Playing Every Instrument

 

As a music education major, I was excited when I first had a chance to learn how to play a new instrument family. We are always reminded that we need to learn almost every instrument in order to provide future students with the correct knowledge needed to succeed in their own music education. However, learning every instrument is not a small task, especially in four years. Each instrument class has a goal to have every student learn an instrument up to an advanced middle school level, but at the same time there are not enough instruments to go around, and simply not enough time. So, how do we do it?

As future music educators, we are encouraged to stay on track with our individual studies, and weave tall tasks into our everyday lives. When it comes to learning a new instrument, we have to devote at least an hour a day in order to have constant improvement. Along with learning a new instrument, music majors still have to maintain their main instrument in order to meet certain requirements for ensembles and general grades for their performances. Instructors understand this aspect, and try to make it as easy as possible for students to learn new instruments. Because there are a lot of students and few instruments, there are constant rotations so that instruments can be passed around efficiently.

Of course, there simply is not enough time that a music major has to maintain a constant schedule in order to learn a new instrument efficiently. We are encouraged to seek opportunities outside of school time so that we can play on our new instruments more often, but this often gets in the way of personal life and musician life. When having a full schedule of classes as well as responsibilities that come with those classes, we have to find pockets between those times in order to work on the instruments. 

It is well known in the music education world that you will hardly have time for your primary instrument when learning every other instrument, but what is not known is that music education majors are still held to a performance standard. We have almost the same amount of performance requirements, but less amount of time to work on our primary instruments. So far, this task has been the most challenging of my music education career. Although I have passed each instrument class with an A, I still feel like I have a long way to go to be proficient enough to teach a student efficiently.