any other musicans against music exams for primary age kids?

[lingle]

I've decided that the whole Grade 1/Grade 2/Grade 3 etc,etc, thing is bad bad bad.

Anyone with me?

Reasons so far:

1. the kids end up learning 3 pieces a year, none of which they chose.
2. it's the ultimate in "teaching to the test"
3. the exam pieces are not chosen for the power to "reach" or communicate with the children's peers
4. being forced to follow an exam piece exactly as written discourages improvisation and creativity and excludes those who learn by ear not eye.
5. there seems to be a pandemic of children at our primary school who play 3 pieces correctly, yet are completely unable to play along with another child or "jam"
6. the first question kids seem to ask each other about their music lessons is "what grade are you on?" not - "what can we play together?"
7. In the case of the violin, I can personally testify that you can reach grade8 with whilst holding the bow completely incorrectly and making a harsh unattractive noise. So passing exams is not the same as having good technique.
8. music should be fun.

10. a child can't do serious work on pieces that attract or inspire them because, if they are "ready" for the next test, such focus on things they actually enjoyed would be delaying their competitive progress. 11. it must be bloody boring for music teachers.

I could go on....

DS's teacher at that age didn't do any grade exams unless the parents actually wanted them for some reason, which let them focus much more on enjoying the pieces and getting good technique just for the sake of it. In the end DS did grades 3,5,and 7 and is working towards 8 - it ceratinly doesn't case any difficulty if they don't do the exams for earlier grades!

Are you a music teacher Lingle???You sound like a lovely one!I have just started ds (7) with guitar tuition,his teacher does teach in schools and seems like a particularly pleasant chap.I tend to agree with what you have written,even though I am totally unmusical.I was quite pleased when ds expressed an interest to learn guitar (backstory,dp,sadly deceased, was a keen musician,wrote,played and lived music,totally self taught by ear and pretty good,but never had any formal music training but a natural flair) when I rang the teacher said that I didn't want to push him and the main criteria was that he enjoyed it and had fun.Ds really seems to be enjoying himself at the moment.He is 7 fgs and surely this enjoyment of music is what it is about at this age.I am sure his dad would be happy if he could see him now.I am hoping ds has inherited his fathers musical genes not his mums tone deaf cannot play a note ones!!

I'm not a musician - just a parent - but I completely agree. My dd came to me and said all the kids in the class were having a race to see who could get to the end of the music book first....I told her that was just wrong - I want her to love her instrument - I want her to play it for pleasure and that is what she does...imo competition and exams remove the joy in the task, in the journey if you like - it become about the destination - but what do you do when you get there? It's an empty victory if there is no real joy in the music.

You make a lot of valid points OP and I have a bit of a battle with our piano teacher who is a grades merchant par exellance.

However it's quite hard to jam unless you have quite a lot of technique up your sleeve.

Place for both I think.

I think exams at an early age cripple creativity. I say that as a music graduate and who can sit down and sight read anything, but for many years was absolutely lost without the little black dots.

One wonderfully talented music teacher friend who struggles financially says that if she was obsessed with getting students through their exams she would probably have twice the students. Parents love exams, and I think that at the lower level probably drive the exam machine.

Exams for music theory are fine, except when they stray into compositional techniques.

I totally agree OP. especially about the lack of interest in the quality and tone of the note. I went to a school concert last week where some kids were clearly good at playing the notes in time with reasonable tuning but the actual sound was poor.
My flute teacher would get me to play single long notes, to listen to the quality of the sound. She didn't do exams with me, said she'd rather pick the music and not waste time. I practised for hours just because I loved it, and played to a high level. I still play now, mainly by ear and for enjoyment, and love 'jamming' on family occasions.
Exams are institutionalising something that is supposed to be a joy in life. Did you see the other thread recently about a girl who had failed grade 1 violin? It was so sad.

Katisha- you don't need years of technique to jam. Music creation (composition, jamming, making your own music, what ever you want to call it) is just as much a skill as performance. I feel the 2 skills should be developed side by side. The standard model for instrumental education however is study the repertoire, get up to grade 5 or so, then start thinking about creating your own music. Why the lag?

Did I say years of technique? Nope.

However I think that the early years of instrumental learning are hard. It's a hard discipline. And it's pretty dull at times. I think it's expecting a lot that the child should "love" it all the time or else not bother.

I have mixed views on this one.

DD1 (13) has never taken any grades for piano because she didn't want to and I was more concerned about her enjoying her music for its own sake. She's now working to grade 3 or 4 level (not been assessed yet officially) and might take the exam next year.

DD2 (8), on the other hand, has taken her prep test and grade one singing and is currently working to grade 2. She loves every minute of it and there's a huge choice of songs for her which she works with her teacher to chose.

It is a personal creative endeavour, not trigonometry. It benefits no-one but the individual, and if it is not fun, and if the child doesn't absolutely love and enjoy every minute of it what is the point? Change teacher, approach, instrument or just let them drop out and find some other hobby that floats their boat.

