mastery (divided into Sensory Mastery and Manipulative Mastery levels) 2) Imitation (divided into Personal Expressiveness and Musical Vernacular levels) 3) Imaginative Play (divided into Musical Speculation and Idiomatic levels) 4) Metacognition (divided into Symbolic and Systematic levels). Findings from this study suggest that when interactive and visual teaching tools are used properly in private lessons, piano beginners as young as 7 to 8 years old can develop music variation thinking using Imitation (Music Vernacular) to Imaginative Play (Musical Speculation), and piano beginners aged 11 to 12 years old can develop music variation thinking from Imitation (Music Vernacular) to Imaginative Play (Idiomatic).