The Ars Nova Story
After earning his B.A. in Music from Colorado Christian University, Joel Clay immediately began working as a music teacher in Colorado Springs for a number of small, local, private music schools. The biggest problem about teaching in these environments is the teacher is largely responsible for providing the curriculum to the students. Every student has different needs, is a different skill level, a different age, has different goals, and different capabilities. Immediately, Joel began compiling as many resources as he could, sending them to students following each lesson. Of course, one problem with pulling resources from dozens and dozens of sources is a lack of continuity, and therefore, a certain lack of structure in the lessons.
Joel wanted to better his teaching and to better equip his students, so naturally, he began creating his own resources according to the needs of his students. Eventually, he had two full binders of handouts, charts, exercises, and visual aids, complete with terms, definitions, explanations, and more, and all of it organized into something that somewhat resembled a textbook. It didn’t take long for Joel to begin considering the possibility of codifying this collection of papers into a truly substantial work. He began writing with the express goal of creating a guitar textbook. Of course, no textbook would be complete without homework, so he began re-purposing his binders of handouts to bolster and reinforce the information in the book.
After many months of work, the book was done. For the next year or so, he used the guitar book to continue teaching lessons to his students, sending them pages from the book after lessons. He even wrote another book for his piano students in the meantime. However, Joel was not satisfied. Something was missing. The final product was not fully realized, and what else is there to do in a situation like this but throw everything out and start over? At least, that is what seemed like the only path forward to him at the time.
He went back to work, completely restructuring his entire guitar textbook from beginning to end. He wrote an entirely new textbook and created hundreds and hundreds of new diagrams and charts to accompany the text. Many months later, again, the work was complete. This time, it was not just a collection of sloppily-make guitar chord charts and a few paragraphs of text, but a fully realized pedagogical method for guitar students called “Connect the Dots.”
Over Joel’s last year of teaching students at the private music school, the number of new students began waning, despite several long-time students continuing lessons with him. Being used to doing things the hard way, he decided to start his own teaching business, and Ars Nova was born.
For a number of years up until this point, Joel had been working at several churches around town in the music ministries. In that time, he realized the need for music education in church. Ars Nova was created to be more than a simple music school, and is seeking to partner with churches, providing music lessons to congregants, volunteer musicians, youth, and even outside community members.
Currently, Joel is continuing to develop his own curriculum for his students. Ars Nova is accepting individual students, as well as church partnerships, to bring music to the people of Colorado Springs, and serve local churches and their surrounding communities.
