Hello and welcome to another episode of Heard It Through The Grooveline. My name is Will Bennett and I'm the founder of Grooveline Music Education. I'm here to help you know how to best support the musical education of your child, even if you are not musical yourself. At Grooveline, when the lesson ends, the learning doesn't stop.
And so as part of our wraparound approach to music education, This episode, I'll be in conversation with Will Savage, discussing his viewpoints on music education from the perspective of a home educator.
Today I'm joined by Will Savage and Will, I'm really happy to have you on the podcast today because I think that you've got a unique perspective on the topic of supporting children with their music education. So I'm really excited to speak to you today. Could you please just let us all know, I guess, your journey through music and education and how you are involved in music education today?
Yeah, sure. Well, thanks for having me and I hope you're going to call this episode well squared by the way, because obviously it's both of them, but yeah, no, I was actually home educated myself a number of years ago, so I've got that, that perspective. My parents, I mean, they obviously loved us as kids and they loved the subjects that they taught.
My, my dad was more into the sciences and Maths and that kind of thing. My mum more into art and language and humanities, but actually neither Were musical and they would say that themselves But I think they were very Smart in that they outsourced that part of our education. I mean it took the form of piano lessons to be honest.
So I had a few teachers along the way. I had some fantastic teachers actually. Emily Wakefield, she was a really, our first teacher, me and my brother. A bundle of fun. She really just made learning. Like you didn't feel like you were learning, you were just having a great time. And then for many years, cause we lived in a university city.
So I studied with the doctor of music, Dave Sanderson. He's fantastic teacher who helped me all the way up to grade eight. Then when I was getting my A level music, I was studying with Nick Gardner. He helped me to get a bit more finesse in my playing and helped me prepare for a teaching diploma. So all the while, kind of alongside my, my private teaching practice was, was growing.
And I thought, you know, this is something that I want to do. And if I'm going to do it, I'll do it properly. So, so I thought let's study the art of teaching in itself. Not just, I think, you know, you can be a good musician, but it doesn't mean you can teach it. I'm sure you know that. So, yeah, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole of, of, you know, pedagogy and how to teach music and whatnot.
But I think that's where being home educated really helped because there's a lot of self study involved with that. So that was good. Yeah, moving fast forward a little bit. I taught music. So piano teaching is what I've done a lot of, of course, over the last 15, 16 years. But I also taught music for quite a number of years to a class of.
children in a local independent school an excellent school actually.
I mean, I've always been aware of the Kodai principles of teaching music and tried to use them in class teaching, you know, soul fire singing and rhythm soul fire and stuff. But more recently, I decided to kind of go back to that and look at it a little bit more carefully from the perspective of a pair as a parent.
Now that I've got two little kids and I'm interested in how they're going to develop musically. But also now I've started online music classes, not piano, but just general music for. particularly for home educated children. I thought this is, this is a really good method of not just teaching music, but, but helping a child to become a musician.
I think that's the key differentiator for me when I started to look at could I more. So yeah, so since COVID, I've been online. For my piano lessons I mean, people listening can't see it, but I've got this kind of slightly geeky setup. wHere you can see my keys light up and I can record stuff and I wanted to make sure that it wasn't the kind of the poor cousin of in person lessons, but it was a really good viable alternative.
So I've got, you know, students all around the world now, which is, which is quite exciting. Yeah, I mean what I'll do is actually the bit where you said no one can say I'll Video recording this as well. So I'll put that little bit Instagram and you could share it on yours as well at least if it was and that's actually I'm glad you showed it because You did touch on something interesting there, which is that you don't want online music to be the poorer cousin of in person music.
And I think that's really important because it definitely can be if you don't think about it. If you just, you know, when it was like for the first ever time in COVID and we just had to suddenly put everything on Zoom, we had no time to think about it. It probably was the poorer cousin of in person teaching for a time.
But I think now there's so much more technology, even than there was, you know, just a few years ago during COVID. And as long as you think carefully and implement that, I think you can come up with a great a great way to teach online, which I do think you've done, which it looks, it looks really cool.
