A friend with long experience working for and around the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival (that king of festivals) has been put in charge of marketing a fascinating new business. WorkshopLive proposes to revolutionize on-line music lessons when it goes live this Fall. You wheel up to your computer with your guitar or trumpet or whatever and wend your way through personalized lessons with well-known players, accessed through a home page of your own construction. The company that’s raising money for this venture already has years and years experience running a national network of music camps and publishing instructional books. There, for a price, you can sit down face to face with Pat Metheny or Adian Legg (trust me that’s a very good thing) and get a sort of master class with no performance pressure. Transferring that experience to the broadband on-line universe is fraught with challenges. But they’re promising they’re breaking hours of in-house instructional video into about 10,000 lessons – little packets of ideas that one can try out, study and master. They’ve got most in-demand genres covered, and I can vouch for their marketing chief anyway. He loves his music. It’s clear talking to him that this whole venture is as much mission-driven as entrepreneurial.
Music lessons need revolutionizing. There’s scarcely a more diffuse, random hodge-podge business in America. Make no mistake. There are thousands of really fantastic music teachers out there, working both freelance and in schools, even some of those guys who take teenagers into depressing closets at the local music mega-store and try to teach them to play like Flea in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But it’s also clear that many of the people who claim to give music lessons, in every genre, are ineffective at best and, distressingly often, discouraging to the very impulse that brought the kid there in the first place. Most parents aren’t going to have any way to figure out who’s good and who’s bogus. Most people who take music lessons quit, and yet most people take that as a sign of how busy people get and not an indicator of poor pedagogy.
Sure, pursuing music past those awkward years and into adulthood seems like an indulgence to some people. And no, it’s not everybody’s thing. But I’ve been convinced for years that a vast percentage of Americans would be happier and more fulfilled if they actually made music with others on a weekly basis. And how many of those folks narrowly missed their window of opportunity because of a lousy teacher, either overly dogmatic or overly indulgent, too square or too arrogantly hip, too poorly trained themselves or just too flaky to really nurture that frustrating, dynamic, hyper-stimulated being that is the modern teenager?
I’ve hunted for good data on the overall effectiveness of music lessons in
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