Music educator argues story and symbolic language made Beethoven and Bach lasting teachers

Zach Tolan, a music educator and inventor of a music notation system, told the TEDx Makatawa audience that storytelling and symbolic structure are core to how musicians learn and remember. “The key ingredient is story,” Tolan said, arguing that composers from Bach to Beethoven used motifs, numbers and symbolic gestures to make music memorable and meaningful.

Tolan described examples he said show musical storytelling: Pachelbel’s Canon motifs as a marriage “covenant,” Bach’s use of numeric and melodic structures to echo biblical narratives, and how Beethoven studied Bach’s well‑tempered clavier as a child. He demonstrated counting and motif recognition exercises for the audience and argued that embedding imagery—serpent, water, ark, falling/rising—turns technical practice into durable learning.

Tolan also linked music study to general learning outcomes, saying instrumental study engages multiple symbolic modes (sound, notation, gesture, picture and numbers) that support higher‑order thinking. He suggested teachers deliberately use story and symbolic devices to accelerate and deepen student learning.

Ending: Tolan closed by inviting listeners to reconsider music education as a multimodal, narrative discipline that can shape memory and expression.