The balance between traditional music theory education and personal musical development

This week in Technology in music education, we were joined by Peter Lee who walked us through the incredible tools of Aurelia and Musition. Much like harmony and aural perception classes at the con, they are complimentary, collectively representing musical listening skills and writing skills.

There are many platforms and teachers that claim to offer engaging lessons on all aspects of music theory, however these two platforms are perfect for the classroom environment specifically, offering basically all the theory content you could dream in a music classroom. Ideally, I would pair the exercises found on Aurelia and Musition with practical musical examples, either activities with instruments or listening activities with music chosen that demonstrates a certain topic.

Music, just like any of the creative subjects, is interesting as it can be considered both an academic/creative/performing subject for education as well as a personal interest and craft. The two sides to this should be brought together as much as possible, if music teachers wish to engage their students. One example of the other end of the spectrum, being the personal interest aspect of music, is the well known and praised guitar teacher Justin Sandercoe. As a guitarist myself, his content on his website https://www.justinguitar.com/ is definitely of high quality and appeals to the personal interests of guitar players in many genres of music. A resource such as his online library of content is a perfect compliment to the strictly educational forms of music learning.

On that note, the other half of today’s lesson was a pitch for our major works. My project in a nutshell will be a video/Ibook resource that will give young musicians a starting point for the essential skills of music theory, learning to play music, songwriting, performing and recording music. While I will more than likely be using examples on guitar, I will make the resource open to any instrumentalist who is of the contemporary music persuasion. The intent here is not to attempt to persuade the viewer to become a musician who thinks, plays and writes the same way that i would, rather to compile my experiences into a single one stop shop resource that I wish i had when i was a young teenager learning to become an independent and creative musician.