Could you let us know kind of. If people learn with you, what do you actually do? How do you actually teach the music and I guess what type of technology do you use as well? Yeah, so, so that's putting aside the piano lessons and thinking about those music classes. So I run them every Tuesday that's currently what I do Tuesday afternoon.
And I run them as a zoom webinar.
So I try to split a 45 minute lesson into a number of different. I think that's, you know, much more digestible for the, for the child. So I do a little bit on music history and appreciation. They get to know, you know, the music of different composers, periods, styles. We had a great lesson just a few weeks ago about Tchaikovsky and we found.
One of his letters that he had written to the publisher of a Russian monthly magazine who'd commissioned from him a set of compositions. And it was a really insightful letter. 'cause you could see it was translated from Russian. You could see, how Tchaikovsky had a lot of doubt about his composition, A lot of insecurities.
And I think it helped the children to see that that's kind of a normal part of the creative process, you know, so we try to. Bring, I know it's a cliche, but bring music history to life a little bit. Think about the composers. But I think the thing that I'm really, that I feel is, is, is lacking in a lot of online resources is the musicianship side of the thing.
You know, you can learn about music, but I think it's really important to actually feel that you can converse musically as it were. So things like inner ear skills. And we mentioned about Kodai. So a Kodai based approach, you know, learning about the rhythms with solfa, rhythm solfa, Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, you know, singing those things as well.
I've heard so many times that perhaps adults will say, oh, I can't read music. And I kind of think that's sad. You know, it's, it's, thankfully it's a rarity now to hear someone say they, they can't read full stop because they always seem to feel that's quite limiting, isn't it? And I kind of feel like Perhaps the same as with music, that everybody should be given the opportunity to learn how to read it.
And I don't think it's that hard. I don't think it has to be hard. So all of that kind of musicianship stuff. Going eventually to literacy. We've just started a few weeks ago looking at like the hands, Dave, you know, to see the relationship between different pitches and the kids are loving that. So we do singing.
Yeah, we learn songs and that kind of links in with the musicianship stuff as well. We do quizzes. We've got some music theory. So we might, if there's like a particular composer or a piece that we're looking at that week, we might dig in and, pull out all that, you know, anacrusis or sonata form or tremolo or whatever and,, proceed from the known to the unknown.
Recently have started saying to people, which is perhaps something that you don't necessarily think of at first, is that written music is just a visual representation of what you're hearing.
It's not some weird code that only makes sense if you know the secret language. It literally, as the note moves up on the page, it moves up in pitch. And as the notes are closer together on the page and more frequent, they, you hear them. more frequently and faster. Like it, it does make sense. It's not a completely foreign language that you, that you have no basis from which to kind of relate to it.
It, it does actually have logical sense. And I think, I think that's something that some people don't realize, or even musicians have gone, Oh, I've never thought of it like that before. I was speaking to someone a couple of weeks ago and he's been a musician for 35 years. And he said, that's always been obvious to me, but I've said it to musicians, really top musicians.
They've gone, Oh yeah. Never thought of that. So I guess that's quite interesting. And one thing that I, I guess I'm wondering is when we teach inside of school, obviously the parents aren't there, when you're teaching and it's home educated pupils, I guess quite often the parents are there. So do you find that the parents are learning along with the children as well?
And if so, do you find that to be helpful in In how they can support their child, you know, if they're struggling throughout the week with any music homework or anything like that. Yeah, exactly that exactly that I mean, I'm banging on about kodai quite a lot, in this podcast But kodai I think he was quite a funny chap at times It seems because he said he was asked when's the best time for a child to start music education You may have heard this quote.
And he said oh nine months before its birth. Yeah, i've heard that Yeah, and then he said, actually, nine months before the birth of the mother. And I thought that second, that little add on bit that might perhaps get missed is actually really important. As you said, it's about the parents learning along with their child.
You know, or even independently of their child. And then they, they kind of have their own journey that they can share. I guess that quote, especially the, the bit that you're, you know, the added on bit that is sometimes missed that shows the value of parental support.
