Author: musicalitywrld

The result of Dr. Harnum’s research is a book called The Practice Of Practice, which we strongly recommend checking out. “The Practice of Practice” is a highly-readable treasure trove of all the latest ideas, understanding, techniques and insights on what makes for effective music practice and how you can learn better and faster.

From a classical upbringing to an exciting 2-year road-trip of discovering improvisation, Jonathan Harnum’s own musical journey is fascinating! We were excited to have the chance to speak with him and share some of the ideas from “The Practice of Practice” to inspire and accelerate your music learning.

If you heard our recent interview with Gregg Goodhart on the topic of practice then you’ll find this is a beautiful counterpoint. Although the broad topic is the same, this is a very different conversation – but similarly packed with insights and nuggets that can pay off for your own music practice.

In this conversation you’ll hear about:

• A simple way to reframe how you think about difficult things which can immediately transform frustration and helplessness into empowered eagerness.
• The neurological research which proves that watching live music can be a highly valuable form of practice too.
• How “guerilla practice” can help you fit in genuinely effective music practice even amid the busiest of lives.

You’re going to really enjoy Dr. Harnum’s insights on improvising, creativity, broadening the idea of what music practice can be, and some of the very specific actionable ideas he shares along the way.

Watch the episode:

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Links and Resources

• • The Practice of Practice
  • Practice Like This by Jonathan Harnum PhD (Free PDF)
  • Jon Harnum – Author, Teacher, Musician
  • Dr. Jonathan Harnum – Books on Music Theory and Trumpet
  • Kenny Werner – Effortless Mastery
  • The Musician’s Ear – Active Listening Course
  • Musicality Now – How to Learn Like a Genius, with Gregg Goodhart

Transcript

Jonathan: Hello, this is Jonathan Harnum, and I’m the author of The Practice of Practice and other music books. And you are listening to Musicality Now.

Christopher: Welcome to the show, Jon. Thank you for joining us today.

Jonathan: My pleasure.

Christopher: So, I have to agree with a quote you have on the front of The Practice of Practice from I think the founder or co-founder of Groupon, who said, basically, “This is the best all-in-one guide to everything we know about how to practice.” And I couldn’t agree more. There is so much valuable stuff in that book, from the tactical through to the strategical through to the mindset. And I’m just going to try my very best to scratch the surface today because people are going to have to check out the book or you have a free ebook on the same topic, which covers some of the same ground, not everything that’s in the full book.

Christopher: But before we dive into all of that good stuff, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about you as a musician rather than as the author of this book and practice. Where did you come from and learning music yourself?

Jonathan: So I grew up in a small town in Alaska, and did kind of the normal band thing. In ensemble kind of deal, band, choir, orchestra. And did that all through middle school in high school and had some amazing teachers despite being in a rural setting in Alaska. There weren’t a whole lot of opportunities to hear live music but the instruction was really great. And so I did that all through high school, decided I want to be a music teacher, did my undergrad. And then taught for a while and was sort of stuck in my musicianship I think. I had come through the school system and I think like a lot of people do, once you are through with that system, if you don’t have a group to play with, like a large wind ensemble, say 20 people, 40 people, it’s kind of almost pointless to play your instrument because there’s not really anything to play for.

Jonathan: So, I was kind of struggling with that for a number of years. I would still play and practice but I didn’t have anyone to play with. That’s starting to change a little more here. There’s a lot more community band kind of activity for those kind of musicians. But I think school music is a model that keeps us reading the written page and I was interested in something else.

Jonathan: So, I got married, took a very long road trip, a two year road trip. And on that trip, I decided to start playing trumpet with anybody and everybody that would want me to play with them. And I had never really improvise a lot before. I played a lot of jazz and sort of, it sort of scared me. I think it’s good to do things that scare you as long as they’re not too dangerous. And as far as I can tell, playing music is not too dangerous, usually. So, I started doing that and just began to fall in love with using my ears and trying to be musical without written music, and listening and that sort of thing. And that led to a whole other experience of playing music and improvising and doing free improvisation and playing jazz. It’s so much more freeing.

Jonathan: One of the turning points I think to do that was a book by pianist Kenny Werner, Effortless Mastery, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. But fantastic book and it’s more about connecting with sound, not necessarily identifying as music, but just sound. So, now I’m playing in three or four different bands regularly. I play trumpet, guitar, piano, some percussion and just love it.

Christopher: Fantastic. I wonder can-

Jonathan: So that’s my musical life.

Christopher: Can we dive into those early experiences, because you touched on there the fact that moving from written notation to improvising can be a bit of a daunting thing, even if intellectually you know there’s no real danger to it. What were those first times when you were out on the road, and you decided, “okay, I’ll try jamming or I’ll try playing with this group, I don’t have sheet music for”, how did that go? How were you feeling, how did you approach that?

Jonathan: Well, I think, it was really interesting and super fun and way easier than I ever thought it would be. Partly because, I mean, up to that point, I’d been playing for, gosh, probably over 10 or 15 years. And I had more of a classical orientation then and a focus. So I knew all of my scales, all of my modes. I mean, I knew scales backwards, forwards, in and out. And so, it was just a matter of trying to find the key that we were playing in and then just messing around with scales and trying to make something that either fit with a musical or was musical.

Jonathan: And I think partly because trumpet is not an instrument that you usually see in, I don’t know, say a singer-songwriter or people just playing guitar on the street, it’s not a “normal” instrument and so, there was this kind of wow factor. People were like oh, my goodness, there’s trumpet playing with us. So that was kind of neat and made me feel special, I guess.

Jonathan: But I think, for me, anyway, being trained to read the page for so long and being focused on not making mistakes, whatever that may mean, that I think for me was part of the challenge to go into more of a free setting where there really is no such thing as a mistake. I mean, there’s something that might cause a little more attention than another note or another line. But for the most part, there’s no way to know what’s right or what’s wrong. You’re either playing in the key or you’re not. And so, it’s very freeing. It was still kind of daunting but it was a relief, I guess, in a lot of ways to be like wow, this is actually really fun. I can actually do this. So, it was great.

Christopher: Gotcha. And you made reference there to how it was about moving more to relying on your ear, and I guess that’s part of what lets you know if you’re making a so-called mistake or how to recover from it, is that staying aware and conscious of what you’re playing and how it sounds.

Jonathan: Yeah. You’re always only a half step away from the right note. Yeah. I think partly, it’s more daunting or more frightening because it’s more personal. When you have a note on a page, someone else wrote that note from that piece of music, whatever it might be. And so, there’s not an ownership. And when you’re creating yourself, it’s yours, it’s you, it’s what you’re putting out there. And I think that’s part of maybe the daunting aspect of it, at least it is for me. And I think for me also, it relates into this idea that’s in the book, about natural ability, and, you know, they’re a naturally talented musician. And I think that’s, well, I believe very strongly that that’s not the case at all, that practice, even hidden kinds of practice that we might not consider practice are what result in talent, or musical ability.

Jonathan: So if you’re improvising and kind of putting yourself out there, and if it sounds bad, that might, in my mind, anyway, at the time, I mean, I’m not talented, so, you know, like, what am I even trying to do doing this? And so, for me, improvising like that or just trying to figure things out was great not only musically, but psychologically I think too.

Christopher: That’s so interesting. And you mentioned a couple of things there that I really want to dig into later in the conversation. One is the idea of hidden practice, that there might be practice going on that we don’t traditionally think of as practice.

Jonathan: Absolutely.

Christopher: And the other is that these improvisational skills, these ear skills can also be a part of practice. I wonder back then, were you practicing between jam sessions? Were you doing something to help you get the hang of improvising and creating?

Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. I had a practice mute, because we are in a small Volkswagen camper and we had a nice stereo system in it. But I would put a practice mute in and just play along with whatever was on that we were listening to. Mostly like pop music singer-songwriters, symphonic stuff, sometimes, just jazz, just a wide range of different kinds of music and just trying to figure it out, but also doing more typical practice, like doing scales and exercises and flexibility stuff, and all the sort of technique-y kind of things that I probably would never play in an improvised setting. But they’re skills that are crucial to being able to play the instrument. So both of those. Yeah, I was both training my ear to try to figure out songs and rely on the practice I’d done before but also trying to keep up with the technique as well.

Christopher: Interesting. And in case anyone in the audience isn’t familiar with trumpet practice mute, doesn’t totally mute you. When you were sat there in the camper van, you could still hear yourself, you just weren’t blasting the driver out of the van.

Jonathan: Right. Would you like to hear an example?

Christopher: Absolutely.

Jonathan: I don’t have the practice mute here but the horn unmuted. So it’s pretty loud. But with a mute in, let’s see. So this isn’t a practice mute but it will cut the sound significantly. Anyway.

Christopher: Fantastic. Thank you. Well, I think our microphones dutifully exploded with the full volume trumpet, so that demonstrates the point suitably. I’m sure a lot of people in our audience are envious of the idea of being able to just sit in a camper van for two years getting to know their instrument inside out and break away from the sheet music. But it must have been going fairly well for you to stick with it. You know, if you were going to the jam session and falling on your face and then sat in the van trying to figure things out by ear and really struggling, I don’t imagine you would have kept that up for two years. So did you find you were getting the hang of it relatively quickly? Were there kind of early wins that kept you going?

Jonathan: Yeah, well, it was, I mean, like I was saying, I’d been practicing for over 15 years at that point. So coming into a scale or finding a key was relatively easy. My music theory chops were also pretty solid so I could sort of extrapolate in my head if I started finding a few notes, you know, using relative minors and majors and those sorts of things. It happened very quickly. I mean, at that point, I’d been studying music from middle school all the way through college and a couple years of teaching. So it was, it was very easy, for me. It was kind of a natural progression.

Jonathan: But I did discover that, normally, I was playing with guitar players and so that put me in for trumpet lots of sharp keys, which tend to be less familiar. I was going to say difficult, but it’s not the case, it’s just less familiar. So that was a really good kind of a nice wake up call to be playing say in the key of F sharp which is what, six sharps. So these unfamiliar keys that were unfamiliar to me as a trumpet player but are very common for guitar player. So if a guitar player’s playing an E, that puts me in F sharp. So that was kind of an eye-opener.

Jonathan: But generally, because I had done so much scale practice and technique work, it was a pretty easy transition, or it just sort of, the challenge was not so much playing in the key but playing something that was worth hearing.

Christopher: Interesting. I think a lot of times in our culture, people see it as an either/or, as a kind of false dichotomy that someone is either a sheet music musician or they’re by ear musician. And both camps gonna end up envious of the other one and not really understanding how it works. And it’s the rare musician who actually starts in one and transitions to the other or manages to learn both at once. Did you find it was challenging emotionally or psychologically? Did you find that your identity just kind of naturally grew into that other kind of musicianship?

Jonathan: No. I think it’s still, because I learned from the page, that influenced me really deeply. So I guess I started when I was 11, and by the time I was 21 or 22, I was out of college, so that’s a good decade of that kind of mentality. And I still, even though, in fact, I have a gig tonight that I’ll be improvising a whole bunch on, but it’s still, I wouldn’t say a challenge, although it is a challenge, it’s still something that I think a lot about, about trying to improvise in such a way that I’m not just noodling around. Like, oh, I’m in the key of whatever and I’m just playing notes. I’m trying to actually be musical. And for me, that’s kind of the challenge, and, I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but it’s the same challenge then in making that transition as it is now.

Jonathan: In fact, lately, I have been, I joined a wind ensemble last year, and it was the first time I’d actually played with a bunch of other musicians off the page for probably close to a decade. And it was really, it was really fun. I kind of had a reaction to that kind of written page music. I didn’t want anything to do with it for a number of years. And getting back to it was really refreshing. It’s a different way of connecting with people and making music. It’s just very different.

Jonathan: So, I think having grown up using written music, it still seems fresh, and I don’t know risky is the right word, but a really nice challenge to try to use my ears and the horn to play. It’s harder. I can read almost anything that is put in front of me, and that’s fun. But to try to do the same thing without anything but your ears and your instrument is, I think, a really fun challenge. And it’s also a little bit scarier too because it’s just you.

Christopher: Sure. I’d been wondering as I read the book what the origin story of the Practice of Practice might be. And now I’m thinking okay, so you go off in a van for two years, you’re playing your instrument the whole time, you’re experimenting, trying new things. Maybe you inevitably come back thinking like, we’ve been going about practice entirely wrong. Is that what happened or what inspired you to write such an in-depth book on practice?

Jonathan: Well, there were a few things. There was partly that. Where I went to school for my graduate work which is Northwestern University, which is known to be kind of like a conservatory school. So it’s very much classically oriented. In fact, some just major players, symphonic players come out of that school. Trumpeters, French horn players, people who are playing in New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, just really a powerhouse of orchestral education. And me, coming from more of, at least at that point, more interested in improvisation and kind of other ways of learning music and making music, made me think about that topic a lot more because I was surrounded by incredible musicians. Like literally some of the best in the world at what they do. And then also seeing that some of them were so frightened of improvising, or of not having something on the page that they could play flawlessly.

Jonathan: And so, that is one of the things that started me thinking about it. But I also, in my own quest to be a better musician, I’m curious about like, how do people do that. And also being surrounded by these amazing musicians and talking to them about what practice is and what they do and how they think about it seemed very fascinating to me. It was a once, literally, once in a lifetime opportunity to be around those kinds of musicians and be able to ask them questions.

Jonathan: So, I ended up creating a research project for my PhD that was geared toward practice. What it is, how people do it, how they think about it, and how that is different from say, a classical musician, to a jazz musician, to a folk musician, to someone from a different musical tradition like Djembe music from Mali in West Africa was one of the things that I wanted to focus on.

Jonathan: So, so all of the research literature, as I started looking into this, it’s literally, at least at the time, so it’s been about seven or eight years since I was actively pursuing the research. But at the time, 99.9% of it was geared toward classical music. And it’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of studies. But it’s all based on the band, choir, orchestra kind of model. And so, I was really curious to ask other musicians how they thought about it, what they did, what practice meant to them, not only to discover what that might be, but also to help myself be a better practicer.

Jonathan: I just ran across a quote that I think I’m going to use, I love quotes, if you couldn’t tell from the book. But this one is from, let’s see if I can remember, it’s from Telamon of Arcadia, he was a fifth century mercenary. And he said, “It is one thing to study war and another to live the warrior’s life.” And to me, that resonates a lot with the practice approach because you can read every book and talk about it day and night. But when it comes down to sitting in that chair and doing the practice, it’s different. Those things can help, absolutely. But it’s still, it’s still a personal relationship with whatever it is you’re trying to do. So, yeah, in a nutshell, that’s how the research project sort of came to be. It’s ongoing too. I’m still learning more and thinking about it and it’s endless. Which is good, I think.

Christopher: Well, I want to come back to that quote because I think it ties in with one of the concepts in the book that you share about kind of keeping at it and “staying in the chair” as it were. But I’m curious to know, if there’s so much that’s been researched and written about that band, orchestra, classical model of practice, what’s the alternative? What did you discover that maybe the average musician going to a one-on-one teacher for lessons each week isn’t getting told about what music practice is?

Jonathan: Well, I think it depends on the teacher for sure. So, one of the groups that I wanted to talk to were singer-songwriters or maybe like folk musician or pop musician, someone who wasn’t necessarily in the classical world was what I was looking for. And one of the first people I talked to was a guy named Nicholas Baron. He’s a singer-songwriter from Chicago. And one of the first things he said was “I never practice”. And, I mean, the guy can play guitar really well. He’s got a great voice, he sings, he knows hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of songs. He writes his own stuff. And so, clearly, he’s doing something, and has done something, to be able to play the way he does.

Jonathan: And so, that started me thinking like, okay, so what exactly, this is, I was referring in our earlier chat about practice as kind of a loaded term. And I think it really is. We tend to think of practice as something that’s boring or doing scales, or, you know, you’re forced to sit at the piano, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. It certainly can be that. And not to say that that’s necessarily bad doing the scales and doing stuff that can be a little more tedious. But some people don’t have the patience or the desire to do it that way, including folk musicians, some of them. And so, their idea of practice is different. They wouldn’t call it practice, like Erin McKeown, another singer-songwriter who I interviewed for the book, she phrased it as spending time with her instrument. Because that sort of sidestep the kind of the baggage that goes along with this idea about practice.

