How well do you remember your favorite music teacher?
Perhaps their technical mastery sticks in your mind every time you pick up your instrument. Or their pencil marks remain in a well-worn book of favorite songs. Maybe you've followed in their footsteps as a music teacher and the sound of your ensemble has familiar tones and inflections that bear a strong resemblance to your teacher.
For Escher String Quartet violinist Aaron Boyd, it was this latter thought that got him thinking about his own childhood music teacher, Eugene Phillips. Boyd had been teaching a master class for a quartet and realized that the sounds they were producing were reminiscent of Phillips.
"I realized at that moment that a personality as strong as his goes from us into others," said Boyd.
This chain reaction is a powerful example of how the legacy of music education can live on through generations of students.
"Music teachers enjoy an almost genealogical immortality through their students," writes Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, also a former student of Phillips, for The New York Times. "Because music making is practiced through the body, teachers imprint their students with the specific physical traits of their craft: gestures, tics and preferences that those students may in turn pass on to yet another generation."
The positive lasting effects music teachers have on their students is one reason why formal recognition of these educators is so important. That's one of the reasons why The Recording Academy instituted the Music Educator Award, an honor recognizing outstanding music educators for their service to their students and the greater music community.
After all, as students of Phillips know, a music teacher's influence can be forever.
"Teachers become your collective conscience," said Alex Lee, another former Phillips student. "[Star Wars'] Obi-Wan doesn't die so much as become one with the Force."
