I’ll never forget the day I was showed how to color properly. It took years to overcome the unspoken lesson.
It was on a bring your child to work day – I was in a staff lounge with my sister while my dad was checking on patients. A friendly nurse popped in as my sister and I colored, and kindly explained that the best way to color with crayons was to make sure that the crayon lines all moved in one direction, rather than haphazardly.
She was probably right – but there was a second lesson she never said out loud. That lesson was, there are right and wrong ways to play. There are right and wrong ways to make art.
I stopped drawing and coloring for decades not too long after that, and while I wouldn’t point to her as the cause, I do think that our insistence on doing art the right way is a big part of creating the art-related shame that Dr Brené Brown says is so prevalent in so many adults.
I would have been better off if I had simply kept coloring without input – I would have probably discovered good coloring strategies, in my own time, without ever being told that the way I was doing something was wrong.
All this can, should, and does influence how I teach music-making. Whether in private composition lessons or in choral rehearsals, I think it’s better to ask questions and lead young future artists through asking them to think, rather than telling them what I think is right or wrong. It’s slower, at first, not to show my students what I think is the right way to do it, but in the end I think it empowers them to continue making art, on their own terms.