Did music lessons at school help with your musical life?

[SamIAm]

Never had any music education at my school (1970s) so not sure if it would have helped.

Sam x

[Johannes]

For most of the students music lessons are just wasted time. Anyway I was very lucky to have a great music teacher in our school who was very good musician himself. He noticed about 10 talents among us and got us playing together, at the begining under his supervision. Many of us became later pro musicians.

[Lfalex v1.1]

No.

[Bagman]

Possibly too young to remember if school music was useful

 

Can definitely endorse part time study at the Jazz School / Polytechnic when in my 30’s. I’m thinking of going back again when I retire 

[knirirr]

Short answer: No.

 

Long answer:

My school offered both music "theory" (how to read music, compulsory from 11-13) and classical instrumental lessons. I was encouraged to make use of these and wanted to, and although I was a bit bored by classical music I didn't hate it so I tried both violin and piano to start with, and, eventually, the highland bagpipe. It was not until I went to university that I found music I actually liked and also managed to save up for an electric guitar (anathema at school). I've not continued with violin or piano and gentlemanly conduct requires that I refrain from piping. Reading music was a useful skill to learn, but I had forgotten it all by the time I got that electric guitar.

 

Frustratingly, I found out years later that the head of music was in fact an arranger for BBC Radio Leicester's big band and her husband was a jazz bassist. A shame she couldn't have brought any of that into the lessons.

 

Edit as requested by @BigRedX - I am referring to the years 1982-89.

Edited April 15 by knirirr

[Stub Mandrel]

On 13/04/2024 at 16:05, Munurmunuh said:

Would some Grade 5 Theory helped Mr YouTuber at this point? 

 

No, but it might have helped some of his subscribers...

[Stub Mandrel]

Just a reminder that there's a world of difference between knowing musical theory and sight reading.

 

Just as you can have a detailed understanding of grammar and be functionally illiterate.

[Dad3353]

1 hour ago, Stub Mandrel said:

Just a reminder that there's a world of difference between knowing musical theory and sight reading.

 

Just as you can have a detailed understanding of grammar and be functionally illiterate.

 

... or blind. 

[JazzyJ]

My music tutor really encouraged me from the age of 12yrs old. Even though I left school to pursue a career in the motor trade, I chose music over metalwork and attained a 'O' level C grade. There were only 5 students out of a 120 intake and I sang/played 'House of The Rising Sun' on guitar for the practical exam. I had taken up bass at 14yrs old for the yearly musical productions. Happy days 😃. 

[SteveK]

My school music lessons helped me a whole lot more than my art, chemistry, biology, algebraic, trigonometry, French, technical drawing, history lessons. I always assumed that most of the subjects are taught to expand the mind and as an introduction, in the hope that a particular subject will appeal to some students and will pursue it.

I found music lessons to be quite helpful: Bass/Treble clefs; Quavers, Crotchets, Minims etc. Note names and positions on the staff. This all turned out to be very helpful in my musical life.

[BigRedX]

It was be useful if people replying to this topic could say when they were at school.

 

I suspect almost all the positive music lesson experiences will have occurred for those whose education came after the mid 80s.

[Jean-Luc Pickguard]

The main thing I remember about music lessons (in the 70s) was that at my school music was so unimportant that there was no music room, so for lessons we would trek to the neighbouring junior school to use their music room. Our music teacher was an alcoholic and some time before he was relieved of his position at some point he just stopped turning up for lessonsto spend his time in the pub a little further down the road. My class would still trek to the music room at the appointed time, but we would bring our favourite 7" singles in and take turns playing them on the class record player.

Edited April 15 by Jean-Luc Pickguard

[neepheid]

16 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

It was be useful if people replying to this topic could say when they were at school.

 

I suspect almost all the positive music lesson experiences will have occurred for those whose education came after the mid 80s.

 

1980-89.  But it was me being useless/lazy/feckless, not the school(s).

[meterman]

2 hours ago, BigRedX said:

It was be useful if people replying to this topic could say when they were at school.

 

I suspect almost all the positive music lesson experiences will have occurred for those whose education came after the mid 80s.

I left school in 1987, so not me. All the music lessons and tutoring that did me any good happened in primary schools and comprehensives. 

[taunton-hobbit]

I was at school from about 1954 to 1966 (ish) - primary / junior school did 'not a lot' involving recorders and my enlightened grammar thought that any music that didn't seem to require a classical orchestra was simply a waste of time - things have (seemingly) moved on ...

 

😎

[diskwave]

65 thru 76. Recorder @ Primary school, Fiddle in Middle School orchestra.. (first chair no less... haha) then relentless study @ High School cause apparently I... "had something"...but my old pensioner tutor was dusty, fussy and hard work, no wonder I went off the rails.. 

[Barking Spiders]

I was at secondary school in Liverpool. Whatever instruments there might've been had probably been nicked to fund someone's crack habit

[Stub Mandrel]

Music up to 1973-4 school year, when I turned 11.

[Rosie C]

18 hours ago, diskwave said:

65 thru 76. Recorder @ Primary school, Fiddle in Middle School orchestra..

