Many Kinds of Musicianship

My strength may not be your strength.

If you are interested in fitness as a hobby or as a path to wellness, you likely find that there are many kinds of fitness. You might be focused on cardio, as I did when I was running every day. Or you might be focused on flexibility, as a daily yoga practitioner. Or you might be focused on strength training (or even, as one former student did, just arm strength, resulting in a rather out-of-proportion physique).

The point is, there are lots of different paths to give attention to your physical fitness, and to develop your own wellness through that path.

Just the same, there are many paths to musical excellence. You might be a fantastic reader, or not read at all. You might be someone who can improvise harmony to a melody you’ve never heard, or a composer, or a scat singer. You might be an expert in the performance practices of the 18th Century, or you might not work with any music written before 1920.

There are different ways to be a fine musician.

It’s probably true for both fitness and musicianship that the best strategy is to choose a little bit from every column and put them together in a mix that fits you. But if you leave a column out, it doesn’t make you bad at fitness or at music. It’s just the journey you are on.