Jonathan: And same thing with Nicholas. With that kind of music, and jazz too, it’s more about the song and the melody and feeling something. Which I think should be part of any practice from the beginning. But because in school music, we learn from the page, and if you imagine, you’ve got a classroom of say 40, 11 year olds, and they all have a very loud instrument, you know, learning something by ear is not probably a good approach. But having the written music there and saying, this is where you put your finger, this is the note that it’s supposed to sound like, it allows you to control that chaos a little bit.

Jonathan: But I think because it’s a sort of a programmatic approach, it can become just button pushing. If you’re not careful as a teacher about talking about the expressive elements of music, it’s just button pushing. And I think one of the real gems that I took away from talking with people who don’t think about practice, the scale approach is, like one of the things that Erin said is, you know, she was talking with someone before our interview about that aspect. They both kind of agreed that they had this idea that practicing something, like really diligently and nailing the parts down or whatever kind of ruined it. It ruins sort of the feeling-full aspect of it or it could. But then she said also that she had just started practicing and she realized it just opened up a lot of other ability.

Jonathan: So I really have found that, like you said, there’s kind of a false dichotomy. You either are a reader or an ear player. And absolutely, I’ve met people who are fantastic symphonic musicians, just say, oh, you know, I really wish I could do that, not realizing that they can. And on the other side, you know, people who play by ear and just sing songs like, oh, I really wish I could read music, and they could do that as well. Yeah, I’m not sure what else I got on that topic.

Christopher: So you hinted earlier at this maybe, but when you encountered Nicholas, this fantastic musician, and he said to you “I don’t practice”, why did you not at that point, say, oh, I guess he’s one of the talented ones, I’ll go interview someone else?

Jonathan: Because I absolutely don’t believe that, And at that point, so I had been reading through all this research, including Carol Dweck’s work, which I’m sure we’ll get to. I’m just convinced and still am, that there’s no such thing as natural ability. From everything that I have been able to read or discover, there might be say for example, someone might have better coordination, slightly better, than anybody, you know, than other people, they might be in a higher percentile of being able to be coordinated. So playing guitar or organ where you have to use your feet and your hands or drum set for that matter, that might be a little bit easier for them.

Jonathan: So there might be some physical abilities that help a little bit. But in order to play music or to do anything more than a beginners level, it takes practice. It doesn’t matter how gifted, if that’s even a thing, you are, you’ve got to spend the time doing some kind of practice. Whether it’s like, for example, Nicholas, just playing songs, and just, he said, he would just start performing. He played in the subways just all day long and would get tips from people sometimes and he would just, his practice was performing, was just playing, just learning songs and playing. It’s fascinating to me that that doesn’t, in his mind, count as practice, it may now since conversation, he may think about it differently.

Jonathan: But I think like folk musicians, and certainly not all of them, but in general, it seems like the idea is that, you just do it. You figure it out. And for whatever reason, that’s not necessarily practice. You’re just hanging out with other people around the campfire just trying to figure it out. But to me, that is practice. It’s a form of practice. It’s not doing scales or theory or any of that, but you’re actively engaging your ear and the instrument and you’re just trying to figure things out. I mean, that’s essentially what I think practice is, is just trying to make it work by whatever means necessary.

Christopher: And in the practice like this book, you actually define three categories of practice, where intentional practice is one, but there’s also accidental practice and play as practice. Could you talk a little bit about each of those because I think it’s helpful for people to understand there might be other types of practice available to them?

Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, the first one of accidental practice, I call it accidental practice, in the Practice of Practice book, I call it Samskara, which is an Indian term from India. And one of the musicians that I interviewed about that, Prasad Upasani, he was the one that introduced me to this idea, and Samskara is an Indian word that means practice based on where you are. So for example, growing up in a house where someone is playing music a lot, you see that, you absorb that, you’re like, oh, well, that’s possible to do.

Jonathan: So for example, my daughter now is three. And there’s instruments all over the house. Of course she can’t play them really at all. Depends on what your definition of play, she plays with them. But she’ll sing songs strumming her ukulele, or she has a little cello that I’ve strung like a bass because she loves the bass. She’s holding it correctly, she’s moving her hands kind of in the right way. And so, to me, even though it’s not intentional practice, for sure, she’s just playing. So it’s kind of a blend of those two, of the accidental practice because of where you are or where you grow up and the practice as play. I think that can be a really valuable way of gaining skill. And we don’t usually think of that as practice. It’s the deliberate practice, so the intentional practice that we usually label as practice. But I think all of those things can contribute.

Jonathan: You know, like Zakir Hussain, who is one of the most amazing tabla players and musicians alive, now or anytime, you know, he was saying, his father was a famous tabla player. And so, that music was around all the time, musicians were around all the time. And he said, growing up, that he would just kind of run in and play tabla for a little bit and run out and keep playing. And, I mean, the guys, I don’t know, are you familiar with him, he’s just an incredible musician.

Jonathan: So, that that Samskara, it can be a really powerful idea. And it’s one of those kind of hidden I think, not hidden necessarily, but it’s one of those ways of acquiring skill that we don’t really think about or we don’t see. When we see someone play an amazing piece of music or do something in sports, all practices hidden, it’s just that one moment that you see. I think it’s much easier to label someone as naturally talented than it is to think about all the things that went into that moment or that event or that piece of music or whatever it might be, even that one little solo. We can’t see all that. And so, oh, they’re talented. It’s easier to think about that way I think.

Christopher: For sure. And what you just said really reminded me of a recent interview I did with a chap named Robert Emery from the UK, who is one of these examples of someone that gets pointed to and called talented, for better or worse. And certainly he’s incredibly skillful. But when he talked about his upbringing, he said, he encourages people to think in terms of your musical duvet, or blanket, and the importance of immersing yourself in music. And he said something like, to the extent that you can’t help but learn, which I thought was a fantastic way of putting it, and that kind of environmental learning that you kind of absorb passively.

Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. From what you listen to, or, for me, one of my, I don’t know if you’d call it a regret, but growing up in rural Alaska, there was not a lot of opportunity to see live music. And I think, at least for me, when I was in a, when I was a little bit older and I could actually go see live music, it changed things for me, because music that we usually consume, it’s an abstract thing. It’s just sound coming through speakers. Maybe we’ll watch a video, at least now. But it tends to be rather abstract. We put our earbuds in and do a workout or whatever. We don’t see the people doing it.

Jonathan: And something about being in a room with people making sounds on these instruments, to me was like, oh, even though obviously, intellectually, I know that that’s what’s happening and people are doing that, but to actually see it in front of me made it more achievable I think or approachable, I’ll be like. oh, I could do that, maybe. Even still, I think anybody who’s trying to learn music, whatever the instrument, going to see live music is one of the best things that you can do because it’s inspiring, with the right mindset. But it’s also, you know, like going to an open mic, especially is a really nice way to do it because you’re probably going to see people who either have never done it before, or are still working on getting it done. And it can give you sort of permission to, it’s okay to be not good at something for a while.

Jonathan: The other thing about the live piece is that the stuff that we listen to, even symphonic works, those are highly edited. I have friends that are in symphonies that I’ve talked to about recordings, so he’s like, well, yeah, we’ll do a recording, and then we’ll go back and punch in and out certain sections that for whatever reason didn’t quite make the cut. And so, we listen all day long till whatever we’re listening to is perfect. There’s these flawless examples of musicality, which is great, and it’s amazing. Like who would want to listen to mistakes. But there’s something about the live, real human beings doing something in real time that is kind of special, I think, and inspirational, for me anyway.

Christopher: For sure. And I don’t want to jump ahead too much, but in the “who” section of your book, you talk about the fact that many of the people you spoke to identified listening and watching live music as a form of practice, right?

Jonathan: Absolutely, yeah. Yup. And I believe that more and more, especially, I have not yet had a student who I don’t have to really kind of push to listen, specifically, to listen to the tunes that they’re trying to do, which always kind of puzzles me. It’s easy when the tune is something that the student brings to me, and says, I want to learn this, they already know it. But if we’re doing something else that they’re maybe not familiar with, two, three weeks will go by and they’re still struggling with this piece of music. And I’m like, “Well, have you listened to it?” “Oh, no.” Okay. So then we actually listen to it in the lesson and start talking about it in the lesson. Because clearly, they’re not doing it at home.

Jonathan: And usually, this is younger kids who might not be as motivated as maybe other adults or, you know, it’s like motivation is a wide spectrum, so some people are more motivated and will just find anything and everything that they can to learn something. And others are just, you know, a little more passive, need a little more help. But there’s tons of research that show, having a model, a listening model, for example, in this case, the learning that happens with a model is statistically significantly better than doing without. I mean, it’s kind of one of those duh-studies, like, well, of course. But I think the more you listen, the better your playing will be because you know kind of what you’re reaching for. Yeah, it’s absolutely crucial.

Jonathan: And there’s another piece to that too, which I discovered in researching this book is the mirror neuron system. It’s just fascinating. It was accidentally discovered in the lab when they had some monkeys wired up to look at brain function. And the researchers, they were I think using peanuts, I don’t remember exactly the details. But one of the monkeys ate a peanut. Or no, no, one of the researchers ate a peanut and the similar system in the monkey’s brain lit up when they were watching the researcher eat that peanut. So that led to a whole bunch of studies on the mirror neuron system in the brain. And there’s a bunch of links to really interesting videos that go into this in more detail.

Jonathan: But basically, when you see someone do something, a subset of the same neurons that you need to do that thing will fire in your brain when you’re watching it. So it’s almost as if your brain, you’re practicing just by watching someone do that. And I’d be fascinated, I don’t know if there’s any studies that have looked at whether that happens while watching video or if it has to be live. I would guess it would work watching video too. But also, the more familiar you are with whatever it is you’re watching. So say you’re a guitar player and you’re watching a guitar player, more of that subset of neurons will fire while you’re watching. And it’s just fascinating to me. And I’m convinced, although I don’t know of any studies, that that is a form of practice that is another way of getting your brain to make the connections that you need to play music.

Christopher: No doubt. And I’m really glad you explained that because I think, you know, you mentioned the motivation thing there. And I know for a lot of our audience, their adult hobbyist musicians. And so, they’re motivated, but I know a lot of them will have skipped the listening part because it felt too fun. They will have felt like listening to music is what everyone else does, I’m going to be with my instrument playing music. And if I’m not doing that, I’m wasting time. And I think it’s so valuable, you know, we did a launch recently for a course all about active listening. And one of the things we talked about was how if you listen to something that features your own instrument, you listen in an entirely different way because part of your brain is imagining how you would play that. And I think it’s exactly what you just described there, that your brain is almost practicing as you listen, and it can be hugely impactful.

Jonathan: Oh, absolutely. And it’s a different kind of listening I think too. There’s the listening that happens when you just sort of have something on in the background and maybe you’re doing the dishes or hanging out or whatever. But then there’s more intentional listening, when you really just close your eyes, put the headphones on and listen around the sonicscape, listen for the other parts or, I don’t know, it’s a different kind of listening experience. It’s very intentional I guess. And I think we’re not really taught, at least I wasn’t taught to do that kind of listening. It’s either listening as just, what’s the word I’m looking for? Or just kind of listening. Not really, what’s the difference between listening and hearing? Like just hearing something? Whereas listening has more intent behind it, I guess?

Christopher: For sure. Yeah. We could have a whole conversation just about this stuff definitely because as you say, you talk to musicians, and most of them will explain, you know, yes, okay, if they think about it, they are listening in a certain way even though no one taught them to do that. But when you are taught it in a structured way, it’s such a beneficial skill-set to have.

Christopher: I won’t take us on that tangent. I said a moment ago that this idea of listening and watching performing being a form of practice to is from the “who” section of your book. And I’m sure people are wondering, what kind of book has a “who” section, what is he talking about? So let’s circle back if we may-

Jonathan: Not talking about Pete Townsend, yeah!

Christopher: Absolutely. Let’s circle back and talk about your pinwheel model, if we may. Because I think again, it’s one of those kind of frameworks or ways of thinking about things that immediately will help people understand what they might have been missing out on.

Jonathan: Yeah. So I kind of combined, well, as I was thinking about this, and there was, you know, I think it’s 380 something research papers that I read through, just trying to make sense of what were they talking about. I mean, it was all practice but it’s a big topic. And it reminded me, once I came up with the categories, which any reporter would have figured out way before I did is what, where, when, how, why and who, so six different aspects. And to me, it helps to have a physical object to represent some complex idea.

Jonathan: So to me, the pinwheel kind of made sense. It has different colors. And in my research, whenever I was reading a research paper, I had six different colored tabs and I would mark up the research paper with whatever appropriate tab they seemed to be talking about. Whether it was, so the what would be definitions of practice. And that kind of touches on, Nicholas Baron has a different idea of practice, even though he doesn’t call it practice than say Ethan Bensdorf, who’s a trumpet player in the New York Philharmonic. I mean, they’re both doing things that get them better, but their definition, what they call it is different. And to me, understanding what it is or what people think it is or believe it is is really valuable, especially if that idea of what it is is different than your own idea of what it is.

Jonathan: So the where is more about where the practice takes place. Like that Samskara idea whether you’re surrounded by music as a kid or not, or even being in a rich musical environment at any age. You hear so many rock and rollers who say, I heard the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and that was it, I was hooked. That’s what I want to do. So, that kind of where you are has an impact on what you practice or whether you’re going to practice or what you’re going to play. The who part is, I think there were two aspects of that both the individual but also,

Jonathan: other people. Teachers, peers, that sort of thing. The why part was motivation. So we talked a little bit about that, like live music is a really good motivator. I mean, motivation is super important for practice because it can be tedious. Working on a scale or trying to get something better takes patience and time. And having a motivation or an inspiration to do that is super helpful. Let’s see.

Jonathan: The when part is about time. So times of day, how much time you spend, when during the day. It turns out that there is some beneficial times during the day that it’s better to practice, at least, research sort of points to that. I might be making unsubstantiated claims but I’m pretty sure that there are times when you’re fresh in the morning, but also, before you go to bed, or before a nap, are really good times to practice because sleep is a whole ‘nother topic, sleep consolidates, you can consolidate your work that you’ve done during the day with sleep. So naps are super important too.

Jonathan: So let’s see, we’ve touched on what the definitions, why the motivation, who, when. We did where too, so where you are. But then the largest section of the book is the how. How do people actually practice? What do they do? What is it that I can do to get better? So, in a nutshell, those are the six parts of the book. And I thought of it as a pinwheel because a pinwheel, you know, when it’s working, doing what it’s supposed to do, it spins around and all the colors blur together and it’s hard to tell what’s what. And to me, that’s kind of what practice is like because it’s this huge topic. It’s kind of hard to pin down exactly what’s going on.

Jonathan: And especially, I mean, I’ve been thinking about this and doing it for a long time now. And it’s still a complicated topic. And I can only imagine coming at it from a beginner standpoint, it would be difficult to even know where to start or what to do. So, hopefully, breaking it down like that will help someone who’s not as familiar with it to make some more sense out of it.

Christopher: Terrific. And I know if I had heard that kind of summary of the book structure, I might have assumed what we were talking about here was a 10 or 15 page chapter on each where you present your opinions as an expert musician on when to do it, how to do it, and why to do it. But in fact, what we have here is almost an encyclopedia of the known science and the methodologies and what you learned in your interviews, such that each of those sections is actually packed with a whole bunch of, it’s like a tool kit, right? And you said early on in this conversation, what you learned was that practice is a highly personal thing, where each musician was interpreting a different and assembling that tool kit differently, right?

Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, and I didn’t, I kind of had to approach it that way because I, you know, in one of the questions was talking about when I thought of myself as a musician. I found that really an interesting question. Who am I? Nobody knows my name. I’m not a touring musician. So for me, and I also am at least a little bit aware of how little I know. The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know. And so, consulting the research record and talking to people and getting other opinions, there’s no way I would put a book out or anything with my name on it with just my ideas because I’m very aware that that’s a very limited experience. So yeah, I did everything I could think of to learn everything could about practice before I wrote even word one. So, thank you for mentioning that.

Christopher: Well, it really shows. And I think what you just said about knowing how much you don’t know is maybe the perfect opportunity to talk about one of the really useful frameworks from the book. I think it’s in the when section, in which you talked about the four phases of learning from unconscious incompetence through to unconscious competence. Could you explain what that is?

Jonathan: So there’s these four phases. And this was taught to me by Rex Martin, who’s just a fantastic tuba player, orchestral tuba player. But he’s also played with Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. Anyway, he’s a tuba player that actually, when he’s walking down the street in say Switzerland, people will stop and say, “Are you Rex Martin?” And we don’t normally think of that for tuba players, I think, but he is one of those guys, just an amazing teacher, amazing musician, kind human being.

