CMEA: You have had an active career in the publishing business, and
yet you have spent most of your career teaching in the public schools. Why
have you continued to work as a teacher?
JS: Well, the books were only possible because I taught. So the writing
is an extension of the teaching. I don't think I could have ever written
a book if I hadn't learned how to teach. Teaching an instrument and taking
somebody from point A to point B is just something you've got to experience
first hand. Once you do that, you write your books in such a way that you're
always thinking of what technique will now be possible. You're constantly
preparing the students to go from one thing to another. There's nothing
more frustrating than to get a book, turn the page, and then suddenly you
say, "Wow, what happened? I was doing great... Did I miss a page or
something? Why is this impossible to play?"
I think teaching kids in school gives you a really strong sense of sequence
and what is possible. And then I think you also try to build in your teaching
(and I try to do this in my books) an option for the kid who immediately
says, "Oh yeah, I get it." He's ready to flip ten pages ahead
or get something more challenging right away. I try to put something in
there that allows that to happen. So sometimes in my books, I'll put in
a challenge page or something that some kids will say "whoa, I'm not
ready for that..." while others will jump on it.
CMEA: One of the things that you're noted for was starting large
group guitar classes in the public schools. How did that come about?
JS: That came about in kind of an interesting way. I was asked one
day to substitute for an evening adult education class that Rudy Foglia
was teaching at San Jose High School. I walked into the music room and there
were 90 people strumming on guitars, and I thought "What is going on
here?" They were having a great time playing all these songs -- mainly
chords, strumming, and different techniques -- and when I got back to school,
I was thinking about how that might work in a high school situation. I talked
to my associate principal and he said "Well, it's too late in the year
to get a new guitar class curriculum approved, but we could offer it as
'music theory - guitar'. We could teach music theory through the guitar
and we could get on the books and do it that way."
That was in the spring of 1968, and we offered the class, and 75 kids signed
up. Soon we had three sections of guitar in the fall of '68. The only part
of the adult education class that I was interested in adding was getting
the kids into more note reading experiences. The guitar classes started
at Piedmont Hills in 1968. Tom Gaudio, my colleague, taught one of the guitar
classes and I taught two of them.
My main interest was to broaden the offerings in music to kids. I wanted
more students involved in music at the high school level. If you performed
or you were a singer, there was a class for you. So I was looking for a
way to expand music. I tried an "Art and Music Survey class" --
team taught -- and introduced a "Music in the Humanities" class.
While they were successful, they still had limited appeal. The guitar classes
brought the kids out in large numbers. We had seven high schools in our
district. The other teachers would say "What's going on at Piedmont
Hills?" The word was getting around. That summer, I was hired by the
district to train the rest of the teachers how to teach those guitar classes.
And guitar went into every high school in 1969. It enabled us to hire a
second music teacher at every high school because of all these sections
of guitar that we were adding. We started it to give kids a hands-on method
to experience music, as opposed to experiencing music via playing recorded
examples or talking about music. With the guitar class, they could learn
harmony by experiencing it.
CMEA: Is that program still in existence? Or did it get hit by Proposition
13?
JS: The guitar program is still in existence. There are seven guitar
classes in the district right now. There seemed to be a resurgence of guitar
coming back into the schools. I noticed when I came back into teaching in
1985 that the situation had changed. Music for the guitar had become more
instrumental in concept. There weren't a lot of simple songs that everybody
could sing. Guitar music used complex chords, and we didn't have Peter,
Paul and Mary, Glenn Campbell, Neil Diamond, John Denver, or Bob Dylan writing
simple songs like they did in the 60's and 70's.
More of the music was instrumental, and I noticed that the classes were
95% boys. So I wrote a new method called Guitar Today from my observation
of what the needs were. I based the new method more on an instrumental approach
to the guitar with less emphasis on accompaniment and singing songs. Now
I'm seeing my classes are almost 50% girls. The girls are coming back into
the class. Some of the kids are singing at a coffee house. It seems like
it's all happening again.
The guitar never went out, but keyboards became the most popular instrument
in the 1980's and early 1990's. We had over thirty sections of keyboard,
and we still have about 22 in the district at the present time. But the
guitar is making its comeback. And there really is a big need out there
to clinic teachers and give them the skills, because the colleges never
really trained the teachers. They responded a little bit, but the teachers
don't feel very confident about teaching the guitar.
CMEA: I know at San Jose State and other state universities that
train music teachers, we never had a mandatory guitar class as part of our
preparation, just classes in orchestra and band instruments.
