Since we moved last summer, I have been dying to start a garden. I actually started working on it before the end of last semester just to keep my sanity. I needed to put some structure back in my chaotic world. I needed a place to bring back beauty, and I needed a place to retreat from all of the emotions that the outside world was dumping on me.

As I have continued to work in my garden, I have noticed three concepts that I want to incorporate into my coaching this year – structure, nurture and propagation. These themes keep coming up everywhere I look and they coincide nicely with this new idea of using fundamentals, musicianship and artistry to develop strong musicians. I see structure as being paired with fundamentals. I see musicianship paired with nurturing, and I see artistry paired with propagation. The more I have contemplated these ideas, I feel like I will spend freshman year on fundamentals, sophomore and junior years on musicianship, and senior year on artistry.

Since freshman year begins with fundamentals, I am in essence building a garden structure for them. These kids are dying for structure and boundaries, so why not set them up in their freshman year so that they will be successful all the way through? If I lay out the boundaries and the “beds” so to speak, then I can later plant seeds, nurture them and then propagate them out into the world. But without the initial structure, everything is just chaotic and nonsensical.

I was going through the list of fundamentals that I want to make sure my students are all equipped with before they leave me. One of the first things that struck me was the area of stress and tension. These are the enemies of every musician. We can manifest tension in any place in our body and it totally affects the way we perform and make music. We think of all of the ways that stress affects us, but what if the sources of stress are not necessarily the ones we initially think of as musicians? Are there some background things that cause undue stress that we don’t even think of? Oh I know for sure that my students are suffering from these maladies in spades!

Not knowing how to function in this new world adds a lot of stress to my students’ lives, and ends up in tension. So I think my first area of concentration with them this Fall will be in the area of basic life skills. The pandemic is not to blame for ALL of these things. A lot of these things can be attributed to an upended educational system that no longer teaches students how to think, and parents who are so busy working to try and keep food on the table that they don’t have time to teach these things to their children. So then comes college, and applied lessons, and coaching sessions, and these kids are lost. And guess who gets the “joy” of dealing with these deficiencies…….we do!

So what if my first section of “structural fencing” deals with basic life skills? I cannot even begin to tell you how many of my students don’t know how to plan, don’t know how to keep a calendar, don’t know how to practice, don’t know how to take care of themselves physically, and the list goes on and on and on!

I’ve been thinking about how to teach these skills alongside our rehearsal time of 30 minutes each week….tall order I know. I need to go play in the garden for awhile to figure this one out. Meet me at the next blogpost!