Teaching the Stories Behind the Music

October 11, 2025, 11:42 PM · A high school student of mine recently came to her lesson, wanting a bit of help with new piece for school orchestra, an arrangement of Shostakovich's "Waltz No. 2."

"Wow, cool piece to be playing in orchestra!" I said. "Did your teacher tell you anything about Shostakovich?"

The student looked at me, blankly. I realized that I'd better fill in that blank.

So we launched into an interesting and engaging conversation about the Soviet composer Dimitri Shostakovich and his artfully rebellious works, many of them created in the face of a Communist regime that had placed a target on his back. Together we looked up "Waltz No. 2" - it was actually a somewhat later work, one of his most popular. It was written for film, and the melody line she was playing was originally written for saxophone - it was written to be a bit jazzy.

Suddenly my student (as well as the parent, sitting on the couch) had become a lot more interested in this music.

"How did you know these things?" the parent ask me as they were packing up to leave. "Did you take a special class?"

I laughed, "No, just life as a curious musician!"

After that conversation, my mind turned to a Facebook post made recently by teacher and electric violinist Matt Bell. He wrote, "If you are a band or orchestra teacher, please consider taking a couple minutes before starting a new piece of music and talking to your kids about that piece. When was it written? By whom? What were they trying to say (musically and otherwise)? Why did you pick this piece?"

It's good advice, and it applies not just to band and orchestra teachers, but to private music teachers - any teachers, actually. Even if you are teaching yourself.

Yes, there is so much to conquer in learning a piece of music: the notes, the bowings, the dynamics, the phrasing, articulations, vibrato, etc. But let's not forget the point: expression. Music holds history, emotion, culture. It is meant to mean something. Where did it come from? This gives us some helpful clues so that we can also involve our minds, imaginations and hearts in our music-making.

Context can revolve around history, genre, nationality, personal experience - so many things.

I'll give you a few examples. Here is a very basic one - when a beginning student reaches the Minuets at the end of Suzuki Book 1, I feel it's nice to inform them that a "Minuet" is a dance - and so is a Gavotte. How would it feel to dance to that?

This holds for the advanced student learning Bach solo Partitas - they are all dance movements.

"Meditation from Thais" is well, a meditation from "Thais," the opera by Massenet. It's a little interlude where the heroine renounces her wayward path and finds God.

I like telling students who are playing the Bach Bourree in Suzuki Book 3 that, firstly, it was written by Bach for cello. I like to have them then listen to the Soviet cellist Mstislav Rostropovich playing it and mention that Rostropovich took his cello outside and played it next to the Berlin Wall, as it was coming down. Then we listen to Pablo Casals - and I give tell them his famous quote from when he was in his 90s, that he played Bach every day because "I think I am making progress..."

As for personal context - well, be careful. When my college professor told me "I played the Bruch Concerto when I was six," I'm afraid that this instantly melted my motivation into a puddle at my feet. But I have loved hearing stories from teachers, mentors and conductors - a conductor meeting Bernstein, or a teacher's precious vintage picture of Joseph Joachim ("who wrote that cadenza you are learning....") or other personal stories offered in the spirit of "passing it on" and making the student (or younger musician) part of a cherished legacy.

There is a rich world of context for everything we play, if we look for it. And those of us who have been taking that special class, "Life as a Curious Musician," should remember to share it whenever the opportunity presents itself.

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