Passion
What motivates you? What keeps you inspired?
What keeps your attention and energy directed? What keeps you eagerly focused, not just for a few moments, but over years?
These are questions that may already occupy your mind daily. You might regularly ask yourself, “What will motivate this group? This student? This class?” Having solid answers to questions like these, for yourself and for each one of your students, energizes your teaching.
I talk with other teachers about motivation a lot. Over the years, I have noticed a trend in the pedagogical mindset of music educators. Many of the questions I’ve been asked sound something like:
“Should I use rewards to keep my student working?”
“Will my group work harder if I constantly praise them?
“Do I keep them on their toes by telling them what could go wrong if they don’t work?”
“Should there be a punishment for students who don’t do the work that they are assigned?”
This kind of thinking is often analogized in the story of the “carrot and stick.” In this metaphor, there is a donkey moving towards a tempting carrot dangling in front of them and moving away from the taskmaster behind them with a scary stick. Motivation is either coming from in front (the promise of reward) or behind (the threat of pain). In either case, what is motivating your student in this kind of scenario is instinct. They are either striving for something they want or escaping something that they feel threatens them.
But here’s the thing about the whole “carrot and stick” metaphor. In this picture of a carrot and a stick, the thing being motivated isn’t usually a person—it’s an ass. And humans aren’t animals, at least in that way.
While it may create some movement for a moment, teaching with a carrot-and-stick approach will ultimately fail. A carrot motivator will only last as long as a person feels the need for it. A stick motivator will only work as long as a person feels the fear of it. But humans, unlike other animals, have another and more powerful source of motivation: internal passion. Each of your students is gifted with the inner drive to accomplish, to learn, to become something, independent of external reward or punishment. Educational philosophies such as Montessori, Waldorf, and Reggio Emilio are built on this truth.
This kind of motivating passion might not look like you think. The word passion might put a picture in your mind of someone loudly declaiming, whipped into a frenzy, or otherwise visually in the throes of intense feeling. That outward-expressed passion isn’t what I am talking about here. A person who is passionately motivated in the way I mean might be seen working in an intent, quiet, and focused manner. They are so focused, they don’t hear you call their name or notice time passing by. They have to be reminded to stop what they are doing to take care of other necessary things. They get lost in their thoughts, in their work, in their activity.
Think about occasions in your life when you have been working on something and totally lost track of the time—hours slipping away as you create. Bring to mind an occasion when you just couldn’t wait to wake up and work on something. This is the kind of passion that I’m talking about. This kind of internal dedication is what we, as music teachers, must tap into and develop in each of our students. When you do, you no longer need to keep a collection of carrots or arrange your sticks for a lesson. Your students will come in with their own desire to work.
This kind of passion requires intense cultivation. The bright sparks and momentary flames of excitement aren’t necessarily a sign of a passionate fire that will last. In order to really keep a fire of passion going, you have to help your students settle the first flame of excitement into a low-burning, dedicated ardency that can last.
This is true of every endeavor in life. Couples who fall madly in love and decide to spend their lives together come to find that those initial flames of passion morph into a more low burning but sustainable love for each other as the years pass by. Pilots engulfed with the thrill of flying eventually find that the thrill isn’t the same when they climb into the cloud for the ten-thousandth time. People who move to their dream city or into their dream house eventually find that the vigor of their happiness dies down into real love for their home and their community. And this is a good thing. These initial flames of excitement, when they are protected and cultivated into long-burning embers of love, make up a warmth of passion that can last a lifetime.
The thrill of playing your instrument for the first time happens only once; it will never return. Instead, that (frankly) cheap excitement is replaced by steady fervor and deepened appreciation for the joy of the work and the beauty of the sounds you make. That steady happy fervor grows into love; over time, that love evolves into a passion that is deeper and more profound than a fumbling beginning student could ever imagine.
Assessing where your students are on this journey is key. In Part IV, I will talk more about how to cultivate this passion from the beginning to the end. But for now, by far the most important thing to know about passion is that it is transferable. Once someone has cultivated a passion for one thing, they know how to cultivate a passion for another.