Jonathan: So the four phases, the first phase is unconscious incompetence. So it’s kind of like my daughter. She’s three, she has no idea how badly she plays and doesn’t care. It’s not about that. And so, she just explores the instrument and plays and messes around. She has no idea, really, she has a little bit of idea because she goes to see a lot of live music and I play a lot. But, you know, for her, it doesn’t matter. It’s not a big deal. And I think if we can encourage, especially young kids to have this sort of unconscious incompetence to just, it’s really neat to have this thing that makes sound. I mean, it’s really cool. And to be able to just make sound with it. It doesn’t have to be on the beat or in tune or anything.

Jonathan: In fact, I struggle to leave my daughter alone and just let her do her thing, instead of reaching in like, oh, your ukulele is out tune. I’ve tried it. I couldn’t help myself once or twice early on, and did. And it just, the moment is gone. She’s like, I’m done, I don’t want to deal with that. And so, I think that’s a really important phase. And for people of any age, not necessarily a kid.  So the next phase is conscious incompetence. And that’s a tricky one because that’s when you start struggling with, you’re aware that you don’t know anything. And you’re aware how maybe awful you might sound. And that I think is a phase that many, many many of us get stuck in. And it’s not like these phases are cut and dried. You have one and then you go right to the next one. I mean, I still struggle with conscious incompetence.

Jonathan: And again, this comes back to these recorded versions that we have. We live in this time where we can listen to people who were not even alive, they’ve been dead for a long time. Like say Robert Johnson or Clifford Brown to mention a trumpet player, or people who are at the height of their art, and they’re models for us. And so, it’s very easy to compare yourself to Jimi Hendrix, and be like, oh, well, I kind of suck. That is conscious incompetence. You’re aware of the fact that you can’t play certain things. And I think it’s difficult to move out of that stage, to where, the next stage, which is conscious competence, which is when you know what it means to play well and you consciously go for that and practice for that, so that you can do it. And whatever practice means for you, whether it’s playing tunes, or whatever, you know, like playing a song a million times, and then going and performing it. So you know what it takes to be competent and you do it.

Jonathan: And then the last version is unconscious competence, which is when you’re in the zone where you just, this is a zone that probably not many of us achieve or stay in, at any rate. I think one of the anecdotes that I use for the book was Miles Davis Quintet. I think it was Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Elvin Jones, no? Drummer. I’m spacing his name. Anyway, they were about to go on to do the show. They came off. Let’s see, how did the story go? So they were doing a show. And this is a point where Miles was very wealthy, he’s driving around his Ferrari. And the other three guys, Tony Williams, that was the drummer.

Jonathan: But the other guys, they were up and coming musicians. They were struggling a little more with money, and Miles told them that we’re doing the show for free. And they got really angry, there was a huge fight, they went on stage, everybody was mad. And Herbie Hancock when he tells the story, “We went off stage after that, and we thought it was awful. We were all just angry. We thought it was the worst thing ever.” But then they went back and listen to the recording and it was just this amazing, performance and all of that emotion was in there. And to me, that is like the epitome of unconscious competence.

Jonathan: So, they were playing this amazing set and yet they are thought it was crap. And yet, it wasn’t, it was amazing. And they just did it unconsciously because they had practiced and performed and were just such consummate musicians that it just came out. I think trying to get ourselves out of the conscious incompetence phase can be a real challenge. I think one of the tricks to sort of get yourself there is to choose something that’s easy to play. And that could be anything. In fact, if you play something enough, if you practice something enough, that’s the goal. The goal is for it to be easy. If you’re struggling, you might want to continue to practice a little bit.

Jonathan: Another thing that Rex Martin mentioned that I use, and remind myself of daily, almost I think is this idea of difficult versus familiar. And he was saying to never identify something as difficult, because then it set up this block in your mind or this idea, let’s say you’re playing a passage and there’s a difficult section, in your mind, when you’re coming up to play, you’re like, oh, here comes the hard part. But instead of defining it as difficult, think of it is just unfamiliar. And that way, there isn’t that block. You’re like, oh well, I just need to get really familiar with this more challenging section and then it becomes a lot more fun, especially when you get to it, or you do it. And to me, that was, I’m not sure if that really fits in with the phases of learning. It kind of does.

Jonathan: But anyway, Rex Martin was responsible for teaching me about that. And I think it’s a really valuable way to sort of get an idea of where you are in your phase. And I think most of us are in conscious incompetence, especially when we’re learning something new. We are a were that we don’t know it, we’re aware that, you know, and that can be painful. It can be painful I think to the point where we give up.

Christopher: Well, I think that’s why I found this framework so useful when I came across it. And I love that kind of mental flip of difficult to unfamiliar. I think that’s a really powerful way to leverage the fact that we go through these different stages. I had an example the other day that was making me think of this framework where like you, I have a three year old daughter who likes to like come into my music room and play with all the instruments.

Christopher: And anyway, I was engaged with her on this little miniature keyboard and playing Twinkle Twinkle, and I was just kind of, it was upside down and I was just kind of playing it. And my wife came in to talk to me and my daughter wandered off, and I realized at the end of the conversation, I continued playing Twinkle Twinkle without thinking about it in whatever key I was in upside down on the keyboard. Five years ago, 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have dreamt of being able to do that because I would have been in the conscious incompetence stage where I know it’s possible but it’s so hard, I can’t believe I could get there. And now it’s just unconscious competence for me.

Christopher: It’s something very simple as Twinkle Twinkle, but I share that to say, what was so useful about this framework and why I wanted to have you share it is, it happens as you’ve described on a kind of global level in your trajectory as a musician. But it’s also happening in every piece you play, every technique you work on. You’ve got those many cases where you can look at it and you can be like, oh yeah, that once was difficult and now it’s so familiar, I don’t even think about it. And I think that’s a huge for motivation.

Jonathan: One thing, like Dave Matthews mentions about when he comes up with a with a chord progression, he’ll play it. He says he plays it millions and millions of times, and thousands and thousands of times until it gets to the point where it’s almost like it is playing him I think is how he describes it.

Christopher: That’s cool.

Jonathan: So it’s so unconscious, yeah, like Twinkle Twinkle, that you can literally almost do it in your sleep.

Christopher: So, something slightly related to this, which you talk about in the book is the zone of proximal development. Can you explain what that is and why it’s useful when we approach practice?

Jonathan: Yeah. So, this is an idea that comes from the learning sciences. Actually, let me find the little graph. So the zone of proximal development is about being in a place where you can do a little bit more than you might be able to do by yourself. So, sometimes it can be facilitated with being with a teacher or other musicians, where you kind of up your level a little bit, and you’re able to do things that maybe are beyond you when you’re all by yourself.

Jonathan: Another example might be, it doesn’t have to be a person, it could be say a metronome. A metronome might allow you to play more steadily than you could by yourself. So when you’re playing with the metronome, as long as you’re with it, you are in this zone of proximal development. It’s called proximal because you’re with other people usually. So here’s the little …

Christopher: Great. And for the people who are just on the audio only podcast, maybe you can explain what’s in the graph.

Jonathan: Yeah, I’ll explain it. So, there, you know, there you go. You can say you have a particular task. It can be too difficult. So the fact, it’s so difficult that you can’t play it at all. Let’s say you’re a beginning piano player and you have a Bach invention in front of you. It’s literally impossible to play it. And then you can also put something in front of someone, say, let’s say, a medium level piano player again, say, Twinkle Twinkle. Well, once or twice through, if they already know that, it’s going to be really boring. And so it’s not pushing their ability at all. When you’re bored, you’re kind of apathetic and you probably won’t learn anything. If you’re frustrated, it’s too difficult, you’re going to give up because you can’t do it at all. So, it’s also not productive.

Jonathan: But there’s this zone in between those two, where something might be too difficult for you to do alone, but with some help, you can do it at a proficient level. So it’s, as you get better and better, it requires better people to help you to do that or better tools, for example.  Another really good example would be playing in tune, at least for a brass instrument. Like if you’re playing guitar or piano, you’re kind of lucky because you don’t have to deal with that. Playing in tune, if you’re by yourself, you don’t have any kind of reference. So, it can be difficult to know whether you’re playing in tune. So you could say use a tuner, or a drone, or playing with other people. And if those other people will help you see like, hey, you’re really out of tune, then you can kind of key into, no pun intended, to what you’re hearing and what sound you’re putting out and be playing in tune better because those people are helping you do that.

Jonathan: I mean, teachers are great, and a good teacher will get you into that zone as much as possible. Because what happens is, the teacher or the group or whatever it is, will help you play up at this higher level. And that sticks, after a while anyway. So the idea is to kind of bootstrap yourself up with these other more accomplished musicians or teachers so that you can reach that higher level yourself. And sometimes when you go back to playing by yourself, maybe you can’t do it again. It’s a building process I guess.

Christopher: Gotcha. And I really liked that you introduced the term scaffold there, which is part of this research, I believe, like that as a way of describing these kind of props or stepping stones that you’re making use of.

Jonathan: Yeah, and the scaffolding is something, just like a regular scaffold, it helps you perform or play or whatever it is you’re working on, at this higher level. And just like a regular scaffold, you dismantle it after you’ve used it.

Christopher: So, Jon, I said to you as we were talking that for a lot of our audience, time is a big challenge. Often music is a hobby and it can be tough to fit in enough practice time, particularly if they’re subscribing to a methodology that says you must practice 30 minutes a day every day or whatever the case may be. And you have this wonderful notion in the book of “guerrilla practice”. I wonder if you could explain what that is and how it works.

Jonathan: Yeah, so guerrilla practice is something that I’m using almost exclusively right now. It’s the idea that you can get things done and you can learn things in just short little chunks, five minutes, two minutes, one minute. And it’s a really powerful idea for a couple different reasons. One is that there’s a lot of research that shows the more that you recall an idea, let’s say, I’m working on a, say, a piano fingering and I have to do, I don’t know, I don’t know what it might be. When I’m sitting in line waiting to, I don’t know, get a coffee or whatever, I can practice is that finger motion on my leg. Maybe I practice it for two or three minutes or less, 30 seconds, maybe two or three run throughs. I’m not at the instrument but that’s not necessarily, you know, there’s nothing wrong with that, you can still practice the motion.

Jonathan: There’s lots of times during the day where you can get in short little bursts of practice, whether it’s say a difficult spot in a melody or remembering lyrics to a tune or, I mean, it could be a million different things. And just taking that moment in your car or wherever you are to do this little short burst of practice. And I mean, it all adds up. It’s not necessary to sit. In fact, it’s almost worse in some ways to sit for two hours. If you do two hours every day, that’s great. I would love to be able to do that right now. And there are times in my life when I did, but right now, all of my practice is short little bursts.

Jonathan: In fact, when I was waiting for the interview to start, I picked my horn up and ran through a couple exercises that I’ve been working on. Or I’m always doing trumpet fingering or thinking about voice leading on the piano or a million different things. And getting in practice it like that during the day is, you know, the more you recall it, the quicker you get better. So it’s one of those really powerful ideas that you don’t have to practice just during your practice time. You can practice anywhere, anytime as long as you’re looking for those opportunities and you have a little something that you could practice. Even singing. Or have a little, I know people have a little fretboard that they’ll carry around a little short section of fretboard to do some fingering or chord shapes, or whatever it may be. Another friend of mine in college chopped up a trumpet and had just the valves that he would carry around with him.

Jonathan: So there’s, I mean, you know, you can get super creative, but doing little practice like that, every little bit counts. And I think the more often you practice during the day, the quicker you learn stuff too. At least that’s been my experience.

Christopher: Terrific. And you had this wonderful example in the book of where it was literally just one minute or two minutes of practice a day, and it paid off.

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, in fact, yeah, Hans Jorgen Jensen, who is this fantastic teacher, cello teacher at Northwestern. In fact, there’s a documentary on him and his teaching. I think it’s called Taste the String. And I think it’s 30-40 minutes long, maybe, but just a fascinating person, super knowledgeable. And he had a student I think who was doing her graduate work and I think she had two kids or one kid, I don’t remember which, but she literally had no time to practice. So she was working on this difficult cello piece, cello etude, and he literally had her practice with one or two minutes a day. And it took her longer, of course. But in the course of I think six weeks or I don’t remember exactly what it was, she was able to play this really challenging professional level cello etude with just that little bit of practice.

Christopher: Amazing. Well, I love that as a clear example that this isn’t just a cop out, you know, it’s not just convince yourself you’re practicing. This is really effective stuff.

Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely effective. Yeah, in fact, if it weren’t for guerrilla practice, I’ve got a performance tonight, if it weren’t for guerrilla practice, I don’t know if I’d be able to make it through it, because I’ve tried to think of the last time I’ve been able to sit down for two hours and really dig in on my own, and it’s been a while. So yeah, guerrilla practice is one of the I think the better ideas in the book, at least it’s helped me a lot.

Christopher: Terrific. Well, I said early on that we could only hope to scratch the surface. I literally pulled out a fraction of the ideas in this book to talk about, and we have only covered half of them. But I need to be respectful of your time today, Jon. You’ve been so generous already. Let’s wrap up by talking about everything that’s available for people at thepracticeofpractice.com, because we’ve been focusing mostly on this book, The Practice of Practice. You also have the Practice Like This ebook that we’ll link to in the show notes. And you also specialize in teaching music theory. So tell people a little bit about what you’ve got going on there.

Jonathan: Yeah. So I have, I think it’s eight books now. There’s the Practice of Practice book though, the one that we have here. But there’s also a shorter one that’s a little more visual. And it has a little bit of, a little bit different information. I wrote it after this one so there’s some more ideas, a couple other ideas like the structure of practice that are in that one. It’s more geared toward either someone who doesn’t like books or younger students. It’s a much shorter book.

Jonathan: And then there’s also A Basic Music Theory: How to Read, Write and Understand Written Music, that has been really well received. It’s kind of a friendly easy, the chapters are super short. So there’s that book. There’s several trumpet method books as well, that work really well for beginners through intermediate or advanced players. But yeah, you can link all of those, either at thepracticeofpractice.com or Jonharnum.com, J-O-N-H-A-R-N-U-M, either of those will get you there.

Jonathan: There’s a video course as well, yeah, for the theory book. And you can get most of those as audio books as well.

Christopher: Fantastic. Well, I’ll just echo what I said at the beginning, which is, I agree there could be no better all-in-one guide to all of the fascinating things we know about practice. And in particular, I think what sets your book apart is that not only do you provide this extensive toolkit for people to pick and choose from, but you open people’s minds I think to what practice can be. And I hope we’ve conveyed that a bit in the conversation today because this isn’t just about how do you drill your scales more efficiently. It’s really about broadening your ideas about what’s possible in practice and what your musical life can look like.  So, just a huge thank you, Jon, for joining us on the show today.

Jonathan: My pleasure, Christopher. It’s nice talking to you. I love the topic. We could talk all day.

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The post What Music Practice Really Means, with Jonathan Harnum (The Practice Of Practice) appeared first on Musical U.

Music Moves uses Dr. Edwin Gordon’s Music Learning Theory, which codifies how the human brain learns music, as the basis for designing how musicianship can most effectively be taught. Music Learning Theory has previously been featured on Musicality Now, most notably in our interview with Professor Cynthia Crump-Taggart, President of the Gordon Institute for Music Learning. We’ve discussed several times on past episodes the idea of audiation, which is a word Edwin Gordon originally coined. Audiation has detail and depth that goes far beyond simply “imagining music in your head”. Marilyn brings a wonderful new perspective to audiation for us, as educators applying it directly in the context of teaching an instrument.

Drawing on ideas from Orff, Suzuki, Dalcroze, and Kodály, The Music Moves For Piano method incorporates listening, singing, movement, audiation, and notation, on top of the pure piano technique skills – and as you’ll hear in this conversation it develops the student into a fully-fledged and well-rounded musician – not just a piano player.

In this conversation we talk about:

• Why clapping, tapping or walking may not be the best ways to internalise the pulse and the rhythmic patterns of music.
• The specific rhythm and pitch frameworks which give students the “vocabulary” they need to improvise and be creative in music.
• Why the age of 9 is a turning point in music learning, and what that means for adult music learners.

A lot of the concepts we talk about here at Musical U are brought to life in this conversation. If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like to learn an instrument in a way that truly incorporates musicality training, rather than having it be off in its own separate area, this episode will inspire your music learning.

