Music Education Benefits – CREATIVE HOBBIES

Experience your creative side

Music education benefits

I was just reading the inquiry titled Extent, Benefits and Potential of Music Education in Victorian Schools by The Victoria Parliament and I would like to highlight the following excerpt:

1. Music intelligence is one of the seven different intelligences that need to be developed and nurtured (Howard Gardner, Frames of Minds).
2. Music is powerfully educational and has emotional, therapeutic and motivational benefits.
3. There are powerful transfer effects that benefit the development of the individual in personal, social and intellectual domains. It benefits language development, literacy, numeracy, creativity, social skills, concentration, team-­? work, fine motor coordination, self-confidence and emotional sensitivity.

Then why the Lonely Guitar on the wall?

All the above are agreeable statements but why then are there so many guitars hanging up on our home walls, songs that have never been finished or even played, dreams forgotten?

I believe that eagerness to learn and self-expression succumbs to the traditional learning process based upon the imitation of others. In traditional education, we only learn how to play other people’s music in the manner they believe it should be played.

This embarks the student on a very slow, frustrating learning process that rewards only those who can imitate others.

If we compared this process to the learning of a language like English, the outcome would be that we would only be able to read but not able to write, talk or communicate with others.

Music is a language; a very unique language used only to communicate emotions. I engage my guitar students in a learning process where writing, talking and reading skills are equally developed at all stages of training.

 I encourage you to experience your creative side. Feel the excitement of accomplishment. Music education benefits our personal well being.

Experience your creative side through guitar music

Creativity through music: a warm current that tingles up the spine, excitement beyond limits, peace and strength.

It feels good to be able to choose a language, for existence, that eliminates confusion rather than develops understanding of facts.

A gentle strum, a choice of chords a change of rhythm, textures, intensities, and there we have it: a door opens up to start feeling who we are and we start sharing such beauty with others.

 Are we all musically gifted ?

This morning I was having a coffee, at a bar on High Street, here in Melbourne, next to my Creative Guitar school. I was having a lovely conversation, with a fellow customer, who stated that only those who had the gift of music could play guitar.

This comment made me very sad as I believe we all have the right to explore our need of self expression through an instrument as the guitar. I also believe that we not only have the right, but the obligation to do so.

Music learning, or learning to play the guitar, is a skill we all have. If you have the need to develop it please do so.

There are no shortcuts in learning how to play the guitar. The student requires to follow a discipline, to achieve a learning, that will allow them to play their favourite songs, in a manner that they will feel good about.

Creativity and well being

When we perform music in a manner that we flow, we tend to feel great about ourselves. At my Guitar school,  students learn to express their emotions through the guitar.

The guitar can be a  medium for our well being. In order to achieve a beneficial flow of expression we need to play the guitar with joy and overcome the natural frustration we all encounter, when we enter a new world of knowledge.

Students need to learn to be logical and emotional at the same time. You will only learn to play the guitar if you can feel, hear and reproduce the rhythmic and melodic values of the composition.

 Please let me help you learn to play the guitar with joy, and contribute further well being to your marvellous life in which you are immersed .

Jimi Hendrix before birth

After 40 years of playing music, understanding how it works and sharing such with others, through education, I reach the conclusion that Jimi Hendrix,  and other musicians of his caliber, were born with the musical knowledge implemented in their DNA.

As a mere mortal,  I have had to struggle to understand his talent, and somehow transfer that knowledge into my own form of personal expression, that at the end of the day makes me very happy as a musician. So,  40 years down the road, I have put together an outline that all musicians and guitarists should master, to reach that level of musicianship and personal satisfaction. Each level, upon completion, will make you feel better about yourself and your playing.

How do you compose?

The objective of my compositions is to make sure the music matches up with my emotional content. Each song has to feel balanced from the beginning till the end of the interpretation. The core composition has to feel logical at all stages.

The interpretation, how I play the composition, has to flow with how I feel daily. Each time I play the composition it will be placed in time after a previous emotion. I can be sad before I play it, or I can be happy. The interpretation will vary but the composition will always sound unified. If this is the case, then I conclude that my compositions are mature enough and I do not retouch them ever again.