For star teacher Anita Collins, the music advantage is clear

Learning a musical instrument means being comfortable with discomfort, says the leading music educator.

Author and researcher Anita Collins with Canberra Grammar students Sophie Hewlett and Victoria Spark, both 14. Picture: Sean Davey.

While researching a book on how learning music helps children’s brains and mental wellbeing, Anita Collins watched as her daughter rode the highs and lows of learning to play the violin.

In seeking to inspire her child’s progress on the instrument, Collins began learning the cello about three years ago.

“Ellie was struggling with frustration, and she’d get really annoyed with herself,” Collins said. “I thought, if I can practise in front of her, and show her that I just keep doing it, then maybe she’ll learn from that as well. And she piped up one day, ‘Mum, you’re not very good — but at least you’re trying’. I think that’s a win.”

Collins calls this “being comfortable with discomfort” and, as a music teacher of more than 20 years, her efforts on the cello are a regular reminder of just how vulnerable we all feel when trying to learn a new skill. “I reckon as adults, we get worse at it,” she said. “We get so good at some things that we actually get worse at starting a new thing because we don’t like feeling vulnerable.”

As well as playing the cello for 10 minutes a day to inspire her daughter, Collins has worked on her first book, The Music Advantage, which is published on Tuesday and shows how parents and teachers can support children’s music development.

Before appearing with singer-songwriter Guy Sebastian on ABC TV’s Don’t Stop The Music in 2018, Collins caught the attention of the global music education community in 2014 with a five-minute animated clip that used neuroscience research to explain the “fireworks” in musicians’ brains when they play. At almost nine million views, it is one of the most watched TED Education videos online.

In The Music Advantage, she expands on that by visiting labs of leading neuromusical researchers around the world, and trialling their techniques on herself and in the music classroom.

Despite being the daughter of a reading recovery teacher, Collins struggled mightily with her own reading until the age of nine, when she began learning to play the clarinet and to read musical notation. That early gap in her education is now well and truly closed, but it remains a mystery and a motivation even today.

“I’ve always wondered what happened in that time where I found it really hard to read, and I made huge mistakes - but then it got better,” she said. “What would have happened if I hadn’t been given a clarinet? Where would I be now? That’s why I’m so passionate about helping kids who are struggling with their reading, because I feel like music changed my path, for sure.”