Music Teacher, David Schnittman
With a Passion
for Music
Written By Jordan Rosenfeld
D
ozens of instruments cluster on
the walls of music teacher David
Schnittman’s home studio in
Morgan Hill, where he now teaches music
lessons full time since the Music Tree
closed down in September, 2015. Brass
instruments like saxophone, flute and
trumpet rub shoulders with the strings,
like guitars and bass; a concert waiting to
happen. When you ask Schnittman how
many instruments he plays, he won’t give
you a hard answer, because he can play
just about anything with one exception.
Don’t ask him to play the Harmonica,
whose requirement of breathing in and
out essentially at the same time defies him.
Otherwise, he says, once you can play one
instrument fairly well, others may follow.
“If you can read music and get a
fingering chart and get a good sound of an
instrument, the question of how good you
become is about how much time you put
in,” he told
TODAY .
You could say Schnittman has put his
whole life into music. Born and raised in
Queens, New York, he already knew he
wanted to teach music by high school,
at which time he was mostly playing
the trumpet and French horn, and the
occasional piano at home. In college at
Stony Brook University, Long Island, he
studied music and history and continued
with the French horn, but did not follow
a direct path to teaching music. After
a detour to France where he sampled
French cuisine he attended the College
of London and worked on his thesis. His
next move was to Santa Cruz. There, he
worked as a counselor for at-risk kids
gmh
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at EMQFamiliesFirst, a mental health
organization in Campbell, and Rebekah’s
Children’s Services in Gilroy. Though
not hired to teach music at the time, he
intuitively followed his natural inclination
to use it in his work with the kids.
“It was really a stunning success, like
magic what music did for these kids who
had the self-esteem of a slug. Most of them
were suffering some kind of psychological
trauma, or were abused or came through
the foster care system,” he said.
What Schnittman saw right away, and
which has since become a cornerstone of
his teaching methodology is that playing
music together had a profound effect on
these children.
“My teaching experience informed my
music. I brought back the idea that the
power of playing music for most people is
about connecting with other people while
you’re playing. There are great musicians
who play solo, but for most of us who are
not virtuosos, the real joy comes from the
synergy of playing with others.”
By 1995 Schnittman had taken up
teaching music lessons full time at
the Music Tree, and brought his les-
sons in counseling at-risk kids into that
experience, organizing ensembles he
called “Music Jam” alongside individual
lessons. And that was before the now
famous School of Rock, started by musi-
cian and producer Paul Green in 1996,
was making national waves. “For the last
fourteen years, once a month instead of
lessons, I arranged my students into three
large hour-long groups,” Schnittman said.
Beginners will play simple songs like
GILROY • MORGAN HILL • SAN MARTIN
JULY / AUGUST 2016
“Louie, Louie,” which he says are “groove-
oriented.” The intermediate group will
have a more complex arrangement, and the
advanced group does “straight ahead jazz,
where they can be more improvisational,”
he said.
Improvisation is another area where
Schnittman differs as a music teacher from
the classic mold. “Every step of the way
self-expression through improvisation is
the core of what I do. They all get tips on
song writing and theory, then I go back in
and say these are the notes, the letters.”
He feels improvisation is also important
in building confidence and creativity.
Equally important in his teaching practice,
he said, is to put his students “in a self-
reflective place when they judge themselves
harshly for failing. That energetic shot you
give yourself…has spoiled your ability to
understand what led to the mistake.” He
said it took him some years to understand
something he’d heard his own teach-
ers say repeatedly: “Don’t practice the
mistake.” Which means, “When you’ve
gone through some process, and you try
to do it and you fail, the negative voices
come in immediately — always lies — and
obfuscates that piece of gold that’s sitting
there that allows you to examine what led
to the mistake. Since you couldn’t examine
it, you end up going through the same
process and mistake again.”
With self-reflection, teaching his
students to notice their own tendency
to judge themselves harshly, allows “a
glimmer of space between the mistake and
reaction” in which a student now has a
choice not to judge, but to learn.
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