Music - visceral vs. intellectual

An interesting thing about music is that it is often very much seen as a largely visceral creative outlet and, by non musicians, there is some kind of sorcery or magic involved - I remember a key moment when I was in primary school and the teacher split the class in four to sing the canon: "London's Burning." I was utterly astounded, that these four simple melodies could be superimposed to create such a wonderful and hypnotic cacophony! (It certainly seemed to resemble wizardry!) Yet the more we learn about how music works the more we appreciate the fact that a musician is simply just someone who has heard music and loved it enough to want to understand how to do it. Songs and compositions are designed much in the way an architect designs a beautiful building: with an eye for aesthetics, but based on certain principles steeped in science and always built out of the correct materials for the job. In our case these materials are rhythmic and melodic features which merge with harmonic and timbral choices. Having quite an analytic mind, the aspects of music that I have seen myself to be particularly apt for, I have often noticed while teaching, are breaking elements that seem rather complex down into their constituent parts so that they can be more easily assimilated and then reconstructed. Sometimes when a student is having trouble learning part of a piece it can help to create "easier versions" that go through graded stages of picking up certain melodic or rhythmic features of the music that lead up to being able to play the piece as it is written, also understanding what each of these elements contributes to the concrete totality of the piece. I always refer to myself as a "better teacher than player," as I know I am not the most virtuossic player to be found.