When, how and who can learn to play a musical instrument? ....... Part I

Maybe you want to start studying a musical instrument, maybe you have years considering it or you already know some music and you want to dedicate more time to it.

As a music teacher, I often meet people who want to study but have many doubts and I often realize that these are frequently asked questions whose response is not always the right one since there are pre conceived ideas of many people.

In this post I want to share some of them:

1.- "Who can learn?"

All people are capable to learn, regardless of age or prior knowledge.
Unless there is a clear physical or neurological disability that prevents it, there are still various methodologies of music education with amazing results, that is why we have to consider who is the person who wants to take classes, their characteristics in terms of prior knowledge, age, etc. All this in order to choose the right teacher and methodology.

What we have to consider is that the learning process is different, this is related to age, as well as to previous knowledge, so if a person is 70 years old, can he learn? the answer is "Of course," the learning rate may be slower than the one of a young person who is constantly exercising his mind and body but we must move away from this idea that "at a certain age you cannot learn" because this is FALSE .

On the other hand we have little children, some people may believe that there is an age when it is not worth having a musical approach because they still do not learn anything. This is also a misunderstanding of student learning, in this case a small child. The child begins to learn and become familiar with the musical language from the mother's womb, so there really is no age at which any musical approach is in vain, of course a newborn can not hold a musical instrument yet, but if he can sensitize his senses to music, that is why the first step is actually MUSICAL INITIATION. Later on, the child can be approached to the musical instrument in a totally pleasant, playful and focused environment.

pictures taken from https://pixabay.com/es/viol%C3%ADn-ni%C3%B1o-ni%C3%B1a-m%C3%BAsica-1617972/

I will continue writing about the nature of music learning specially answering those frequent questions that sometimes lead us to have an inappropriate approach to the musical instrument and prevents us from entering the beautiful world of music as it should.

Thank you for reading.
@ilsepiano