Fortunate to have taught at the GMI, says a US-based faculty member
- Feb 18, 2020
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 25, 2020
In a write-up posted by Pattie Gonsalves in the Global Music Institute’s blog section, the writer says that he feels very fortunate to have taught at the Institute during the 2013 semester. The writer says he had long desired to visit India to “hear the sounds, taste the food and experience the history that I had been interested in back home in the States.” His three months as a faculty at the GMI in Delhi fulfilled his desires. But not only that, it also gave him the “added bonus” of teaching and mentoring students and interacting with the city’s musicians.
He says that when he first arrived in Delhi, he was surprised by the music scene, especially, the Western one. “It was much smaller than I expected and without the musical diversity…I found out that music education at the tertiary level in Delhi is for the most part not intensive, focused primarily on traditional classical music.
India’s long history of music training is based on a lifelong guru-shisya template…(t)his system does not lend itself to large class sizes or homogenized curricula, and I believe this in part transfers into the general psyche of the learning approach of Western-centric music.”
He further writes that this is the reason why an institute like the GMI plays such a crucial role in India’s capital. It blends this ancient guru-shisya model with a modern approach to teaching, learning, experimentation and curriculum development. He says that he found students, with a high degree of performance experience, expressing eagerness each day to dive into new learning material. He says, “I am a saxophone player, but many of my students were not saxophone students. My time at GMI was especially enjoyable because of this, because it took the technical aspects out of the equation and focused the discussion on the foundations of what makes music so damn cool.”
The writer says that while he was tutoring students, he was also exploring himself. India to him was a “new and exciting experience”. He quotes Tagore and says he applied his teaching to shape his own classes with his students. He records one particular class which he recalls fondly. “An electric bass player, he wanted to know about the formal construction of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. We had a great lesson and the hour or so of its duration was of course not enough time to explore the many facets of this complex composition, yet he was engaged, I was engaged, and it was fun.” He concludes that “GMI has it right”.
For the whole article in the original, please click here — globalmusicinstitute.in/gmi-and-me
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