My Music Mentors

Mentoring plays a substantial role for us whose careers revolve around the arts and other related sectors. Even those who pursue a college education will usually mention some mentor as a key to their growth.

I was under a number of music mentors, there are those who helped me understand the art of creating music and there are those who provided me the opportunity to polish my craft.

I have a number of mentors that taught me music four of which gave me private piano lessons when I was 9 up until I was a sophomore in college. Each and every one played a part in my development, but one in particular stood out as a mentor more than the others. While three of my music mentors concentrated mainly on method and expression, my instructor through high school recognized my gift in songwriting, and being a songwriter herself, tailored my training to include theory and contemporary songwriting, as well as classical training. She did not merely put me in a system instead she helped me develop into an artist.

I had private instruction under 2 composition professors while I was in college taking up composition as my major and like my four previous mentors one of the two stood out. He discovered my weak points and strong points as a composer and he provided me with a task that will help me grow. He is more of a coach than a teacher and he is willing to work with every aspect of my humanity not only as a composer but as a person as well.

There were also some mentors along the way who did not really teach me music, but recognized the gift and made room for it. I spent a lot of time in church music surroundings as a young man, and several of the musical and spiritual leaders in those settings gave me access to musical instruments and recording equipment, let me play on the music team (even as a youth), allowed me room to make mistakes, and even found me other areas to play. They were more than cheerleaders to me, they were the people responsible for laying the foundation of my success.

There are two things I seem to remember when I think about my music mentors. First off, those mentors that really affected me were the individuals who took interest in me, as a musician and as a person. Second, I realized that in the course of my growth as a musician, I learned more from my mentors than my college education..Despite the fact that my teachers and mentors are in the college setting, their personal interest in me helped me grow into a better musician than homework and classes.. College was helpful in my development, but my music mentors were pivotal in my development.

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