I honestly can't see the point of persevering with music lessons if the student genuinely finds them dull. Chance are they are not going to have some kind of break though moment down the line.

oh well you seem determined to make out that I am advocating a joyless approach to music.
What I am actually saying is that to get to the point where you can make your instrument do whatever you want it to you have to be prepared to put the hours in and NOT ALL OF IT will be flooded with light and rapture.

There is a necessary element of discipline.

NB Does not equate to having to do every blinking ABRSM exam and knowing Fsharp minor double thirds in contrary motion.

I'm sorry to get ratty - I just get frustrated with people who believe music practice is always to be experienced in some sort of state of bliss, and I know that is not what the OP is saying.

That funny cause I get exasperated and ratty when I hear parents stressing about their kids not practising hard enough. If they enjoy music, they will want to do well, if they want to do well, they will do their scales. If they don't want do continue with music, but don't have the communication skills or personal strength to let their parents know this, it is expressed though indifference to practise.

There too many adults who can scratch out an accomplished partita if they have to, but don't really want to. They have been dragged from lesson to lesson, dutifully doing their practise because parents are either living vicariously or parents think musics lessons are a compulsory part of a well rounded middle class existence, and as soon as they reach adulthood, violin slips back into the case, and put in the back of the wardrobe.

Imagine if all that effort and energy had gone into something they had actually enjoyed.

If a child who is taking a music exam plays the 3 exam pieces for a whole year then something is definitely wrong. They should be playing them for the term in which the exam is to be taken and maybe the holiday before (ie get set the pieces at the end of the previous term) and that's it. Anything else is overkill if it takes someone a whoever year to get three pieces up to scratch then they really aren't actually at that level of playing.

Scales OTOH should be done all through the year (but often aren't. :) )

It's a complex thing and there's no one right answer for everyone. I agree with the OP in general, but then I also agree with Katisha's objections - particularly about music practice not always being "fun". It's been my experience that the children who do well over the long term at music are not necessarily the ones who show the most early promise, in things like naturally being able to sing in tune or play in time. Often they are just the ones who have better discipline, ability to delay gratification etc; the kinds of personality traits that are necessary for learning such a complex, labour-intensive skill.

More specifically:

1. the kids end up learning 3 pieces a year, none of which they chose.

That can certainly happen and probably does too often. But it's just a sign of bad teaching, or of too much focus (maybe from parental pressure) on the exam aspect. I always try to intersperse exam music with other things, and to put kids in for exams below their potential level so they don't become the be all and end all. The exam is then more just a "confirmation" of some things the child has achieved.

2. it's the ultimate in "teaching to the test"

Well yes, but then the test is to play the right notes at the right time, with a right sense of style - and these are pretty fundamental aspects of musicianship.

3. the exam pieces are not chosen for the power to "reach" or communicate with the children's peers

That's not completely true - that ability is certainly one factor influencing the choice of pieces.

4. being forced to follow an exam piece exactly as written discourages improvisation and creativity and excludes those who learn by ear not eye.

Not true: this is a false dichotomy.

When you're reading you're reading. When you're improvising you're improvising. Doing one, or doing an exam in one, doesn't in any way discourage your ability to do the other. It's true that most exams don't CATER to children who are better at improvising and ear playing, although there are for example the ABRSM jazz exams and such things are becoming more widespread all the time. But the exams are just tests in certain things; they don't stop anyone from doing other things as well.

5. there seems to be a pandemic of children at our primary school who play 3 pieces correctly, yet are completely unable to play along with another child or "jam"

Agree totally that that's bad. However it's probably more to do with the fact that most teachers are classical musicians, than the fact that they do exams. You'd probably find most of those kids' teachers have the same limitations.

6. the first question kids seem to ask each other about their music lessons is "what grade are you on?" not - "what can we play together?"

Yeah, that's also bad. IGrades are really not as significant as most people think.

7. In the case of the violin, I can personally testify that you can reach grade8 with whilst holding the bow completely incorrectly and making a harsh unattractive noise. So passing exams is not the same as having good technique.

Yep. And in most instruments you can pass grade 8 while having a woeful sense of rhythm that would get you thrown out of any jazz or rock band.

9. music should be fun.

Hmmm... you could say the same about reading or science, but we have no qualms making kids sit tests in English or Physics. Music also requires skills that take hard work to develop, and structuring the progression of developing such skills is just part of our education system. It's the job of the teacher to balance that structure with the "fun" aspect so they feed into each other.

10. a child can't do serious work on pieces that attract or inspire them because, if they are "ready" for the next test, such focus on things they actually enjoyed would be delaying their competitive progress.

Again, that's a teaching & overall management issue, not an exam issue per se. Though I agree it's a common problem.

11. it must be bloody boring for music teachers.

Can be. OTOH it can be a useful reality check, making teachers ensure that children actually acquire skills that can be demonstrably measured against criteria beyond themselves. One just has to remember that those skills are only a subset of what it means to be a musician; one has to make sure the child is entering the right race at the right time, for them, and have the strength to insist that for some the race is not appropriate.

Wow!