Watch the episode:

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Links and Resources

• Music Moves For Piano
• Music Moves Books
• Music Moves Videos
• The Gordon Institute for Music Learning – Music Learning Theory
• Edwin E. Gordon – Learning Sequences in Music
• Edwin E. Gordon – How Children Learn When They Learn Music
• Gerald Eskelin – Lies My Music Teacher Told Me
• Eric Bluestine – The Ways Children Learn Music: An Introduction and Practical Guide to Music Learning Theory
• Music Learning Academy
• Musicality Now – Audiation and Thinking Music, with Cynthia Crump Taggart
• Creative Piano Teachers Podcast – Forrest Kinney on The 4 Arts of Music

Transcript

Marilyn: Hi, I’m Marilyn White Lowe, creator of Music Moves for Piano and this is Musicality Now.

Christopher: Welcome to the show, Marilyn. Thank you for joining us today.

Marilyn: I’m glad to be here.

Christopher: So the more I’ve been learning about Music Moves for Piano, I’ve just been admiring the approach more and more. And I’m super curious to understand some of the back story to where this series of books came from and where you as an educator came from in terms of teaching piano. Maybe we could start right at the very beginning. What was your own music learning path like?

Marilyn: I always was playing the piano. My parents recognized when I was a baby that I was interested in music and they encouraged it. So I studied piano, have a master’s degree, worked on a doctorate in music theory, and have always taught piano. I have a passion for piano.

Christopher: Terrific. And one of the things that really marks Music Moves apart from other piano methods is that there’s a lot of creativity and autonomy and expression in the skills you equip the students with compared with a lot of the traditional methods that focus purely on technique and repertoire. And I wonder was that a natural part of your own learning where you, the kid who grows up just naturally playing by ear and improvising without thinking about it or what was your own piano musician identity like?

Marilyn: No, I tried, unsuccessfully. And it wasn’t until I heard Dr. Gordon speak in 1992 that I realized that I did not audiate. I had not learned the skills I needed in my head to be able to use them for improvisation in learning music.

Christopher: Interesting. So if someone’s watching or listening, who’s never heard that word audiate before, would you mind just explaining what does that mean and what was it that was explained to you in that year that suddenly changed your perspective.

Marilyn: I use this example with my students. I have them visualize something like a seed in their head with their eyes closed. And then I have them think something in their head with their eyes closed. And I tell them that’s going on in their mind. I don’t know what’s happening, but it’s there. We can audiate or think music in our head, in our mind. And I have them sing a song, happy birthday or a nursery rhyme, some music in their head to realize that audiation is what happens in the mind.

Christopher: Got you. And so with that example, probably it’s fair to say everyone can imagine happy birthday in their mind to some extent or another. But a moment ago you said that you realized you weren’t audiating or you couldn’t. So what was the distinction there that you weren’t able to do that you realized maybe missing?

Marilyn: So you audiate the song, you hear the song, what questions can you ask about the song? How would you describe it? What is the meter? What are some rhythm patterns in the song? What is the tonality? What are some total patterns in the song? What is the form of this song? Compare Happy Birthday, for example, with the Star Spangled Banner rhythmically, and you’ll find some of the same rhythm patterns. Knowing what it starts on, the starting tone, knowing that it is an upbeat pattern, knowing the harmony, the chord changes, all of this can happen in one’s head and if it does, then one can take it to an instrument and perform it.

Christopher: Amazing. Well that’s quite a payoff to give people and I know that a lot of people hearing that description will immediately understand, okay, I can hear happy birthday, but I’m not doing a fraction of those things in my head when I hear it. And I know that later on we’re going to get into a bit of the nitty gritty of rhythm and pitch and how you can do that kind of analysis in your head to the extent of being able to just pick up your instrument and play. But I’d love to dwell a little bit more on that kind of turning point for you when you heard, Edwin Gordon speak and this concept was introduced to you. What impact did that have on your own playing, learning, teaching?

Marilyn: It had an overpowering effect. I felt like concrete blocks were lifted from my shoulders. He described that triple meter was moving in three. We didn’t need to worry about whether it was in three, four, three, eight, six, eight, nine, eight, just feeling the rhythm, because rhythm is based on body movement. And so I went home after that one week and told my students we were changing the teaching approach and I removed music from all my beginners and told parents that I had learned something very powerful and was changing my way of teaching.

Marilyn: And they were welcome to go to another teacher because I was experimenting. And some stayed and some left. So it was a very good teaching situation that I had because the students were, and parents were excited about what I was doing. We were singing, we were chatting, we were moving. I learned that tonal audiation is based on singing. So obviously we had to sing, and I’m not a singer. And rhythm is based on body movement and I’m not a dancer. But, all of these activities were essential for the students to learn how to audiate and put these, elements in their mind and in their bodies.

Christopher: That was a brave move by the sounds of it to come back and have that to totally not 180 but to make such a huge change to your teaching practice was bold. I’m curious to know why were you so easily convinced? Like we’ve just talked through the idea of audiation and I’m sure people listening are like, that sounds cool. I can imagine maybe that would work. But for you to come home and be like, right, this is now going to be the heart of my teaching. But you mentioned rhythm there. Were there particular examples or experiences where you could immediately see the positive impact this would have?

Marilyn: Yeah. So I worked very intensely with my, very fine performers who were, 9th, 10th, 11th grade. We worked as a group and I actually had parents come in and watch. Some of the parents were reading teachers and psychologists and they understood everything I was talking about. They understood the language. We did not talk about these learning words in any of my music courses.

But one example, I had a student playing a Chopin waltz, and I had him stand up at the music stand and just sing and chant the piece. And we moved to it in three, (singing) like that. And then he went to the piano and played it and it was like night and day difference. So he realized it, I realized it, the parents realized it. And, the body movement worked, the singing worked. And I said, “We need to learn a vocabulary”. So you have music vocabulary to use just like you have your speaking vocabulary to speak. Improvisation. We improvise all the time with speaking, because we have a vocabulary and ideas and knowledge. So we can do the same with music.

Christopher: Interesting. And what did that look like to say we need to equip you with a vocabulary?

Marilyn: Well, we started with learning rhythm patterns. Gordon has a sequential, set of rhythm patterns and he introduces duple meter and triple meter side by side, so we’d get the comparison. So we know what, we can’t really know what duple meter is unless we know what triple meter is, what feels like moving in three. So, the six categories are, well, let’s talk about the big beat, which is we call it the macro beat, which we put in our heels and rock back and forth.

Marilyn: The big body movement gives us that feeling of consistent temple, which is our big beat. We feel that, and then we split that beat with our hands into two parts for duple meter. And, we use neutral syllables, Baa-Baa-Ba-Ba-Baa, and then we apply rhythm syllables, which are, Dew-Dew-Dew-day-Dew. And the exciting thing about this is that these syllables are not tied to notation.

Marilyn: So when we feel music, there can actually be differences. Some can feel a very fast moving macro beat and some can, very slow moving macro beat. So it’s how it’s felt, not as how it’s notated. Gerald Eskelin has a wonderful book called Lies My Music Teacher Told Me. Here’s… Oops, it’s backwards. But anyway, there’s the book. And he said that’s, if you want to sell it, is how you notate it. So in other words, four equal beats can be notated as four quarter notes, for eights, for 16s, for half notes and we can’t hear how it’s notated.

Marilyn: But, we want people to look at it and feel comfortable with it. Very often in duple meter four-four for example, I will feel the half note as the macro beat. It just feels better. If, for example, twinkle twinkle little star, I feel if they had written maybe four quarter notes, I would feel the half note as the Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba-Baa, which would be, Dew-Day-Dew-Day-Dew-Day-Dew. So the half note would be, the map would be as I am reading music. It feels better. You could actually feel the whole note is a macro beat if you want it to, Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba-Baa, it makes longer phrases.

Christopher: Got you. Well, I fear our audio-only listeners are missing out on a bit by not seeing how you’re moving with this. But hopefully the idea is still clear and-

Marilyn: my heels are moving.

Christopher: I think it’s a great illustration of the difference in approach and I think the language analogy is a really interesting one because from that perspective, improvisation and coming up with your own expression of your ideas is so obviously a big part of the end goal. Yet in music, we don’t quite have that same perspective traditionally. And I know that for us we have a Foundations Cours with which is based on the Kodaly approach, and we see that same interesting gray area where students who’ve come in from a very notation based background find it a bit funny at first when we say there isn’t necessarily one right answer.

Christopher: So you may be feeling it a half the tempo or double the tempo and that’s not necessarily a problem. And the important thing is to tune into that instinctive feel for the music and get a sense of how it works. And then later on you can worry about how you might choose to write it down.

Marilyn: Yes.

Christopher: And so that was a little bit about the rhythm side. What about the pitch side if we’re talking about equipping students with a vocabulary to work with?

Marilyn: Well, this is interesting. We have tonal patterns that are in context and also everything is in context. That is perhaps one of the biggest, ideas about music that Gordon promoted that I don’t find talked about anywhere else. But it does matter if we’re in major tonality or for in minor tonality. So, we have tonal patterns which are harmonic. They’re functional like a tonic pattern, Do-mi-so or dominant pattern, so-fa-re-ti, in major tonality or the same in minor tonality.

Marilyn: We use moveable do with a la-based minor, which is fabulous because one can get into all the different modes this way and students, learn the three major tribes and the three minor tribes that we find built on a scale and changing tonalities. They just rearrange those triads with a new resting tone. Do is the resting tone for major tenacity. And re is the misting tone for do in tonality and so forth. La is the resting tone for minor tonality, but all the triads are the same. They’re just in a different order. And that is pretty exciting when you start improvising and know that.

Christopher: Absolutely, and I know that some longtime viewers or listeners are going to be right on the same page with us in understanding what you just described there. But if someone’s newer to the show where they haven’t immersed themselves in this idea of Solfa and particularly movable do, maybe we could just make it a bit concrete. Perhaps going back to that example of twinkle twinkle and you have a student who can hear it in their head, but you’re equipping them with the understanding they need to translate that onto the keyboard. How does the system you just described work in that context?

Marilyn: Okay. Well, we’ll talk tonally first, I guess. Tonally they need to know the starting tone. And if they know that twinkle twinkle starts on do, then there they have the ability to transpose it to any keyality they wish. So that’s the first step. Then knowing essential tonal patterns, which in twinkle, which should be do-so, they have to know where do and so is in the key they’re playing it in. So that is essential, All that is just moving from so to do, (singing) then do so again.

Marilyn: So those essential tonal patterns are filled in with passing tones and neighbor tones. And it’s easy to remember. We don’t sing solfege for the whole song because then it becomes words and we can’t sort out the essential tonal patterns which are basically tonic and dominant. Re-so is a dominant pattern. Do-so is a tonic pattern.

Christopher: Interesting. And if we bring things then a notch more concrete and talk specifically about your Music Moves for Piano approach, how does that manifest in lessons or in the book series? How does that feature into a lesson? If you were using twinkle twinkle as your piece for teaching, how would all of this work together to bring the student from zero to this kind of understanding of the song?

Marilyn: Well, I sing the song and have them move and I often, sometimes they just like to dance and they do their own thing. But I will give them special ways to move according to, Rudolf Laban’s four effort movements, time, space, weight and flow. Weight and flow are the most important for musicianship. And we always try to insert flow into all the songs, all the patterns. Music has to flow. It doesn’t stop. And that’s why we don’t clap or stomp or even walking.

Marilyn: Students have a hard time walking to a tempo, but they can move their heels to a consistent tempo. So, we will experiment, I’ll sing a song, we’ll sing patterns from the song. We’ll recognize the rhythm patterns for, twinkle… What are we doing? Twinkle.

Christopher: Sure.

Marilyn: Twinkle little star.

Christopher: Sure.

Marilyn: In duple meter and that there’s one rhythm pattern for the whole song, Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba-Baa, Dew-Day-Dew-Day-Dew-Day-Dew. And that rhythm pattern is used for the whole song. And, we listen for contrast. There is another song, Away in a Manger, the Christmas Carol, that has the tune, (singing). I know there are different tunes, but with that tune, there’s one rhythm pattern that’s used for every phrase of the song. So we compare that like we compare with patterns from Star Spangled Banner and Happy Birthday.

Marilyn: Always comparing, always contrasting. Lots of variety, because we learn by differences rather than sameness. We take the tune and this as students advance, this would not be four or five, six year olds. But as they advance, they take the tune and change the tonality, and they’ll sing it in minor. (Singing) And then they’ll change the meter from duple to triple, (Singing).

Marilyn: And making those changes, changing anything about a tune or piece is improvisation. So they begin to learn, they can make those changes with the folk tunes that they know. And then they can take the tunes and use the rhythm patterns to create something new at the piano.

Christopher: Wonderful. And I’m obviously a convert, but I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a moment and ask, because I know a lot of people watching or listening will be coming from the more common approach to instrument learning these days, which looks, a lesson might look something like student comes in, talk a little bit about theory, do some warm up exercises, run through some scales and spend a bit of time on each of two or three pieces working on problems, sections, getting them more fluid, correcting technique, that kind of thing.

Christopher: And we did a survey recently of music teachers in our audience in which we were asking them about ear training and how they develop oral skills with their students. And we asked them how much time do you typically spend on that with your students? And suffice to say, the vast majority recognize the importance but really struggle to make as much time for it as they would like. And so it’s very much crammed into a few minutes in a lesson.

Christopher: Now, what you just described is obviously an approach that has essentially ear training throughout. It’s baked into the method. But for one of those teachers or one of their students who’s hearing that and thinking, I don’t have time for all of that extra stuff. I’ve got enough work cut out for me just getting through the technique and repertoire. What’s the advantage? Like if we compare those two approaches and a student goes through it for say three or five years, at the end of it, what’s the difference in outcome for the musician who does a Music Moves like approach versus a musician who does a more theory and technique repertoire, traditional approach?

Marilyn: All right. My lessons are based on skill building. So, we do use repertoire, but basically I have them learn skills and use skills for improvisation. What I’ve discovered, if students can hear, sing, chant, have a vocabulary of rhythm and tonal patterns and use that vocabulary to create and improvise with, when they are able to think abstractly around age 11 or 12, that’s when that kicks in that thinking they’re excellent readers, musical performers and I can actually send home, rumors of Haydn’s thought of what basically sonatinas, shorter pieces that they can learn independently on their own.

Marilyn: I have one example of a student who started with me in my preschool classes when he was two, and homeschooled and studied with me until he graduated from both high school and college. Then went on for a master’s degree and on for a DMA. And at age 23, he received his doctorate musical arts in piano and has a job. So that I am thrilled with his success. He had the ability to do it all and was a hard worker, but it showed he had none of the traditional theory, I guess you would say theory books.

Marilyn: We did repertoire. We did lots of arrangements, lots of medleys, lots of creative work and a few other students, the same thing. They’re singing, they’re in bands. Music stays with them. It’s internalized and they’re using it like we use language. So it’s the same process. Students listen and learn, they imitate and then they use what they know in conversation, and in music they use it in improvisation, and in audiating and hearing music and they learn it quickly. They learn it without mistakes. That’s the thrill because they anticipate what would be coming next and they hear if it’s incorrect.

Christopher: Very cool. And I know whenever we use that word improvisation, it comes with a lot of baggage for people and a lot of people’s minds immediately jump to, okay, I’m going to compose a masterpiece out of nowhere on my own solo, or I’m just talking about jazz and I’m going to fill in, eight bars in the middle of a standard. I know that you use the term in a lot more variety and creative ways. You mentioned medleys there for example, or coming up with arrangements. Are there any other illustrations you could give of what you’re empowering your students to do that an approach that wasn’t based on Gordon’s audiation would lack?

Marilyn: Well, the music vocabulary is fundamental. Having the categories of rhythm, which I’ll just mention them, there’s the macro beat/micro beat, which is your tempo beat and your meter beats, duple and triple. Then there are divisions. The divisions are when the micro beat is split into four parts like, ba-ba-ba-ba ba-ba-ba-ba. And then there are elongation patterns where you have, well, just think of dotted patterns, Ba-Baa-Ba-Baa, where a sound goes over a macro beat or micro beat.

Marilyn: Then they’re rests, and tie, and upbeat patterns. So with those six categories, students have a lot of, patterns to use for improvisation. They also have a lot of patterns to recognize in notation. They are familiar with our rest pattern sound. So they see rests in music and they know how it should sound, and they observe the rest from the ties and know upbeat patterns. So I have my students, even my fours and fives always improvise with a rhythm pattern.