JS: The guitar just conjures up a problem with a lot of teachers.
They feel they don't play guitar, so they can't teach it. But all of us
can play a lot of instruments. A lot we don't play very well, but we know
the basics. So, when I give workshops for teachers, (I've given over 200
workshops/clinics around the country) I emphasize the classical guitar right-hand
finger-style technique, that can be applied to jazz, folk styles, strumming,
and I also teach them pick style.
We need to look at what's going on in the real world. There is a new playing
technique that merges finger style and pick style. There is no problem selling
the kids on learning both styles because there are so many examples of good
music that they like and popular artists out there who use both styles.
CMEA: Could you elaborate on the style difference a little bit more?
JS: Well, I think basic guitar might be described as learning chords
that have open strings voicings that involve fewer fingers to put down and
that avoid using the fourth finger which is a problem for beginners. So
you learn open chord positions first. These kinds of chords lend themselves
to accompanying songs.
Students also need to learn how to play a lead line -- a single note melody.
Students generally learn the first position on the guitar, and they will
learn to play one note at time. That's a basic bit of knowledge that will
apply no matter where they want to go with it. They might want to pick out
the melody of a song, play classical guitar, or play a lead line in a jazz
ensemble. After you expose students to lead line playing, learning basic
chords is next. Then you begin to show them how chords can be extended;
for example how a D chord can become a D major 7 or a D6. Next you show
them some basic substitutions. Finally you begin to teach them movable chords,
which really opens up their playing -- they get a lot for their money if
they can play movable chords, some form of the bar chords. This gets them
into rhythm guitar, which is going to be what they need to do if they are
going to play in a jazz ensemble. They need to know extended and altered
type of chords.
A third component of basic style would be to introduce scales, get them
working on scales, and sell them on the idea of their value as a means of
improvisation. Show them blues scales and major scales, and how the modes
can be used to play against scales -- how scales are the horizontal expression
of the vertical chord. That gets a lot of kids excited about being the composer
or the improviser.
The guitar is at home in a variety of styles. It is the most popular instrument
in the world. The guitar just lends itself to all kinds of popular, classical,
and Latin styles of music. There are just so many wonderful players doing
major things.
CMEA: If I was a young guitar player, and interested in getting started,
or becoming more involved in the business, what advice would you give me?
What do I need to know these days? It used to be that if you were a popular
song writer, you could basically jam a few chords and figure out a tune,
and if you could sing, you could put together material for an album, and
then everything else was handled for you. But that doesn't seem to be the
case any more these days with so much competition and the fact that the
music industry has changed quite a bit. A lot of the production work comes
from independents -- people that are producing their own compact disks and
things like that. What kind of preparation would I need to have if I was
going to be involved with this as a guitar player.
JS: I think being versatile would be a good way to approach the guitar.
The more versatile you are, the more possible situations where you could
make some money at it might pop up. If you can play a variety of styles
you will be able to work. The full time musicians that I know who play guitar
might be playing a jazz band one weekend, and a salsa band another night,
or they might be playing at a wedding during the day. If they learn how
to play bass or sing vocals, that opens up some additional doors. If you're
going to specialize in classical guitar, then you need to find a teacher
you can work with and really focus in on that. I've got some students that
have gone into flamenco guitar, and they've found some good teachers, and
they're really pursuing that.
Finding a good teacher privately in the style that you want to pursue is
important. You may have to go to several different teachers to learn different
things, because it's not always one person that's going to know everything.
You shop around and keep adding to your skills.
CMEA: What if I just wanted to be a rock guitar player?
JS: Rock guitar, a lot of that I think comes from getting really
excited about some group that you want to emulate. That's probably where
it starts. Then you get into power chords and you get into the rock scale.
You begin to write some things yourself and it might, after a point, tend
to get repetitious to you and you might start to want to investigate more
complex chord structures or chord progressions.
But if you are going to be a rock player today, you should work on technique
-- a lot of the rock players have fantastic techniques -- they know how
to get around lead-line-wise and hammering-on-wise, tapping. There are just
so many techniques that they can get into -- sweeping; they really need
to study how to do that, and tapping with their right hand while playing
with their left hand seems to be style that players can get into. There
are some unique techniques that they use. You need to know how to set-up
your guitar. It has got to be set up completely differently from a jazz
guitar. The action has got to be low, the gauge of the strings has to be
lighter, just your total set up -- the amplifier, how you're going to set
up your amp, you need to learn about the effects you might want to incorporate,
fuzz tones, delays, reverb, and distortions. There's just a whole bunch
of stuff going on for the rock guitarist.
