Music schools switch from teaching face to face to online lessons amid coronavirus pandemic
- One-on-one lessons are the reason students attend the top music schools – so how can that tactile experience be moved online?
- ‘Extremely good Wi-fi’ becomes a necessity, says a student. To avoid connection issues, professors get students to video themselves playing, then critique them
Music schools have had to reinvent how they’ve been teaching the art form for generations because of the coronavirus pandemic.
When the coronavirus shutdown began in mid-March, practically everything that defines a great music school had to be reimagined. One-on-one lessons and academic classes went online; ensemble rehearsals and performances were scrubbed; juries, in which students perform for faculty to receive grades, were abandoned.
If a treasured music school is built on the premise of hundreds of educators and students convening in a central location, that template suddenly was rendered inoperative. And though the spring quarter was a bit of a scramble, music schools in the Chicago area, a magnet for students from around the world, have been laying out intricately conceived plans for autumn – though even these are subject to changing circumstances and governmental rules.
“We all are trying to figure this out,” says Toni-Marie Montgomery, dean of Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music in Evanston, in the US state of Illinois. “No one has been through training for this. How do you build for a pandemic? Kudos to our faculty and to our students – we had to quickly change.”
The most critical part of studying music at the highest level always has been the individual lesson, in which teacher and student meet in a studio to hone repertoire. They typically work together for a student’s entire tenure – four years or more.
“That tactile contact, that immediacy of a student and teacher being together is crucial,” says Ronald Caltabiano, dean of DePaul University’s School of Music. “But if we’re going to get there – and if we’re going to get there with everybody intact, everybody healthy – we’ve got to back away from that” for the time being.
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So at DePaul, teachers and students will decide on an individual basis how to conduct these critical lessons.
“The range could be everything from one faculty member saying, ‘I’m going to work face-to-face’, to ‘I’m not going to work face-to-face at all this quarter,’” says Caltabiano. “If either the student or the teacher wishes for something to be online, rather than face-to-face, then that is the decision that will carry.”
But can you really teach a talented young musician how to shape a phrase of Chopin or a riff by Ellington online? Can the teacher really hear tonal quality and instrumental attack and other extremely subtle variables via Wi-fi?
“As long as the connection is good, it works quite well,” says pianist Anthony Molinaro, director of music at Loyola University Chicago.
“You do have problems. If a student doesn’t have the greatest high-speed video access, the video freezes up. But there is one nice thing in online that I’d like to carry over to in-person lessons,” whenever those should resume, adds Molinaro.
“Because the connection is sometimes not perfect when the lesson starts, a student will play through a piece, and you can’t get everything right. So we’ve been asking them to record themselves, upload the video to YouTube a day or two before their lesson, and I’ll listen to it, because the quality is much better.
One time [my teacher] said: ‘Look at the page, and tell me what the dynamic marking is.’ I noticed it was piano [meaning soft]. He said: ‘I don’t think you were playing piano.’ Just from my gestures he could tell my volume
“I’m always preaching: ‘Record yourself! Listen to yourself!’ And I’m never sure if they followed through. Now I know students are recording themselves and thinking: I can do better.”
If the spring has taught Molinaro anything, it’s that “my students have really developed as much as – if not more than – ever, in those last six weeks [of spring] that we were online”.
Students apparently agree. Northwestern’s Bienen dean, Montgomery, reports that student evaluations “were really positive”.
Violinist Jessica Cao, who just graduated from Northwestern with degrees in violin performance and economics, concurs.
“The main part is having extremely good Wi-fi,” says Cao, who studied with Bienen violin professor Gerardo Ribeiro.
“I definitely believe we were able to accomplish quite a bit. It might not have been quite as much as we could have in person – there’s just no way to tell the subtle nuances. But definitely a lot better than I thought it would be.
“I remember a funny instance. One time [Ribeiro] said: ‘Look at the page, and tell me what the dynamic marking is.’
“I noticed it was piano [meaning soft].
“He said: ‘I don’t think you were playing piano.’ Just from my gestures he could tell my volume, even though sometimes videoconference software kind of adjusts the volume.”
For now, the idea is to make the best of a tough situation.
Molinaro, the Loyola director of music, plans to “get a little more elaborate” with his online teaching. Whereas in spring he relied on the camera on his laptop for online lessons, now he’s thinking of “having a second camera that has an overhead shot, so [students] can see my hands better”.
