“Why did I want to become a music teacher and what is important in my relationship with students?”
I’ll answer this question from the perspective of someone who has been teaching for 12 years now after a career change. I divide my time between teaching performance and studying.
First, two closely related factors have driven me to start making music and to explore it. The first motivation could be considered somewhat selfish, but it is counterbalanced by my second driver. I only started playing and practicing late in my teens. I always viewed music only from the listener’s perspective, and although I felt very passionate about it, I thought its practice aspects were too similar to sports, for which I didn’t have a particular passion. I was completely wrong, of course; music and sports couldn’t be more different.
I also always had a knack for languages, so the first key moment came when my bass teacher, during our very first lessons at age sixteen, encouraged me to listen to as many different genres as possible without being judgmental and without having a particular goal. So, the first motivation was to make connections, to learn music, and to play music that was presented to me as a language—more mysterious than spoken languages and remaining elusive at its core even today.
This passion for music as a language and cultural heritage is linked to my motivation to share that knowledge, and it ties in with my teaching activities. Of course, one of the main objectives is to transmit craftsmanship, but this doesn’t happen in a vacuum separate from cultural practices (listening to and performing music, the music industry, musicians’ roles, etc.). I also think that because I started late in my teens—which can be an impediment to reaching embodiment and mastery—I can relate more to students struggling with certain aspects of music-making or adults picking up an instrument later in life. These exchanges remain a source of inspiration and pleasure for me and, I hope, for my students.
“Why the choice of this subject for pedagogical research?”
Over the last 10 years, I have created together with Jérôme Goldschmidt, Jonathan Levi, and Alex Greenwood several educational music apps. While they are all centered around rhythm and use different web and game audio technologies, the random element was always more of a side note. This research is an opportunity for me to explore, on one hand, a teaching approach incorporating surprise elements and, on the other hand, to apply my experience with multimedia projects to create a proof of concept, as the following pages intend to demonstrate.