Guest Speaker: Jacobo Nitzsch

Danielle Di Pietrantonio

Jacobo Nitzsch is a musician from Guatemala with a background in

performance and music education. He has worked with the music
conservatory in Guatemala and now teaches at a university there, as well as
being part of a band called the Treble Shop. Last Wednesday, he spoke to our
class about his career as a musician and educator.
Some Big Ideas he asked us to think about:
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How to combine performance and education into a career

How can we promote creativity in classical music education?
Creative thinking and divergent thinking are not the same thing
Who do you think you are, and what do you want to do?
Education is political, in terms of how we choose what to teach or what
not to teach
We should recognize diversity in music (white European men arent the
only people who have ever composed music! Keep that in mind)
Theres a need to connect your personal background with work in
music education, because your background influences your
experiences & the way you teach
Think about: what Im doing, what I did, what is next?
How do you contribute to your culture through music?
You cant make people learn, but as an educator you can provide
people with the space and the opportunity to learn.

Guest speakers in our class have been a very interesting experience to

me so far, because I always feel like our guest speaker comes into our class
with an hour in which to share as much wisdom as possible, so I end up with
a jumbled page of notes like this, which are inspirational and informative but
not necessarily very coherent or logically ordered. He also gave us a lot of
things to think about, without answering his own questions! I guess thats
maybe the point. My biggest question for him is the one he asked us,
because Im still not sure: how do you promote creativity in classical music
education? My friends often will describe me as creative, probably because
Ive chosen to study music instead of, say, business or science. But I really
dont think of myself as being creative, because my experience of what it
means to be the music person mostly has to do with self-discipline and
technique development. This is a really interesting topic for me and
something I hope we continue to discuss in class.