Maintaining Student Motivation on the Musical Journey Toward Mastery (Essay‪)‬

There is no doubt that the process of learning to play a musical instrument takes hours of solitary hard work and dedication to the task. The journey toward mastery is seldom a linear process of achievement. In today's world, where our culture seems to glorify notoriety more than skill, where success seems to come overnight and effortlessly, and where value is not necessarily placed on hard work and steady progress toward a goal, how do we maintain student motivation throughout the study and mastery of a musical instrument? Maintaining student motivation has been the subject of numerous journal articles and was even the topic of the MTNA pre-conference Pedagogy Saturday VII in 2003. (1) Yet, in spite of the wealth of information available about motivation, maintaining student enthusiasm still confounds and exasperates many music teachers. How is it that students who bound into our studios, unable to restrain themselves from "playing" with reckless abandon at the beginning of tutelage, lose their zeal and enthusiasm for the instrument and for the music that we, as teachers, love so dearly? It can be difficult for overworked teachers to make the leap from understanding motivation theory in a sterile, non-musical context to practical application in the music studio with real, live 21 st-century students.