This is a complaint. A complaint about teachers. In particular, teachers of musical instruments, especially piano, but more than that.

Here’s the nature of my complaint. But before I give you the basis of the complaint, answer this question:

Which group of teachers has the highest failure rate?

If you answered public school teachers, you’d be close, but not close enough.

If you answered Seminary professors you might also be close, but again, not close enough.

Maybe you thought of college professors in general. And while you might have some basis for this, you would not even be close.

Here’s my answer. Music teachers!

These are the teachers who offer to teach your child an instrument – piano, violin, flute, cello, clarinet, guitar, harp – you name it.

But look at how many students take music lessons then quit as soon as they are teenagers.

Now they would probably quit Math and English classes if they could, too. But music is one subject that mom and dad say is optional.

But the fact that it’s optional is not why the kids quit.

They quit because they can’t play the instrument.

After 5 or 7 or even 10 years of lessons, the child is still struggling to get his hands and fingers around around a musical instrument and play a piece of music – any piece – from beginning to end, without faltering.

What an achievement! Most kids love to do this, and when they can do it in their primary years (ages 8-12, approx), they delight in their skill levels and have a sense of achievement.

But how many primary students reach this level of ability? If you take all the instrumental teachers in a given location, and find out how many actually have their students achieve this level of competence, you’ll be surprised. The number is not high. How do I know? Because it doesn’t matter whether it’s Brisbane-Australia, Ashland-Ohio, or Atlanta-Georgia, I’ve ended up with students who play poorly. And they play poorly because they’ve been taught badly.

Well, I’ve had enough. I’m not taking any more basket cases. It’s too hard on me and too hard on the student to fix the problems. The fixes rarely happen, no matter how “talented” the child is.

Most music students fail. And fail miserably. And it is not their fault. The fault lies directly with the teacher. And here’s why.

My instrument is piano. I’ve struggled over many years to understand music in general — and the physiology necessary for the instrument, so that a piece of music can be played in a particular manner. You can’t have one without the other.

When God planned the human body, he interlaced a number of muscles and tendons to allow certain movements. Misuse of those muscles results in unnecessary tension, sometimes in other parts of the body.

Try this: Hold your arm out in front of you, elbow sitting just near your waist.Now bend your wrist back as fair as it will go, so your hand is pointing upwards, at about 90 degrees to your wrist.

Now, try to move your fingers. The more you pull that hand backwards at the wrist, the hard it will be for you to move your fingers. Simple. Any health care professional will tell you this is the response of stretching the muscles in the upper arm that pull the wrist back. The finger muscles flow along your forearm, so pulling the higher muscles tight affects the ability of the lower muscles to move easily.

Keeping your arm where it is, let your hand flop downwards, and now try to move your fingers. Any difference? There ought to be.

Next time you watch a child struggling at the piano, take a look at how his or her wrist is flexing. If the wrist is below the level of the keys, the wrist will flex backwards, putting pressure on the finger muscles, and preventing freedom of movement.

Piano playing really is not difficult. There are only two things a student has to learn. Music is a series of sounds produced by pressing keys on the piano. Those sounds are of two kinds: some sounds a joined, while other sounds are separated.

The separation of the sounds is a technique composers use just like painters and drawers. These folk often want to highlight something in their painting, so that it stands out. If you were to pain a green tree on a green hill, the tree will not stand out so much unless you highlight it in some form. This could be different color, making it a darker or lighter green, or highlighting with a darker green or even a different color altogether. It is the mixing of opposites and shading those opposites that make things stand out.

In music, the opposite to sound is silence. Or it could be a softer sound, a louder sounds, or a different color sound, produced by different instrument.

So the student of an instrument cannot produce the sound of another instrument on this one, but he can do some things to highlight. He can put silence between notes to create effect.

So the poor piano student just needs guidance on which movement is necessary at this point. Is he to join sounds, or separate them. The latter option requires his hand to come off the keys so that the sound stops. Silence.

This is referred to as staccato – an Italian word, often mistranslated as ‘short’. The French equivalent is detache – detached. The translation ‘short’ often misleads inexperienced musicians to cut long notes short, when the composer clearly wants silence between the notes. ‘Short’ is not the same as ‘shorter’, or ‘not so long’.

Understanding neither the physiology of the philosophy of music and its historic origins and how composition developed to provides “performance instructions” to the performer, leads music teachers astray.

As a result, they screw up the physiology, make piano playing hard work, with the outcome that most pieces of moderate to difficult level cannot be played. The student doesn’t have the ‘technique’ to perform the piece the way it should be played.

