Music Teacher Ian Taggart sat down with us for an ASpotlight Interview! Read his full interview to learn how he instills a passion for music and learning in his students by teaching to their experiences, their interests, their choice, and their physicality. Ian also co-organizes our Lower School Community Times on Fridays, ensuring that every student and faculty and staff member is heard and represented in our community.
Has music been a life-long passion of yours?
My current love and passion for music and music education stem from a lifelong journey. I have always loved music, but my passion for music-making and teaching is something that developed slowly through countless musical experiences. This started with my love of singing. My dad always sang in the car, which meant that I always sang in the car. Even when I didn’t know the words, I still loved to sing along.
From there, I was fortunate enough to be given piano lessons for a short while. Following that, I started playing the drums outside of school in the Fourth Grade. Then, I started the baritone in The Fifth Grade, switching over to percussion when I went to middle school. Sometimes music-making filled me with anxiety. Teachers could be unforgiving and rigid with their ideas around music-making, but I always had singing and jamming with my friends. It has always been the music that I made with people that I love that has inspired my passion for music.
The feeling I get when I am playing, singing, and/or creating music with others is like no other. It is similar to the feeling of being listened to and understood by loved ones without having to speak. It is that deep connection and deep listening that has guided my love and for music to where it is today.
When and why did you decide to bring your love of music into the classroom?
I’m not sure it was an active decision. It was and is the path that I walk.
I have always been inspired by my mom. She kind, patient, and the most generous person I know. She also happens to be a recently retired special education teacher. She often had my brother and me in her classroom after school hours, and I always liked the way schools felt. With that, I was the eldest cousin on my mom’s side of the family and relished the role of being a kind guardian for my little cousins.
My intention to go to school for music education was set a couple of years before graduating from high school. This was the case because in order to go to college for music, one must meet some significant requirements even to be considered, let alone excel in the audition process.
It was in college, through various practicums, that I saw my place as a general music teacher. I was jazzed by the opportunity, flexibility, and creativity that took place in the music rooms that I visited. The potential for fun and exploration seemed endless and investing in young people by giving them these musical tools for self-expression sold me on the work that I wanted to do.
What does music add to our boys’ holistic education at A-S?
By definition, holistic education develops one’s identity and how one puts meaning and purpose in one’s life. If we strive to teach and nurture this sense of self in all these young scholars, then giving them as many different lenses as possible to view their sense of self as well as the world around them is incredibly important. Music is one of those lenses, making it a necessity for any holistic program.
In Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, he describes musical intelligence as a distinct intelligence that focuses on developing one’s sensitivity to sound. It is this sensitivity to sound regarding pitch, rhythm, and tone that also has the potential to open up other avenues of intelligence such as their interpersonal intelligence. With the ability to listen more sensitively, a student of music might be better at hearing and understanding another’s inflection while speaking, thus building their interpersonal skills.
Music can also be used to develop creativity and intrapersonal skills. When developing a student’s creativity through creating music, students can hear and see themselves in a highly personalized way. This is driven by the choices and explorations that need to take place for a student to create a piece of music specific to their interests. The process of students’ exploration and creating in music is one of my favorite opportunities to bear witness to. It is as if I have given them an opportunity to see themselves in a new way.
How do you make music fun for your students? What strategies do you employ to foster a love of music?
I try to make learning fun for students by teaching to their experiences, their interests, their choice, and their physicality. With the goal of introducing students to new music and musical ideas, I find it important to create a bridge between what is familiar to them to the new material.
For example, not every boy in First Grade is aware of flamenco music. It just might not be on their radar, but they have often heard what a guitar is and have heard popular songs that might use musical language common in flamenco. By building that bridge between guitars and flamenco and another bridge from a familiar song to flamenco, we create stronger connections and relationships between students and a foreign concept. These stronger connections make learning fun for students.
Using movement is also key to creating an environment of fun in music and often helps create strong memories and experiences to new musical ideas. One of my favorite ways for students to use movement is to explore form. Students will identify the structure of a piece of music and use movement to represent each section physically.
To achieve fun in the classroom, it is key that students are given the opportunity to choose and contribute to what is being created in class. This helps to foster an environment of respect where students feel comfortable taking risks and exploring new ideas.
I want to empower my students to explore. I think an investigation is such a powerful tool as a learner. I love to give my musicians the time to experiment with different aspects of music, from pitch to dynamics to tempo.
This creativity and exploration open up so many possibilities for our boys as young students, which then extends into adulthood by helping them think flexibly about situations and generate multiple solutions to the problems we find.