I guess what he's getting at is. You know, nine months before the parent is born shows that if a parent can be musical, that really helps the child as well. So obviously that's an ideal situation, but what about if someone is not musical? Cause that's what this podcast is all about. It's about supporting parents who are not musical or not necessarily musical, at least to know how to support their child.
So now that we kind of understood how valuable. parental support is do you have any kind of top tips or actionable steps that listeners could take to support their child in their music education? So yeah, I mean my parents, as I mentioned earlier, musical and I've managed to, you know, come and have a career in music.
So I think it's just take heart that it's possible is what I would say about that. For me, I think my parents were very helpful in creating some structure to my, well, in my case, it was piano practice, making sure that I did it daily. I, you know, looked at the book from my teacher and followed the notes, et cetera.
I Think they encouraged me to be patient and to kind of keep going with something. Because, you know, it's hard, isn't it, at a time when you're learning an instrument, or you're learning to sing, you're learning anything about music. There's perhaps this vogue idea that, oh, you know, things shouldn't be easy, everything's easy.
But the reality is It's hard work at times and I think parents are critical at that point. Over the years when I've been teaching piano I've seen a few parents who have perhaps taken the lead of their child a bit too much when they lost heart, the parents lost heart, that was that. And perhaps the child will later look back and wish that they'd been pushed a little bit more.
So that kind of structure, encouragement, patience, that's good. I think communication with the teacher. I know we were talking that it's a challenge at times, as a Perry, when I was teaching in a school, piano. I'd find that even, even though that was not ideal, I barely saw the parents, some parents I didn't even recognize, but those who wanted to communicate with me managed to do so.
Very often it would be a note in the book but that was sufficient, it did the job. What else beyond that? I think trying to create a musical environment. It can take many forms, listening to music at home, in the car just asking questions.
You don't have to know the answer to the question, but like, oh, what did you hear there? Could you notice any particular instruments? Did you notice, was it a happy sound? Was it a, you know, all those types of questions. questions. I mean, it's not rocket science, but it's just getting them to listen to music rather than just hear it.
Yeah, for sure. I like that. So just to summarize, you basically were saying that, you know, the final point there was to kind of educate yourself as well, along with the child so that. When you are communicating with your child and they're maybe saying this is hard. I don't understand this Even if you can't do it on the piano yourself You can at least talk to them in a language that makes sense Even if you can't read music you understand that it's a visual representation and you can say well doesn't this note go up?
But you're playing the note that goes down. Are you sure you're playing the right note there? You know, that's something that can be done without actually being musical yourself And the previous point to that was all about structure, and really, I like that one a lot because it doesn't require anyone to be musical. It's about creating an environment, which was also your other point, so I kind of mixed those two together, structure and an environment, whereby music is celebrated and music is valued, and you've put time aside and said, we're doing music for this You know, for example, on a Tuesday afternoon with, with weird online, we're going to do music for 45 minutes.
And that kind of adds a lot of value to music and shows how important it is. And I think none of those steps require you to be a virtuosic musician yourself. So if anyone is listening and has ever thought, I don't know how to help because I'm not musical. You know, this just proves it's all about the non musical support that you provide.
And as I keep banging on about in other episodes, the results are also. Musical and non musical, you know, it's not just about getting good at the piano. Your child is learning about hard work, they're learning about resilience, discipline, structure, all of these things that are valuable to all assets of life, and that is how you can support them.
I think, you know, if you're musical as well, that's a bonus, but I don't think you need to musical, and Will, you're proof of that, because you said your parents are not musical, and yet you've become, not just a musician, but But an educator and not even just an educator, but someone who's doing something a little bit different and doing something quite cool and unique and kind of pushing, you know, the industry forward, if you like, and making sure, keeping everyone on their toes, you know, making sure everyone's getting great music education, which unfortunately, as we know, is not always the case in every single school.
Well, yeah, thanks. But yeah, no, it's great. It's a fun journey, and I think the response, it confirms to me that there's definitely an appetite for it, that people are wanting it, but it's just the tools aren't quite available like they should be, so I think we're getting there.