Well, kids aren’t stupid. Why would they practice one piece of music for 6 months, still not have it anywhere near what it should sound like, when they can go and kick a football or play with a basketball. It seems a whole lot easier than trying to struggle with Chopin’s Etudes, or Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos.

All because the piano teacher does not know how to have the student do two simple things: join sounds or separate sounds — the easy way.

A recent visit to our home by friends wanted to display their child’s skill at the piano. What did I think? The teacher has not a clue what he is doing, and that’s why the student was jamming her hand and fingers in the most grotesque position to show me what they could do.

The ignorance of parents allows a situation to continue that wastes parent’s money, the students time, and ends up in discouragement and another adult who always wished they could play but never made it.

If you’re one of those, then stop blaming yourself. And find a teacher who knows what they are doing.

This is a fundamental problem of allowing the inexperienced and unlearned to become teachers. The education system of the day is very quick to make students experts. They become critics of the greatest writers, artists, and poets. They may be asked to write a critique of Shakespeare, or analyze what’s wrong with a Fugue by George Frederick Handel. Not that the students are capable of writing one any better; but they will be asked to be critical.

I am reminded of the comment that there no statues of critics — anywhere. Nor are there any statues of the teachers who teach this nonsense.

If you think this is bad, consider this. I had supper last night with my client and his son – architects. They specialize in designing buildings that don’t leak, and the father spends many hours as an expert witness in court case where another architect is getting sued because the building leaked. Over supper, they told me how the college courses do not equip students with design skills. The courses are certainly entertaining as teacher and student explore aesthetics and other esoteric matters. They are taught drawing, but not design. Consequently, the students cannot design a building that will withstand the elements of the weather.

So a poor music educator, or a poor language teacher is one thing. But to have instructors who cannot get our architects to build a building that will protect has serious ramifications. Such as when a bridge collapsed recently in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

God bless you this week.

In the first part of this discussion topic, I highlighted the feminization of culture with hymns. Here, I want to look at music.

If your life is similar to mine, then we’ve both spent an awful amount of time trying to make up for a bad education. Public schooling was my background. It was not good. Here’s why. Being hostile to Christianity, public school secular education left out anything that might point to God. That, according to St. Paul in Romans chapter one, is most of the creation.

Now it is through the arts that the secularization and feminization of culture has received one of its strongest influences. I was never taught this at school, though. Based on faulty philosophy and faulty conclusions, education began the “dumbing down” process which continues today.

Consider this:

“Every melody, every rhythm, and every instrument has its own peculiar effect on the moral nature of man and of the state. Good music promotes the well-being of the res publica while bad music destroys it; therefore good and useful music is closely bound to and determined by the norms of moral conduct. This is emphasized by the same word, nomos, for correct musical ‘harmony’ and logic, and for the moral, social, and political laws of the state.” (Paul Henry Lang, Music in Western Civilization” p. 13).

Did you get that? The same word, nomos, which is the New Testament (Greek) word for “law”, is used to describe the correct rules of harmony and logic.

I don’t know about you, but I was never taught this at school. Nor was I taught it in my church. Nor have I ever read this in any Christian book about music.

But the fact is this, music is a language that allows us to express ideas just as much as if we express ideas with words. Words, after all, are sounds. Music is sounds. It is sounds that communicate to us, and sounds are what we use to communicate to others. Singing, as my old singing teacher used to say, is merely “speaking” on pitch.

Sounds usually accompany our actions so there is a total communication at the time. The selection of the right sounds — verbal or musical — at the right time is important.

But since our music education has failed so miserably, we no longer think about the use of music to express our thoughts and emotions. We listen to music, we use music, but we don’t get the connection — or if we do, we ignore it.

Only the movie musicians today understand the connection. They get it right almost every time. That’s why you will never hear the music of J.S. Bach when the visual scene is a disco with semi-naked female bodies in full motion. The actions and the music don’t go together. They are a misfit. Neither are you likely hear the music of nineteenth century romanticism (e.g. music of Frederick Chopin) when the visual scene is a disco. They just don’t belong together.

But somehow we are willing to allow the music that does fit the disco and those writhing female bodies into our churches under the silly notion that being “contemporary” is the way to attract people to the faith.

The trouble is, our verbal message and our music don’t tell the same story. Add to this, the over-use of romanticized hymns and spiritual songs, and it is not hard to see why Christian culture is failing.

It is failing at the the most critical point: in the church.

According to the Greeks, so Lang observes, “the will can be decisively influenced by music in three ways. It can spur to action; it can lead to the strengthening of the whole being, just as it can undermine mental balance; and finally, it is capable of suspending entirely the normal will power, so as to render the doer unconscious of this acts” (p. 14).

