Making Music Lessons Attractive Again, By Courtney Trappell

Alicia Aluisi

Professor Ishigaki

Music 9

28 September 2015

Article Analysis Essay In the article, “Making Music Lessons Attractive Again,” by Courtney Crappell, Crappell gives multiple suggestions to fellow music instructors about how to inspire music students to invest themselves in taking music lessons again, after already quitting before for various reasons. Throughout her article she shares many personal experiences, which influenced her to write the piece to begin with. She addresses critical questions to those trying to inspire students, however one must truly analyze the credibility behind her statements before accepting them credibly. Therefore, throughout this article analyze, further summarization of her piece will be forgone,

Throughout her piece, she addresses these three drawbacks and provides solutions in order to avoid problems such as these. Therefore, she argued three main points for those solutions. The first solution, which addressed the problem of getting people to spend money on lessons, was to prompt the person to “feel more like the person they aspire to be” (Crappell 3). According to Crappell, making someone feel prosperous, exotic, and desirable causes him or her to invest in themselves, thus putting money towards music lessons (3). The second solution argued is that if music teachers align the appropriate difficulty level with the student, they will never get bored or discouraged when taking lessons. And lastly, she claims that with the proper preparation it is easy to build up a student’s confidence to withstand their fear of public performance (Crappell 4). Even though these are Crappell’s arguments, further analysis of points will help determine her reliability and success

Crappell purely went off her own speculation for her arguments, which presents faulty reasoning. She never exemplified any statistics or studies shown to prove that her three main reasons for music dropouts were actually the real reasons why people lost interest. A more realistic and reliable perspective, as to why students quit music lessons, would be that of Tony Mazzocchi, another music teacher, who also wrote an article on this topic. However, in his article he stated that he asked all of his quitting students why they were choosing to do so, and in a way formed his own hypothesis from those study results (Mazzocchi 1). He came to the conclusion that all of his students quit because they were too busy, they were not talented enough, or they simply just hated playing an instrument (Mazzocchi 1). This determination is much more influential than Crappell’s for he drew conclusions based on the direct source, which are the quitting students. Moreover, Crappell never even gives background of her own successes, therefore one could insist that she is a brand new music teacher trying to gain popularity in order to build up clientele, which would ultimately make her a very unreliable source. Crappell also does not speak of any counterpoints or arguments that she could have rebutted to make