Many people come back to playing a musical instrument later in life – having perhaps learned at school and given up as a result of other activities taking over. Some may have really wanted to carry on but found that the pressures of work and family made a regular commitment to learning difficult. There are also keen players who have been put off learning by having a lack of rapport with a teacher, or feeling that the music they were given to learn was uninspiring and didn’t hold their interest. For people starting again - sometimes as a new years resolution, or a hobby taken up in retirement, the choice of teacher is important – as is their motivation to start playing again, perhaps after hearing a beautiful piece played on the radio or at a concert.
What adult pupils are looking for is a teacher who can kindle their love of music as well as understanding their individual needs. Mature students may not have time or the desire to wade through many scales or preparatory studies and therefore must feel inspired to play right from lesson one.
Whereas children can be quite motivated by the need to achieve ‘grades’, this is not always the case with adults and the teacher must make sure they help the learner towards other goals – such as the desire to play in an amateur orchestra, to simply play the pieces they have always loved, or to perform for friends and family. Having a less formally structured lifestyle than children, some adults prefer to arrange their music lessons in a more flexible way, so rather than coming every week at 5pm on a Thursday, they might prefer to phone up a few days in advance and arrange their lessons around other activities that week. Some might prefer to have fortnightly lessons, or just to come ‘as and when’ – whilst maintaining a consistent level of commitment to individual playing whilst at home between lessons. A rigid period of ‘practice time’ need not be scheduled in every day, but if pupils can take the instrument out of the case for bursts of 20 minutes three or four times a week, good progress can still be made.
In terms of learning material, a teacher working with an adult pupil needs to explore music which is enjoyable and inspiring to play. One problem is that many ‘beginners’ books are geared towards children, so from the teachers viewpoint, it’s a bit embarrassing asking a 55 year old student to play ‘Row, Row, Row your boat’ and the student will quickly lose interest. If the teacher can find out what kind of pieces the learner enjoys listening to, (whether classical, jazz, folk or even popular music), they should be able to source sheet music that will be of interest. Sometimes learning to play simple duets together (with the teacher accompanying on piano or their own instrument) can open up all sorts of possibilities and help ‘ensemble skills’ of listening and adjusting to another player.
Most importantly, adults learn in a different way to children – often by building on understanding that they already have, so if a good teacher can use the pupils own experiences as a resource for learning and expand upon it, quicker progress can often be made – it’s simply untrue that musical instruments become more difficult to learn as we grow older, and many mature pupils are very motivated and achieve some very impressive results. However, learning the violin or viola is not an easy task and although both instruments can sound absolutely stunning, the journey towards this will usually involve some fairly off-putting sounds in the beginning. Adults can be very self conscious about this and feel quickly demoralised that their violin doesn’t make the glorious sound that they hear on ‘Classic FM’, but a good teacher will quickly reassure new players that like any skill, it takes time and focus to get beyond the initial stages – after all, they’ve been through exactly the same thing themselves!
When looking for a music teacher for either adults or children, it’s vitally important to find a person that the student feels comfortable with – especially if an adult feels uneasy about going back into a ‘learning situation’ – something which they may not have taken part in since leaving school many years ago. A teacher should be able to take lessons at the pace suitable for each student, and uplift and inspire pupils to become musicians – after all, not even top professionals ever stop learning or improving - we are all on the same journey.
