Tips For The Young Musician Vol. 18
by Stephan Hume
In our last column, I talked about how music is a language. I explained how you can enjoy music as a listener or a player the same way you would enjoy speaking your primary spoken language. In fact if you really think about it, music is often even better than your native tongue’s means of communicating because you can always feel what is being communicated through music without having to understand it.
So, learn a foreign language.
Don’t run away just yet. I know most any of you young musicians are finding yourself being force-fed a foreign language in your schools. But hear me out. First of all, we live in a world where it is simply smart to be able to speak to someone who speaks another language. I can’t tell you how much being able to speak a decent amount of Spanish has helped me. It has helped me gain favor at my workplace, work with musicians I would not have been able to work with, and it has helped my brain expand.
Learning Spanish is so similar to learning music.
Those tiny little dots on the staff paper have meaning behind them. Once you learn what that meaning is, you can share in that meaning by playing the note or phrase, right? Well, you just translated. When you read music you are reading a language and translating it to a beautiful, new meaning. When you learn to read a new series of letters and find that it sounds a little different than your primary language, you are translating again. The more you do both kinds of study, the easier both become.
Spanish is easier than English…music is even easier.
That’s right. If you are speaking the English language, you are already speaking a language that is vastly more difficult to learn than languages like Spanish. I am not only advocating Spanish as a second language, it just so happens that it’s the one I like to speak. But really it is my third language, if I count music as one, and I think it’s obvious by now that I do.
In the English language, there are six different ways to pronounce the letter “A.” In Spanish, there is only one. That alone will tell you something about how your brain is already wired to learn Spanish since you already know how to speak an easier language.
Learn through immersion.
If you are learning your foreign language in the country it is spoken, you will learn it much faster than reading a book. Remember, music is the same way. If you start by being around others who can play well, you will advance much more quickly. Now, I suppose if you combined all of these tips, you could surround yourself with a bunch of skilled musicians who speak a spoken language you don’t. That would be ultimate!
Category: What's Up?, Shop Talk
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