My high school orchestra teacher had a huge impact on my life. And it wasn't just because he was an outstanding conductor. According to my older siblings, the orchestra teacher before him was so awful that the higher-talent orchestra, the one you had to audition for, sounded like crap.
Then Mr. Robertson came along, and he turned both levels of orchestra around so hard that you'd barely recognize it was from the same school. The lower-level orchestra sounded better than the higher-level one did under the old conductor.
In my time as his student, he set a five-year goal for himself as a conductor: to bring an orchestra to State Festivals that would bring in 1s across the board. (For those who aren't familiar, 1 is the highest rating you can achieve. There are five categories, each rated 1-5, and then your total score is averaged.)
He pulled that off in one year.
Oh, and he does this awesome Kermit the Frog impression that's really accurate and always good for a laugh.
So yeah. Mr. Robertson is a phenomenal conductor.
But to me, he was so much more than an orchestra teacher. He managed to intertwine long-lasting life lessons with teaching music. Sure, you could argue that music
is a long-lasting part of your life, and I'd agree with you, but Mr. Robertson's teachings were far more than that. It's been almost five years since I had him as a teacher, and yet some of the things he said still resonate in my life today. Oh, and due to schedule conflicts, I haven't even played my viola in over a year - and yet, my high school string teacher's lessons still affect my every day life.
So what was it about these lessons that stuck with me? Was it just "hard work pays off, practice makes perfect, music is life"? Well, yes. But it was so, so much more than that.
Practice Makes Permanent
We've all heard it before. "Practice makes perfect!" Encouraging all people to practice whatever it is that they want to do, so that one day they'll be great at it. Mr. Robertson used to tell us this. But over time, as he consistently heard the same people making mistakes or playing out of tune, he realized that the saying is wrong.
He drew us a little diagram with a target where your finger should go on the string for a note. Obviously, you want to hit the "bullseye" every time so that you play in tune. Then he drew the same target again, only with dots all over the place; this is the diagram of a person who doesn't practice and is sometimes sharp, sometimes flat, and rarely in tune. But then he drew another diagram, and that one represented someone who consistently hits the note wrong, but always in the same place on the string. It was then that he said this to us: "Practice makes permanent."
If you practice something very often, but are always practicing it
wrong, you are never going to magically get it right one day. You must practice something correctly in order for practice to make you perfect.
But if you practice something incorrectly, all you're doing is making your mistakes permanent.
Nickle and Diming
This one is a little more commonly known about, but it was the first time I actually heard the phrase. One day, we just kept talking. I don't even remember what we kept talking about - probably business things, like practice charts, upcoming performances, songs we'd like to play; I imagine we birdwalked a little and ended up talking about pop culture or something as well. Maybe we talked about our school and the way it worked. I don't even know. In any case, we would play a little, talk a little, play a little, and talk some more. Our school had block scheduling, so each class period was 90 minutes long. This was both good and bad; it was a nice, long period, but it also kind of made you feel like you had all the time in the world. So you birdwalk and talk about non-class things, you stop playing for 3 minutes at a time in a music class, and you think there's still plenty of time to rehearse the next song, and all of a sudden the bell is ringing and everybody has to rush around to pack up their instruments and make it to the next class on time.
So, as we're taking another chat break, Mr. Robertson brings up the phrase nickel and diming. When you spend 5 cents or 10 cents at a time, you don't think anything of it, but suddenly after a few weeks you realize you're out $50. If you waste time a few minutes at a time, you think you'll be fine, but after a whole day you realize you've probably lost about 1-2 hours of work time.
Don't nickel and dime your time away or you'll end up missing out on something important.
Once Means You Were Lucky; Twice Means You Can Do It Again
This is probably one of my favorite teaching techniques of Mr. Robertson's. Occasionally, if there was a particualrly difficult section in a piece, he would go section-by-section or even person-by-person to make sure everyone could do it. First violins, play measures 8-12 for me. Try it again. There you go, you got it! Try it once more. Awesome. Second violins, you're having a really hard time with measures 15-18. Let's have each person play them. Great Amanda, you got it! Try it again. Yes! Good job!
Whenever you're struggling with something, you practice it. If you get it once, that's great, but you might have just been lucky. Maybe your fingers stumbled in the right direction this time, or maybe you fell but landed perfectly by chance.
Whatever you're doing, when you get it right, do it again to make sure you actually know what you're doing. And if you can do it a third time, that means you've really got it down.
On a related note...
When You Perfect Something That You Were Struggling With, You Not Only Grow As A Musician, You Grow As A Person
This was another thing Mr. Robertson would tell us to encourage us to practice. If there's a few measures, a whole section, or an entire piece that you just can't play, you play it over and over again until you can get it right. And when you've finally conquered those notes, you know you've gotten better at it, which means you've grown as a musician. This piece used to be hard for you, but now it's easy. But you also grow as a person.
Something used to be hard, and now you made it easy. You can feel more confident in yourself knowing that you're good enough to learn, grow, and fix your mistakes.
Cheating On Something Is Only Cheating Yourself
Because it was high school, we had to have grades from written things. Rather than assign us bullshit papers or worksheets, we simply had to turn in weekly practice charts, signed by a parent, to show that we've been practicing. Easy enough if you actually practice when your parents are home to hear you. But what about people who don't practice? They either don't turn in practice charts, which lowers their grade (and come on, who doesn't get an A in orchestra?), or they forge their parent's signature and lie about practicing.
Obviously, Mr. Robertson didn't care enough to prove it by calling parents and asking them if their kid was actually practicing. But, to discourage lying and encourage practicing, he warned us that the only person we're cheating is ourself. Yeah, we get a grade that we don't deserve, but in lying about practicing, we've cheated ourselves out of getting better as musicians.
So if you're on a diet, but you
really want that doughnut, go ahead and eat it and don't report it to your calorie tracker app. But who loses in that scenario? The app, which knows nothing but the numbers you give it; or the person who eats an extra 350 calories?
Cheating on tests is risky, because if you get caught you could get expelled or suspended. But if you do cheat, and you don't get caught, who loses out? The teacher who got one pulled over them, the kid you cheated off of who actually knew the material, or you, who only learned that the answer to number 6 was D?
Never cheat or take the easy way out. The only person who is truly cheated is you, and there's no point.
So, Mr. Robertson, I don't know if you'll ever read this or hear about it, but thank you. You taught me how to be a better viola player, and in doing so you taught me how to be a better person. My life is better having been touched by yours, and I hope that your future students will realize just how lucky they are to have you as a teacher.
