Stepan Miltonjan’s Method of Teaching Music and Violin

Development of a personality

"A child is a human sprout, the aim of his development is to enhance his unique self" - Stepan Miltonjan.

Stepan Miltonjan’s method* is characterized by an unusual approach towards the development of a personality, which greatly respects natural development of a child, appropriate to his age. He explains that the traditional methods do not consider the development of a personality. "Mastery certainly is a value, but is it an absolute one?" asks Stepan Miltonjan. He acknowledges that the real teaching aim is to prepare a human to be human.

Improvisation and composition

Considering that music appeared spontaneously in the history of mankind, Miltonjan recommends to start teaching music to the children just with improvisation, as it is the most adequate to a child’s age and the most comprehensive form of playing music. Interpretation, underlines Miltonjan, is the youngest form of musical activity – it appeared only 250 years ago. Interpretation requires conceptual thinking and refined mastery, for which a child more often is not ready yet. On the contrary, improvisation is music genesis itself. By creating their own compositions, children begin also to learn music notation.

Lessons in a group

Ancient people, in order to survive, needed to be able to co-operate. It was just thanks to art and music that it became possible to exchange the information, which could not be expressed by words. For this reason, Stepan Miltonjan’s method at the beginning proposes lessons in small groups (2–3 children).

Drawbacks of the soviet teaching system

Miltonjan is also a constructive critic of the soviet music education system, historically established in Russia and, therefore, also in Latvia. He acknowledges that the existing system is not oriented towards variety and depth of existing methods, but towards unification – impersonal teaching. The teacher notes: the conservative approach is in contrast with the modern pedagogical thought, which is now accepted worldwide. Miltonjan is convinced that our society (referring mainly to the post-soviet states) is ready for humanisation of the music teaching process! Miltonjan reminds that a child’s privilege to be a child during his childhood is a sacred thing that adults have no right to violate. The teacher does not give marks to his school-age students, because by doing so he often has to distort his students’ personality. Moreover, his school-age students rarely participate in the competitions, avoiding in such a way their negative impact on the development of a child’s talent.

Miltonjan relates the large number of students, who drop their studies at music schools, and the dissatisfaction of those, who force themselves to graduate, directly to the studying process that is inadequate to their age. During interpretation of compositions written by the others a child is not given a possibility to express his/her subjective attitude, which actually constitutes an end of a learning process.

* More information in his book “Pedagogy of a Musician’s Harmonious Development: a New Humanistic Learning Paradigm” (Тver 2003).