The Musician’s Equivalent Of Writer’s Block

I’m currently working with a high school student who has been playing saxophone for a few years. This young guy has a lot of potential.

When I first started working with him, I asked him how serious he was about learning sax, and what his goals were. He rattled off many of the goals I’ve heard other students say over the years: improve his tone; improve his technique; learn some of the standard saxophone effects and how to use them; and become an overall better player.

These are all valid goals. Now my job as a teacher is of course to take those and translate them into weekly or biweekly lesson material that is stimulating. Over the past few years I have found this harder and harder to do with young students who have grown up during the age of instant gratification.

Learning to play a musical instrument proficiently does not come in one’s sleep to 99.99% of the population. We have to work at it. It involves, among other things, a great deal of repetition.

Learning to play is something that many found boring years ago, before our society shifted slightly, and became saturated with the types of products, images, and pop cultural messages that grabbed our attention for 15 seconds or less. Add to this all the multi-tasking that youth today do through social media sites while simultaneously sitting in their classrooms or doing their homework, and this all was bound to have a trickle-down effect to the very way the brains of our young generations are wired.

Where am I going with all of this you ask? Well very simply, I am faced with a challenge: How do you encourage a youth who has an incredible amount of potential, when he hits a road block—which will take some effort to work around—in an age where all the messages he is sent is: the fix should be instant.

Last night I got together with my student for the last time before breaking for the summer. I’ve only been working with him a few weeks, so I thought I’d try a different play along CD. (We had been using the Jamey Aebersold stuff until now.)

Last night I decided to use It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing) from Volume 1 of the Hal Leonard Jazz Play Along Series. Although the track is very fast, my student was able to pick up the notes and phrasing in no time.

So once we had the melody all worked out and up to speed, we put on the CD. When it came to the improvised part I was going to play 8, and then turn it over to him. The idea was that he would do something: anything he thought of.

The first time we tried it he drew a blank. He was stuck. He could think of nothing to do. This happened the 2nd time as well, as well as the 3rd. It seems when faced with blank bars with only chord symbols, my student drew a blank…

So I stopped the CD, and we went over a bunch of ideas, but the more we worked on ideas, the less original ideas he had. It was like the empty bars with only chords symbols over them, were throwing him off. I then covered up the page and asked him if he had ever considered using the melody of a song as inspiration for a solo. Nope. No one had ever suggested that before to him.

Now before you start thinking that I was throwing him to the wolves, you should know that besides playing in his high school jazz band, he is also in a small jazz combo with a few of his friends from school. They write their own music, and perform it at school functions. He improvises in that combo, so these are not completely foreign concepts to him.

We have already worked on things like: play over the full range of your horn; use repetition; tell a story; don’t feel the need to fill all the available space with notes. He internalized all those messages, and his solos had improved a lot from one week to another. (At least the ones he did during his lessons did.)

However, last night when confronted with chord symbols over bars of a song he really liked, it seems my student was suffering from the musician’s equivalent of writer’s block. This got me thinking about how he learned, and I started asking him questions. It turns out he has a photographic memory. However, he doesn’t necessarily remember things he hears.

When it comes to creative writing, that’s also not his strong suit. He does best when the learning is logical and structured. Good to know. Through these, and a bunch of other questions I asked him, I was starting to see a pattern emerging.

Source: wikipedia.org

The left side a person’s brain controls things like:

• Logic
• Analysis
• Sequencing
• Linear thought
• Mathematics
• Language
• Facts
• Thinking in words
• Words of songs
• Computation
• Writing
• Scientific skills

While the right side of a person’s brain controls things like:

• Creativity
• Imagination
• Holistic thinking
• Intuition
• Artistic motor skills
• Rhythm
• Non-verbal
• Feelings
• Visualization
• Tunes of songs
• Daydreaming
• Spatial awareness

My student was definitely leaning more towards being left brain dominant. The trick was going to be how to get him over his musical writer’s block, and get him using his right side of the brain to improvise. Hey, no problem… I opened this can of worms in the last 5 minutes of our 1 hour lesson before breaking for the summer…  😕

OK, so I’ve got a Master of Education degree… big deal… I really shot myself in the foot with this one. Sometimes things go off the rails in the last minute.

Luckily we both had some extra time, so I worked with my student for an extra 30 minutes in an effort to undo some of the damage I had just done. My job is to build a student’s confidence, not undermine it.

After some work he did develop some reasonably good improv ideas that were built on mine, but it took some work. Now the challenge for me this fall will be to develop some study materials specifically for this student. These will have to allow him to develop his improvisation skills despite his left brain dominance, yet will need to keep the attention of a youth who is hardwired to expect fast-paced stimulation. So Tweet that…

Just as an interesting aside, the Art Institute of Vancouver has a Right Brain vs Left Brain Creativity Test with about 50 or so questions in it. I discovered the test this morning while researching some info for this article.

I did the test, which took me under 5 minutes to do BTW, and found the results surprisingly accurate. Having taken similar tests in my grad studies, I am familiar with what the questions are testing for. Interestingly enough, I did learn some new things about myself from doing the test.

If anyone is interested, my score was: left brain 52%, right brain 48%.  The score is then broken down further like this:

Left Brain Percentages

• 34% Logical (Your most dominant characteristic)
• 34% Verbal
• 31% Sequential
• 27% Linear
• 25% Symbolic
• 14% Reality-based (Your least dominant characteristic)

Your Right Brain Percentages

• 37% Concrete (Your most dominant characteristic)
• 32% Fantasy-oriented
• 30% Holistic
• 29% Intuitive
• 17% Random
• 13% Nonverbal (Your least dominant characteristic)

The test has full descriptions of what all these things mean.

If you’re interested in perhaps comparing the results of this test to similar tests you’ve done in the past, you can find it here, on The Art Institute of Vancouver’s Website.