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American Music Teacher, April-May, 2002 by George F. Litterst

Have Your Students Performed for a Global Audience?

Like most music teachers, I hope that every week is a productive week for my students. However--human nature being what it is--I have found the two or three weeks just prior to a student recital or other performing opportunity are the weeks in which the most material is learned and polished. In fact, I would say that the musical growth of most of my students would be severely stunted if I did not schedule regular performance opportunities for them.

I consider the task of finding audiences for my students to be one of my crucial obligations as a teacher. Regrettably, we no longer live in a society where it is common for families to spend their evenings informally making music with friends. There are too many other activities that compete for our time. If our students are going to perform at all, it is usually because we have scheduled specific performance events for them.

A standard performing opportunity is the student recital. The private teacher's student recital usually takes place in the teacher's home or perhaps at a community music school or some other borrowed space. The audience generally consists of family members and friends.

Other performing opportunities may present themselves at the student's school or church. These are good situations for our students because the audience often is larger and may include people beyond the student's circle of immediate friends and family members. The industrious teacher may even create opportunities at restaurants, shopping malls or other community venues where the audience may be comprised of complete strangers.

Most of these performance opportunities do not materialize spontaneously. They usually are the result of organizational and entrepreneurial work on the part of the teacher. The results, however, can be extremely rewarding--assuming proper preparation of the students, of course.

As our society continues to evolve, the logical venues for student performances change, too. Now that we are living in an age of nearly instantaneous, global communications, we must ask the question, "Should our students perform for a global audience?"

Students and the Internet

Before jumping into this question with an answer, let's look at how teenagers' social lives have changed in recent years. A few readers of this column may remember the days when young people communicated with letters. Most of us, however, probably grew up in the era when teenagers in the household dominated the family telephone in the evening.

I currently have a teenager at home. He never writes letters. Although he has his own phone in his room, it hardly ever rings for him. His computer is usually on, however, and he has extended evening dialogues with multiple friends using the chatting and instant message features of the Internet.

For young people, the Internet has become a major, if not the preferred, medium for communication. This fact, alone, suggests we should explore this medium for musical communication.

Experimenting with the Internet

I conducted my own test of this theory last year when I designed a Web project in conjunction with the Museum of Science in Boston. The project was related to a temporary exhibit on music and technology called Playing with Music.

A major challenge of designing the exhibit as a whole was making it interactive. A good, interactive exhibit usually takes three to four years to design and implement. In this case, the museum needed to create the best possible exhibit in a couple of months. And, it was only a temporary exhibit intended to last three months.

My concept for the Web project was to involve young people in music making, introduce them to new technology, take advantage of the familiarity of the Internet and make the students part of the exhibit.

The exhibit had a number of interesting instruments using new technologies. As you might imagine, some of them took special skills to play and were kept behind glass except when demonstrated by a specialist. One instrument, though, was based on the familiar piano, and I decided to take advantage of it.

The piano in question was Yamaha's Disklavier Pro 2000. Just a handful of these instruments were made both to celebrate the millennium year and suggest future possibilities based on today's state-of-the-art technologies. The instrument is a true acoustic piano that has a fiber optic record and playback system, a silent system, a tone generator with over 1,000 digital voices, a built-in Pentium computer and touchscreen display. In other words, if you were to imagine many of the best features of acoustic pianos, digital pianos, MIDI keyboards and personal computers all rolled into one instrument, you would have a basic understanding of the Pro 2000.

With the Pro 2000 as the exhibit centerpiece, we set up the Web project to work like this: On three successive Saturdays, piano students visiting the museum were given an opportunity to record a piece on a normal Disklavier piano located in the lobby. In other words, they played on an acoustic piano with hammers and strings. Other than inserting a floppy disk into the Disklavier's control unit and pushing a couple buttons to engage and finish recording, the students were not concerned with technology. They simply played their pieces.