CMEA: Coinciding with that, there's been a real great resurgence
of blues guitar in this country. It's gotten much stronger that I ever remember
it being, and there's a lot more interest in that. What about somebody who
is interested in learning the blues style?
JS: I had an opportunity to do a book with B. B. King. I interviewed
him back in 1978 and put a book together with him. In order to interview
him, I had to do my homework. So I did a lot of listening and really got
into his music and he told me "you got inside my head." I had
good questions for him. I still have all the cassettes of all that interview
, and the book I put together. I think what I learned from him is that the
blues is a lot of different things. It's not sad, necessarily, it's not
always a tragedy or anything. It's a definite style; it's a definite feeling.
There's a lot of musical pathos -- just a lot of musical expression. There
are certain things that you do in the blues style where you bend the strings.
Like a jazz musician may play a flat third, but a blues guitarist will bend
to some of these intervals -- will bend the strings up. And sometimes you'll
purposely just kind of get in the crack, like a singer. So there's those
kinds of techniques, and there's an extensive use of the blues scale in
various songs and singing is a big important part of it.
CMEA: Let's talk a little bit about notation and guitar. This has
always been a controversial subject in some ways. Some guitarists come up
and say, "Well, I just refuse to do anything but read tablature"
and you say "But you really need to learn how to read notes so you
can communicate with the rest of the music world." And other people
say "I don't want to even deal with that. I want to be on the level
of musical communication where I don't need notation." So where do
you stand on this issue? Where do you think things are going?
JS: Well, I think a guitar player needs to know every system that
exists out there for guitar notation. Tablature has a history that if you
play lute, you're still dealing with a system of tablature called cifra.
It tells you exactly where on the guitar to play something. Unfortunately,
it doesn't contain the rhythmic elements of a song. Some publishers have
desperately tried to put some rhythm above it. There was a series of books
that came out using this idea that were somewhat helpful. A lot of the tab
today puts the regular music notation above the tab, and I think most of
the people who use tab, come to it with either a recording that they have
in mind, or they have the sound, and they're just looking for where to play
it on the guitar. I introduced tab as a system of notation, but then I point
out that it has serious limitations. If you aren't familiar with the song,
you're just going to have a heck of a time figuring it out.
Unless you know a little bit about the rhythm of the song, it's impossible
to include right hand techniques in it. So I bring the kids back to the
realization that standard notation has got to be part of their knowledge
and they at least need to be able understand all the various note rhythms
and at least be able to play the notes in first position.
The guitar has a unique problem, well not totally unique because string
players have this situation also, but a trumpet play can play G on the second
line pretty much one way. Whereas a guitar player can play that note in
four different places. So, this makes it confusing for guitar players. If
you have something really complex, you've got to consider the position you
might want to play it in -- the left hand fingering. So you can't really
become a great sight reader on chord solos. You can get pretty good at reading
single lines.
Anyway, I think all musicians need to read music, guitar players need to
be familiar with all of the different styles. They need to know when they
pick up a jazz chart that probably the guy who wrote the arrangement is
clueless about what the guitar player is suppose to do, and you have to
fix things all the time. So you need to be a musician, you need to play
chord voicings that resolve correctly, yet be out of the way of the bass
player. You're dealing with that notation which is more interpretive. It's
like the drummer in a jazz band -- if you played what was on the chart,
it would be so square. So you've got to be an interpretive musician.
But then, like all musicians, you've got to be a good ear player. You've
got to be grooving with the rhythm section in a band. So you've got to be
listening. You should be a person who can improvise and take a solo. I think
even symphony musicians should be able to play by ear and improvise at some
point. You can't just be note bound. I think you're a better musician if
you can play by ear as well as play by note.
Both an advantage and a disadvantage is the fact that the guitar lends itself
to improvisation in many styles: folk, jazz, rock, blues, etc. There are
sounds you can create on the guitar that standard music notation is limited
to create. The advantage is that guitarists become creative in playing the
guitar "by ear". The disadvantage is that many guitarists never
get very good at reading music. Of course, classical guitarists must work
on these skills. Everyone needs to be able to read a lead line.
CMEA: Maybe you could talk about that a little bit more. For instance,
in keyboard, we're doing a lot of the same things but we get two staves
for notation. If you look at classical guitar notation, especially, it's
very difficult to read because you're trying to do everything in one clef
and one staff. Has there been any movement to change that or is it a tradition
too hard to fight in music?
