Brandon Rhinehart

Students who are engaged at a younger age preferably still in middle or high school can

be heavily influenced by music and experience massive growth as a musician before they leave

the world of k-12. I would like to start this out with a discussion that I had last year in my mued

class. The topic was, “what was the right amount of challenge to keep from overwhelming a

student but giving them a good challenge”. Over this topic we discussed how students don’t

always find challenging what we find challenging, it's almost like its assumed it’s a challenge

because we are more experienced at the subject. But if we don't make the subject seem like a

challenge, then the students won't be hesitant when approaching the subject. Like for instance,

playing multiple instruments.

This subject that I chose is also extremely difficult to cover because there are not a lot of

scholarly articles on the subject, I still chose to talk about it because I think it's something I could

further investigate in the future and hopefully add to the list of scholarly articles one day. In

“From Child to musician” it discusses the development of students in a k-12 program mostly 7 to

9 year olds. These students were held accountable for learning and developing these

musicianship qualities and were assessed at the end of each semester. These students were

faced with challenges that others at an older age would even consider a challenge, but as these

students developed, nobody told them it was hard material, leading them to not think of it so

much as a challenge, allowing for the student to soak up more. (McPherson, 2005)

My next source of information is on a 16 year old, striving to develop through learning

saxophone, guitar, and piano. The struggle with this student is that they found it hard to keep up

all three skill sets at the same time, but still found it enjoyable playing and performing on all

three. Students do not need to become heavily invested in all the secondary instruments they

play. As covered, being able to just noodle back and forth is very valuable still. This being most

of the time as long as it hasn't been years, students can easily still pull back set traits and skills

needed to play these other instruments. Also their understanding of how it works and the

process of teaching it because more apparent in the classroom. Students also will be able to
Brandon Rhinehart

encourage others to take up these multiple instruments if they see that they do not need to

overwork themselves to achieve what they want as well as we read in Isak Nes’s post from his

earlier school days. (Nes, 2016)

You do not have to master the instrument to be proficient in the process of noodling and

becoming more involved in a music making experience. Two musicians with a podcast named

Christopher and Andrew talk about the toxic atmosphere developed between musicians saying

they must master one. (Musical U Team, 2018)

Somewhere in time somebody decided that you must have a “main instrument” but

perhaps maybe students can become craftsman decent skilled musicians on 3 or 4 different

instruments. The idea of a main instrument can come naturally to you as you learn your first but

does that mean it needs to be your strongest? Does it mean you can't take the time to learn

similar instruments and become equally as talented on that? Maybe you want an opportunity to

learn more visually and theory based music and so you decide to pick up piano, but 2 years in

you just want to play oboe and sing, are you still obligated to play piano because it was your

first? (Fistula, 2012)

We build these imaginary barriers as musicians thinking we can’t switch around but we

can. On my own opinion on the subject, middle schools that limit student’s instrument selection

because they have lots of students who want to play clarinet are monsters in this case. How can

you say no when you are setting the path for the rest of this student’s music making career. Also

they might be stereotyped based on the instrument they play, putting all female characters all on

flute or all male characters on tuba for example. We build these barriers already, when we could

find a simple fix like having an open clarinet choir.

I have already covered my topic of not mastering any instruments but being able to

noodle on many, that can be an issue when you want to become very very good at one

instrument, it can be a very tedious process. The next issue is the crossing between techniques,

for example the F# fingering on a saxophone is the F fingering on a oboe. That can become an
Brandon Rhinehart

issue in all sorts of places when you combine all your knowledge of all these complicated music

making machines. (Bergman, 2012)

The next issue is no instrument is cheap, everything costs money so unless your

parents are some kind of instrument maker it might be hard to make an instrument so you might

just end up buying a few good quality instruments. This can come back to the jack of all trades

but master of none, as you would have a lot of cheaper less quality instruments instead of one

really nice one. The next challenge can be finding time to invest, this is why I recommended

starting students at a young age because the information will soak in faster and they will have

more time to do these kinds of things. Especially if music is already a big part of their public

school education experience. The last point is the emphasis on patience. With any musical

process everybody in the world knows you can't be the best musician tomorrow if you just

started today. It takes a lot of time for your brain to process what you are even doing, so it will

be a lot of hard work with little visual results for the first bit of the whole process. (Freitas, 2016)

It is also important to keep parents involved in this process. Students who do not have

their parent’s support might result in pulling the student completely out of music. Show the

parents what progress you make, make sure they come to the Holiday concert with the steel

drum band and guitar ensemble. The parents need to see that the student is making progress,

and most of all having fun. When coming to an ultimate decision, maybe even invite the parent

to sit in on a rehearsal, assuming those are going well and the students are developing.

