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 Leigh Harrold, piano
Leigh Harrold is an Associate Artist at ANAM. Born in Whyalla, South Australia, Leigh completed undergraduate and post-graduate studies at The University of Adelaide with concert pianist Gil Sullivan. During this time he had many successes, including being a National Finalist in the Young Performer Awards and a recipient of the Beta Sigma Phi Classical Music Award. He moved to Melbourne in 2003 to take up a full scholarship at the Australian National Academy of Music under the mentorship of Geoffrey Tozer, and in 2004 was made the Academy Fellow — the first person in the institution’s history to be chosen as such after just one year of study.
Leigh has performed across the world as a soloist, chamber musician, and guest tutor and lecturer. He’s a founding member of Syzygy Ensemble, and records with ABC Classics and Sony. He was awarded his PhD in music in 2012.
Leigh, take us on the journey of your upbringing with music education.
Stumbling into music for me was a wonderful, exploratory adventure.
I grew up in Whyalla, in regional South Australia, and did not have a family that was steeped in any sort of musical training. My parents enrolled me in keyboard lessons at the local music store at the age of eight, because they noted an enthusiasm I had for picking out tunes, mostly Christmas carols, on the little three-octave Casio we had at home.
My initial lessons, therefore, were on the electronic organ, or Electone. [My first teacher Peter Brown] was a young guy himself and did lots of playing in bands about town, so he taught me skills that would later prove invaluable: how to read chord charts, basic pop/jazz improvisation skills, how harmonies function, and quite advanced transcription skills.
After two years, he sent me to another local teacher called Jan Mitchell, who was a much stricter disciplinarian in terms of basic keyboard technique. […] I learnt with Jan until I was 20, studying Electone and piano concurrently. I then auditioned for the Elder Conservatorium on both jazz keyboard and classical piano. I studied both at university for a year — with Ritsuko Dalton and Gil Sullivan, respectively — before […] at 21, I devoted myself to full-time study with Gil.
He was incredible – he worked overtime to address the deficiencies in my piano technique, as well as provide the most comprehensive approach to musical characterisation and keyboard colourisation that I have ever received from any teacher.
At 27, I was accepted into ANAM as a student and did two years of training with the late master Geoffrey Tozer – he was really my ‘finishing school’ teacher. He taught me skills I needed to survive in the industry, including invaluable advice on relaxed approaches to piano playing, and analytical tools to help learn music rapidly.
I have always felt so fortunate to have had a set of teachers that always somehow knew what I needed at precisely the right time – and, although I’m a late bloomer compared to many other professional pianists, I never had a teacher who gave up on me because of my age.
How do you feel a music educator is responsible for a young person’s passion for music?
It’s a no-brainer to say that educators hold probably the most important responsibility in this regard. My parents were totally supportive, and enabled my music education every step of the way, but they were not musically trained themselves. And I grew up in a town where almost none of my peers played an instrument, and my school didn’t have a music program. So my teacher was almost my sole connection with another musically minded person, apart from a few of my fellow students.
Retrospectively, one realises that the best teachers are doing an amazing juggling act – they have to keep a student stimulated enough to practice without killing their love of music, and they have to bring a student’s individual musical voice to the fore while also encouraging them to explore ideas and concepts outside their natural comfort zone.
The balance of these elements will be different for every student, and the art of good teaching is finding exactly where that balancing point lies.
At what point did you realise you wanted to take what you’d learnt about music and form it into a career path?
I fell into a musical career almost by accident. While learning music was a big part of my life growing up in Whyalla, I never really had a comparative sense of how I was developing, particularly on piano, and so just assumed the ‘big city’ kids would be progressing better and that I’d never be competitive enough to have a professional career as a musician.
I finished year 12 without doing music as a high school subject, and then completed a Bachelor of Applied Science in Chemistry and Materials. While I was studying science at uni, I had my first major success in a music competition, and for the first time ever I started to entertain the idea of being a professional musician. But I can’t stress enough how vague that idea was! It was just one of a number of career options that I was thinking about – and a very low-ranked one, at that. Most of my horizons were centred around science and engineering.
Why did you decide to pursue higher music education?
Continuing on from my answer above, Jan — my piano teacher at the time — encouraged me to audition for the Elder Conservatorium in Adelaide when I was in the final year of my science degree. I auditioned and was offered a place, but I never intended to accept it!
I graduated from science and was offered a job at the local steelworks as an industrial chemist. I took the job, and it was perfectly fine, but there was a man who worked in my office who was about 30 years older than me who was one of the most bitter men I had ever — even to this day — met!
Although I didn’t hate my job, I suddenly felt a pang of fear that if I didn’t explore some further options now, I might live to feel disappointed later. So I resigned from the job after a few months, and moved to Adelaide to take up my offer at the Conservatorium.
I only initially intended to do a three-to-four year degree to get the music bug out of my system, and then I was going to go back to a job in chemistry. But suddenly I found myself doing Honours, then Masters, then training at ANAM, then working in the industry.
I’m still waiting to ‘get the bug out of my system’. It’s looking less and less likely!
What have been some of your strongest needs as a musician?
At the con, I was so fortunate with Gil to have a teacher who recognised my slightly unorthodox musical upbringing when it came to classical music training, and worked on helping me develop what I lacked without smothering the flame of the things I was naturally good at. […] I didn’t know it at the time, but that was setting me up invaluably for a lot of the coaching and presenting that I do now.
Diana Harris, another teacher at the con, had a passion for chamber music and collaborative piano work. Her courses on piano accompaniment were revolutionary, and set me on the career trajectory that has led to some of the most rewarding work I currently do.
