Inside the Bookstore:
What Children Really Get 
This is information that you can adapt to your own needs, print out and leave with prospective students—or, if you’re feeling particularly evangelical, information you can print out and just leave lying around wherever. Doctor's surgery waiting rooms. Neighours' letter boxes. School newsletters. On noticeboards at creches. Wherever parents are a captive audience.
So why is it that music lessons change the lives of its students for the better? I mean, we know, don't we, I'm sure we could explain it if we needed to?
Let us count the ways…going beyond the usual reasons...and then make sure we spread the word:
Long before they’re in high school, music students will have faced—and coped with—pressure in countless recitals, workshops, examinations and lessons. In the process, they will learn to have it work for them; that pressure is a familiar and manageable byproduct of doing things that matter, rather than a disease you’ve somehow contracted.
Our music lessons won't immunize them against being nervous at an important job interview or presentation. But the skills they acquire for their various music performances are transferable — control your breathing, frame the situation positively, focus on the job at hand rather than the consequences. Make sure you're prepared. And don't go too fast.
So we are not merely music teachers. We conduct weekly workshops in Dealing with Pressure, and the skills we teach last for life.
In a world that all too often coddles kids with undeserved “that’s wonderful!” and “you’re so clever”, music teachers are necessarily and frequently blunt about the things that are not working so well: Your dynamics are flat. The presto section is not fast enough yet. Your pedalling stinks and I’m sorry, you cannot—I mean cannot—use this fingering in that passage.
It’s not self-esteem deflating. It’s ensuring that students learn at an early age to regularly accept advice and feedback from people more knowledgable than themselves, even when the news is not always good. And that they’ll only hear “that’s excellent” when something actually is.
Music students often won’t feel like doing the practice that’s required to be ready for a recital. But here’s the thing…
...with the Big Day drawing ever closer, most of them do the work anyway. The reasons may not be noble—fear of making a complete goose of themselves is often high on the list—but every time there’s a recital, somewhere, somehow, a lot of work goes on that the students involved probably didn’t feel like doing.
Projects, quizzes, presentations and mid term papers are just other performances to get ready for. They won't feel like working on those either. But the regular deadlines that music lessons creates will have helped them confront the reality that—with apologies to Nike—you just Do It Anyway. It's an ethic that certainly won't bring any protests from future admissions deans or employers.
Most adjudicators do an excellent job, but music is a subjective game, and the umpire's decision can sometimes be bewildering. And with every competition, audition and exam result being determined by verdicts, music students end up with plenty of experience at dealing with rulings—the appropriate, the borderline and the incomprehensible alike.
Why does this matter? It means that the first time the music student is passed over for a promotion at work, they can bring a perspective to the disappointment that might not come so naturally to those without a musical background. They can think of the rotten adjudicators they have had over the years, and realise that they may simply be in the presence of another.
Even more importantly, they’ll be more willing read any feedback that came with the decision carefully—because years of post concert lessons have trained them to do just that. Because, as we point out in lessons, much of the time the adjudicator actually was right. So don't pout, learn from it, do better next time.
Philosophical about the outcome, proactive about the accompanying criticisms. Values that keep the student steady, in control, and able to move on, even when the referee clearly does not have a clue.
Bad referees aside, if a musician gives enough performances, sooner or later they will have a disaster that they were responsible for themselves. A memory lapse that brings the whole recital crashing down around them. Forgetting to take a repeat that the rest of the ensemble observes, and then getting hopelessly lost. Starting too fast, and having the presto section skid, and then disintegrate into a thousand smouldering sixteenth notes.
Performances end up being metaphors for countless situations music students will face in their later life, and they will experience the same mixture of triumphs and setbacks that we all do. They just will have had a lot more practice at coping with them—by the time they have completed a decade of music lessons, they will have had to bounce back from plenty of disappointments.
And after every setback, there will be a new lesson to suit up for, at which they’ll be told: pick yourself up, learn from what just happened, keep going. They learn that the world moves on, that most disasters are actually nothing of the sort, and quickly erased by an outstanding performance next time.
It’s not a word. But bouncebackability should be on any music student’s resume.
Music students work in an arena where being careless with any of the parts—no matter how seemingly insignificant—can sabotage the whole.
Never took the time to work out a fingering for that C#? Watch the entire passage collapse at full tempo. Didn’t notice the marked subito pp? See the conductor glare at you as your trombone blast drowns the oboe solo.
With consequences being tangible, public, and potentially painful, music students learn not only to look out for details, but to polish them until they shine appropriately.
The result is that whatever they end up doing—whether musical or not—they’ve had powerful early confirmation that success is not just about tuning, but fine tuning.
Bombarded with computer games that allow players to win the US Golf Open an hour after reading the manual for the first time, or play electric guitar like Hendrix in their first outing on a virtual stage, music lessons is a powerful and sobering reminder that genuine excellence takes time. That no accomplishment worth celebrating comes quickly or easily.
Like so many of the other benefits listed here, it’s a throwback to an older world; of patience, of determination, of application. Of setbacks and self-doubt, and sticking with it anyway. Of not assuming that you’ll be congratulated irrespective of what you actually achieve. And of then eventually being able to do something that the rest of the population can only admire, as they say to themselves “I’d give anything to be able to play like that.”
Anything? Ok. Here's what you need to give: a decade of careful work. But the phone call that launches that adventure, that makes you one of the few that can, instead of the many that wished-they-could, that only takes minutes.
Check your yellow pages.
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