Marilyn: If they can come up with one of their own, fine. If not, I give them one. A rhythm pattern has four. I call them four foot, heel moves or macro beats. So Baa-Baa-Ba-Ba-Baa would be four. Or Ba-Ba-Ba-Baa Ba-Ba-Ba-Baa would be four in triple. So if they can think of one, fine, if not, I give them one. But I insist that they improvise with a rhythm pattern. They can repeat the rhythm pattern two times three, but using this as a fundamental approach to improvisation, they begin to improvise in phrases structure. Their composition has form and structure.

Marilyn: They know that they can repeat a rhythm pattern and repeat also the melody pattern that they’ve used. Or they can do something contrasting. One of the hugest, ideas that, hugest that’s not a good word, but anyway, a good idea that I’ve used for improvisation is just random improvisation, random key, where they don’t worry about the particular notes, but they’re thinking about the rhythm pattern.

Marilyn: They’re thinking about the characteristics in music, dynamics, tempo, articulation, range, where to play on the keyboard. And they get very, very interesting sounds. And they will repeat a pattern or they’ll contrast a pattern, or change register. And it just gives a whole lot of freedom because they’re not worried about this sound going to the next pitch, isn’t quite what they wanted, so they have to fix it. So there’s no fixing, they just do it in a throw away. All their improvisations are throw away. So there’s no worry. There’s total freedom and they’re breathing. We work a lot on breathing.

Christopher: Terrific. And it sounds like you made this major shift in your teaching and introduced these ideas and it was kind of it just a success from the start by the sounds of it. But over the years and as you’ve continued working with students, are there any standout memories or anecdotes where you were like, yes, this really works, like this is empowering the students in a way that I wasn’t before?

Marilyn: Yes. well, I had a kindergarten student, I had him improvise with Ba-Ba-Baa Ba-Ba-Baa, and he played on the piano and looked shocked. He said, “That sounds like jingle bells.” So they relate. An older student was playing the Sonatina in the third movement and came to the slow middle part, and he jumped up and grabbed his iPhone, found John Williams’ theme from Hedwig. Or is that right? Hedwig is the-

Christopher: From Harry Potter.

Marilyn: Harry Potter. Score. And he said that reminded him of that theme, which they’re very similar in quality and in range and texture. So, the other day a triple pattern song, reminded a student of big band (singing), and that piece she was playing was (singing). And the seven year old brother said, “It’s backwards.” So he heard that and she made a medley of the two songs together, which was kind of fun.

Marilyn: So just that awareness of what they hear. I remember a high school student, with a pen, and she said, “I remember that sound.” And in orchestras kids would come and say, “We played a Dorian song and the orchestra teacher would say, ‘how did you know it was Dorian?’” So it makes a difference when this vocabulary is internalized and it only happens when they use it. I have a model they have to do it. They’re at work.

Christopher: Got you. And maybe this comes back a little bit to Gordon and the conceptual frameworks as much as it does to your own specific method. But a lot of people would take the stuff you just described as kind of you’ve got it or you don’t. I know for me, growing up in school, I can vividly remember wondering how people make medleys for example. Like I was listening to some kind of pop medley that had been recorded and I was like, “How does that work?”

Christopher: And I knew enough about theory to be like, well, maybe they’re just in the same key and they just swapped from one song to the other. I really didn’t have the mental frameworks to conceptualize how you could make two things mush together and sound good. And at the time I just assumed, the gifted perfect pitch musicians just could do that. And so we leave it to them and the rest of us just played from the sheet music. What’s your perspective on that? Clearly, you approach a lot of these skills as teachable. Are there natural limitations, natural advantages? What variety do you see across students?

Marilyn: Well, everybody is born with music aptitude and that aptitude, can be developed from birth. In fact, the ears is developed in the third trimester. So singing a special song or hearing special sounds to that unborn child is significant. And those sounds that they hear from birth to 18 months, that’s called the critical period. Is very important in music. They’re short songs in short chants without words. Words confuse.

Marilyn: And so in my preschool classes, our songs were without words, they were very short. We use tonal patterns and rhythm patterns using on a neutral syllable, (singing), that type of sound. And so gradually the developmental stage decreases. So at age nine, the music aptitude, like all other aptitudes are stabilized. That’s sort of an age goal. And at that point, students, are measured on achievement.

Marilyn: So we work with achievement and that depends on what a student likes to do. Some students love music and every once in a while there’ll be someone that really doesn’t care about music. So you deal with those differences. But everyone has a music aptitude that can be developed until age nine. And that’s one of my goals. I want students to, have their full potential realized for music and I want them to grow up to be music supporters, listeners in attending concerts and supporting music in schools. That to me is the goal of my teaching. And that happens when students internalize what music is all about and can do and use music themselves.

Christopher: And so what’s the ramification of that for say, an adult music learner? If we take someone who maybe didn’t grow up with music but they’ve been learning to play guitar for the last five years, they haven’t been learning in the kind of way we’ve described. So they’ve just been kind of playing the notes on the page, getting their technique down. They haven’t really tried improvising, audiating, playing by ear or anything like that. What’s the significance of the age nine aptitude to achievements, which in that context?

Marilyn: Adults need to have, go through what we call preparatory audiation where they hear the sounds of music. I guess compare it to learning another language, French, German, Russian. The goal is not to put a book in front of them and say, read and decode this language word by word or letter by letter, but to hear the words and learn labels for sounds they hear and then use them through improvisation.

Marilyn: So that is, I do take transfer students at different ages and they have to start at the beginning and they are, I tell them what we’re doing and that it’s important to develop complete music literacy so that they can create and improvise and arrange and do other, play in ensemble, play with others, for example. That is as important as reading music or maybe even more important. Sometimes I think reading is overrated.

Marilyn: I have an interesting quote from, an article written about sight reading. That was the purpose of the article about sight reading, which is reading new music for the first time correctly. And one of the quotes is, “Despite the belief commonly held by many teachers, students and music professionals that simply partaking in informal sight reading activities will improve sight reading performance. Little evidence exists to support this premise.” In other words, reading sight reading just on itself is not productive.

Marilyn: “A recent review of over 60 years of studies into sight reading highlighted that effective interventions to enhance sight reading include components such as oral skills, training, composition, improvisation and solfege, collaborative playing activities along with understanding the different styles of music and the importance of pattern recognition and prediction. All of those are shown to enhance sight reading.” So that’s quite a list. And actually all of those are included in the Music Moves for Piano instruction.

Christopher: Tremendous. And I know that’s something that our students at Musical U are sometimes skeptical of when we say, “Hey, all of this stuff you’re working on at Musical U in terms of musicality training, is not a distraction from getting better at your instrument and improving in this stuff you’ve already been doing. It’s actually going to have a huge positive impact.” And I think what you just described is a perfect case in point.

Christopher: At this point, anyone watching or listening, will understand. We’re describing something that has a huge range of benefits. And in one of your books for teachers where you’re describing to the teacher how to apply this method, you have some guidance on the advantages and how to communicate them to parents who might be used to a traditional approach or expecting more of a just notation based teaching approach.

Christopher: And you say children who learn music from an audiation perspective, develop musicianship. They can become functional literate musicians who can play by ear, improvise, compose and arrange music, listen to music with understanding, think music, play with technical ease, perform in ensemble, perform solo repertoire in a musically flowing manner, and read and write music notation. And I think we’ve touched on a lot of that in our conversation.

Christopher: But it kind of begs the question, why doesn’t everyone do it this way? And I’d love to hear your perspective on that. Obviously I have my own opinions, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on, with all those advantages and the fact that most of those are missing from the mainstream instrument technique approach. Why isn’t this more common?

Marilyn: Well, it’s become traditional to have that 30 minute lesson or some teachers go to 45 minute now, and that structure seems to work. Many teachers are not familiar with ways to work with more than one student at a time. That is an essential part of learning. And I would quote from, the psychologist Sidorsky who, believes that collaborative learning strengthens learning. And he saw that, working with others built skills because students had differences and students could learn from other students in a way that they couldn’t learn from a one on one teacher approach.

Marilyn: I changed my outlook from being a teacher to helping students learn. And that made a huge difference in my approach. So, that 30 minute, 45 minute lesson time slot works, it’s convenient. Having a book that students turn the page and go from one page to another, is convenient. I asked, the person who established Alfred music years ago, why one method was discontinued, and he said, “Teachers couldn’t understand it. They needed another type of turn the page method.” So that perhaps is part of it.

Marilyn: Another part is that it does require singing and chanting and moving. And this can be done with one student because you’ve got the two of you. But it’s much more fun if there’s another student there. So with pairs or threes or fours, I overlap and sometimes with coming and going, I’ll have five or six students together and we’ll move and sing and they just have fun with it. And I let them do the leading whenever they can, which is a good way to learn.

Marilyn: And the singing, the chanting, the moving, the solfege, those are all, skills that took me a long time to incorporate. But I needed to do that because I needed to teach students to audiate. So that was important for me to learn the solfege, the syllables for rhythm, the syllables for total patterns and to learn the Laban movements, the strong, the light, the flowing, the boundness in activities where students would engage in those types of movement.

Marilyn: Now I will say that Krista Jadro has an online course called, Music Learning Academy, and she demonstrates all of this. This is using the keyboard gains materials, which are for beginners and students that are four and five use these materials. But I use them for any beginner regardless of age. It just gives them the freedom of not having to worry about all those things on a page. When we look at a page of music notation, think about what’s included, cleft signs, time signature, key signature, stuff lines, bar lines, pitch notation, rhythm notation, finger numbers, slash, tempo markings, dynamic markings, articulation markings, and so much more that it just makes it a very complicated activity.

Marilyn: So if we learn those things separately, we are much better equipped to understand notation. Really, we can only learn one new thing at a time. We cannot multitask. And even in reading music notation, I have had the experience that, I am a sight reader. I read difficult music easily, but I noticed that I was reading the rhythm, the meter, scanning that and then scanning the pitch, the movement of the melody and the harmonization. All those things were happening in a flash. And so I tell my students, they learn one thing at a time and then they stack them up and can do all of them, but still one thing at a time. They just get better and better at it.

Christopher: Fantastic. Well, having said that this kind of approach is not nearly as mainstream as I wish it were. You have had fantastic success with Music Moves for Piano, and I’m glad you mentioned Krista’s course there. I’d love if we could talk a little bit more for those in the audience who play piano or are indeed piano teachers, about where they can learn more about Music Moves for Piano and that course you mentioned at the Music Learning Academy.

Marilyn: Well, dub dub dub Music Learning Academy, I think, Facebook, K. Jadro, K-J-A-D-R-O, that Music Learning Academy. The course is new this year and has over 60 members, which is really exciting for… A lot of the teachers are brand new to this concept and then some of the teachers have been using music moves for several years and they’re still taking the course and learning from it. She plans to do the student book one starting in January. So it will continue.

Marilyn: There are books… Gordon wrote a book of the way children, this is all backwards, I understand. But, “How Children Learn When They Learn Music”. That was one of his first books. And Eric Bluestine has a very nice book called, I love this, called, “The Ways Children Learn Music”. So there are, some easy books to grab ahold of to read about. It’s much better to go to a conference or a seminar.

Marilyn: I just, finished a two day seminar at Salem College in North Carolina where I talked with, graduate students in, music graduate pedagogy course, and that was a lot of fun. It was very exciting. Two days is enough to begin to make some inroads. It takes a long time and teachers tend to go over and over again to seminars and we talk and engage in conversation, through zoom and through Facebook.

Marilyn: And then of course, this is Gordon’s seminal book, which is thick and deep, but, its his basic music book “Learning Sequence in Music”. And it’s a contemporary Music Learning Theory, 2012 edition. He has revised it a number of times. So there are sources in the music moves, teacher’s guides, there are descriptions. And, I always say, take three years to try and learn something new. Take your time, get a book and listen to the audio files, which are free downloads, and look at the pieces and then read some descriptions about how to teach them.

Marilyn: Patience and time is necessary. And what you’ll find your students doing is exciting. First thing I do when students arrive is I ask them to play something for me. So they’re used to that. They never take music to the piano. They go and they play an arrangement of the folk tune they’ve made or a composition. “And I made up a new song,” they’ll say. And they always have something ready to play that’s original.

Marilyn: And I have some of those video clips on Facebook, to see on, www.musicmovesforpiano.com. There’s a section of video clips and they’re categorized according to improvisation and arrangements and solos. So, there’s over 100 there to look at, and then they’re on Facebook music piano teacher’s group also, which is a group of over 500 members which is quite nice. It’s international.

Marilyn: Find local teachers in your state, that may be hard. Sometimes there’s only one or two teachers in a huge state, but the word is spreading. There are some teachers in England now using the materials and China is… a teacher in Taiwan is finishing up her translation of 14 of the books and plans to have them completed by January. So, there’s a translation in Spain. No, not in Spain, in Italy, sorry.

Marilyn: Italy and one in Germany. And so it’s slowly gathering momentum. As teachers use the materials, they become more and more excited about what they’re able to do and what their students are doing. And like I say, they’re skill-building, sight-reading rhythm from notation, which is a thrilling way to learn new music. They will read from, I don’t know, heightened Sonata or other, repertoire, the rhythm only and improvise on the rhythm only.

Marilyn: And once that rhythm is solid, the pitch reading is easy. It’s kind of miraculous how that happens. So that’s my newest advice and my newest, skill that I’m working on in lessons now is reading rhythms, patterns from music notation, not just rhythm, pattern straight without notation, but it’s reading them from notation because that is the first thing we read when we read music.

Christopher: Tremendous. Well, I’m always so delighted when we come across an approach such as yours that puts Musicality right at the heart of learning an instrument. And so I highly recommend your work to anyone who’s learning piano or teaching piano. We’ll have links in the show notes to all the resources you just mentioned and thank you for including some books beyond your own. A hat tip to your modesty that you only just about mentioned your own books there at the end!

Christopher: But we’ll have links to all of those, and of course musicmovesforpiano.com in the show notes for this episode. I feel like I could talk to you happily all day. So I want to be respectful of your time today, Marilyn, and just say a big thank you for joining us on the show today and sharing all of this with our audience.

Marilyn: Yes, it’s my pleasure. Thank you so much.

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The post Mind Before Fingers, with Marilyn White Lowe (Music Moves For Piano) appeared first on Musical U.

Knowing when to place your fingers and take your fingers off the notes is just as important as knowing which notes to play – and a good rhythmic sensibility will make your play-by-ear practice easier, more fun, and more intuitive.

In this pack, our Resident Pros give general and instrument-specific tips on recognising rhythms, counting them out, and playing them on your instrument. Included with the Pack are a variety of practice exercises, tracks, scores, and tabs to start you off.

Singers – we’re continuing with what we started last month, expanding your toolkit to include transposition, or the practice of singing a song in a different key than the original to better suit your vocal range.

Singing

Our last Singing Pack looked at the practice of moving music up and down octaves to give singers an easier time singing both alone and with others.

However, sometimes an octave is simply too big an interval to shift.

For situations like these, we have transposition, which allows you to move a song up or down by any interval you like, placing it in a key that best suits your vocal range.

In this month’s Pack, Clare Wheeler explores the art of transposition, showing you how you can recognize when something might be more comfortably sang in a different key, how to use a musical instrument to find that perfect key, and how to use intervals to easily transpose melodies.

Including:

• Using an instrument to find a comfortable range and transposition
• Using scale degrees and intervals to easily transpose
• Using a melody to elucidate an accompanying chord progression
• Vocal scores for both male and female voices, corresponding with the exercises and songs covered in the video

Bass

There are two components to playing rhythms by ear: recognizing them, and responding to them.

In this instrument pack, Steve Lawson gives a lesson in recognizing rhythmic patterns, locking in with them, and using a basic rhythm as a springboard for embellishment.

Including:

• Understanding rhythmic pulse and experimenting with changing the pulse
• Understanding and playing eighth note displacements, swing rhythm, and offbeat accents
• How to lock into a groove on the bass together with the drums
• MP3 backing tracks to practice hearing and experimenting with rhythmic “keys”
• Bass scores and tabs for the backing tracks

This Instrument Pack is perfect for those wanting to expand their rhythmic palette on the bass guitar, train their ears to better recognize grooves, and experiment with embellishments and emphasis.

