Our Musical Journey from The Missing Coda
For some of us music teachers – who are also performers, we have felt sadness due to the lockdown and a great worry at the prospect of lessons via online platforms or in many cases, no lessons at all.
Our experience has been similar, however we also felt some excitement at the prospect of the challenge to see how we could adapt; metaphorically speaking, the shackles were off for us to explore and create our breadth of resources for teachers and students.
We are Norfolk-based musicians, teachers and authors who have collaborated our blend of our musicianship and personalities to form The Missing Coda.
Since working together, we have encouraged our music teacher colleagues to engage in debate and professional development to explore and nurture The Whole Musician.
As musicians and teachers, we’ve always nurtured our students with modelling the musical elements and using the instrumental grades to challenge and reward.
Our passion for ensuring that the subject of our instruments are taught with breadth and depth. Unfortunately we have found this a challenge with some of our colleagues avoiding meeting for discussions to reflect on all of our teaching. It is our duty to ensure that we use pathways to educated the whole musician who can not only perform for their grades but those who can play their scales with shape, pieces with character, music theory to develop sight reading skills and aural training that reflect the title of the music.
During the lockdown, we had time away from teaching and performing so we decided to embark upon our previous ideas of creating resources. We wanted to create resources that demonstrate the links between the musical elements rather than keeping them separate.
We are delighted to introduce ‘My Practice Diary’ which we hope will become a personal and exciting tool for students as well as a method of encouraging practice.
My Practice Diary is a resource that encourages the basic principals to be included in the weekly lessons. We hope by covering a lot of ground that this exciting resource will bring the elements together in harmony, whilst providing a personal diary for our young musicians.
In addition to the diaries we have extracted the designs to produce poster designs which hope to highlight the musical journey.
We certainly welcome our teacher colleagues’ thoughts with these designs and if you were interested in contacting us, we are always here and ready for sparking a discussion.
Best Wishes and Stay Safe
Benjamin Howell and Matthew Preston
The Missing Coda
