#IT TAKES TWO ETCH A SKETCH HOW TO#

#IT TAKES TWO ETCH A SKETCH HOW TO#

Music education can find itself in a similar situation if the average music student, after seven to eight years of time spent in school ensembles, typically knows how to finger notes, how to produce sound on their instrument, and how to read notation- but may have little understanding of how and why a piece of music works, or how their individual part functions in the communication process from composer to performer to audience. Benny Lewis, author of Fluent in Three Months and fluent himself in seven languages, suggests that to learn a language effectively, students should ignore grammatical rules (at least in part) and focus instead on memorizing and speaking common phrases each day. Similarly, it is not uncommon to find a high school student who has taken four years of language class but unfortunately cannot participate in every-day conversation with native speakers. Yet there is danger in notation as well: the ability to replicate notes, dynamics, articulation and rhythms without necessarily possessing the ability to audiate those elements breeds an environment in which students may become great technicians, but not fluent in the language of music. I wholeheartedly believe that music notation is a wonderful communication medium, one that allows for a highly organized approach to making music that is particularly suited for large ensemble rehearsals. Growing up in Texas and being introduced to music performance largely through my school band program, I learned to play an instrument primarily by reading music rather than by rote. Ability to draw depends on ability to see…”Īnd if this is the truth-if the ability to draw depends on the ability to see, then it’s not too far- fetched to hypothesize that the ability to make music depends on the ability to hear. In a discussion of drawing-albeit the pencil and paper variety-in her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Dr.Betty Edwards states “Drawing is a curious process, so intertwined with seeing that the two can hardly be separated. Simple as the toy is, to draw anything successfully, an Etch-A-Sketch operator must have a clear picture in their mind of what they would like to portray, and then possess the ability to do so. You remember the Etch-A-Sketch of course: a simple device with a flat gray screen and a red plastic frame, in which drawing is accomplished by using two knobs that each controls a stylus, one for a vertical line and the other for a horizontal line. When I was around nine or ten years old, my dad took my Etch-A-Sketch-a favorite childhood toy of mine-and intricately drew the front of our two-story brick house in detail. The first profound interaction I experienced with an artist happened under unlikely circumstances. To effectively create a work of art in any medium, an artist must both understand what it is they are trying to create, and possess the technical skills required to bring the artwork into existence.

It takes two etch a sketch