Lowell's words are like an engine that drives the serious student to success.  Delving into the vast world of music with excitement and curiosity offers a journey with infinite beginnings, endless discoveries and the reward of personal achievement and satisfaction. How often do we consider the importance of our own role in the study of music?

In the student-teacher partnership it is very easy to put all of the weight on the teacher. We practice our pieces and look to the teacher for answers rather than immersing ourselves in the music and coming up with a list of questions resulting from our own inquiry.  Teachers tell us that the most important part of the lesson is what we do on our own between lessons.

A big temptation is to take the tunnel vision approach and simply learn the right notes for the next lesson.  Is this our main goal?  So much more is available.  A multi-dimensional approach includes analyzing the score, listening to a CD or several CDs to get an aural context of the work, and reading about the composer and the time in which the music was written.  This approach is rich with substance and gives us a deeper insight and fuller understanding of our particular piece as well as the musical climate and landscape in which it was written.

History gives us an example of a self-directed student in the person of composer Richard Wagner.  He is believed to have had about a year of regular musical study but his life was devoted to his individual pursuit of knowledge.  When he was fifteen he borrowed Logier's System of Musical Knowledge and of Practical Composition from Friederich Wieck's lending library and kept it so long he had trouble paying the fee.  At age seventeen, out of curiosity, he copied the orchestral scores of Beethoven's Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, concluding that the best way to learn music is from the score.  Wagner was an original thinker and experimented, made research sketches and was always projecting new works and then finding out how to do them.  The result was masterpieces of great originality.

The resources we have at our fingertips are amazing as compared to those available to Richard Wagner.  If we take advantage of what is available to us and maintain a healthy curiosity by asking ourselves questions rather than depending on our teacher for every answer, we will have a substantial understanding of the pieces we are studying and will be well prepared to contribute our own originality to their interpretation.