(Stopper, 2015)

My last point of discussion that I would like to quote in this paper is an article by a guitar

player named Glenn Sutton. In this article it goes over the importance of how learning multiple

instruments can benefit you and how it can increase your musical understanding as a whole. It

even touches a little bit on marketability if you are looking to make some cash while you enjoy

your music making experience. But the two final points this covers are understanding of style

and genre between new instruments, and also the process of noodling in the future after you
Brandon Rhinehart

don't really dedicate practice time to that instrument anymore. I will start with the style subject,

the importance of learning about different styles of music can be obvious to incorporate the

learning of more global music and give the students a chance to really try something they

haven't heard before. For example, I didn't know what a gamelan group was until I got to

college. If I knew more about it and maybe got to play some of it in public schools I would really

like it and would seek more opportunities to play it. Second, most students at this age are not

interested in mastering all instruments, however, most students would enjoy being able to learn

the instrument to the point where they could noodle or even play some very basic functions of

the instrument. Noodling helps students from getting overwhelmed and gives them an

opportunity to do more individual study of the instrument. For example, teaching a student a

chord on guitar, then showing them what a capo is, then let them do some self exploration and

noodle. It can be that easy to engage the students in this music making process. (Sutton, 2018)

For future research on this subject I would encourage going into schools with and

without these extra ensembles like Guitar Ensemble, Piano Ensemble, World Music Ensemble,

etc. and observe how the students treat these classes and if they think their music experience at

their school would be much different with or without them. I would also try and bring it to schools

that don't have it to see how the atmosphere changes the class for the day. This topic was

difficult to cover because lack of articles that could be seen as “official”, because I don't think

this is something really talked about in public schools, I think most band directors just work with

what they have. When I make my way into the field I hope to incorporate the elements in my

school, so my students have a better rounded music making experience.

From child to musician: Skill development during the beginning stages of learning an instrument.
(n.d.). Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0305735605048012
Brandon Rhinehart

Is Your Child Ready to Learn a Second Instrument? (n.d.). Retrieved from

http://www.metrokids.com/MetroKids/Is-Your-Child-Ready-to-Learn-a-Second-Instrument/

Fistula, L. (2012, November 08). Learning two or more instruments at once - Adult Learners.
Retrieved from https://www.abrsm.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=52193

Hangout Network Help. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.banjohangout.org/archive/287857

5 Benefits and 5 Problems of Playing Multiple Musical Instruments. (n.d.). Retrieved from
https://www.vibemusicacademy.com/blog/2016/5/17

The Benefits of Learning More Than One Instrument. (n.d.). Retrieved from
http://powaymusiclessons.com/free-guitar-resources/the-benefits-of-learning-more-than-one-
instrument/

Team, U. (2018, July 13). About Playing Multiple Instruments. Retrieved from
http://www.musical-u.com/learn/about-playing-mul

Nes, I., KheltonHeadley, Milton, M., Evans, W., Boyen, & Stermitz, T. (1968, January 01).
Learning 3 instruments at a time. Retrieved from https://thesession.org/discussions/39301

White, A. (n.d.). Jumping Into Multiple Instruments. Retrieved from

https://www.awsom.info/blog/2016/7/29/jumping-into-multiple-instruments

Elephant journal. (2012, September 02). Eight Benefits of Learning to Play Multiple Instruments.
~ Suzy St. George. Retrieved from https://www.elephantjournal.com/2012/09/eight-benefits-of-
learning-to-play-multiple-instruments-suzy-st-george/