Why Childhood Music Lessons Don't Stick - by Mark Trevail

Mark Trevail is an advisor to growth-stage businesses. He has a background in strategy consulting and technology, and holds a first-class Masters in Physics from Oxford. His passion is learning new skills and teaching his daughters: he writes about his experiences here.

If the goal of music lessons is to teach kids a skill they enjoy for the rest of their lives, they don’t work very well.

Before I qualify that, I’ll say that there are of course lots of reasons to learn an instrument that go beyond the skill itself and the beauty of the music. There are social, emotional and physical benefits, and possibly even cognitive ones.

But in terms of the goals of music lessons, developing a life-long skill feels like… a big one? And the results are poor. Of adults who learnt an instrument as a child, only 1 in 3 say they still know how to play, and just 1 in 7 still do play (1).

Common explanations are that music teachers don’t make practice fun enough, life gets in the way, or that kids never wanted to learn the instruments anyway. All may be true to some extent, but I believe there’s something deeper going on.

I’ll argue that we have put far too much emphasis on replicating notes on a page, and lost the art of messing around with our instruments. And that by first trying to create music (with gentle guidance), we can build a mental map of the musical landscape that gives the theory a place to land.

Learning the classical way

I’m no exception to the trend of giving up instruments. I was lucky to have years of piano lessons at school, and do a few grades. I was taught the way most children are - practise scales and classical pieces until you can play them with no mistakes, then move on to the next set. Playing pieces I’d mastered was fun, but I found the learning process highly un-fun and quit in my early teens.

Despite no longer having lessons, I still had opportunities to play the piano. I’d been learning for years, and so in my head I was still “someone who could play”. But whenever I tried, I felt stuck. I could (maybe) play an old piece, but it was like being on a set of train tracks. I could jump to another set of tracks, but ask me to play something I’d just heard, or Happy Birthday without the sheet music, and I’d be lost. What’s more - with or without sheet music, the pieces I did know were fading away.

Starting again

As an adult, I decided to re-learn the piano. This time, I focussed on the music I actually wanted to play - great pop songs. This renewed my interest, but again I felt stuck. Learning specific chord inversions and “licks” was tedious, and if I stopped playing a song regularly, I would lose it.

I knew there was something missing. Proper musicians played their songs slightly differently each time, improvised and played by ear. Why couldn’t I do that? Did I just need to learn more songs? Practice more chord inversions? Study more theory?

Searching for help, I stumbled on a strange course (2) that promised freedom at the piano and the ability to play by ear. The core tenets were to “create” (improvise with guidance) for at least 5 minutes every day, and to think in terms of numbers (relative pitch) rather than note and chord names. I signed up with some misgivings - most of my piano-learning experience was about avoiding mistakes, and I assumed that improvisation was something you could only safely attempt after finishing Grade 8.

Rediscovering play

I was blown away by the impact of “creating” every day. My improvisations were (and still are) extremely basic, but each day I could feel freedom building, and it somehow gave me a reference point for theory and the music I was listening to. I became able to recognise common chord progressions and intervals, and songs I learnt stuck with me - I believe because I understood, rather than memorised, them. To be clear, I’m still a rubbish pianist. But what I do know, I feel I own.

Was this just my experience? In 2015, a Swedish study of 4,000 adults who had taken extra music lessons as children found that those who had improvised were 1.5x as likely to continue playing their instrument, and those who had played by ear were 1.6x as likely (3). We can’t know if this is causal, or whether the children who improvised were simply more dedicated to begin with. My hunch though is that “messing around” is somehow central to a lasting relationship with an instrument.

Creating first

Now I’ll admit there’s a big difference between me playing a few chords and a classically-trained pianist playing Bach. I also think I know what most people would rather listen to. Being able to read and play complex classical music is an amazing skill that I’d love to have, and the world would be a worse place if people couldn’t do it.

My argument isn’t that learning to read classical music is somehow worse than playing by ear or improvising. It’s that they’re very different activities that I believe produce different effects in the brain and a different relationship with the instrument. I would argue that the traditional approach actually doesn’t work for the majority of children (as measured by life-long playing), and that they would be better served by starting with guided listening and creating, rather than first learning to read and precisely replicate the works of others. For one thing, it is (IMO) much more fun.

The two approaches are of course not mutually exclusive, and the best teachers incorporate both. But, for me at least, the order of learning matters. Once I have attempted to create something in a given context, I’m much more receptive to theory or examples from others. This new information then answers questions that were already asked internally, rather than landing cold.

Learning from the greats

I would argue that we are overly focussed on studying the outputs of others, rather than creating ourselves, and that this phenomenon is not unique to music. We tend to follow recipes rather than experiment in the kitchen. Or go to business school instead of starting our own company. Or use language apps when we could be talking with a native speaker. These approaches feel safer, but they’re not the path to becoming chefs, entrepreneurs or fluent linguists. At worst, these activities can be procrastination, stopping us from doing the scary and necessary thing: putting ourselves out there and making mistakes.

When we think about learning from Mozart, Bach and Beethoven, it’s typically by examining their compositions. But in their day, these musicians were primarily renowned for their improvisation skills. Taking the fruits of their labours and dissecting them is valuable, but I would argue it’s a fundamentally different activity to the creative process these musicians went through.

Most of us won’t reach the heights of these great musicians, but I believe we can absolutely gain our own small slice of their creativity and freedom. And in the process, build a stronger relationship with our instruments.

Footnotes

1

Still know how to play: 38% of GB adults who had childhood music lessons (YouGov, n = 2,203, Nov 2024, link). Still play: ~15%, derived as 9.7% (adults 25+ who made music in the past year, DCMS Participation Survey 2023–24, Table A36, link) × 75% (current players who had childhood lessons) ÷ 49% (adults who had childhood lessons); latter two YouGov as above, link.

2

PopMatics, link. No affiliation.

3

Theorell T, Lennartsson A-K, Madison G, Mosing MA, Ullén F. "Predictors of continued playing or singing - from childhood and adolescence to adult years." Acta Paediatrica 2015;104(3):274–284. doi:10.1111/apa.12870. Web-based survey of n = 3,820 adults (65% women, aged 27–54) from the Swedish Twin Registry who had taken music lessons beyond those provided at school, link. Reconstructed from Table 2: for each method, the share of continuers vs non-continuers who used it, converted to head-counts via group sizes, used to calculate a continuation rate (risk ratio).