That's awesome. Thank you. And there's one more thing I want us to talk about today. Just, just before I let you go, I am interested how as a home educator, you can kind of really engage with children from an assessment point of view. So obviously our teachers can see physically what, the children.
are getting up to and they can teach them and in lesson they can assess them because they can actually watch them perform. So as a home educator, how do you kind of tackle that side of things? And I guess, once you've answered that, as a parent, how could a parent assess their child and help kind of, you know, get a feeling as to how well they're doing and kind of help them so that it's not just relying on a weekly lesson.
But throughout the week they're getting these little micro assessments and little bits of encouragement and kind of checkpoints as to see how they're getting on each week. Yeah, so that is, and quite frankly that's, I've been aware for a while that that's one of the big challenges of online lessons. When I'm trying to teach at scale, which is Which is what I'm doing because I, you know, I want this to be accessible to as many people as possible.
Therefore, it can't be expensive. But for it to work for me, to allow me to put the time in that I need to put into it, I have to have a, quite a good number come along. So, you do get this. Conundrum. Well, then how do you give that personalized support assessment? So I'm just going to be making some improvements to the way that I do the lessons and there'll be a, a little extra for those who want it.
And I hope that lots will want it, the option to have. periodic assessment of their child. And the way I'm thinking of doing this, one of two ways, if they want, because as I mentioned, this music tech element is very popular, and lots of love to kind of remix a track and And then, you know, get some feedback.
I just don't have the time to give feedback to everybody. So they could choose for me to give some feedback on that. Say, well, why don't you try this loop? This isn't perhaps lined up onto the grid, so it's a little bit out of time, blah, blah, blah. oR, if they prefer, and I actually hope that most will choose this, to be honest the musicianship assessment.
Because a big part of what I'll be doing, I'm already doing actually, but in a more kind of structured way, going through the Nikos Go for Bronze. It's a fantastic musicianship course, basically. So I'll be sending out the pupil book to the family when they sign up. They'll get that for their first month and then they can go through all the exercises.
I'll be sending them the videos to help them through. And then I think about probably every six weeks or something, every half term. I'll invite them to send me a video, a short video, of their child going through, you know, a few exercises. They can ask questions if they're struggling with something, but they'll probably just perform, let's say, a little exercise or two.
And then I'll send back a video with some suggestions and comments. And and that's the assessment that they have. So You know, I know that online assessment works because I do it every day of the week with my piano teaching. It's just trying to do it, trying to take a larger number of people and kind of individualize the process.
But I think that I'm quite positive about that working from January onwards. That's awesome. It sounds like you've got an ever improving service. And I really am a fan of what you do. It's different. And, and you're really pushing, pushing the boat out, I guess, using all the technology available to you.
And, you know, even just your screen. Now, , when you touch a key, suddenly all the camera screens change, or I can see the keyboard, it comes up with the notation. It's awesome. You know, you obviously. We've put a lot of time into that. There you go. We've recorded it now for anyone at home who wants to check that out on our social medias.
So, Will, how can people either find out more or, interact with you and , learn from you? How can people do that if they're listening and they're interested? So, nice and simple, musicwithwill. com, that's where you'll find more information about the classes and how to sign up and so on.
I'm fairly active on Facebook as well facebook. com slash willsavagemusic and on Instagram. And, you know, come along and see, see how you, how you like it. And I, I'm actually doing some, I didn't mention this until now, but. I want people to have the chance to come along, and try it out for free.
So periodically I'll just do a free lesson for people to join.
So yeah, go on over to the music dot world music with will. com and then you can find out more there. That's awesome. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for your time today It's really awesome to speak to you and to speak to someone with a slightly different perspective on music education then Then myself, for example.
So thank you so much and we'll look forward to everybody hearing all about you when this comes out in January. Well, thanks very much for inviting me on and yeah. And all the best with all your work in the schools. It sounds like you're on to a really good thing as well.
So all right. Thanks for inviting me. Thank you. Well, cheers.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Heard It Through The Groove Line, the podcast that helps parents like you best support your children's musical education, even if you are not musical yourself. To find out more you can follow us on social media and don't forget to hit like and subscribe.