Music educators must give our students experience making musical decisions.
Once you get outside of scholastic ensembles, musical experiences require making musical decisions. We don’t often practice that part of music-making.
That’s too bad, because if you can’t make musical decisions, two things will happen after you leave school: either you’ll stop making music, or else you’ll make music that never gets past correct notes and rhythms, into the finer points of musicality.
I told my students today that I want to do my best to work together to make musical decisions because I want them to get better at it. Of course there are decisions I’ll make: I’m the director, and I’m also more experienced, generally speaking. But when I can, I want my students to discuss, assert, and argue about musical minutiae. That’s the only way they’ll get better.
And it makes it so much more likely they’ll continue to make music.