 

Oh, I'd forgotten that. While high school music lessons were a waste of time for me, we played recorder at junior school age 8 or 9. They must have worked as I still play recorder now - though admittedly now I play it through a rack-mount chorus unit and a PA  muhahahahaha!

 

[chris_b]

I know half a dozen musicians working in schools today. They are teaching drums, guitar and singing and have full books.

 

Some of these kids come along to our jam nights and the standard is good.

 

In West London at least music education and learning musical instruments seems to be prospering.

[Rosie C]

12 minutes ago, chris_b said:

I know half a dozen musicians working in schools today. They are teaching drums, guitar and singing and have full books.

 

Some of these kids come along to our jam nights and the standard is good.

 

In West London at least music education and learning musical instruments seems to be prospering.

 

It's similar at our local high school - great teachers and very good facilities. Very different to my own experience in the 1980s!

[Mediocre Polymath]

So, for context, my experience is all from an infamous south London comp (most of the notable alumni on its wiki page are murderers) between 1997 and 2004.

 

I did school music classes (as in the academic subject, not instrument-specific lessons) during my first three years at secondary school. We just had the one teacher during that time, who I'll call Mr Johnson.

 

Looking back, Mr Johnson was a sad, haunting sort of a figure. He had a big bottle-brush moustache, side-parted brown hair and a pinkish face that was always shiny with rage-sweat. I remember being told that he was apparently one of the country's finest players of an instrument that there's absolutely no demand for – like a contrabass Saxhorn or something like that.

 

He'd typically start his lessons by yelling at a volume that sounded genuinely painful. Once everyone had shut up, he'd start working through some rote lesson, interrupting himself at increasingly frequent intervals to do some more red-faced shouting.

 

Eventually, there would come a point in every lesson where he'd completely lose his temper, slam the lid of the classroom piano down and scream "SILENCE!". Then we'd sit for the rest of the lesson in tense, terrifying silence. He'd glower at us; we'd stare at our hands; and the clock would tick away in the corner by the door. Sometimes he reached that tipping point less than 20 minutes into an hour-long period. It was white-knuckle stuff.

 

I dropped music at GCSE, and I think Mr Johnson was encouraged to find a new career about a year later. I believe his last term of teaching was the one where the lid of the piano finally broke, though the actual final straw was when he gave a kid a concussion by repeatedly slamming his head in a door.

 

---

 

There are two parts to this story though. After Mr Johnson left, he was replaced by an NQT – a guy who had done a teacher-training degree in his early 30s because he was fed up with life as a touring musician and cruise-ship performer. I'll call him Mr Smith.

 

About six months after Mr Smith started, I agreed to record a bass part for a friend who was doing a music GCSE. I'd been playing for less than a year at this point, but this kid didn't know anyone better. I went in after school, set myself up, and we recorded a bunch of takes for a (truly dreadful) song he was working on.

 

Mr Smith was around during this process, and came up to me after the session. He said he thought I sounded really good, and asked if I'd be willing to play on some other projects people were working on in the music department. I explained that I wasn't doing music, and he explained that this didn't matter.

 

I ended up as part of a sort of spotty-teenager wrecking crew that backed singers and played at school events all the way through sixth form. Mr Smith led rehearsals and occasionally filled in on guitar, and also dispensed more musical education in ad-hoc explanations of chord changes or walking basslines than I think I'd gotten in several years of classes. When I started a noisy rock band with some other members of the group, he helped set us up with rehearsal spaces on the school grounds.

[Owen]

* spotty-teenager wrecking crew

 

I love it!

[TimR]

8 hours ago, Mediocre Polymath said:

I think Mr Johnson was encouraged to find a new career about a year later. I believe his last term of teaching was the one where the lid of the piano finally broke, though the actual final straw was when he gave a kid a concussion by repeatedly slamming his head in a door.

 

That's the problem nowadays. Kids have no respect for authority. In the old days hardly a day would go by without some kid in the class visiting casualty after getting their scales wrong.

[Leonard Smalls]

Music lessons in my schools (70s-early 80s) were largely a waste of time...

There was nothing in primary, just a bit of singing at assembly. 

And in secondary we had music in years 1-3, 1 lesson a week. They consisted of Mr Bird playing some music (usually Young Person's Guide, or The Planets, or for a contemporary feel (!), Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Yawn). Then folks would say if they liked it or not, though because he wasn't particularly good at discipline this usually meant him shouting above a general cacophony of rude comments. And then we'd do some very rudimentary theory. This theory would be tested at annual exam time. However, they discovered I had private piano lessons after I got 100% in the first exam (my mum's a piano teacher) so from then on I got different exams from everybody else - though this was usually about grade 1 theory when I'd already done grade 5... So music wasn't really a thing for us at school.

Though in 6th form, Mr. Q had the bright idea of forming a one-off band to play before a viewing of that banned anti-nuke film (wot I can't remember the name of). I played keys, Cossack played guitar and Mouse played his violin bass - someone rattled a tambourine in the background while we did a couple of BarclaysBankHarvest and Dylan songs. I was so fascinated by Mouse's bass that I took it up when I got to Uni - and strangely it turned out that the Hofner bass belonged to Mouse's brother, our very own @lurksalot!