Guitar

Rhythm is an intrinsic and important part of playing guitar – strumming is percussive, and lends character and structure to your playing. Guitar pro Dylan Welsh dives into the rhythmic aspect of playing guitar, using examples to show how you can break down complex rhythms into their constituent upstrokes and downstrokes.

Including:

• Relating upbeats and downbeats to upstrokes and downstrokes on your instrument
• Breaking down the rhythm of a specific guitar part to make it easier to learn
• Tips and tricks for composing and improvising your own rhythm guitar parts
• Exercises and MP3 tracks with rhythm guitar examples in three different styles

Dylan’s method for recognizing and playing rhythms works for everything from simple riffs to complex solos, and really gets to the root of the connection between strumming and rhythm.

Piano

Pianists are taught to focus on reading notes off the page and understanding rhythm from the note values given on sheet music. Unfortunately, this approach does not touch on hearing, internalizing, and interpreting rhythm on the instrument.

In her approach, Ruth bridges the rhythm gap with an approach that emphasizes replicating the rhythms you hear easily and naturally, and using both hands to best approximate the rhythm on piano.

Including:

• The basics of counting rhythms
• Using counting to identify which syllables each note falls on so the rhythm can be replicated
• Dividing a given rhythm between your two hands on the piano for best results
• Scores that illustrate counting and beats for sample rhythms
• Exercises with reference songs to practice counting and replicating rhythms
• MP3 tracks – drum tracks and rhythm piano demos of the reference songs, for easier counting and replication

As Ruth notes, the best way to improve your rhythm is to play as many different rhythms as possible, in as many styles as possible. This resource pack is the perfect place to start!

Coming up next month…

Next month, we’ll finish off our play-by-ear journey with a special My Play By Ear pack, where our Resident Pros will demonstrate their process for learning a song by ear. The next installment in our Singing series will focus on singing with chest voice.

The post Rhythm and Transposition: Resource Pack Preview appeared first on Musical U.

Gregg’s YouTube channel and project is called Learn Like A Genius, and with good reason. When you see the virtuoso instrumentalist, the person who seems like a musical genius, and wonder how they got so good, the chances are that they either consciously or unconsciously have been using some of the learning techniques that Gregg shares today.

We talk about:

• The two disastrous ways that the idea of “talent” sabotages music learners and can hold you back from reaching your true potential.
• Gregg’s simple three-word summary of the powerful idea of “deliberate practice”, and how it can be the key to fast progress.
• The counter-intuitive but foolproof way to break past plateaus where you just can’t seem to play a certain passage correctly at full speed.

You’re going to come away from this episode seriously inspired about what could be possible from your music practice in the future – and to make sure you’re able to really follow through on that, we’ve got a couple of fantastic ways for you to dive into using these ideas in a practical way.

Watch the episode:

Next Steps

If you’re inspired to try some of the techniques discussed in this episode, here are two great ways to get started:

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Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

Links and Resources

• • Gregg Goodhart – Learning Coach
  • What is a Practiclass? Sax, cello, guitar, The Learn Like A Genius Institute
  • Learn Like A Genius – Piano Practiclass (Full), Houston, TX with Gregg Goodhart
  • Learning, Competence, and Talent, with Gregg Goodhart
  • Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning
  • Geoff Colvin – Talent Is Overrated
  • Effective Practice: Lessons from Neuroscience and Psychology, with Gregg Goodhart
  • Practical Ways to Play Better Now, Right Now, C’mon, Go Do It!
  • Why an “A” is not enough

Transcript

Gregg Goodhart: Hi, I’m Gregg Goodhart from Learn Like A Genius and this is Musicality Now.

Christopher: Welcome to the show Gregg, thank you for joining us today.

Gregg Goodhart: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Christopher: So I was watching one of your Practiclass videos in which one of the students who actually has a PhD in Education from Stanford said that he felt like he kind of knew that theory behind all the stuff you do, but he’d never been able to apply it in practice. And he said, you’re one of a kind in your ability to actually help students get results using all of these powerful ideas from the research science. I’m super eager to unpack all of that with you because I know from past communication that you’ve got a lot of really meaty stuff to say on these topics. But before we dive into all that, I’d love if we could share with our audience a little bit about Gregg Goodhart, the musician where you came from and your background in music.

Gregg Goodhart: It’s funny because I can look back and now my beliefs about passion and how passion is created. We think we’re born with a passion for music. I could see clearly how mine was created and then culturated into me. My earliest memories dancing around in my basement with my mom to her Rock ‘N Roll 45, Little Richard and Chuck Berry and the Everly Brothers and all that sort of stuff. Ana all of a sudden when I became aware of the Beatles when I was about 10 years old, I happened to like Rock ‘N Roll, go figure. I think that was pretty set up.

Gregg Goodhart: It’s a long story how I started listening to them a lot because I wanted to fit in, basically. And the cool kids were doing little Beatles skits, and I needed to learn their music. Well, I quickly forgot about the skits and listened to the music a lot and realized that that’s what I wanted to do. I was playing drums at the time. Then I took up guitar, and it all went from there. Then it went to more complex music, which eventually led to classical guitar, and I’ve really experienced what it’s like to not know how to get better. That’s my whole life until I really started understanding teaching, and I started college and couldn’t read music.

Gregg Goodhart: I was a self taught rock guitar player and so I had to struggle, and take forever to do that music theory. I sure I knew a few things about keys, but the idea here you have to memorize all these key signatures and all that. So I’ve been there. That’s my upbringing. But I loved it so much that I just never got away from it. And that’s just always been the… that’s the part they talk about grit. I have an unreasonable amount of grit even when I should quit, I don’t. Luckily in this I ended up finding out that, hey, you don’t quit. You eventually get there. Before I tried so many wrong ways to get better that I probably should have quit, but for some reason stuck with it. And finally got it.

Christopher: Interesting. We’re going to talk about the alternative, which is I suppose a much happier way to learn, and a much more enjoyable journey. But I’m sure a lot of people could relate to what you just said in terms of sticking with it purely through grit and passion and you kind of question why you do it, but you persist because you loved the music so much. Could you give us a sense of what you were doing back then that now in retrospect you can see was misguided or what did practicing look like that you now look back, and you’re like, I can’t believe I spent so much time doing it that way?

Gregg Goodhart: One specific thing I remember always was I could play things slowly, and I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t play them faster. When I tried to play them faster, they fell apart. My reasoning at the time was, well, I can walk or run. I can choose to do either, and I actually if you really think about it. You do learn to run if you don’t do certain things when you’re a kid and learned a lot anyway, so I thought if I can do it slow, I should be able to do it fast, and I tried everything. What I did was tried a little bit halfway of everything instead of doing it fully, which is what a lot of us do, we get ideas, “Hey, I hear this idea works,” and you try it for a little while and you don’t realize how long it takes.

Gregg Goodhart: And I just could not figure out how to get over that hump. And I had what I think most everyone has, and I think this is a, in my experience teaching and as a player, I think a lot of people deal with and that is no matter how much you work, most people when you get on stage, make a certain amount of mistakes that are unacceptable. You know no one would pay for that. You may be 95% correct, but the 5% that go down that you worked on like crazy because you knew those sections were hard, don’t work in concert and then you walk off stage really disappointed about the 5% because we all know full well despite everyone telling us that we’re great, we’re wonderful and everyone enjoyed it. We know full well, no one, let’s be realistic, no one would pay for a concert ticket to see that.

Gregg Goodhart: We know that and that’s the, yeah, and it’s good to have that ideal in our mind, and it’s that hump. Getting over that hump. Why can’t I? I know what I want to express, and you are correct. When I’ve read what Musicality says about your training, it is so hard to express yourself if you have that hitch. If you don’t have that foundation to understand what’s going on, it’s also really hard to express yourself if your technique doesn’t work. These get in the way between this and this and your instrument and you kind of have to train them, and the biggest regret I have is I had no idea how to get from the, I can play it slowly and accurately, to I can play it really fast. Sometimes it would happen. If I look back now I can see I was involved in certain situations that made me learn better.

Gregg Goodhart: A great example is I played in a band for a couple of years, and I remember being afraid to go on because oh, I don’t want to make mistakes little, and they were my, other people in there were very good, so I got support. And we got better and better and then we didn’t… something happened, and the drummer left, and we didn’t play it for like eight months or something and we got together for one gig, and it was the best gig we ever played, on weekend at a college club. And I thought, how could we be so much better? Well, without realizing I had learned about interleaving and spacing and retrieval practice all through that experience. If you listen, for instance, to the Beatles, they’ll tell you we became a band in Homburg and we were doing those long nights, and I never understood what that meant when I was younger.

Gregg Goodhart: Now I do, the automaticity of performing the hard parts. Now you can spend thousands of hours jamming with a band or there are specific ways that research has shown us that you can go about getting through those situations, which by the way then takes care of performance anxiety. If you’re not afraid, 5% is going to fall apart when you start playing. Because really how much of it, when we get on stage, how much of it is a roulette wheel? Will we hit the number? Will we have that one in 10 chance that we play those sections correct? Everyone knows what the odds of one in 10 are, they’re one in 10. Or will it go wrong for us? And that’s nerve-wracking.

Gregg Goodhart: I had a student once that I was doing Skype coaching, he was in Wyoming at 13 years old in a very pressure situation, and we never talked that, he was in a competition. We never talked about performance anxiety, never. We just went through killing the sections that he couldn’t play well. And we got them one after another, and he went to the competition, did very well, and I asked him afterwards how it was, and the first thing that came out of his mouth was I wasn’t nervous. It was really weird. We didn’t even work on performance anxiety. So that, you asked about the one thing that I really wished if I could have figured out how to get from this level of the stairway up to greatness or good or competent or whatever it is to this step, to this step. I didn’t know any of them.

Gregg Goodhart: I knew I wanted to sound like here and that I was here, and I was in the dark. I was pulling music off of tapes, kids, if you remember those, and learning songs and boy if I only… and then I took music theory and right there was all the information I needed to unlock the guitar neck and build and I couldn’t see it because I didn’t know how to learn it properly. So that’s the big thing, how to learn taking care of those last sections that always seem to get in your way.

Christopher: Got you. You’re not a man that shies away from speaking directly. So it’s maybe not surprising that you’re willing to say you’ve got as far as teaching music without truly understanding how to practice and how to learn and how to master those difficult sections, right?

Gregg Goodhart: I got a master’s degree in performance playing this way, and a lot of people do. The very few who don’t are the ones we call talented for some reason. The reason is the way they work. What’s interesting about that is look at the really good, and forgive me if I’m getting off the rails, but look at the really good, for instance, just referencing my country music programs in America, where do they get their students? Through talent auditions. So the people who can figure out how it works is not talent. The people who can figure out how it works, and some figure it out on their own, some are inculturated through certain family values to work this way, whatever it is.

Gregg Goodhart: Who are willing to do lots of deliberate practice figured out, get good, no one knows how. And they pay a lot of money to go to the select schools, which are connected enough to help you get a career. The rest of us go to other, I was in a very good for your music, but I have a master’s degree as well with very good teachers, but I didn’t know how to take advantage of what they were teaching me. Now I was good enough that most people, I was, let’s put it this way, I was better enough than most people that, hey, what are you going to complain about someone who plays better than you? And a lot of us kind of ride that out, you know? Well, I’m better than most people. So that at least gets me some recognition.

Gregg Goodhart: But I will tell you, I was always, and a lot of people out there are like this. I was always internally disappointed. I kept working towards performances or even when I was teaching, working towards doing this or recording or planning at this place, and it never worked. And then, this is interesting, as a teacher, I started to get scared, because I started to get my kid’s good and realized I didn’t know how to get them better. And that’s what started all of this. I said, “What’s going to happen when one of these kids gets to the point where I need to start getting their scales up to serious, serious, start getting up into those virtuoso level.” I don’t know how to do that. And for some reason I just knew that I could do it, but I didn’t know how.

Gregg Goodhart: And it was through that experience that I learned how, so I was good enough to get by. I was good enough that most people said, “Boy, you’re really talented.” I could pull off some good performances that people, it was enough to ignore the stuff that was not so great and the good stuff was very good. And I happened to be in-cultured and trained through my, I got lucky and got an excellent, excellent classical guitar instructor who taught me about interpretation first. So while some of the sections did fall apart, a lot of my heart and mind knew what to do. So I got lucky in that regard. But yeah, I was very disappointed in my playing well up into my teaching years.

Christopher: Interesting. So I can understand that problem you are facing then that you are now for these students, and you had a clear idea of where you wanted to get them, but without having fully understood how to get yourself there, it was even harder I imagine to imagine how to get them there. And you hinted at maybe the path you went down there when you said something about talent, and you have this great PDF about how to practice better that we’ll put a link to in the show notes. But at the beginning of that PDF you say something along the lines of, “You can have all the talent you want,” which is a pretty bold statement. So I have to ask, what is this relationship between talent and practicing? And could you unpack a bit more what you just said about the fact that a select few figure this stuff out, and they’re the ones we call talented.

Gregg Goodhart: I could talk for an hour or two about this with you. So I will try, I will start, you might need to cut me off and I’m trying to think of just where to start. And here’s where I will start. This is a mindset issue. Think about the belief in talent. In other words, you need to have something that you have no control over that is magically gifted to you through the universe. Whatever your belief system is, however you get it, you don’t know if you have it until you see it make you better. And once you have it, people need to nurture it or it might not work. And even if they nurture it, it might just be early talent that doesn’t pan out. Okay.

Gregg Goodhart: So I’m setting the stage now, so let’s just take music. But this is exactly the same in academics. And it’s also the same in sports though in music and sports, we’re much better at getting around us because we’re performance based and not phony test-based, that’s a whole other situation we can unpack. So here’s what we do in music. I’ll just, class music, anything, but I’ll just take private lessons for instance. You’ve come to me for lessons you don’t play, and here you are with your parents and you. And I say, and I’m a great teacher, I have a great reputation. And here you come to me on your instrument and you say, “I want to learn to play the violin,” or whatever. And I say, “Okay, here’s what I need from you. I need you to sit down and practice 30,” or whatever. Maybe it’s 15 to start.

Gregg Goodhart: “I need you to focus like crazy on everything I say. Every minute I need you to be aware. Every time something goes wrong, I want you to think, how could I do it better? And if you don’t have an answer, I want you to write down and ask you in the next lesson and every lesson we’re going to do this. And if you focus and dedicate and practice in a way, you don’t do your homework and you probably don’t do anything else in life that requires, especially by the way the younger you are, the harder it is to do because it requires the prefrontal cortex of the brain right above your eyes organ, which has not fully formed until you’re 25 years old. So we’re going to really be taxing that, you’re really going to have to work at heart and in about six weeks we’ll see if you any have talent, good luck.” How can anyone get themselves to work under those circumstances?

Gregg Goodhart: The answer is, is most people can’t. The few that figure it out and do seem very talented, and then we point to that situation and say, “See, that’s evidence that talent is rare and it takes some magical things, we don’t know how they got there.” Let’s roll that back and start with reality. Let me start by saying, if the idea of talent, as we understand it, talent may exist, whatever it is, it doesn’t appear to matter in any level of skill development. That’s it. Other than providing some enthusiasm by telling your kid you have talent, which is where I’m going with all this. So if talent did exist, it would be correct to say, let’s just try your math and your English and your history and your music and your sports, and let’s just see what you’re good at and hopefully we’ll find something because you’re good, because there’s a lot of truth in that.

Gregg Goodhart: If you’re good at something, it makes you want to study it and do more and more. That’s the idea of getting into flow and that sort of stuff. If that were the truth, then that’s what we should tell people. But what if it isn’t? If it isn’t, we’re essentially committing a crime against education. If we’re telling people no matter what you do, you may not get this or you may work very little and get really good at it. Now, let’s go back to the beginning of that whole thing again and let’s do it this way. Hi mom and dad. Here’s the deal, and the child, here’s the deal. Talent may or may not exist. I’m not sure. In fact, there’s probably a 0.00000001% chance that it makes the greatest players once they’ve put in thousands of hours and you can’t know till you get there.

Gregg Goodhart: But here’s the deal, it appears in all the research I’ve seen to not make a difference, whatever it is in the longterm of getting better and stuff. So here’s the deal, I’m going to ask you to do work. We’re going to start off with very little bit so that we can build up orienting selective attention, for instance. That’s something we never do when we ask kids to practice. If you ask me, I’ll walk you through a whole process of getting kids to practice more. We say go practice for a half hour. The hardest part is getting started and the longer you have to practice, the harder it is to get started. Getting started requires orienting selective attention that is taking your… that’s your prefrontal cortex, taking you away from something that you are doing to getting you to do something you don’t want to. I’ll give you an example of orienting selective attention that when, by the way everyone hates to do it, that everyone hates. That works really well for prefrontal cortex development.

