The Times: Nicola Benedetti frustrated by music education

Both my husband and I were asked to leave recorder club at our primary schools. I was even asked to mime in a concert. My problem - I didn’t practice. Not sure if that’s because I always forgot or because my mother didn’t remind me. She wasn’t big on helping me with anything to do with school. My husband on the other hand, is musical and spent 20 years as a Sound Engineer and Producer, before switching careers.

Our daughter is very musical, although she’s also not big on practicing. She was very lucky and managed to be offered a 3 year place on the Royal Academy of Music’s First String Experience course. She made it to grade 5 violin (then gave up to work more on her ballet, currently 8hrs a week of lessons), grade 4 piano, grade 3 recorder and is now just beginning grade 5 flute (her only weekly lesson instrument now). She’s spent lockdown teaching herself to play her guitar (Rolling Stones, A Star is Born soundtrack and random Siri inspired tracks), learning how to use GarageBand and back to playing her piano.

Nicola Benedetti has said she was motivated to help young talent due to her “innate frustration that something was wrong with music education”.

The violin virtuoso compared music to religion in an interview with Vikas S Shah, an entrepreneur and philanthropist.

“Music represents a humility, and people relate to it in the same way they may relate to religion,” she said in Thought Economics, a journal read in more than 120 countries.

“They have a sense of faith and belief that what music is, and what it does to them, can never fully be understood yet the truth of what it does to them means they don’t necessarily need to understand. That’s the humility of faith. That’s how I feel about music.

“That invisible quality of music gets inside us and attacks thoughts, feelings and things in the brain which we simply do not understand yet. The fact that music infuses into all those parts of who we are so powerfully just fills me with humility, faith and awe.”

The full article (paywall) can be read here: Nicola Benedetti frustrated by music education