JS: There was a person named Johnny Smith who published his
method in treble and bass clef. Guitar notation is a transposing notation.
The E on the fourth space of the treble clef sounds an octave below. But
Johnny Smith said the guitar should be written on the bass clef. It should
spill over to the treble clef; it should be like a piano. So he has written
a method about that, but it never caught on. Nobody else has jumped on the
band wagon. All of the music that I normally see is notated on the treble
clef sounding an octave lower.
CMEA: Are most writers pretty careful about that? From time to time,
you'll see guitar parts clearly written in the wrong octave, just more convenience
than anything else, I guess.
JS: Well, when you get to a lot of ledger lines, an easier way to
notate would be to write in the lower octave and then mark it "8va
higher". The guitar player should be expected to play anything in any
octave. That's one of the skills you try to make students aware of -- you
should be able to transpose anything an octave above or an octave below.
The other thing, when I started working as a guitar editor for Hansen Publications
in 1971, I noticed there was a big discrepancy in the way even classical
guitar music is written. For instance, just in writing stem directions --
it's very inaccurate when you see an arpeggiated type of figure, implying
that we let all the notes ring, but it's not written that way. It looks
like you're going "do-mi-sol-mi-do" and it's suppose to be all
be ringing, There's a way to write it to make it look like that, but it
can get so busy looking, with ties and everything. And there are other times
when a rest means stop the bass note from ringing. There are Segovia studies
that, you know, they're not correct if you let the bass note continue to
ring and give a fourth beat, when it should be stopped with the thumb. Some
of those things, you just don't know until you go study with a good teacher.
CMEA: You said that a guitarist who is aspiring to the business should
be able to read notation and should understand tab. What are some of the
other musical training skills that are very important? If I wanted to be
a professional guitar player, what else do I have to know? Do I need to
go to college and get a degree or can I learn through experience? Didn't
most of the guitar players that made it in the professional world just go
out and get gigs and learn that way?
JS: Well there are a lot of places where guitarists can go and major
in guitar. Back in 1968, when I first introduced the guitar in the high
school, the Peabody Institute was about the only place you could be a guitar
major. Classes on the guitar were available here and there, but very limited.
Now there are guitar majors offered all over the place. The emphasis at
the university seems to be on the classical guitar. There's a graduate of
San Jose State here, Daniel Roest, he's a classical guitarist, and
he's a very sought after soloist and works with duos, plays all the time.
He's also involved with South Bay Classical Guitar Society. He learned not
only his guitar ability, but learned marketing skills, how to market himself,
how to open up the doors. He needed to be able to get an audition tape together
and portfolio showing what he could do, and start marketing himself.
There are places like the Berklee School of Music in Boston where
there are 600 guitar majors, and one wonders what they're all going to be
doing. A lot of them come back to the Bay Area and they're playing shows
or teaching privately. Some of them work at other occupations, doing something
else that can make them very good money, but are still keeping their feet
wet in the guitar world.
CMEA: So, in other words, you think it's important, that somewhere
along the line, a young guitarist gets some training in some business skills
-- marketing, developing portfolios, maybe learning how to record something.
JS: I think all those skills will help. He also needs a knowledge
of song writing, copyright laws, and recording skills. I think a musician
these days needs to be able to pursue playing, writing, teaching, and recording;
just be knowledgeable about all these things. If you're a super star, you
can afford to just play. But there aren't that many people that just can
rely on their ability to play. You need to be able to do other things too.
CMEA: Let's get back to some things about your own career. How did
you find the time to balance the demands of publishing, getting gigs, with
the demands of a teacher? How do you find the time to schedule all of this
stuff without one suffering as a result of the other?
JS: Well, I don't know where you want me to start on that. The present
time? What's going on now? Okay, well in the present time, I'm a teacher
for four periods and I'm the Performing Arts coordinator for the high school
district. I get a whole period to do that. (laughs) So, my job between September
and June is the teaching job and the coordinating job.
During the school year, if the San Jose Symphony needs me to come
in for a performance, I do that. I play a few solo, duo, and trio jobs here
and there. If time permits, I like to do those things. But most of the time,
something going on at school. So school is the number one thing. During
the summer is when I have the time to do some writing. Maybe during the
year, I'll get the project going on the weekends -- kind of think about
what it is I'm going to have time to do and kind of outline it -- and then
when the end of the school year comes, I'll jump into the project. It kind
of depends on what the project is. Sometimes I can do some of it during
school year if it's an arranging project. I did a book on classical guitar
and a book on wedding music for the guitars; these were projects that I
could just work on now and then.
