BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Music education matters.
Whether you first picked up an instrument at school, you’re working full-time in an orchestra, or you’re just entering your industry training, it’s likely you share the sentiment.
The airing of music education program Don’t Stop the Music on ABC resonated so strongly with Australian audiences that they donated more than $60,000 and 4,000 instruments to the benefit of schoolchildren. The legacy of music education advocates and activists such as the late Richard Gill have inspired generations of musicians to teach, and share their knowledge of music with students young and old. Australia can no longer turn away from the knowledge that children who sustain music education throughout their school years will experience permanent benefits to their brain, advancing their language and problem-solving skills.
In this new series Music education matters, we team up with a leading Australian educational institution to find out how music education can help shape lives.
Speaking with talent from the Australian National Academy of Music, we introduce you to practising industry figures – emerging and established, performing and teaching – so we can discover the true stories behind the power of music education.
Music education matters, says Charlotte Miles, cello
Charlotte is in her first year at the Australian National Academy of Music, having progressed through her education being mentored by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s principal cellist David Berlin, and travelling the world over for masterclasses, tours, and competitions. (Of those competitions, she’s been awarded more than 100 prizes and they’ve taken her to the stages of Carnegie Hall and Opera Bastille.)
Charlotte finished high school last year, and now she’s learning with Howard Penny at ANAM. The musical world is her oyster.
Tell us about your upbringing with music education. What do you feel are some of the defining moments during your music education as a child?
Growing up in a musical household, with a music educator father and an amateur cellist mother, I am so grateful for the appreciation for music that I have inherited.
When I was very little, Dad and I would sit at the piano and he would lay down chords over which I would improvise, playing with the colours and shapes of sound.
After many an afternoon in my early childhood spent sitting and watching Mum play the cello, at age four I put a violin between my knees and, naturally, attempted to copy my role-model, playing it between my knees like a cello before I was handed a real one a few months later.
From prancing around in bedsocks to Yo-Yo Ma CDs, to scribbling in crayons on the easel with Mendelssohn or Smetana playing in the background, my earliest musical experiences were coloured by the thrill of imagination.
How do you feel a music educator is responsible for a young person’s passion for music?
When a child is taught to listen curiously, their passion for music will flourish.
I am unbelievably fortunate to have had four fantastic cello teachers – Rachel Atkinson, Judy Dempster, David Berlin, and now Howard Penny – who have guided my enthusiasm and inspired me to find characters and storylines in music.
I was taught from a young age that scales and exercises are a meditative and therapeutic way of connecting with the instrument and recentring the self […] I grew up believing that intonation, rhythmic accuracy, and articulation were all just ways of developing our musical vocabularies in order to speak with greater musical poignancy.
To me, the responsibility of a music educator is to convey to their student that musical accuracy and technical proficiency are only meaningful within the context of musical storytelling.
At what point did you realise you wanted to take what you’d learnt about music and form it into a career path?
There was never any ambiguity surrounding what I wanted to be when I grew up. I don’t remember thinking much about it as a child, but I now realise that I have never been able to envisage a future that didn’t involve playing the cello.
Through many evenings in my childhood spent at Melbourne Symphony Orchestra concerts, I grew up with the idea of a career in music being normalised in my mind. With my young eyes, I would marvel at the collective emotional metamorphosis of an audience who entered the concert hall engrossed in their busy lives, and emerged from the hall touched, challenged, or inspired; to me, music was always a noble and powerful profession.
Why did you decide to pursue higher music education?
At the beginning of this year, my first year at ANAM, I couldn’t wait to see what musical experiences awaited me, what knowledge I would absorb, and how deep and intricate my understanding of sounds and their purpose could become.
I decided to pursue higher music education to immerse myself in an environment of collaboration with like-minded musicians, fascinating and fantastic studio training with the wonderful Howard Penny, and incredible musical opportunities; working alongside world-class artists and expanding my horizons in a diverse and multi-faceted musical space, which whirs and hums every day with the sounds of discovery.
What have been some of your strongest needs as a musician?
A hallmark of brilliant teaching is the teacher’s adaptability to the developmental stage of the student.
Throughout eight years of study with David Berlin — from the ages of eight to 16 — as my intellectual and emotional understanding of the world matured, one of my strongest needs has been flexibility.
When at 16 I revisited pieces that I had been playing at eight, passages that had once been illustrated to me with imagery of fairy bread, trolls under bridges, or meat pies had matured into their adult counterparts – images of love-struck fantasies, tyrannical dictators, and melancholic brave-faces. […] There was never a definitive point when our approach to our weekly lessons changed. Instead, we bounced musical concepts and stories off each other for eight years as I grew physically, musically, and emotionally — and my need for flexibility and adaptability was met perfectly.
