The recent outreach work we’ve been doing has led me to bring up some issues I have with the way musical education is approached in this country. I believe that music needs to be inspiration-led. Without inspiration, there is no music. My own drive to make music was born directly out of my obsession with my heroes, starting out with watching Michael Jackson on TV, when I was 6, and going on from there. All I wanted to do was learn how to be like that.
I don’t believe that turning up at a school and handing a kid an oboe or a violin and a sheet of music and saying ‘learn this’ is ever going to be appealing, let alone inspiring. Music teachers do a great job but are constantly up against the constraints of time, class sizes, a narrow curriculum, and the fact that a lot of teachers I’ve met feel that they are just ‘babysitting’ the class and stopping them from throwing chairs at each other for 30 minutes, rather than imparting actual knowledge.
Even singing, which I see the government announcing millions of funding for, is hard to present in a way that is cool to young people.
Me teaching
But beatboxing is different. You can turn up anywhere: at school, at a youth club, or on the street, with a sound system and a beatboxer, and you can amaze people. They are immediately into it. They are intrigued and want to know more. And the thing is: anyone can do it, anywhere. It doesn’t matter what language you speak, what age, sex or colour you are, or what music you like. Everybody has a voice, and because the basics of beatboxing consist of simple phonetic sounds which we all use in day to day speech, it doesn’t take long to get started.
To be continued… (see rest of post here)
Tags: education
May 27th, 2008 at 9:47 am
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