Personal Narrative: Music Education

I first met Jason in sixth grade, when I finally got sick of being a last chair second violin. Jason was the first private violin lesson teacher I had ever had, but far from my first private instrument teacher. Prior to him, I had labored through years of Suzuki piano lessons, and I thought I had a pretty good handle on the whole “private lesson” business. Oh, how wrong I had been. Jason was like no other music teacher I’d ever had, not only in the way he taught, but the impact he has had on me. If I were to describe him in one word, it would be “meticulous,” but that doesn’t do him nor his reverence to music justice. Where Jason differed from my other private lesson teachers was his attention to detail and need for perfection. The …show more content…
We would take each new song apart section by section, phrase by phrase until each note, bowing, hand position, and breath was perfect. If I were to make a mistake, he would single out my error and have me repeat those few notes over and over and over again until my wrists ached, my fingers throbbed, and - finally - the music sounded just right. This process was not limited to solos, either; every etude, arpeggio, and scale received the same treatment. He drilled into me that every single thing I did on my violin had an integral role in progressing as a musician. Jason’s process could be so incredibly frustrating, especially when I had first started out. It felt like no matter what I did, I could not play right, but Jason was relentless. I would be near tears, and he’d just tell me to, “do it again, one more time.” Whenever I finally made it through whatever had been troubling me, however, the results of my efforts always far exceeded my expectations. At the end of each lesson, the sounds coming from my violin were beautiful, ringing, and not at all like those made at each start. Like the transformation of the music from the beginning to the end of a lesson, I, too, have improved as a person under Jason’s