From Geoffrey at ANAM, I learnt the importance of relaxation in piano playing – this literally changed my life, as it gave me the tools I needed to be able to spend long hours at the piano without damaging my body — or, at least, recognising the warning signs of potential damage early enough to address them.
All of my teachers have also taught me super-important things about the administrative side of being a musician, as they were all performers themselves while they were teaching me. It really does take a village to raise a musician!
How can teachers best support adult students?
I think that ultimately it comes down to the concept of ‘balance’ again, but the balance of elements is likely to be different for an adult student.
Firstly, if an adult is a beginner or intermediate student, then they’re less likely to be thinking of music as a career; secondly, they are likely to have a well-developed ‘other’ life, full of the responsibilities of work and family; thirdly, as adults we lose a certain amount of our childhood neural-plasticity, so certain concepts and co-ordination tasks don’t come as easily as we would like! So a good teacher, I think, should be constantly asking themselves whether what they’re doing to help the student is enhancing their student’s quality of life.
Adult life is full of responsibility, and learning an instrument shouldn’t simply be an ‘added’ responsibility, or something that just adds to the daily grind – a good lesson should be like a good yoga class, or like listening to a stimulating podcast. It should provide some inspiration so that the rest of the week is brighter. Part of this is setting realistic practice expectations – sometimes adult students have the ‘curse’ that they know what professional-standard playing should sound like, and so often try to end-gain or skip steps, and get easily frustrated when they don’t sound like the performer on their favourite CD. Part of good teaching is emphasising the process rather than the result – treating practice as meditation, maybe!
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?
It is ludicrous to me that the importance of music, or any of the arts really, needs to be debated. Economic growth on its own is meaningless without a society that is able to provide its citizens with a certain quality of life. As soon as someone tries to tell me that music education is ‘non-essential’, I ask them to imagine their own lives devoid of music – no radio in the morning, no work-out music at the gym, no advertising jingles, no TV or movie theme tunes, no birds twittering in the trees, no rising arpeggio before an airport announcement, no ringtones, no police sirens, no warning alarms.
People who continually advocate for money to be diverted away from music and towards industries with more ‘measurable’ outcomes, like economics and science, are often ignorant as to just how much these industries rely on the employment of music and music-related technology for their success. Where do they think the people who write catchy advert jingles, or work out the resonant frequencies for echo chambers, do their initial training? And that’s before we even talk about the creation of music for its own sake – which has proven benefits in collectively lifting both the intellectual capacity and the mental health of those who create it and consume it.
A healthier population is also good for a nation’s economy, as it means less people burdening the health system, and more people willing and able to contribute to the functioning of society.
Everyone wins when music education is valued – no question about it.
What changes would you like to see in music education in Australia on an industry level?
I am very proud of what Australia achieves in educating its musicians, especially as it seem to be done currently with both dwindling support from our current federal government, and a general sense of ignorance from the wider community.
From my personal experience, I really long for just two major changes.
Firstly, from a classical piano perspective, I would love our leading teachers — and everyone, really, but it starts with the educators — to drop once and for all the distinction between ‘soloist’ and ‘accompanist’ when it comes to playing the piano. […] Before I started at the con, I had done everything from playing classical sonatas on stage, jazz piano in bars, pit-band work, accompanying singers, to working as a church organist. I never found one aspect of music-making more difficult than another, although they certainly required different skills. And I certainly never considered there was an implied hierarchy amongst them.
The second change I’d like to see is simply that I would just love the Australian music industry to take pride in the musicians they produce and in the institutions they have created.
While doing a stint of study at an overseas institution may have some merit in terms of broadening one’s life experience, or pursuing a particular teacher that one might really click with, I think it’s time to well and truly shed the ‘cultural cringe’ idea that one can’t get a complete musical education in Australia. ANAM, for example, is recognised as one of the world’s great post-tertiary institutions – I can’t name another institution in the world that boasts such high employment rates in the industry for its alumni. All our major conservatoria provide degrees to doctoral level, and punch above their weight in terms of the standards they expect from their graduating students and their faculty. We are unapologetically internationally competitive, and that’s something to be proud of.
What impact have you made, or would you like to make, on the industry?
I have no idea what impact, if any, I’m making on the industry and, ultimately, I don’t think I’m qualified to make that call. As I’ve gotten older, coaching and mentoring has started to become a bigger part of my career, and I just try to be as authentic as I can. I work mostly with young adults, and they can spot insincerity and condescension a mile off – so I just try to draw on my own personal experiences, and be absolutely honest about what has helped me be a better musician, and what has hindered me. […] Musical mentorship is a continuum and as industry professionals we are duty-bound to pass on the legacy.
What advice would you give to musicians to help them get the most out of their educational experiences?
Remember that the collected body of musical knowledge is vast and wide. You should never be afraid to milk your teacher for all the insight you can – ask them, question them, even challenge them. But only ever take their advice as a starting point. If your teacher asks you to listen to a Mozart concerto, go and listen to all of them, while following along with the score. If your teacher asks you to read up on Samuel Barber, read up on his contemporaries (Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss) and his predecessors (Charles Ives) and successors (Robert Muczynski) as well. Treat each morsel of information as a loose thread, and if the thread is tantalising enough then follow it to see where it leads you. Eventually, you may find it leads to a question that no one’s answered – that’s exciting, because then it’s up to you to write the next chapter and to make your own contribution to the world’s vast musical legacy.
Check out the ANAM concert season to see musicians such as Leigh Harrold and music educators, live in action.
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.