I want to go and do a Beethoven jam with each and every one of you now! Even though there was some minor disagreement between posters, I really feel like everyone is coming from a similar place, and I feel really encouraged.

I'm not a teacher. However, last year I learned that 3 of our year 5 girls were attempting to teach themselves the violin in lunch hours (having found some neglected violins in a cupboard) because their parents couldn't afford lessons. So a friend and I started mentoring them, concentrating on making an nice noise.

They've done great - they memorised a 66 bar (not that they know what a bar is) version of the bassline to Vivaldi's "spring" and performed it with me at the school concert. they made a smooth pleasant noise on their open strings, with bow technique levels I only learnt as an adult, and perfectly in time.

But I guess if I was a "proper" music teacher and they had middle class parents, it would have been hard to resist getting them to do lots of left-hand fingering (at the expense of rhythm, tone and bow technique and with poor intonation). It would also have been hard to square the idea of playing Vivaldi with making no attempt whatsoever at teaching notation (they don't want to learn it, and we figured that, given their backgrounds, they could learn notation from the internet when they were ready, but they will never have another chance to be shown how to hold a bow right).

Now they are playing scales - but they've never heard the word "scale" - they think they are doing a church bell jam, where each calls and answers the other, one on one string, answered by another on another string, but hopefully soon to get to that string crossing moment.....

Music teachers, throw off your chains and revolt!

seriously, though, I'd like to know how we got to this awful point in classical music learning. Are the exam boards or the parents to blame?

or, given confidence's point that many of the "stiff"-performing children's teachers have the same limitations, do we blame the teachers? or the way they themselves have been trained?

What you are doing sounds quite a lot like the suzuki method lingle.

hi katisha, yes, I hadn't realised it but someone told me that recently.

cool.

I don't really disagree with exams in themselves, like with other exams - SATs etc - it depends on the teachers. I taught piano for 5 years as a PT job at a music school, and we didn't just move from one grade syllabus to the next y'know :)

We did lots of other pieces and activities, it was definitely not just about getting through each grade. We would start the next syllabus when the child was ready and willing, but it wasn't to the exclusion of other fun pieces until maybe the last two weeks (ie 2 one hour sessions). Scales, sight-reading etc were done all year round and not just to cram for the exam.

It was very successful (100% passes for the entire history of the school) and a really happy place with enthusiastic students. I miss it :(

I do think a lot of it comes from parents though, yes. A lot of pressure for children to race through the grades. I think it is nice to have the certificates but why the rush? We had one child who was 'only' at grade 4, but was absolutely determined to learn Fur Elise (the whole original, not just the first few bars that everyone knows) so we helped him. Another wanted to memorise some Satie by ear because his mum liked it, and another loved jazz improvisation to the point of obsession.

While I'm on this thread I have a question (sorry for hijack) - I'm hoping to get my piano moved here soon and am thinking about teaching again eventually - just beginners to start with as I'm out of practice and confidence. Do you think anyone would actually be interested in a very cheap piano tutor who would just introduce it and make it fun, but not do exams? Or is society just TOO obsessed with competition now and I'd be on a hiding to nothing?

It depends on the teacher. DS2 is learning the clarinet at school in a group and he's gone straight from doing Grade 1 to getting the Grade 2 pieces - he's already learned 2 of them but he hasn't learned anything else. So he's not enjoying the clarinet because it's dull and limited. I don't know whether that's because the limited time means the teacher does what he think the parents expect.

On the other hand, on the piano, he did Grade 2 at Christmas and since then he's played about 10 new pieces - some really easy which he can master in a week, some much harder so they've taken him 3 or 4 weeks. The teacher's found some jazz style pieces which he enjoys. At the same time he's gradually learning all the scales and arpeggios for Grade 3. Everytime he passes the piano he plays his current favourite piece and enjoys picking out tunes/experimenting with rhythm.

So after rambling I kind of agree with you, if they're used wrongly (as in the clarinet example) but think they can act as motivational 'marking points' in a broader school of music teaching (as in the piano).

Hi Freudian,

DSs' piano teacher is doing what interests you. The first thing she said to me was "I don't believe in exams" (in fact, she does believe in them, but only about grade 5 onwards).

The secrets of her success are: she comes to your house and tries to get to know the musical interests of the whole family and do pieces that will get the family excited (jazzy stuff in our case even though it's outside her comfort zone musically); she is quite insistent on having termly concerts to try to create a musical culture; she actively seeks out children who are all at the same school - so that she can learn what big events are coming up and how the kids can fit their music into the school events; she is unwavering in her attempts to get the parent to practice with the child, to the extent of expecting the parent to play duets with the child at her concerts if at all possible; and last but not least, she genuinely thinks that scales are fun!

She is a totally unqualified eccentric lady with good pianistic touch but very rusty - but her enthusiasm wins parents over.

Ds 1 is possibly the best piano player in school now and I'm regularly asked who teaches him - the "not believing in exams" thing really impresses the parents, rather than putting them off.

So I think that you could find a real niche for yourself. hope you go for it!