But my first job is the teaching job, and second is getting the publishing
projects out. Then I like to get out there and experience what it feels
like to be a gigging musician, working under a conductor, or playing in
a group. It keeps me buying equipment or updating, just keeping up with
what's going on out there. One kind of compliments the other, because I
can take the experiences I have in my playing back to school and share those
with the kids, and I can tell them about the other kinds of opportunities
that are open to them in music.
For instance, after going to the National Association of Music Merchants
convention, I can come back and tell students about all the people that
are a success now, and not necessarily as players, but all the other things
that they come up with. How Ernie Ball, for instance, decided it's
ridiculous that you couldn't buy a second string - you had to buy a complete
set of strings. So he started his business by making strings available separately
in different gauges. Now he's got Music Man, and sells all kinds of guitar
equipment. So there's always somebody that just sees a need because he's
experienced it as a musician. "Why can't I buy a second string?"
All of a sudden, he responds to that need, and he's a businessman.
I tell the students there are a lot of music related jobs out there that
are interesting. I have a guitar student who was a music major at San Jose
State, and he's now working for a computer company that's doing things with
Silicon Graphics. His job is recording commercials, working with companies
at conventions, and putting together multi-media presentations. Because
of his background in music, all of his experience in gigging, and his composing
ability, he got himself a real good job. So I think musicians should be
really on top of the technology thing. They should know MIDI and all the
guitar players need to get into improvements in guitar synthesizers and
things like that. They need to know the new technology; it could open up
a lot of doors.
CMEA: I'd like to follow up on technology. A lot of guitar players
have complained about using guitars to input MIDI data. Do you think it's
good for a guitar player to play keyboard also?
JS: I bought a guitar synthesizer that's made in Australia. It was
the best thing on the market at the time. I think there are new improvements
now. I haven't really found that I use it that much. I tend to go back to
laying down guitar tracks on my tape recorder, a bass track and then going
back to the jazz band to make an improvisation tape. I do it the old fashioned
way. The disadvantage being that I can't change the recording to any tempo.
I usually record a fast and slow version.
A keyboard background is good for anybody on any instrument. To have some
knowledge of the keyboard is really important, I think. The delay on the
guitar synthesizer has been the main thing. You strike a string and there
would be a delay. They have improved that. I'm not really on top of or could
recommend what's the best one out there yet. The guitar is now able to do
some MIDI stuff in real time without the delay thing. Try out products and
see what you think. Check out the Roland guitar synthesizer.
CMEA: So you think something eventually will become the industry
standard, but is not really there yet?
JS: Not really there yet.
CMEA: What advice would you give to school music teachers about the
guitar. For instance, I have a situation where I have a guitar player in
my jazz band, and I'll say "Don't you know what this chord is?"
and we can look it up in the chord book, but it has nothing to do with what
should really be played. I look at these jazz band charts, and even the
simpler ones have really tough guitar parts.
JS: Probably the best advise you could give a student would be to
thin out the chord. You've got to, in a lot of cases, play non-root versions
of the chords. You've got to lose a sixth string almost all the time. On
the guitar, say from fret 1 to 5, you probably can play a lot of good sounding
voicings for rhythm guitar on the first four strings. When you get from
the fifth fret on up, you probably do not want the high first string sounding,
and you're going to play voicings that fit on the fifth, fourth, third,
and second strings, avoiding the first and sixth strings.
You can even play three string chords on, say, the fifth fret on up, where
you just play the second third and fourth string. Less is better. You need
to go for the sound of the chord and a lot of times, a guitar player can
play the upper part of the chord, leave out the root. Get out of the way
of the bass player; the bass player will love you for getting out of his
way.
There are too many books that present all ten-thousand-and-one chords, and
really, you need a book that shows you how the chords work, and how to resolve
them from one or the other. When I was the editor for Hansen, I met Warren
Nunes, a great jazz guitarist. We worked together, and we did a book
called Rhythm and Background Chords. He's gone ahead and done some
books called Comp Chords. The main thing is learning how to use these
chords, and to use different types of chords for a jazz band then you would
for when you're the only chord instrument in a band.
I think you just tell kids about getting off the lower strings, and try
to play in a range or register that's more medium, where you're not going
too high or too low. Find a spot that will blend in with the rest of the
band.
CMEA: How do you advise teachers to help their guitar players map
out actual performance strategy? For instance, in a fairly complicated blues
progression, the chart will have some altered chords and flat ninth chords.
