Personal Statement

A growing concern in music classrooms today involves the constant battle between education and entertainment. Dana Gioia, distinguished poet and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, once spoke: “ I worry about a culture that trades off the challenging pleasures of art for the easy comforts of entertainment. Entertainment promises us a predictable pleasure…it exploits and manipulates who we are rather than challenging us with a vision of who we might become.”  Many teachers strive to educate students about the value of hard work, excellence and persistence; skills that take time and effort to master.  In homes filled with multi-sensory electronics and instant communication via email and phone texting, students are often more satisfied by immediacy than patience, placing greater value on the spectacle of an art-form rather than its historic, cultural or virtuosic value. Educators must find ways to make the art disciplines more accessible, more relevant and perhaps more engaging for students, not from an entertainment perspective, but from an imaginative one.

My teacher and mentor, Marvin Keenze, says that “information is only useful if it stirs the imagination.”  I have found this idea to be the foundation of my pedagogical philosophy. I find that my students’ musicality is often limited by narrow perceptions of their own creativity. Some have no auditory imagination and are often self-conscious about singing alone in public. By developing a student’s ability to imagine, they become less inhibited by things like making a “correct” sound or performing a piece perfectly. In both the private studio and the classroom, I work to increase the student’s comprehension of not only foundational musical concepts, but to expand their sense of self through developing an informed, innovative intuition–that is, making practical information more useful by stirring the creative desire to learn more about self and environment.

I am passionate about teaching vocal music because I feel that developing vocal and aural skills helps strengthen self-confidence, improve communication ability and encourage community. In addition, as a music educator, I am able to teach a wide spectrum of skills such as the mathematics of music theory, the phonetics of new languages, the history of performance practice and the science of voice pedagogy. This diverse combination encourages a mixture of creativity and information, providing students with a “challenging pleasure” and allowing them to grow both academically and personally. Helping students discover themselves through music, more specifically through their voice, is perhaps my greatest motivation.

Pedagogically, I use a wide variety of tools to achieve this goal, including computer technology to teach acoustics and voice science, yoga for body awareness and progressive methods in auditory discrimination for sight reading and aural skills.  I believe that the balance of imagination and intellect lies in a holistic, multi-method approach to education. Thus, through broadening the student’s perception of his or her own abilities through creativity and disciplined practice, perhaps we may also promote the idea that art in any form should be experienced not just as an entertaining display of talent, but as a means by which we may more fully realize intellectual and imaginative potential in all aspects of education.

Megan Smith, 2009