Teaching What You Had to Unlearn: Scott Tennant's Quiet Revolution in the Studio

There's a particular kind of irony that follows gifted students into adulthood. You spend the better part of your formative years absorbing everything a teacher puts in front of you — the technique, the phrasing, the values, the habits — and then one day you find yourself on the other side of the desk. And the question hits you hard: Do I pass this down exactly as I received it, or do I trust something new?

For Scott Tennant, that question didn't arrive quietly. It arrived mid-lesson, mid-sentence, somewhere between explaining a fingering choice and watching a student's face fall into polite, practiced compliance. That moment — that flicker of a kid learning to perform understanding rather than actually having it — changed how Tennant thought about what teaching even means.

The Weight of a Good Education

Tennant came up through a tradition that prized precision. His early instruction was thorough, rigorous, and deeply respectful of classical guitar's long lineage. The teachers who shaped him were serious people who believed that technique was a form of integrity. You didn't cut corners. You didn't freelance before you'd earned the right. That kind of formation leaves marks — and most of those marks are good ones.

But some of them aren't. Or rather, some of them are good for the student who received them and quietly catastrophic when applied wholesale to someone with a different mind, a different body, a different inner life.

Former students who've worked closely with Tennant describe a teacher who seems almost preemptively aware of this. "He'd start to explain something the traditional way and then kind of catch himself," one guitarist recalled. "Like he'd say, 'Okay, this is how I was taught — but let me ask you something first. What does it feel like when you play it?' That pivot was everything."

The Question Before the Answer

What Tennant developed over time isn't so much a method as a discipline of listening. Before he prescribes anything, he observes. He watches how a student naturally approaches the instrument — where the tension pools, where the instincts are already doing smart things, where the borrowed habits are getting in the way of something more authentic.

This runs counter to how a lot of classical instruction operates. Traditional pedagogy often works from a fixed model outward: here is the correct position, the correct tone, the correct interpretive tradition. A student's job is to approximate that model as closely as possible. Progress is measured by proximity to the ideal.

Tennant hasn't abandoned that framework entirely — he's too steeped in the tradition to dismiss it — but he's learned to hold it loosely. "There's a version of respect for your teachers that becomes a cage," he's said in various conversations over the years. "I don't want to hand my students a cage and call it a gift."

When the Student Teaches the Teacher

Some of the most telling moments in Tennant's teaching career are the ones where he openly admits to being changed by a student. It's not something every instructor is willing to do — there's a vulnerability in it that cuts against the authority the role seems to require. But multiple people who've studied with him describe the same experience: a session where Tennant heard something unexpected, stopped everything, and genuinely engaged with it rather than redirecting toward what he'd been planning to teach.

One guitarist described bringing in a piece she'd been working on with an unconventional right-hand approach that her previous teacher had flagged as incorrect. Tennant listened, watched her play it, and said nothing for a moment. Then: "That's not wrong. That's yours. Let's figure out where it takes you."

That kind of response isn't just generosity. It reflects a specific philosophy — that technique in service of genuine expression is always more valuable than technique in service of correctness for its own sake.

Honoring Influence Without Becoming It

There's a real tension here that Tennant navigates carefully. He has enormous respect for the teachers and traditions that built him. He doesn't dismiss the rigor or the lineage. In fact, part of what makes his mentorship so effective is that he can explain why traditional approaches exist — not just what they are, but what problem they were originally solving.

When a student understands the reason behind a technique, they can make informed choices about when to apply it and when something else serves better. That kind of contextual knowledge is very different from obedience, and Tennant seems to know the difference intuitively.

"He taught me the rules the way a good lawyer teaches case law," one former student put it. "Not so you'd follow them blindly, but so you'd know exactly what you were doing when you decided to go a different direction."

What the Next Generation Actually Needs

Ask Tennant what he hopes his students take away and he tends to give answers that sound deceptively simple. He wants them to be able to hear themselves — really hear themselves, not the version filtered through what they think they're supposed to sound like. He wants them to develop enough technical grounding that they're not limited by their hands, but enough creative confidence that they're not limited by their training either.

That balance is genuinely hard to teach. It requires a mentor who's willing to hold two contradictory things at once: deep respect for tradition and genuine openness to whatever comes next. Tennant has spent a career learning to do exactly that — first in his own playing, and now in the students he sends back out into the world.

The paradox at the heart of his teaching is this: the most valuable thing he passes on is precisely the thing his own teachers couldn't have given him directly. It had to be discovered. And now, quietly, lesson by lesson, he's trying to help the next generation discover it a little faster — without stealing the discovery from them in the process.