The TSU Guitar Summit: A Guitar Program For “Guitar Town”.

Nashville is home to some of the best guitar players on the planet. And while there are many, many great guitar teachers and no shortage of students, none of our many academic institutions have a reputation for turning out great guitarists. There are many smaller, well-established private programs that do very well, with strong reputations and a steady clientele, and some of the same people that teach for the small businesses also teach at our colleges and universities. I fall into this category myself, having worked for one of the larger music stores in town for almost three years before I started teaching college. We don't lack for talent or resources, and maybe that's part of the reason: no one program is likely to become THE place to go when there are so many options. But I think there are other, more significant factors at work.

In my opinion, there are so many fantastic self-taught players here that the prevailing sentiment seems to lean AGAINST formal music education. History does back up this view...choose any iconic popular musician of the last fifty years, and odds are if they studied music it wasn't in school. Some of the most influential players in pop music created their sound by developing technical approaches to their instrument that no teacher would even consider. Mark Twain famously said “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education”. I'm sure there were thousands of novelists from Twain's day with college degrees, but we don't know their names or their work. So given all of this, why WOULD an aspiring musician want to study formally? And why would Nashville, a city with more raw talent per square mile than possibly anywhere else on earth, need to develop such a program of formal study?

Truth be told, maybe it doesn't. Some of the most important lessons about playing music will never be learned in a classroom, and unlike other disciplines a degree in music doesn't make you a musician. Raw talent, creativity, and drive can sustain an entire career: the education comes from the proverbial school of hard knocks. Some believe that those things can't be taught but must be God-given, and sometimes they are. But I've come to believe that our gifts are something to be grateful for but not relied upon. The purpose of formal education is to help the areas we have been gifted reach their full potential, and to cultivate the areas where we lack those gifts.

Formal education gives us the tools to identify and strengthen our weaknesses. It teaches us to be responsible: to take tasks seriously, and to achieve when achievement is demanded. We learn that we don't know what we need to know, and that we may not see the fruits of our labors for years to come. Or, we might learn that we're terrible at taking direction, and either learn to handle it or quit. And the fact is, most people quit. They drop out of school, or they stop practicing, or they quit taking lessons, or a thousand other things that could continue to happen but don't. And for every story of the star who dropped out of school to make it to the big time, there are thousands of other dropouts who just stayed dropouts. To quote one of my favorite songwriters, Tommy Womack, “you can't be a has-been when you never was.”

It's as simple as this: commitment and hard work come more easily to some than to others. Life doesn't give grades except for pass or fail. That ought to be incentive enough, but for most of us it's not. Formal study provides another means to gauge our progress, and surrounds us with like-minded people in a focused environment that promotes and rewards learning. This doesn't have to happen inside the walls of an institution, it's happening right now on Music Row or on Lower Broad. But the institution exists to lift everyone up, while the school of hard knocks is ultimately out to thin the herd.

This might sound cynical, but it's not. With so much talent in one place, talent becomes less important. When so many people are trying to get through one narrow gate, the gatekeeper has to work harder just to manage the traffic. Standards become increasingly harder to define, and the bar is forced higher. This is a good thing in that the people who can stick it out and grow from the process raise their game, and they begin to stand out. But not everyone is ready for the rough-and-tumble...so what happens then?

As a career educator I'll be the first to admit that I'd be hurting for business if all those people just took the proverbial ball and went home. But I can also say with complete conviction that I have never met a hopeless case in twenty-six years of teaching music. I've met plenty of lazy, distracted, self-absorbed, and unreasonably self-entitled people.....but I've never worked with anyone who didn't progress if they made the commitment and stuck it out.

School is a great place to learn those foundation skills without risking your career in the process. If I had come to Nashville straight out of high school, I'm pretty sure I would have been chewed up and spit out. And for the record, I was a mediocre student in high school, the kind who would get endless lectures about my “potential”. One English teacher called me a “conundrum” (which of course I then had to look up)....he could see that I had a good mind but wasn't putting it to much use, at least in his class. Now I have students like that myself, but the difference is that rather than telling them (in so many words) that they're just lazy, I look for ways to reach them. When one method fails, I try another. I learned this from some of the great teachers I was fortunate enough to be exposed to in college. And I was also fortunate enough to live in a place that was crowded with talented, successful people who wanted to give back. New York City was an amazing place to be a student, and so is Nashville for exactly the same reason: there are SO many talented people to learn from. The trick is to find them, or better yet, find them gathered together in one place.

This summer, as I have the past two years, I'm organizing a guitar festival at Tennessee State University we call the Guitar Summit. The term “summit” can mean a pinnacle, the very top, or it can mean a meeting of great minds or great leaders. That second definition sums up the intent and mission of this event: to bring some of Nashville's best players and teachers to one place and see what happens when they work together. This is not the first program of its kind, here in Nashville or anywhere else...but it IS unique in that the entire program is based on the idea that this meeting of great minds and great talent creates great energy. Some of the classes are team-taught, and some are just discussions between one player and another. No matter the method, the idea is always to be engaging. By offering so many classes in a short time, the student's brain gets stimulated, but by varying the approach we allow room for ideas to settle in. You don't leave the Guitar Summit with a stack of photocopies and books you'll never open again (trust me, I have plenty myself from past experiences in my student days). If we accomplish our goal, you leave with a head full of ideas and inspiration, and had an opportunity to hang out in an intimate setting with true masters. Putting all of that to work in order to make you a better musician is still up to you...but as I learned from my best teachers, that booster shot of inspiration can make all the difference.

Whether this event makes a mark on the guitar community in Nashville remains to be seen. It's certainly one of my goals, and the team we've assembled this year is the best yet. (An official press release with a full instructor list is coming very soon). But the idea of a meeting of minds and ideas is at the heart of the very concept of a university, and this too is the heart of the Guitar Summit. I am in the very fortunate position of having the support of one of Nashville's oldest institutions of higher learning, and an unparalleled pool of talent to draw from. It's a powerful combination, and I have high hopes and higher goals. Join us at Tennessee State University this June 3-5 and see for yourself.