The Side Effects of Teaching Music

If you are relatively new here, you will probably not know that I have a quite long history of teaching music online. For many years I have been giving private lessons over Skype to students from all around the world and have written a "Daily Filmscoring Bit" on my personal web site for more than 10 years before making the move to Patreon in early 2020.

So teaching music in one way or the other has always been a part of my professional life. 

It started out as a pure financial neccessity back in the times when my work as composer and orchestrator wasn't as steady as it is now. Having a fixed income each month that you can count on really helps to take pressure off your mind and allows you the benefit to not needing to accept every underpaid gig (which when being selective about your work has a lot of other benefits for your career).

I have been fortunate enough to having built a career by now that doesn't require me to teach anymore but as you're reading this, I'm obviously still doing it. So here are my reasons why I think that every composer should at one time in their life teach music, and my reasons why teaching can be really annoying.

One thing that I always had a big problem with when teaching actual lessons was the need to be on time. Generally, the fact that I knew that I had to teach at let's say 2pm each Wednesday really made that day of the week rather unuseable for me. In the morning I wouldn't start anything big as I would need to teach soon anyway and after the lesson(s) it was too late to start work again. The fact of needing to be mentally completely present and communicative independently of whether I had things to do that I felt to be more important or simply didn't feel like talking to someone at that moment really stressed me quite a bit. 

I know for people who work 9-5 jobs a rigid schedule usually is part of their every day life but I have never worked a 9-5 job in my life and am used to organizing the day in the way that I like to and not how a clock dictates me. This rigid schedule of teaching really annoyed me a lot and it took up a big portion of my days. So as soon as I didn't need that money anymore, I decided to not take on any more new students and just let the ones that I still had finish the course on their own terms.

The other really annoying thing about teaching lessons was that many times, you simply would repeat the content of a lesson more or less exactly just to explain it again to that new student. While of course there is no way around this in this constellation, it really felt like I'm wasting my life repeating things over and over again.

Fortunately, I only had students who really wanted to learn and were eager to improve as they were all paying for the lessons as I feel I would really get massively annoyed by teaching someone who doesn't really show any interest in what I'm telling.

And yes, I know that all these points are every day's business of a regular school teacher who don't whine about it as I do here, and yet, these things were really frustrating for me.

And yes, I had the occasional first lessons with new students where I really thought to myself "What the actual fuck?". People welcoming me in pyjamas laying in their bed ready for sleep or people throwing a tantrum when I asked them questions that they couldn't answer. It was really weird sometimes.

All these points seem to really speak against doing anything like teaching if you can avoid it.

And yet, there are some benefits to it that outweigh all the negative sides for me.

The biggest one is that it helps you immensily to categorize and sort your own musical knowledge. The need to explain a musical concept to someone requires you to be able to formulate the concept to yourself first. If you don't do that, you remain in that "grey knowledge area" where you have a feeling for the concept and somehow can use it but you don't question yourself when you need to figure out why you're doing something the way you're doing it to explain it to someone. Also, teaching helps you to keep knowledge alive that you don't constantly but occasionally need. Trying to remember what that range of that one instrument was because you haven't written for it for a year doesn't happen if you constantly need to teach these things. I really can't stress enough how teaching and explaining things to someone else has helped me to bring my musical understanding of things forward. 

You start to create connections between things that you didn't see when you first learned about something but realize now that you're revisiting it again in order to explain it to someone else. So effectively teaching advances your own craft.

Another striking factor is that it indeed has brought me several jobs beyond teaching. Especially the online content that I put on my website made several people realize that I seemingly knew what I was talking about, hiring me for an orchestration or arrangement job. But also, former students who moved on in their career sometimes hired me to help them out on a project that was maybe still a bit too challenging for them or where they simply needed some reassurance whether what they were doing would work.

And lastly, of course there is that very nice rewarding feeling of helping someone along in their musical career. Seeing former students becoming prolific composers with an impressive portfolio or helping other students to prepare for their application tests at music university and passing it really is a very nice aspect of this whole teaching thing. It feels like you're helping to shape the life path of some people.

And lastly, I do have to admit that I enjoy explaining things to people and I feel like I'm not too bad at that.

What I like about that latest iteration of my teaching path here at Patreon is that it generates some income that compensates a little bit for the time that I invest into it but even more that I am very free at what I want to write about and when I want to write about it. I have been asked to prepare online courses many times or why I don't write a book. The reason for always saying no to these was that all of these would require a huge amount of time that I would need to invest before it would create any "revenue". The freedom of investing a bit of my time every few days to write something about a topic that I was thinking about or felt like it would be interesting as I can do it here on Patreon really gives me all the pros of teaching without the cons.

But of course, that is just me and my personal preferences of how to approach these things.

The bottom line here however should be: teach music for at least a while in your life. It will bring you forward in more ways than you might imagine.