A person who learns how to love their clarinet can also learn to love chemistry. Someone who can dive deep into piano practice can work through the rigors of a classical language. People who can passionately work through tough music can learn how to work through tough equations, tough relationships, tough problems, and tough times.
Passion in Action
In the classic and amazing 1998 movie The Red Violin, the story is told of a centuries-old violin that, because of extraordinary properties imbued in it by its creator, inspires generations of musicians to risk everything—their loves, their fortunes, even their lives—just to possess and to play it. Passion for the instrument and the music that flows from it transcends the dangers each violinist faces, be it disability, infidelity, or governmental repression. It’s a gripping story, well told.
And the music! The violin solos in this film are glorious, performed by American Joshua Bell, who himself owns a centuries-old violin and is an acclaimed virtuoso violinist.
What is Bell’s story? As a toddler growing up in Bloomington, Indiana, Bell displayed his natural music ability early on. He stretched rubber bands around the knobs of his dresser in order to pluck out the tunes he heard his mother playing on the piano. Honoring his enthusiasm, his parents signed him up for violin lessons when he was four. Just as he was becoming serious about the violin at twelve, he had the good fortune to meet his mentor, Josef Gingold. Even though the teacher was seventy years old at the time, he took Bell on as a student.
Bell talks about Gingold in an interview with Mother Jones.
Mother Jones: I gather your mentor wasn’t too strict.
Joshua Bell: Quite the opposite. Gingold was exact opposite of the cliché, hard, strict teacher.
MJ: At your level, you’d sort of expect some intense Russian coach.
JB: Well, that’s that old traditional Russian school, and that can be effective as well. Different kids respond to different teaching; there’s not one way. His way was just through bombardment of kindness and joy. [Laughs.] What would be the opposite of shock and awe? Because of that, you just wanted to please him. It was more of, by association with someone that loved something so much, it just rubbed off. He didn’t spoon-feed his kids how to play every little thing; he was good teacher because he guided me but let me think for myself and learn for myself. He never answered the questions; he kind of asked more questions.
MJ: And made you want to excel?
JB: And also figure it out for myself. I think the figuring out process is a big part of learning. . . .
MJ: Describe your emotional relationship with your [Gibson ex-Huberman Stradivarius] violin.
JB: I don’t want to carry the analogy too far, because it can get a little corny. I don’t sleep with it in my bed, but there is something very magical about the instrument. You open up the case; it’s a masterpiece, it’s gorgeous, the varnish is still there from three hundred years ago. People who know violins, they look at it and it’s almost like a face. So I open up my case every day and have one of the great creations. It is very inspiring. It makes you want to practice. How can you open up a case and look at a violin that was made in 1713 by one of the greatest artists in history and then say, “No, I don’t feel like practicing today.” [Laughs.] You step up to the plate.
Do you see what happened here?
Bell’s teacher recognized what was already in him—a natural love for a string sound and a strong curiosity for how to create it. Through his teaching, he was able to nurture that first, intense desire to play and hear musical sounds into a deeper, stronger passion that is the cornerstone of who Joshua Bell has become as a player.
How were you, yourself, motivated internally to continue with music?
How can you share that with your students?
How well do your students know the pathways from excitement to passion?
What are some ways you can cultivate that passion within them?
If we don’t create passionate musicians, we could end up:
Giving people the impression that a first excitement is the only excitement in any venture. (More on excitement in Chapter 11.)
Creating people who will stop a process halfway through because they haven’t experienced the reward of that initial excitement in a while and haven’t yet developed a settled passion.
What we gain from creating passionate musicians
When a music student learns how to love the hard work of music making, they can:
Learn how to build their passion for any other thing.
Find their drive from within themselves, instead of having to have it imposed on them from outside of themselves.
Recognize and appreciate true passion in others; they can enjoy another person’s interest in a subject.
Communicate convincingly about their passions.