Ultimately, I want to bring fun into the classroom by centering student joy, exploration, and creativity in a way that is relevant to their knowledge and experience.
How does collaboration between departments enhance the boys’ learning?
Oh my gosh, collaboration is incredible. It’s like cross-pollination. It’s about approaching the same topic from multiple perspectives. It’s giving students the chance to look at the same thing that they have been exploring and talking about and asking questions from a slightly different perspective. That variation in perspective is so important.
One example that comes to mind is the kindergarten transportation unit at the end of the year. Collaboration adds another layer and texture to the project. The students each choose a mode of transportation – be it a fire truck, helicopter, or bullet train. They can choose anything they are interested in, and that inspires them. They ask questions about this mode of transportation and do research to write books about it. Then, they tie it to art class using materials to build prototypes.
In music, we add another dimension by examining the soundscape around their specific mode of transportation. We take it on as a listening challenge where we try to recreate the sounds that take place by and around their mode of transportation. It’s another lens that shifts the perspective they are approaching from and creates connections to the research that they conducted. When we ask what soundscape would fit with a fire truck, students have to use their knowledge of where firetrucks are kept, what sounds do they make while they travel, and more to create a sonic version of the world in which a fire truck lives.
Collaboration enriches these connections and gets scholars thinking tangentially. It deepens their learning on a topic familiar and relevant to them.
Music classes have continued remotely over Zoom throughout the pandemic. Why has continuing our boys’ music education throughout the pandemic been so important?
It comes back to this idea of students being at the forefront of what we do in the classroom.
Having our music class centered on the boys and their experience gives them opportunities for self-expression so they can work through some of the emotions that have emerged during this pandemic. I see it as specifically student-centered social-emotional learning (SEL) work.
Creating open projects that have them composing music is one of my favorite projects to assign students because it allows them to have this outlet where they can create something and be proud of it. The extension of that is for others to hear it and be excited for them. Learning how to celebrate other people’s art is huge.
Google came up with an interface using graphic notation to create music called Google Chrome Song Maker. It’s a great system with lots of options, whether you want tempo or different instrumentation. It’s been really fun to explore this with students because what they create is their music. It’s a fantastic opportunity to have every student in the class making music specifically relevant to themselves, their interests, and their experiences. I’m happy to offer them that opportunity.
By creating this opportunity for student choice and creativity, students are given control in a way that is often foreign to their lives. As a young person, many choices are already made for you. From when your bedtime is, to what you wear, to when you can and can’t go to the bathroom. This lack of choice can be isolating, but I believe music and the arts can give students the opportunity to be celebrated in their choices.
You do an incredible job running our Lower School Community Times on Fridays. Why is this space so important for our community, and what do you look for when coming up with activities and lining up guests?
Thank you so much. Louisa Wells and I work really hard to create the Lower School Community Times, and I have such a fun time working with her to create something special for our community.
I have this love for the potential of a community. I think it’s such a powerful thing, and I like creating it. If you can develop connections – don’t stop. Keep going. It’s just so incredibly important to have a space where people, in our case students, teachers, faculty, staff, and parents can feel a sense of belonging and can see themselves reflected in what we are talking about.
Louisa and I feel that this time is important, now more than ever, because of how siloed we are during COVID learning. This community time is a chance for members of our community to see each other and revel in the unity of our diversity. We are a hugely diverse group of people with an incredible wealth of knowledge and experiences, and it is important that we celebrate that. This helps teach young people the value of our vastly different experiences. Offering us the space to celebrate those differences helps to create a space where all members of our community can start to feel safe and supported. Which we all know is necessary for learning to occur.
Learning is difficult. For Louisa and me to help create a space where our community can gather and be celebrated seems like the least that we can do to help those learners feel seen and supported so they might feel more comfortable taking those necessary learning risks.
Are you a musician outside of A-S? Tell me about that.
I am when I can! I often play with the Chelsea Symphony, a community orchestra that I have been in for about six years. I also enjoy whatever other opportunities come my way. As a classically trained percussionist, I tend to enjoy the more Avant-Garde and leap at the chance to find interesting and unique sounds.
This being said, I also really enjoy making music for myself on digital music software, and I love making music with my friends. I am lucky to have a lot of incredible musicians as friends as well as talented untrained musicians as friends. There is an ease to making music with friends and loved ones that is often not there during a paid gig. There is the opportunity for creativity, and strange turns that I find to be my favorite parts of music-making. It is in the safety and support of that space when I feel most creative as a musician.