Throughout my musical upbringing, I have needed most strongly to be challenged and inspired. In recent years, I have thrown myself unflinchingly into an increasingly deeper series of metaphorical deep ends, beginning with the Melbourne String Ensemble, then the Australian Youth Orchestra programs, and most recently, ANAM.
In all three of these learning environments, I have developed musical relationships with much older friends and colleagues, and I have emerged from all of these experiences craving the camaraderie, enrichment, and all-around joy that these opportunities and those like them always bring to my music-making.
How can teachers best support adult students?
While children can often intuitively explore new ways of achieving a certain sound but can’t necessarily rationalise how or why, adults can generally intellectualise what they need to do to reach the sound but may struggle with putting this conceptual learning into kinetic practice.
When exploring technique, I believe teachers can best support adult students by guiding them through the sensations of the instrument, taking advantage of the analytical capacity of adults to describe as vividly as possible the way the body and hands should feel when playing the instrument in order to mimic the intuitive sensory exploration that comes naturally to children.
As I have begun teaching adult students, I greatly enjoy the wisdom and dedication they bring to our shared experience of learning from each other. The older the student, the broader the scope of their imagination, the greater their vocabulary with which to intellectualise their musical stories, and the more sophisticated their understanding of the human experience.
There’s been a lot of dialogue about the importance of music education in Australia. How do you think music education can benefit the community as a whole?
At the beating heart of all music-making, from its primordial origins to its contemporary culture, is the fundamental act of unity.
From the smiles on the faces of community orchestra members during rehearsals to the cognitive and linguistic development of primary school children singing songs at assemblies, thousands of people all around Australia are powered by the joy and lifelong learning music education affords anyone in any community fortunate enough to experience it.
What changes would you like to see in music education in Australia on an industry level?
I’d love to see the joy and lifelong learning of music [made available to all communities]. Every day, on my commute from my family home in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne to ANAM in the urban centre of South Melbourne, I pause to reflect on how tremendously lucky I’ve been to grow up as a musician in a cultural hub like Melbourne — a well-saturated market of musical experiences, where world-class performances are only a ticket and a short train trip away, and so many amazing acts are competing for the attention of potential audiences.
With inspiring pedagogy and enlightening concert experiences being the two main foundations of strong musical futures in young people, I would like to see a greater emphasis placed upon regional outreach and education programs.
Regional tours and education programs, such as those conducted by the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Queensland Youth Orchestra, and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, among numerous others, are fantastic — and their profound impact upon children who may not otherwise have access to concert experiences in urban centres must never be underestimated.
What impact have you made, or would you like to make, on the industry?
With the great gift of learning comes the great responsibility to share it with those who may not have received the same opportunities. Though I believe I am yet to make a significant impact on the industry at this point in my life, I regularly upload videos of performances to YouTube, partly because I have received feedback from young cellists around the world that they have found it extremely useful to observe my fingerings, bowings, phrasings, and articulations; to benefit second-hand from the brilliant teaching that I have been so fortunate to receive.
I am passionate about sharing the stunning cello repertoire and all its treasures, celebrated and obscure, with people of all walks of life. In particular, I would love to champion gorgeous cello works composed by women, such as the Nadia Boulanger pieces I performed in my recent ANAM recital.
What advice would you give to musicians to help them get the most out of their educational experiences?
Be as efficient as possible within the time you have. Work smarter, not harder – a small amount of mental practice, troubleshooting practice, or active listening is often more effective than hours of mindless note-bashing.
Perform as regularly as you can for as many people as will listen; each person who listens to you play has given you the gift of their time and attention, and the gift of performance experience.
Forget about the pursuit of perfection; focus instead on the pursuit of intention. As tantalisingly close as you may come to reaching the mirage of flawlessness you’ve come to demand from yourself, you will never get there, and the futile act of fruitless reaching will exhaust you.
Your practice schedule may become a daunting to-do list of endless pages of notes to chew through, passages that need to be steamed over and over again with the hot iron of intonation work, or excerpt after excerpt that drives you up the practice room’s thin white plaster walls. When that happens, take a deep breath, put on your headphones, crank up your playlist of all-time favourites, and remember why you’re doing this anyway.
Let your stress dissolve to joy as these soaring melodies, these breathtaking harmonies, carry you away like they always have.
We’re teaming up with ANAM throughout 2019 to share these interviews in our series Music education matters.
Stay tuned as we prepare to bring you more of the personal stories behind music education in Australia.
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Images supplied.