Gregg Goodhart: Take out the garbage at Tuesday night, 7 o’clock, 7:01 is a consequence. But dad, the garbage man doesn’t come till tomorrow. It doesn’t matter. We’re working on your prefrontal cortex. Why should it be hard to do that? Why should it be hard to just take a few garbage cans out? Because it requires and it makes you angry, doesn’t it? It requires, now you’re asking someone to do essentially the same thing on their own when they’re a young person or even an older person, if they’ve never dedicated themselves to practice and somehow sit there and focus for a half hour. You know what? Start with five minutes. Work on orienting selective attention. So that’s the first thing that I do. I say, here’s the deal and it’s like learning to tie your shoe. When you first teach a child to tie their shoe, what’s the, and then you say, “Oh great, you got it.”

Gregg Goodhart: Then the next time you go somewhere and you say, “Okay, time to put your shoes on.” They whine and cry like it’s the hardest thing they’ve ever done. It’s not because tying the shoe is hard, it’s because it’s hard to orient selective attention and make yourself do something that someone else had previously done for you. So what do we do? We do the right thing, now we’re not going anywhere until you tie your shoe. And after that happens a few times and they build up the ability to orient that selective attention. When’s the last time you got upset about tying your shoes? You don’t love it. You don’t hate it. It just is. And you do it. What we want to do is get starting to practice to the point of it just is. So that’s the first thing.

Gregg Goodhart: Then I say, “Mom and dad, here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to see these improvements. We’re going to start with bull hold. Look how badly he’s doing that. If he can control that by next week, that’s a big thing.” And I’ll say something like, “By the way, if you can show me the violinist who played Paganini, 24 Caprices in a month, I will believe in talent. But you can’t find that stuff despite the rumors. What we’re looking for are these little improvements that build and we’ll start playing music. So that’s where the myth is. It’s very hard to get yourself to do work if you don’t know, and this dovetails really nicely with the question you asked me earlier about what’s the biggest problem I had? I didn’t know how to get good. It’s so hard to work when you don’t know how to get good.

Gregg Goodhart: And most of us are in this really nebulous area. Even if we’re taking lessons and I am not criticizing, I am or was a private applied instrument teacher, there is not time in lessons. Just like there’s not time to teach music theory appropriately though you reference it. No time to teach ear training appropriately though you reference it. Music history, there’s no time to teach practicing appropriately though you reference it. Imagine trying to learn ear training or music theory with a couple of tips and tricks thrown at you every couple of weeks in a lesson. Yet it is the single most important determinant factor as to whether you will progress and get good, not just at your instrument, but at your musicality studies and ear training, at your history studies, all of which are important to build the mental model so that you can progress more quickly.

Gregg Goodhart: So that’s the talent thing. It is, I don’t mean to be too stout but it’s pernicious. It causes people to believe that near competence is excellence and they don’t need to reach excellence because only a few people, I’ll unpack that a little bit if you’d like. The idea that for instance, let’s reference academics that getting an A in a class is somehow excellent. It may be if it’s an honors class or an AP or whatever they call them in different parts of the worlds, these accelerated courses, but it’s just competence to get a good grade. The point is, we’re studying terribly. There are no shortcuts to learning, but there are a lot of long cuts and most people take them. So what’s interesting is, if we brought our dry cleaning and they got out 89% of the stains, we’d never go back.

Gregg Goodhart: If we ordered a pizza and one of the pieces was missing, that would be 90% of the pizza. We would be upset. If we went to a gas or petrol station and we were getting less than we paid for per gallon. They could be arrested for that. That’s a crime. Yet we take classes and we say 85% is pretty good. You can’t do anything 85%, and here’s why the essence of learning is so present in music. You either do it or you don’t. If you’re doing music at 95% it sounds terrible. There’s a very interesting video on YouTube called Why A is not Enough. And the guy with this big orchestra, student orchestra, they sound really great. Does what I’ve always said would happen and finally someone did it, have a group play at 90%. That’s only one mistake out of 10 and it doesn’t have to be a wrong note. It could be an articulation or a dynamic.

Gregg Goodhart: So he has this whole orchestra play at 90% accuracy and of course it sounds terrible. I mean if you think about it, 89% and 90% of a 90 minute performance is 10 full minutes of mistakes. Not 10 mistakes, 10 full minutes. No one would keep their job in music. So we have been forced in music to figure out how learning really works and get people to actual competent performance. What do people say about music teachers? It’s so nice that you get all those talented students and are able to just do music with them. That’s their excuse for academic teachers saying, “Hey, some kids get 70, some kids get 90,” and here we are with all the kids in our classes getting 98% or better because there’s no good performance you ever seen that’s anything less than 98 and you’ve criticized some 98 performances too. Justifiably so.

Gregg Goodhart: In fact, not to go too far off the rails, but that’s kind of what got me to where I am. I’m like, what is different here? I mean there must be something, because my goal was musical competence, which by any other measure is excellence. To be able to perform in music would be the equivalent of getting an A in any given class. And of course I am convinced that it is fun, in fact, I actually do academic coaching with people. The turnaround is so quick once you figured out how to do your work, once you figure it out, for instance, how you can memorize large volumes of information very quickly in small sessions and without cramming and keep it in your brain forever, like dual coding and things like that. And you can do those types of things in music.

Gregg Goodhart: What I found was the path to excellence is really just competence. We confuse competence with excellence, and we find that presence in music instruction.

Christopher: So fascinating. I have tendency to blame the media for the talent myth and how it’s kind of grown and grown and grown because I don’t have that same educational perspective you do. And it’s so interesting to hear that kind of counterpart explanation of why we get into this and the kind of disastrous allure that it has to tell people there’s talent and you may have it or you may not. I love the way you just explained it. Before we dive into some of the cool tactical nitty gritty of the things you’ve been talking about, like how to learn quicker, how to enjoy it more, how to memorize faster.

Christopher: I want to talk a little bit more about that big picture, and the kind of strategy we’re talking about here. Because if the problem has been that kids or adult beginners are presented with a worldview that says you either have talent, or you don’t, and if you don’t, it’s going to be a hard slog to get to that 99 or better percent accuracy and performance. That sounds pretty intimidating, that doesn’t sound like something many people are going to be enthusiastic about. So what did the teachers need to do or what did the people need to have that’s going to help them tackle that?

Gregg Goodhart: There are several things. I think the first I’ve talked about though, please ask if you want more detail, but that is understanding the, I don’t want to say the myth, but the great misunderstanding of talent. Then once you understand that, what other thing? Well, learning should be fun but here’s the deal. If you don’t want to make learning fun in the beginning there is a price of entry to learning being fun. I call it getting over the hump. This is hard, very hard. Then you get good and it’s much easier, and there’s a lot of good research detailing and in fact, I continue a particular study that I love to reference that once you get good at stuff, it actually makes you want to get better and better. Now think about the model we currently have. If you find something that you like and you won’t like it if you’re struggling with it, then you have passion for it.

Gregg Goodhart: Now we found your passion. Let’s nurture that passion. Then what happens if you don’t have that for music. Should you give up? Should you give up on math? And then of course we look at talent, well we encourage talent. Sure you do. And the 2% that have it, what are you saying to the other 99%? Usually, we say something like, “Well you have talent in something.” But what if that area is cleaning toilets? I mean, that’s what we’re getting… Nothing wrong with cleaning toilets and nothing wrong with doing an honest day’s work no matter what it is. But if that’s not what you want to do and someone is saying, “Oh, you don’t have talent over here because he didn’t get good at it right away.”

Gregg Goodhart: So that’s the first thing, you have to realize that this is mindset, that you will make mistakes. They will discourage you. Mindset doesn’t work by itself. Mindset has been misinterpreted by a lot of people and oversimplified into just encourage kids to keep going no matter what. No, maybe you have an inferior method, maybe you need to find a different way to teach it. Understand I’m not talking about learning styles there, but maybe you need to find a different way. Maybe all the time I spent repping things over and over and then overnight discovered contextual interference and things got way better. Maybe it’s not talent, maybe it’s that. And those are the kinds of things I try to show.

Gregg Goodhart: So one thing that I do, and that’s why I do Practiclasses, and when I do academic instruction, I do dual coding and get a whole group of people to memorize a bunch of stuff very quickly. The most important thing I think you can do to get past the, what do I want to call, the inculturated attitude of talent, which makes it hard to dedicate oneself to doing work. Once you get past that, everything else becomes much easier. So you’re very upfront. This is going to be hard. It’s not going to be that hard, but it’s going to be hard. I used to say about my classes to my students, this class is not easy. It is also not hard. It’s just a bit of work and if you start following directions, little by little, just do a little bit here, a little bit there.

Gregg Goodhart: There’s an old saying that’s really important that if we would just take it to heart when we practice instead of giving up and getting discouraged, it would work. And that saying is if at first you don’t succeed, try doing what your teacher told you the first time. And it’s funny because it’s so true, but really you think you’re not getting good at something because you didn’t follow a teacher’s direction. I start to talk about these realities with people, and it sets a laugh. Yeah, it’s funny, okay. And why not for a week try it by following directions. I used to do things like write down, let’s write down what your directions are. Put that on your music stand when you practice.

Gregg Goodhart: Now if you come back the next week, and you don’t have it down, instead of saying, “Oh, could you just don’t have talent,” first thing I’m going to ask you is, or actually more say, “You didn’t put that on your music stand.” “No, I didn’t.” How much do we ask that of students? We tell them to do something and just assume. This is actually, here’s a little story. I had a student who was, in my class I graded appropriately and have assessment systems. It was very fair, three times is long to do things as normal because I gave plenty of time for him to catch up. Of course, there’s always going to be a contingent of folks who are going to wait till the night before a test in order to learn an etude, which they never have.

Gregg Goodhart: I remember working with this one kid who he and his parents were so upset. He’s trying, he’s trying so hard I’m like, “Something’s wrong.” “Well, my son’s not a liar.” “I’m not saying he’s a liar. We can think we’re trying when we’re not,” and so I taught him a particular, I knew something was wrong and if he would just do a particular exercise over and over for a few minutes a day, it would take care of this particular technical problem. You wouldn’t struggle with it and it would get them to another place. So after about a week, you still have this problem. Maybe it was even more than a week. You still have this problem, “Didn’t you work on it the way I said?” “Yes.” “How many times have you done it?” “Well, once.” “Didn’t I say you need to do this every day for a few minutes?” “Yeah, I guess you did.” “Why didn’t you do it?” “I don’t know how many times if you’re a teacher,” “I don’t know.”

Gregg Goodhart: This is where we want to be delving into in lessons, and we teach other people. In fact, the biggest lesson that we take is not with our teacher. The biggest lesson we take is with our practice. Are we teaching ourselves through practice? Well, I don’t know what to teach myself, I’m a student. Write it down. Write down what your teacher says. Many people record their lessons. I work with lots of people who record the, go back and look what did the teacher, but that will take longer. No, what will take longer are the massive reps you’re going to do that aren’t going to pay off in the long run if you do it this way.

Gregg Goodhart: So it’s so hard to stop, orient selective attention and pay attention to the little things. So I guess the best answer to your question is, a lot of people misunderstand the word try. Try doesn’t mean you just did something that was unpleasant. It means you started by whether you think it’s going to work or not, following directions. I used to say, I used to say to my students when I taught high school, said, “I just want you to, you guys, you are teenagers, you’re all about reality and get it right and be fair and honest and that’s not fair.” I said, “Okay, let’s talk fair. Let’s talk honest.”

Gregg Goodhart: I said, “You walk into a class, I don’t care what it is, math, English, classical guitar and my class, whatever it is. You don’t know anything about that class otherwise, you would have proficiency and out of that class. You are in the right place, you don’t know. You have someone standing in front of you who at the very least has a four year degree in a year practicum and teaching and has a credential for teaching you. If not that they have a Masters, maybe a doctorate and they’ve possibly been teaching for a year, five or 10 even more and when they give you an assignment,” you say, “I know better. I know, I know an easier way to do this than this person who knows that much,” and I would say, “Does this make any sense?” And I find cutting through that haze, it doesn’t make sense.

Gregg Goodhart: The whole talent thing just doesn’t make sense. The idea that we do things differently, than a teacher doesn’t make sense until you started understanding human nature. And that’s the next place that you get to after you talk about technique and what do we teach, how do we get people to do it? And that’s kind of what comes next.

Christopher: Fascinating. I imagine that is a slightly different challenge with teenagers in a high school compared with the adult beginner at home in their living room trying to carve out that 30 minutes a day for guitar practice or whatever the case may be?

Gregg Goodhart: I don’t know that it is. I don’t know that it’s that different. I would imagine, well, let’s put it this way, if someone is searching for this information and watching this right now, they probably are doing it the same way. If you are doing everything right and practice a half hour a day and listening to your teacher, you’re probably doing okay. You’re probably making progress each week, and you understand how the process, if you’re doing that, and you’re not doing okay, then something was wrong. But I find it to be pretty universal. And here’s the big problem adults have, and I would say older kids.

Gregg Goodhart: When they go to learn a new concept that involves doing some home improvement project or learning something about their car to repair it, they are learning that upon a foundation of something like 12 years of science education in school, 12 years of history, 12 years of, they’ve learned physics or whatever it is. You’ve learned math, even if you are terrible in math, to learn how to reason in that way and take a new information and evaluate it using mathematical principles, even if you’ve got an 80% in math, which means, which means you can’t really do algebra, you will take many of those concepts in. So then you go and learn to do something new. You don’t expect something of yourself.

Gregg Goodhart: If you want to learn to ride a motorcycle, you learn to ride a motorcycle, you don’t learn to ride motocross. No 30 year old says, well… and you know what? We learn in a reasonable amount of time a week or two or three. And we go from not knowing to knowing, okay, after three weeks of study we can figure out how to remodel a bathroom. That’s because we have a mental model for all this stuff. We’ve been taught all the basics of getting through life. Now we go to something completely different, music, has its own written language, has its own audio language, as you well know. Has its own set of constructive principles’ music theory. Has its own history. You know nothing about the history.

Gregg Goodhart: Believe me, you might not know it, but when you’re looking into remodeling your bathroom somewhere in there, your knowledge of history is helping you somehow to figure something out in there because, oh, I remember Napoleon did this or what, and you don’t think about it. It’s just part of your mental model. Now you’re getting into something that you have zero mental model for. You are exactly like an infant, well not an infant. Exactly like a five-year-old in first grade or six year old. Now think about that. What did you do in first grade? You’re like wrote the letter A, over and over and nobody thought twice about it and then after years you wrote sentences and then read novels and then I analyze them and then maybe what some stories and hey, how is it in music that you don’t think you need to start out writing A over and over again because we have this indicator from life.

Gregg Goodhart: We’ve seen the evidence, we’re smart, we’re adults. We can figure things out. If we can’t figure this out in three weeks, like we could figure out the bathroom remodel, which we didn’t know how to do that when we started. We didn’t have any knowledge, but you had so much similar knowledge then we’re not talented, but it’s not that at all, especially when you’re an adult beginner and another factor that goes into this and that is you have to be willing to look like a child while you’re learning, like a clueless child. that goes to pride and if you, and listen, we all have pride. I had a jazz improv teacher that said something something great. If it weren’t for pride, we’d all still be living in caves. I realize that’s not exactly historically accurate, but I get what he was saying.

Gregg Goodhart: Healthy, being proud of what you’ve done motivates you to do more work. As anyone knows this, adults know, once you’re old enough that you can take that too far. If you’re too proud, it can get in your way. Pride comes before the fall, all that sort of stuff. So yes, it’s good to be proud and acknowledge what you’ve done, but if you need that accomplishment to be, believe me, when you’re done remodeling that bathroom, in most cases you’ll be pretty proud of your work. You’ll want to look at it. People will say, good job and rightly so, and that will feel good. Not that the praise feels good, but the acknowledgement that, yeah, I did do a good job. It’s going to be really hard to get that with anything meaningful.