Is that why we see provocatively moving female bodies at the front of the church? The music has rendered them — and the church leaders — unconscious of what is going on? Hard to believe, isn’t it?

If music is this powerful — and it is — then isn’t it time we changed the music in our church?

Please make note of this statement: I am not here trying to say that all contemporary music is wrong. I am merely saying that in most cases, the words and the music don’t belong together. We can often have good lyrics with bad music, or good music that doesn’t “fit” with the lyrics.

Christian culture of the past was not possible without having something to say about the music. Christian culture will not be restored without the reconstruction of a Biblical view of art and music that speaks the language of Scripture.

Click below to continue with the series:

Click Here for Part 1: Eliminate Masculinity in the Church

Click here for Part 3: Use Music For The Moral Revolution

In this series on the feminization of culture, I’ve wanted to get you thinking about communication. In particular, communication with music.

First, I highlighted how hymns were used to help eliminate a rigorous intellectualism in the church and replace it with a more emotional environment.

Second, I drew your attention to how music is an important ingredient in communication, and how we can contradict ourselves by having the wrong music with the right words.

One composer who understood this was Richard Wagner. Remembered often because his music was popular with German Nazism, it is also important to remember what Wagner contributed to musical development in another way. He contributed to a moral — better known as an anti-faith — revolution with his particular style of music.

At one time the church was known to speak out against certain types of music. Some music was too sensual. Some music could influence a particular licentiousness that was unhealthy in the eyes of the church leaders

Take certain European folk music, Spanish flamenco, for example. It can often be an example of seductiveness. But it is this type of sensuality that, if not held in check, can lead to something out of place.

Now the church fathers saw that to open the door to licentiousness in any form was just courting disaster. So especially in the church, music was devoid of the kind of emotions that, while they might have a proper place in the bedroom of a married couple, certainly did not need exposure outside the home in culture or the church.

With the 19th century onslaught against Christianity, one man who failed in political revolution turned his musical skills into a self-conscious desire to continue the revolution with music. The revolution was one against Christian culture, the key being Christian morals and moral restraint that had been achieved by the application of biblical principles.

Sexual licentiousness is relationships without rules. The emphasis is on emotion. So Wagner turned his hand to writing music that encouraged licentiousness and emotion. He had a choice. “He could either subordinate his desires to the logic of the music, or the music to the logic of his desires” (E. Michael Jones, Dionysos Rising, p. 43).

To understand this revolution, think about the basis of our music, the diatonic scale. According to Jones, “The diatonic scale with its ability both to arouse the emotions and to subdue them to the demands of reason had unleashed a burst of musical creativity without precedent in the history of the human race, a creativity that found one of its more significant expressions in the German-speaking lands of the eighteenth century.”

“The price of admission, however, was the rigor of the tonal, diatonic system, which conformed so admirably to the movement of human emotion. Because it possessed a beginning, middle, and end, the diatonic scale could evoke a catharsis of emotion unprecedented in other musical systems. But there was a price to pay here, and the price was the adherence to the canons of reason. The emotions that were aroused would be resolved only by returning to the key from which they originated. To modulate the notes unceasingly from one key to another, as Wagner’s chromaticism did, was tantamount to blunting the emotional focus” (ibid.)

Stop!

Go back and read that again. Did you get the point?

Here’s how Jones summed it up:

“The music that was the fullest expression of this modulation of emotion from key to key for hours on end with no resolution in sight had a lot in common with pornography. It was musical pornography and was having a sort of enervating, draining, and debilitating effect on the audiences that heard it” (ibid.)

Wagner self-consciously wrote the type of music he did to evoke erotic emotions. Just as pornography is sex without rules, so classical music following Beethoven — who desired to compose without rules — became just that. Music without rules.

We need to follow the music trend into the twentieth century to see the end result of music without rules. John Cage sitting at a piano for three or four minutes not playing anything — yet pretending this was serious composition. Its equivalent is modern, abstract art that looks like it was painted by a two-year-old in a temper fit. A world without rules is a childish world, and music without rules becomes childish and primitive — elementary.

Our churches, full of highly romanticized harmony and erotic rhythm are the breeding ground for emotions rather than reason — reason based on God’s word. If you understand this, you know why it is most often females standing up the front leading the new music in the contemporary church, with a tendency, when it suits them, to move with the music in ways that send a provocative message which they surely cannot intend.

But this lack of understanding — the anti-intellectualism that is rampant — in our age is playing havoc in our churches.

Until the music is changed, we are unlikely to effect a change in the culture which is increasingly recognized as feminized.

This is why we need musicians who can compose — Christian music, if you please.

Click here for Part 2: Feminize the Culture With Music

Click here for Part 4: Preach Psychology Rather Than Theology