Q&A: Mahaliah Edwards

HF: What was your music education like?

ME: I have a Caribbean background, so music is embedded in my culture – there was always music playing at home, and I grew up in a Pentecostal church where music was inherent to the denomination. My musical upbringing split into two halves: I had my informal music education at home and at church, where we would be singing three-part harmonies and so on, and I had formal music lessons that completely juxtaposed this. I initially had piano lessons in primary school, and then I began having lessons with the local music service in Nottingham; by the age of 16, I was attending the Purcell School of Music, playing the violin. This was a significant change for me, as prior to this I was learning more for the love of music rather than being trained with the more academic knowledge that would help me become a professional musician. This meant that I had lots of gaps in my musical education, but I was very driven in learning more and took this opportunity with a positive attitude. After completing Sixth Form there, I attended the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, where I studied for four years and taught on the side. After a few years of teaching in Nottingham post-graduation, I then moved to Surrey and started working for Music Masters while also working as a freelance musician.

HF: Have you found that the informal and formal sides of your music education have combined as your career develops?

ME: About a year and a half ago I started working professionally in music entertainment, so doing freelance work for live TV and things like that. In that context I am not given sheet-music at all. The fixer will send me a track, and I have to learn it by ear with no sheet-music, and the longest I have been given to do that is two weeks (other jobs being only a day or two). Sometimes the violin parts are very low down in the mix, too. Nobody had ever taught me how to learn something by ear during my scholarships at Purcell or my training at Birmingham, but there I can draw on my musical education from growing up in the church and learning things by ear. In my last gig, we listened to a track and then they transposed it down a semitone. That’s just a long-winded way of saying yes, it has converged, but not in the way that I thought it would. These are the skills I learnt informally and did not see as valuable at the time, and now I am using them in a professional environment.

HF: From your experience, do you think this divide in informal and formal music-making is a problem?

ME: I am currently doing a Master’s in music education, and am very much embedded in literature about this at the moment. I am learning that there are valuable skills you can learn outside of the classroom, and I am being critical of the fact that there are so many bedroom producers and people who learn music in communities, with valuable musical skills that aren’t praised enough. One amazing educator, Gary Spruce, talks about how some people don’t see themselves as musical because they don’t identify with the formal music curriculum they learn in school. There is currently a genre hierarchy, and we often prioritise reading standard notation over being able to hear and listen and feel. I am constantly thinking about this practically and asking myself how I can improve this, bit by bit, in my own teaching.

HF: How did you feel about the repertoire you learnt when you were younger?

ME: There was a poignant moment for me when we were learning about Julius Eastman, when I realised I had never studied a black composer before. Despite attending a prestigious institution, I had never learnt about music from my own culture. I also had this realisation when I performed Caribbean music for the first time in a gig when I was 21; I remember thinking ‘how have I not played music from my own culture professionally before?’ That experience opened a thirst for knowledge in me, and made me investigate how I could teach my own students about this type of music despite not being an expert.

HF: Do you have any overriding piece of advice for early-career teachers who may want to implement some of the things you have mentioned?

ME: Stay open-minded and keep things manageable. This may sound vague, but what I mean is that it can be taxing if you want to be inventive all the time and cover loads of diverse repertoire. You can’t do it all, so try and include one new thing a week and build up from there. Stay open and curious and know that there is no singular path your students may follow to work professionally in the music industry. Play to their strengths and listen to their interests.

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