The thing students seem to appreciate most about Tom Patterson’s teaching system is that he doesn’t have one. “Tom Patterson’s greatest strengths as a teacher are his genuine concern for each student’s needs and his ability to discern just what each student needs to hear, whether it be on technical matters, musical ideas, or just simple optimistic encouragement,” says Douglas James. He studied with Patterson from 1989 to 1993 and is currently director of guitar studies at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. “All of this is made possible,” James explains, “by his generally nondogmatic approach to guitar playing. His long and varied experience has taught him that there is no one way to play the guitar and that general principles of good guitar playing can apply to more than one approach to the instrument.” The one thing Patterson does stress with all his students is that good guitar technique comes from “relaxed strength.”
Patterson has headed the guitar program at the University of Arizona in Tucson since 1980. During that time, he has groomed a great many competition winners and young teachers, but listening to them, it’s hard to trace them back to Patterson. “I am proud of the fact that my students do not sound like one another,” he says, “excepting that they play very well.”

Creating Opportunities
Patterson found the UA guitar program in shambles when he began. It had gone through two directors in its first four years, and Patterson was welcomed by only two graduate students and one undergraduate performance major. None of them were Hispanic, which Patterson thought odd for a program revolving around a Hispanic instrument in a significantly Hispanic city.
He immediately began recruiting promising students of different ethnicities and social backgrounds. He just as aggressively found donors to provide financial aid for his students as well as prize money for four in-house competitions the UA guitar program presents each year. “Guitarists are traditionally a blue-collar group,” he explains. “With tuition going up and scholarships going down, we rely on donors a lot.”
In the 1990s, Patterson also served as mentor for the Apex program, which reached out to at-risk minority high school students. That program has lost what little funding it had, but Patterson hopes to find a new patron for it.

“Share Your Knowledge”
Patterson capitalizes on the diversity of his students by having them work together and learn from one another. Wolfgang Sehringer, one of Patterson’s grad students and teaching assistants through the early 1990s, now performs and teaches in his native Germany. He says he employs many of Patterson’s teaching principles in his own work. “One of those was: ‘You guys together know more than I do alone. Share your knowledge,’” says Sehringer. “He made us explain things to each other. He would say, for example, ‘Pete has a fantastic tremolo. Have him show you how he does it.’”
Says Patterson, “I try to establish a group of students that’s cohesive, set rules about cooperation, and get a synergy going. Being part of this guitar program is a lot different from having a lesson once a week.”

Performance and Feedback
“We had to perform for each other an awful lot,” recalls Sehringer. “Tom believes that the stage is the best teacher in the world.” As a result, his students routinely take top prizes and honors from the likes of the Fundo Nacional para la Cultura y los Artes in Mexico and the Stotsenberg International Guitar Competition. “This is definitely a performance degree,” Patterson says, “and they go into competitions with a lot of experience being in front of people. Even the meekest performer alive will get to the point of being able to play confidently in public.” Patterson believes that lots of performance and lots of feedback affords students the opportunities to experiment and explore and try to come to terms with the instrument and its music in their own way.