Then you look at the kid, and he's trying to do it all over the frets instead
of using logical voice leading. Then when you watch a professional guitar
player, it seems rather effortless, because the fingers tend to all be in
this medium range you talked about. How do you help somebody figure that
out?
JS: If you don't play guitar, then you go to the keyboard and you
help them notice that the B flat in a C7 chord resolves nicely to the A
in the F chord, and that the E of the C7 chord moves up to the F. Try to
make them aware of how chords naturally want to resolve. On a guitar, you've
got to do that too. That's why you can get away with just playing three-string
chords. If you're playing the third and the seventh, and you're making it
resolve to a chord that you're going to, a major chord or a minor chord,
it sounds complete, because the bass player is catching the bass line.
So all you need to do is catch the main part of the chord which is the third
and seventh. You can sound great. So, you go to the keyboard and show the
kids the natural resolution of the chord; your ear can really follow, and
that's what you try to do. You've got to get into some theory of how chords
resolve, and then try to learn the voicings that allow you to do that. There
are books out there that cover that.
CMEA: One of the things that's very important for any guitarist at
any age, is to continually be listening to the repertoire, recordings, and
to other people. Who were some of your main influences?
JS: As I grew up, I was listening to Johnny Smith and Tal
Farlow. I was attracted to the guitar because I could hear it as a miniature
orchestra. When I heard Joe Pass the first time, I thought here's
this guy playing finger style electric guitar...that's what I want to do.
I want to be able to play these chord solos. These early guys are important:
Joe Pass could do it all. Wes Montgomery is another all time great.
He could not only play the things that he became noted for -- playing those
octaves -- but he was a great single line player and chord soloist. Wes
Montgomery's album "Road Song" has a lot of great tunes.
Check out Django Reinhart; I wasn't that familiar with him as a kid
growing up. I began to hear about Charlie Christiansen who was a
guitarist with Benny Goodman, so I got into the history of the electric
guitar, and how he had the first amplifier. Your sense of history helps
to guide you through all of these people, then you come into what's going
on now, and there's just so many great guitarists.
I like Elliot Fisk, a classical guitarist. His technique is just
astounding. He plays a Paganini caprice, you can't believe is possible.
It's a composition that's impossible to play by most violinists, and here
he can play it on the guitar. There are people that are achieving things
that nobody knew were even possible.
Locally, I studied with Tuck Andress (from Tuck and Patty). I was
drawn to him because he makes a guitar - he plays these great bass lines
while comping with the right hand -- sound like an entire orchestra. Then
he comes back and hits the strings and gives you the back beat like the
high-hat of a drum set. Michael Hedges does some interesting things
on acoustic guitar; different tunings and so on ... there are just so many
people out there. Al Dimeola.
Top ten recordings? I like a variety of styles. You have to check out the
artists and see what's out there. Certainly, if you're going to go into
classical guitar, then you're going to check out Segovia and right
through Elliot Fisk who was respected so much by Segovia, that his former
wife has him coming out to look at his estate, music. Christopher Parkening
has wonderful recordings.
Then when you get into finger picking and country-style guitar, another
guy I was really excited about, was Chet Atkins. There's a finger
picking style that Merle Travis started called two-finger-picking,
that leads to a solo guitar style that has this rag-time feel, with an on-going
bass.
CMEA: Anything else you'd like to say?
JS: The guitar has a lot of possibilities. Guitar students are not
different from anybody else. I hear some teachers say "Oh, those guitar
kids are different." I found the difference is that maybe they're more
individualistic about their music; it's more personal. They're not a member
of a band; they don't want to march anywhere. And they don't necessarily
want be in an ensemble. They want to do their own thing. A lot of them write
music and are very creative.
My clarinet section in the school band aren't composing music like the number
of kids in a guitar class. Because it's a chordal instrument, guitarists
get into writing. Many times, when I am teaching all this theory to a guitar
class, I'm thinking "How can I get my band and orchestra students to
get into this? Why don't I have more kids in band composing and writing
like all these kids in the guitar class?"
I think the guitar class in the school opens your eyes to the fact that
we aren't reaching all the kids and we're not giving enough creative opportunities
to our traditional classes: that is, the chance to compose, to write, and
to individually express themselves. In a guitar class, everybody is learning
notation, how chords work, and a right hand technique that's legitimate.
They also listen to a variety of music. The goal is to inspire students
to continue to grow and investigate music for the rest of their lives.
The Guitar Page is a service of the Bay Section of the California Music Educators Association.