About
Our company was founded with a hybrid purpose for existence: we are musicians that are also dedicated teachers who have formed a tribe in response to folks' wanting but not personally knowing a knowledgeable, reliable and fun music teacher, specifically seeking one who actually makes a living making music, or an "intown musician." We always try to keep that mindset of symbiosis and authenticity in all that we do. We believe that if we are functioning at our highest potential, we cater both students and families with the perfect music teacher and likewise are a resource for educated, reliable music teachers to find interested students in their area.
We are believers in and teach the fundamentals, but we make them as fun as possible. Music is and always should be intrinsically fun, of course, but it's worth mentioning because we’ve found that the more one plays, the better one tends to sound. We do also understand that almost no one walks into a beautiful building and says, “My! What a beautiful foundation!” Finding ways for the student to discover joy in building a strong, musical infrastructure through mutually agreed upon goals and guidance in finding each student’s own, personal truth is the art of teaching. We've developed our own books filled with the resources that we have found helps the most amount of people make the most amount of progress.
We stress that there is such a thing as the "talent myth," in music or in any hands-on skill (or probably a cerebral skill, too, for that matter): the number one thing that we've seen as teachers that works for everyone is that the more one plays music, the better one will get. Music is no different than any other skill in this sense. Musical families generally produce musical children not because of some mysterious gene that scientists have yet to find; it's because they surround a youngster with music! It is for this reason that our philosophy and teaching materials are action-based and meant to be fun. If one spends a reasonable amount of time with them (and with us), we guarantee positive results.
Teaching beginners and slower, musical learners, is fascinating and rewarding for a similar reason: The talented (for lack of a better word) student, we believe, is likely to learn so fast that small stages in the learning process are glossed over, creating an opaque surface that hides the secrets of the art from view. With the slow learner, the teacher is forced to deal with small, incremental steps that penetrate like x-rays the very essence of the art, and clearly reveal the process through which the art becomes manifest in movement. Gradually, the mystery unfolds.
Think about how long it took you to learn English. You don’t usually remember the specifics if it was at an early age, but at some point you had to learn how to use the small muscles in your tongue and press them (close to) perfectly against a very specific location in your mouth in order to say any, specific sound (depending on how articulate you intend to be). The same happens in music and this is our starting point in teaching it: the more specific we can talk about technique, the better able we will be to execute a specific musical wish.
We try to avoid vagueness at all costs; the closest we'll get to it is purposefully utilizing a specific metaphor. Generally speaking, only practical, technical (specific) advice helps the early music student when they are trying to learn a new piece music. This is noteworthy because music, when enjoyed, accesses a more elemental, pre-specific emotional place than verbal language. You may be able to identify that a song without words is sad or optimistic in nature, but other than that 100 different people will have 100 different interpretations about its specificity. And let’s face it: music, for this reason, can be difficult to learn (and teach)! Attaching specific techniques to unspecific, “invisible” sound is challenging! We have spent years finding what we think and continue to learn to be the best and the most fun exercises and resources to allow the student to make the kind of music that one hears in one’s head. The lack of good, music education literature has even led us to write our own workbooks and guides.
There are three main criteria for which we employ our teaching staff. All Intown Musician guides must display all of the following:
They are skilled and accomplished musicians in their own right.
They are passionate, thoughtful teachers who work towards improving their teaching as well as their performing abilitiy.
They are able to relate music to larger, more universal concepts and are actively capable of carrying on a conversation in which music aids in being a net-positive influence on the indirectly related, non-musical interest of the student.
We have a database of over 30 musicians, covering every instrument type and level, that we use as contractors in order to find you the perfect fit.