When we started the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago in 1957 we were very interested in this question, "how do people learn music" and can it be done by by-passing formal approaches?

In lieu of notes ad theory, we devised a tablature that in order to learn to use, we had the students copy it through arrangements of traditional pieces from the blackboard.

We were successful in our surmise that you don't have to take a conventional music school approach to learn music and apply it professionally or on an amateur level. As it turns out, many graduates of music school are mostly qualified to teach music and many drop out of the profession altogether. The music school has been used as a means of weeding people out rather than including them in as we tried to do at the Old Town School.

I believe that we were doing important things in the field of music education that could not be learned at any music school in the country at that time or maybe even now. In the U.S, general education has become hackneyed and standardized without innovation for many years. There is little market for innovation particularly now when the emphasis is on how one performs rather than what one learns.

A school, IMHO, is just a place where a body of information has been gathered. Some of the information is useful and some not. There is as much information that is useful in music on the street as there is in the classroom in my opinion. I have had experience with both.

Frank