I was presented with Owen about this time last year, as a year 10 GCSE music student needing to prepare performances for his year 11 exams. Year 11 is the normal time for kids in the UK to take their first tranche of public exams; they are aged 16. Year 9/10 is where they start the build up to the exams.
Owen did not and still does not read music. Let us leave discussion about the lunacy of being able to take exams in a subject in which an individual is illiterate to another occasion. My job at the school is to do the best I can with the students presented to me.
Owen is socially inadequate. He
appears on the surface to not be very bright but that could simply be because of his personality. Or lack of it. He is perpetually in trouble in school because he appears to hate everyone and everything in it except for the music teacher and, by extension, me.
His trouble making is happily not sufficient to get him expelled from school. He does not spit at staff, for example, or try to knife fellow students, or try to burn down the building. Or maybe the school sees more promise in him than is visible on the surface. Let us hope so.
So there I was this time last year presented with a non-reading non-pianist who had never had a piano lesson in his life and the brief to prepare him for the performance section of his GCSE music. Top marks in this section would usually be gained by someone with
at least five years of instrumental tuition and progress behind them.
Great. Whoope-doo.
It turned out that Owen has a colossal natural attribute. Musicians describe it as, "A good ear". Hard to define, but these people hear music more distinctly and accurately than others and are able to reproduce them on an instrument. He was able to play me a few short thingies he had learned 'by ear' off the internet.
The long-term approach to Owen would be to take time, teach him to read music and gradually develop his ability to learn independently. This would have been no help to a child needing to prepare one solo and one ensemble piece at approx Grade 4-5 standard inside inside 15 months instead of the normal 5 or so years.
I started teaching Owen pieces by rote. I would play a tiny bit several times and he would copy. We have one 20 minute lesson a week. Imagine how long it takes to teach even a short piano piece by rote when that is all the time we had together unless I could cobble together the occasional extra lesson - not easy given the epic periods of time that Owen spends in 'isolation' for bad behaviour.
Another thingy emerged in this child's favour - persistence. Other teachers at the school tell me that when not in isolation (i.e. separated from the rest of the school for causing trouble) or in a lesson, Owen is to be seen practising what I have taught him. They hear the same stuff over and over again - then it is extended by a few seconds each week.
It is an exhausting way to both learn
and teach. We succeeded. We started with a tiny Bach minuet. We moved on to a harder piece of Haydn. We completed the solo leg of the journey with a jazzy style piece by Mike Cornick that is just about of a standard to attract maximum marks. The performance is recorded, marked by the music teacher and eventually sent off to the exam board for moderation.
That took us to half way through last term. Time to embark on an ensemble. This can be playing as a duo in, say, a Beethoven sonata for violin and piano, or a piece of Romantic Lieder - a song where singer and pianist are equal partners.
Something like that is so far away from Owen's ability to learn that the idea was ludicrous, so we embarked upon a piano duet. I taught him the Berceuse from Faure's Dolly Suite - "Listen with mother" to those of us Brits of, ahem, a certain age. Anybody under about 55 forget it. You will not get the reference.
With increasing confidence came increasing ease of learning so the duet progressed quickly. I gave Owen a Youtube link to the Labeque sisters playing it and he clearly listened to it obsessively - he could already 'hear' what I was about to teach him.
We got a recording of the duet 'in the can' today. Owen played beautifully. He shaped phrases. He took the musical lead sometimes. He followed mine at others. Brilliant stuff.
Fingers crossed that the success he has enjoyed in this aspect of his life gives him some pointers for progressing. Let us hope that he has gained levels of self-esteem that he lacked before - I think he has and so does the school music teacher.
I can have no influence over the next 90 years of Owen's life. I hope that the little influence I have
now will help him deal with those years productively and happily.
I
always love it but sometimes my day job is especially rewarding.
