Thanks for your comments, Frank, or actually, thanks for your thoughtful insights--I particularly appreciated this thought:

>But it's
>an analytical way. Good for a start. But I believe that at some
>point, the student needs to be able to articulate his/her own idea
>from what comes out of his/her head.

Because I not only really agree with it, but I think it is the most important thing. The real objective isn't to learn theory, or structure, or how to craft a particular sort of piece, it is simply to find a way for individuals to express personal feelings and personal visions--

The thing that connects Monk with Jean Ritchie isn't that they are both masters of their genre, it's that both used their medium as a channel for their own personal expressions--

A person whose plays relying only on the things that I have explained above is still an apprentice though, because the personal expression element isn't there--The analytical stuff is very seductive, though, and there are a lot of fast, facile, and theoretically sophisticated apprentices out there who don't realize that there is more to playing than that--