Differing Approaches in Music Instruction: Why does someone learn music?

An interesting experience happened to me the other day while I was teaching music lessons. I was called into the studio owner's office when I arrived and I was asked if I'd checked the schedule yet. I have, and I noticed earlier that day that there was an unfamiliar name on the bottom of my attendance sheet. I was told that this student has already been taking music lessons for about a year now, but for some reason the past month or so they haven't been showing up to lessons, and a no-call-no-show is quite a big deal. They were told by their instructor they couldn't perform in the upcoming studio recital because they weren't ready for it, even though this student has performed in the recital last year. 
Immediately something didn't sit quite right with me, and I asked a few more questions about the student and I told them I would hold an hour lesson with him tonight to assess what's really going on. He now has six lessons with me to come up with anything at all on drum set to perform for the showcase concert.
When it comes time for his lesson, in walks a student about teenage age who seems genuinely excited to play drums or music. I handed him a pair of drumsticks and asked him if there were any warm-ups that he does with his instructor before they get to the lesson, and he points to the large Joel Rothman Big Book of Basic Drumming (no disrespect for Joel Rothman, his works are very helpful for teaching) and told me they play a new line or phrase out of that book every day for a warm up. I introduced him to the warm ups I give my students, usually 7 or 8 depending on the level of the student, and he seemed somewhat concerned we weren't reading sheet music. I found that interesting, and I told him that my students will memorize these warm-ups over time, with no reading necessary.
When we move to the drum set, I now have the opportunity to see where he's at with his playing and we can move from there. When I asked what he was working on with his instructor, he told me bass drum permutations and showed me a couple. He gave me a clean backbeat, and played variations on the backbeat with the kick. When he was done, we discussed a lot about how to listen to and hear the backbeat, what a subdivision was, and how to chain a couple grooves together. 
I also showed him the concept of "if you can say it you can play it", which I use very often with my students. I showed him a basic soca beat on the drumset, and I did this to show that vocalizing it and learning how to say it will transfer over into playing. After showing him and having him beat-box a soca beat, I had him play it on the drumset. Something really interesting I noticed is that, in the beginning, he only played the groove correctly (or put the first snare hit on the & of 2 and the second one on 4) either while or right after he spoke it. I think this makes perfect sense: you need to embody the feeling of the music, whether its a groove or melody or harmonic progression, in order to understand how to correctly play it on your instrument. Embodied cognition is how we play music, or type, or drive, or perform these complex actions that we don't need to focus our entire thought process into, all while not even thinking about it at all. 
We even used this to come up with a new groove. His previous method for thinking of and playing grooves is, admittedly, tried and true, but I feel is somewhat more statistical in its approach: permutations of the bass on different eighth notes in the measure. I had him use this same method, beat-boxing something out, to come up with a new groove, and he did successfully, even moving the snare to different places other  than 2 and 4 which he wasnt doing prior. 
I gave him homework too: beat-box 3 different rhythms and notate them. If you have a hard time notating them, record them and bring them in next lesson and we'll write them together. He seemed really happy with his homework and I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of his work. 

I teach music depending on the wants and needs of the student. The parent of course has a say but if the student is disinterested, they won't practice or pursue music and they'll begin to detest it in some instances, seeing it as a waste of time. I ask every student why they want to learn drums, because many students have a different answer. I have students who only wanted to learn to play one song and that's all, I have students in school bands, students auditioning for scholarships and music camps, parents who want their child to learn an instrument so they can form a band/jam together, students who learn drumset in order to know how to compose with it, and students that just think it's cool and and want to have a productive way to get energy out. If a student shows up to lessons wanting to do something and they're regularly told they can't, they'll feel discouraged. When I asked this student why they were taking drum lessons they told me it was because they wanted to learn to play drum set. But when I was asking him about what lessons looked like, they told me it was full of practice pad lessons and reading music. Both of these things are important; I use the practice pad with every student every day, it is a necessity for developing good technique. But if the student is there to learn drum set, and you're not giving at least an equal amount of time or more on the drum set than the practice pad, the student is going to lose interest and feel discouraged. 

I've noticed the way I've been teaching music is quite different from how most teach music, and it's also quite different from how I initially learned music. Throughout my time studying and playing, I've learned that a lot of people have their pre-conceived beliefs and notions about music, and strong ones at that, that are somewhat akin to religion in terms of power that they hold over our mental superstructure, or interpretation of the world. Because of the wide variation in belief of what music is, wide variation in pedagogical practices from around the world exist as well. I was never taught to write anything, or make up a melody, or improvise. I was never taught how to vocalize something musically, or what makes a rhythm or melody sound good. I was never taught about groove or feel. I was never taught how important it was to look away from the music. All until I joined university Big Band, Jazz Combos, African Music Ensembles, and a Steel Pan band. I was taught about how these groups of people learned music, and how they played music in an inherently different fashion than us, where masters of these art forms have never read a page of sheet music in their life yet are master musicians, composers, and improvisors. I learned there was so much more to what it meant to make and play music, and how powerful improvising music is as a deep form of expression. But not everyone has this awakening to what the world shows us is music. Many musicians never have the opportunity to fundamentally conceive of music as something different than how they were raised, much like studying the linguistics of one's native language, becoming an expert at it, and then calling one's self an expert in linguistics and teaching linguistics exclusively from the framework of your native language. I believe music has a labeling issue as well, where two people teaching music, even music that comes from the same nation (like Rock and Jazz, for example), can be teaching conceptually different things but both say they're studying music, or American music. The world of music education and academia is somewhat fuzzy in terms of categorization.

Without sounding too spiritual, music literally exists inside you, as a part of you, that you understand and comprehend the patterns of surprisingly well. Musical training is only a tool to allow the music that you already have and feel in you to not only be expressed, but developed over time. A great, recently-passed jazz legend and mentor Marvin 'Doc' Holladay, said this famous line that I will never forget: "You only choose the first two notes of your improv. You are a vessel for the music to flow through you, you do not control the music." I believe approaching music education with the belief that one is already musical and needs a way of expressing it is a much better, and faster-progressing method than believing that musicality is something that needs to be taught and that develops, because in reality it is both of these circumstances. There is evidence of the inherently musical nature of humans; every society in humanity has a form of music, instruments have existed for as long as we could carve lithophones (stone instruments) and bone flutes, and experiments done by linguists on schoolchildren show that if you repeat a phrase often enough, the brain recognizes the inherent rhythmic quality built-in and naturally applies a melody, thus turning it into a little song. This is also seen in African societies quite often, this repetitive cyclical nature of the music based on a singular phrase or concept, and represent some of the most raw, human forms of music-making in the world. 

I love being able to link African musicology and global music pedagogy to my lessons and teaching methods. These global pedagogical methods exist because they're naturally human ways of representing music because humans are musical creatures, and thus these methods are natural for students to pick up, like vocalization and improvisation. Through this recognition of the naturally musical human, we can then begin to expand and develop our musicality and become better musicians.

​I'm looking forward to seeing what my student brings in for their next lesson.