This morning I heard back from someone who sent me their resume to potentially teach for us. This was a graduate of a college music program. After asking some simple questions about her scale and key knowledge, I was informed she only learned how to play in up to about four sharps (in a college music program). This saddens me deeply. This college graduate would honestly not make it pass the first two minutes of our audition process, and, most of my 6 and 7-year-old students could easily. 

We take music very seriously. As we constantly tell our students and parents, that isn’t because it’s all about the right notes and the right rhythms, it’s because we are all about the people making the music, the people the music serves. We want our students to be able to go wherever their music goes, to be able to win any audition they may take some day, not to be held back or limited by what they don’t know.

That sad reality is, like it or not, while scales, etudes, and excerpts are far from everything, if you can’t nail something thrown at you in an audition in the first few minutes, your window of opportunity for that position may have just been missed. We want our students flinging the doors open and walking in with confidence, demonstrating both mastery and musicianship.

Excellence and expertise matter because you do, and because the people we make the music for matter too.