Keynote Session: To Teach is to Learn

Ricardo Castro, pianist, conductor and founder of Brazil’s NEOJIBA youth music training programme on ‘To Teach is to Learn’.

We experience teaching and learning from our very first contact with another conscious being.  The practice of music is an opportunity to create beauty without barriers, offering us the possibility to communicate immediately and without limits.  Neuroscience also shows the positive influence of the practice of music on the development of the brain. Given the significance and influence of music, this practice cannot continue to be a privilege restricted to the ‘talented few’.

Several programmes have been created to bring the practice of music to disadvantaged populations, but our leading music schools and top musicians have not changed their views or pedagogy, and have continued to send their best students to the podium – normally by means of a highly competitive game – and the less good ones to the classroom. As we need to understand how the practice of music can become universal, I propose a brainstorm on the best and fastest way to achieve this and the importance of sharing musical knowledge and opportunity as widely as possible.