My Personal Music Mentors And Teachers In Music
Mentoring plays a significant role for us whose careers revolve around the arts and other related industries. Even those who follow a college education will usually mention some mentor as a key to their growth.
I’ve had several music mentors (my primary art form), and they typically fall into one of two categories: those who taught me the art of making music, and those who gave me possibilities to grow in music.
I have several mentors that taught me music four of which gave me private piano lessons when I was 9 up until I was a sophomore in college. Each mentor helped me turn out to be what I am now, but there is one mentor that stood out among rest. While three of my teachers concentrated mainly on technique and expression, my instructor through high school acknowledged my gift in songwriting, and being a songwriter herself, tailored my instruction to include theory and contemporary songwriting, as well as classical instruction. She did not merely put me in a system instead she helped me grow into an artist.
I had personal instruction under 2 composition professors while I was in college taking up composition as my major and like my four previous music mentors one of the two stood out. He discovered my weak points and strong points as a songwriter and he provided me with a challenge that will help me grow. He was not just a teacher, but also a personal coach, willing to work with my human side, my attitude problems and my meltdowns in the process.
There were also some mentors along the way who did not really teach me music, but acknowledged the gift and made room for it. I spent a lot of time in church music settings as a young man, and several of the musical and spiritual frontrunners in those settings gave me access to musical instruments and recording equipment, let me play on the music team (even as a youth), allowed me room to make mistakes, and even found me other places to play. They were more than cheerleaders to me, they were the people accountable for laying the corner stone of my success.
There are two things I seem to recall when I think about my music mentors. First of all, regarding the mentors themselves-the ones who touched me most were the ones who took a private interest in me and in my development, both as a musician and as a person. Second, I realized that in the course of my development as a musician, I learned more from my mentors than my college education..Despite the fact that my teachers and mentors are in the college setting, their pesonal interest in me helped me grow into a better musician than homeworks and classes.. College helped but my mentors made the difference in my growth.