Gregg Goodhart: You’re not going to get the equivalent of a remodeled bathroom on an instrument for a good year, where you’re able to actually do something that looks like the end product and show it to other people. So you have to, if we were going to stay with this bathroom, you’re going to have to start to understand the inner plumbing of a toilet. That’s where you’re going to have to start. And not even with the toilet. You have to go in and learn how gaskets work, and we don’t, especially when we’re older, we don’t have to experience that. We’re used to getting stuff relatively quickly because we’ve gone through mandatory education. This can be extremely discouraging for adults.

Gregg Goodhart: Let me say to any adult who wants to play out there, it is totally normal to struggle. It is also very normal, and please be aware that you will think you should make more progress than you do while also using inferior methods. So, you know you’re learning sometimes when it hurts, slow down so slow that you’d be embarrassed for anyone to hear you, concentrate on the smallest things and never let it go. If you don’t want to do that, you’ll be experiencing what makes most adult beginners want to quit. And you can either give in to that or go through it but this is normal. Nobody picks it up. Don’t talk about, I know this guy down the street, you bet… You don’t know. Look at it, there’s evidence out there that empirically investigates how quickly people learn stuff from the beginning. Look at that.

Gregg Goodhart: You don’t know what happened down the street. It reminds me what you just said about the media and how you believe that absolutely. Because talent is viewed like someone being a King or a great, it’s a compliment, why is it a compliment? You didn’t do anything to get it. But it’s a compliment and people really want it. So throughout history, people have misrepresented the child prodigy. Beethoven’s father is a great example. Lied about his age because he wanted people to think he was a child prodigy. Now, was he playing any better if you thought he was younger? It’s because it’s a marketing tool. The whole Kubla Khan poem, which supposedly came in an opium dream. No, no, if you look at the way it all came about and if there’s a previous poem that was based upon that was a marketing tool to get people interested in buying the poem.

Gregg Goodhart: So you’re right about the media. The media love’s talent and the idea that these, so few people should be put on a pedestal. And by the way, I think we should put people with high level skill on a pedestal. Not only should we admire their work that they’ve done, but it is wonderful to experience high level skill. I don’t care if it’s a football game or a Beethoven piano Sonata. It is wonderful to see humans achieve at that level. I’ll use an example that’s in the book, Talent is Overrated, which I always say if you read one book the rest of your life other than the book of your religion, it should be Talent is Overrated. He talks about an incident that I’ve gone and looked it up and read about this where there was a Mozart symposium somewhere in Europe and one guy gave up and gave presentation called Mozart is a Working Stiff and he mentioned that Mozart never really wrote anything for art’s sake. He wrote it for money. That’s what he was doing and he was just a normal working dude who was really good at what he did.

Gregg Goodhart: And he was denounced and told he shouldn’t say such things because Mozart’s music belongs in the aethereal spheres of the heavens. What’s the difference? How is the music any… see this is how I talk to students. Come on folks. Let’s all get on the reality train because it’s really good. I’ve had people say things like, “Well, even though what you’re saying is wrong, I see that it’s good because it encourages students to do their work.” That’s a problem. I’m not lying, I’m telling the truth, but it was the other way I’d be honest. That I believe, and again, I’m going all over the place here, but that I believe that idea that we’re just trying to get students to work hard so we can see if it works. I think that most people, most kids believe that when we say to them, you can do anything you want if you just put your mind to it, that they view that as a phony statement to encourage them to work hard, where they’re going to fail most of the time to find that one small area where they’ll be successful, and it’s just not true.

Gregg Goodhart: So anyway, to go back to the adult beginner, yes, you will struggle if that, and it will definitely, and this goes for everybody, including myself. It will take a lot longer than you think it should. You will feel like you’ve put in enough work, more work. And I always say, by the way, when did mother nature promise you that the neuro biological changes that need to take place will happen in six days, six months, six weeks? When did you, I missed that memo, but Oh, it’s going to, how many times did we program a senior recital in April and we’re going to put all this really difficult music on it and it’s August and we tell ourselves we’re going to work hard nine times out of 10 that fizzles off, and some of us work really hard and then wonder why didn’t it work, I gave it eight months. Who said eight months? What if it’s nine? What if it’s 20? Who knows? And were you’re doing the work right?

Gregg Goodhart: So you will always feel like you put far too much effort in that if anyone else had done it, they’d get a lot farther. That’s normal. If you can get through that, you will. I guarantee you get very good.

Christopher: I think that point you just made that children and adults alike, are really skeptical of these comments we make is such an important one. It’s one I’ve been really conscious of in our marketing and Musical U because we’re trying to spread this message that, Musicality isn’t an innate gift, it’s a learnable skill and you just know that some people read that and they’re like, “Ah, you’re just trying to flog a product.” Like you’re spinning the facts the way you want to. But it’s not the case. Like the scientists out there with zero reason for bias, zero skin in the game except academic excellence at telling us this. 
Christopher: Gregg, I feel like we could end the interview here and it would be a fantastic episode and my summary would look something like: Talent is not a real thing. It’s going to be hard, but stick with it and you’ll be able to achieve it. And that would be a really valuable thing to put in front of our audience!
Christopher: But actually the reason you are such a fascinating individual is that you actually tackle that problem and say, “Maybe there is a way to make it easy. It’s not talent, but maybe it doesn’t have to be such a hard long slog.” And in particular you do that with a structure you called the Practiclass. I’d love if we could talk a little bit about that, what’s in it, how it works and what our audience can learn from the things you share with students there.

Gregg Goodhart: Well, the main purpose of a Practiclass, let me give the overview. I always say “you, like me”, and I think I say this near the beginning, “most of you probably”, and I’ll say “how many people have experienced this problem?” and everyone’s hands go up. “You work like crazy. You have a few sections in your music that are very, very, very hard that are just technically beyond you. You know what you want them to sound like, but you continuously make – they’re a problem and you work on them like crazy until the date of performance and you wonder why they don’t go well. And then you get very upset” And I say “I, we will fix one of those problems.” 
Gregg Goodhart: And I generally work with people who just did it in a jury or a recital or just gave a, don’t bring me something new. But we work on new stuff too, bring me something that you’ve given it your all and you just can’t get it. And in about 20 minutes, and I’ll talk about the method here in minute, in about 20 minutes or so and there’s video online of me doing this so I’m not making it up. And I think there’re enough students there that everyone can realize, I don’t know all those people in that part of all around the country that it was a set up and they can already do it and we’re faking it and I’m in front of an audience many times. So that’d be quite a setup. Again, when I do my practice coaching I always say, okay, first session is free come and by and I just do the same thing in this session. And in about 20 minutes we fixed one of those things so that it’s cleaner, exactly the way you want to sound. Faster, actually many times faster than you even want to play it. Think about that for a minute. It feels like you’re playing slow on stage and easier to play. It feels easier to play.

Gregg Goodhart: Now if you can do that – after working on it for six months, if you can do that in 20 minutes, imagine what else you can do. And that’s the real focus of the Practiclass. I have come to find it is so hard to get people to do deliberate practice and to work like this because frankly it’s hard. My favorite line from the original deliberate practice study, which I always talk about in my workshops at Erickson’s 1993 study quote, “Deliberate practice is not inherently enjoyable.” That’s my favorite line. If it is your probably not doing it, but you need to look for that difficulty, that challenge, that focus. So it’s going to be hard to do and you’re not going to get an immediate payoff, so you have to stay with it.

Gregg Goodhart: I designed the Practiclass to give that immediate payoff so that you could feel, it’s one thing for me, and you talked about, boy, it’s not a marketing tool. You’re fighting the good fight. If I may put it that way. You’re trying to get this good information out there that you know has a scientific basis and can be looked at as well, maybe he’s doing it for this. So what I do in a Practiclass is, okay, feel it. You feel it. I can say all day long that these empirical studies show this or that and that’s why I put the videos online. See it, hear it, feel it. You lack talent. You work as hard as you could, you couldn’t get it. And in 20 minutes you just got it. That internal feeling is the greatest motivation in the world. That’s what motivates people. And there’s good research that shows, if you will get people good at anything, and some of the research was throwing darts in a puddle.

Gregg Goodhart: They had one group that just tried and tried and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And they had another group that they gave a training regimen to. The first group, yeah, it was okay. And these are people who didn’t care about our darts at all. The second group couldn’t wait to play more and learn more about darts. By the way, that is where I believe passion comes from. Now I am positive, 100% positive passion can be created where there was none before. That is in the literature. I’m positive. So you can become passionate about music if you didn’t have a passion for music, you can become passionate for math and all of your academic studies, whatever it is. I know that sounds crazy by following teachers’ directions, doing a little bit of work at the beginning and gaining confidence so that it’s more fun instead of the wrong kind of struggle, which is the struggle that doesn’t get you results.

Gregg Goodhart: So to feel this is a really big deal. So I set up the Practiclass and what I do when I’m doing academics to get them to do this is I do dual coding. I said earlier, I give them to memorize a large volume of information. And then the whole, I stop every 15 minutes. What did I say? And they just rattle off. Well, my memory can work like that. They say, “Wow, my fingers can work like that?” And they can. The other thing I use, and I’ll tell you the methods in a second, but the other thing that is different about a Practiclass that I find important is I use it as a vehicle for teaching.

Gregg Goodhart: that is, unlike a masterclass where people will kind of say, “Yeah, do this and hey, what about that?” And I love this and tell stories about the famous people that they knew. When something happens, I stop and look at the class and say, “Listen, this is what’s going on.” What happened there was this, it was mindset. It was self control. Then here was contextual interference. This is how we did it. And as they’re struggling, you’ll see in almost every Practiclass as they’re struggling, I say, this is it. Everybody look, this is where you want to quit. This is what you want.

Gregg Goodhart: And then they watch as it’s struggle, struggle, struggle. They never get it right. Struggle, struggle, struggle, and then we stop you go back and do it the original way, and it’s through the roof. So I use it as a teaching exercise. So what do I do in that class? Generally, I consider a Practiclass a bit of a parlor trick, though it is genuine. First as it builds off the practice they already have, it’s not going to work if you’ve never played the thing before though we can get you from never playing to learning pretty well, not to performance level by doing the same thing. And what I’m doing is employing a particular thing called contextual interference. Contextual interference is learning-

Christopher: Sorry, to interrupt. I wonder if you could pause before diving into this because I feel like what you do in that context is actually a notch more sophisticated than what most people out there are teaching on the topic of deliberate practice. I want to make sure our audience can appreciate what’s going on. So if you wouldn’t mind, could we first just talk a little bit about the idea of deliberate practice and then what that might look like in a vanilla sense and then what you’re doing in the Practiclass that’s maybe a bit different.

Gregg Goodhart: Sure. Of course everything is deliberate practice. So anything, any devices that I would bring in, will be serving deliberate practice. Deliberate practice demands constant improvement. In music, it’s very easy to explain, but the same explanation works anywhere. I will say that this is, I kind of came up with this on my own. I had seen other people talk about it but never in this context. I was at Florida State University, which is where K Anders Ericsson is at now doing some things and on a whim on my layover right before I got there, I emailed him. Then I asked, I said, “I used your research. I think it’s great.” He showed up to this classroom lecture I was doing, which was great. I was honored until I got to my version of deliberate practice and I realized I had never run it by him before and I was taking his research and explaining it, boy talk about performance anxiety.

Gregg Goodhart: I’m in the middle of my talk and I realized this, I’m about to pull up a slide, whatever… I talked to him later and he said it was fine. So Ericsson is fine with this, but boy that was nerve-wracking. So here’s how I illustrate it. We all do something, right. We’re going to do something. You’re going to learn a piece. In fact, we do reps, let’s use it in terms of doing reps, every rep should follow this.

Gregg Goodhart: You plan, I’m going to do something. You then do it. Then you reflect, put that right there. Then you reflect what was good, what was bad, how could I do better? If I don’t know how I can do it better, how could I find out? Perhaps writing it down and talking to my teacher. This is what I would call, I’m sorry if I’m using an American reference here, but the Indy car of learning. Indy cars, Indy 500, they go 212 or 230 miles an hour. They are highly engineered to the tightest tolerances. They are amazing, amazing speed machines. This is how most people do it and is the tricycle of learning.

Christopher: I should maybe just explain for anyone listening to the audio only podcast, what we’re looking at is a triangle with a plan, do and reflect in an endless loop. And what Gregg just covered up to create the tricycle was the reflect. Removing that from the triangle.

Gregg Goodhart: And isn’t it interesting, as we’re pulling together all we’re talking about because learning is an ecosystem. It isn’t one thing. Yes, deliberate practice, but how are you going to do it unless you know the factors that go into it? Isn’t it interesting that the reflect stage is orienting selective attention? What we talked about was so hard that we would want to begin to train by doing practice for short periods, so this is very hard to do. So people should be aware you can do this, I’m going to tell you a couple things are going to happen. You’ll do it the first time and then you’ll do your next one and it will be less unless you go, how much am I focusing? This is called meta cognition. Thinking about your thinking, unless you’re constantly going, am I doing this right? Am I doing this right? Trust me you won’t because I do it too.

Gregg Goodhart: I teach people how to do this. I’ve been doing this for years and in my own practice I will stop and go, I haven’t been focusing for the last 10 minutes. Like I have not been focusing. I had been on auto pilot. So you constantly need to readjust and see if you’re actually even doing this. It’s going to be hard because orienting selective attention takes mental energy, which is something refers to it as a psychic energy. You only have so much mental energy and you can only concentrate for so long. Apparently the research shows that experts can’t do more than five hours a day, and by the way, five hours a day of practice is a lot more than most people think it is because if you think you practice five hours, try documenting your start and stop times and take out everything, when you make a sandwich, when you fold laundry, you’ll find out it’s a lot less than you think because you need breaks.

Gregg Goodhart: So one thing that’s important about this is, the less you’ve done of it, the less you’ll be able to do of it. That means it’s going to frustrate you and you’re going to get to a point where you just can’t… Do you know how you know when you reach that point, when you reach mental confusion, I should be able to do this but I can’t. I think we’ve all had an experience where we’re repping something and then all of a sudden we just can’t do it. That means take a break. Well if sometimes that happens in a Practiclass, what I do there, because obviously we can’t take a 10 minute break at that point. I say stop everything you’re doing. Stare at the back wall for 30 seconds and think about nothing music related, thinking about what you’re going to do this weekend, think about it, whatever.

Gregg Goodhart: And after 30 seconds, it’s amazing because they go back and they can play it. So one of the first things you want to recognize about deliberate practice, and this is part of the original study and all subsequent research, is that if you’re doing it right, if you’re forcing yourself to focus and to reflect, it will weigh on you and you will experience mental fatigue. The only solution for that is a break, which is really weird because if you’ve finally gotten yourself to the point of I’m going to work hard, I’m going to focus and you’re all wound up to work hard. Once we get to that place, we want to have strength and that, “Oh, I need to take a break.” Yeah, that’s right.

Gregg Goodhart: Constant hard work isn’t a good thing because it diminishes the quality of the work we can do mentally. And this is in the literature. The general rule is three to one. If you do it for 45 minutes, take 15 minutes off. You generally can’t do, I found more than 90 minutes straight at a time and that, that takes years to develop. How about you start if you’re going to practice, how about instead of 30 minutes a day, how about several, two, three, four, five, five minute sessions of art. Because especially if you’re starting, you’re not going to need a huge warm up because you’re not doing whatever it is. You’re not doing anything real. You’re probably just learning bull-hold or home position on the piano, but do it. And then once you get it right, do it again. And then once you get it right, do it again. Make sure you have it right.

Gregg Goodhart: Then review the next day. Even though you’re sure you have it, don’t just do it. Go back and reflect and take breaks. So intense focus. Let it go after five minutes, watch how that works for you and it almost seems easier. Then as you start, then what happens is it becomes easier to focus A, because you’re building this circuitry in your brain because I’m telling you that reflective piece is everything. That reflect piece of that process is everything and that is a skill very few people are born with. It usually only comes out when fear is present. Boy, we reflect really well when we are afraid because we want to think. The brain knows how to learn best when it wants to get itself out of a bad situation. But we generally don’t, if all our needs have been met and were okay, which generally we’re not practicing music if those things haven’t happened.

Gregg Goodhart: So it will get frustrating and you will need breaks, it’s hard to make yourself take breaks, but once you start doing this, you will pretty quickly see the benefits. And this gets too, and the price of this is doing the frustrating deliberate practice. This leads to something that one researcher calls flow. This is a great concept. Everybody has experienced it. Have you ever sat down to practice or maybe if you’re more of a beginning practitioner and musician sat down to do something, anything work on a project, a home project or something for work and you start working and you feel like it’s been 10 or 15 minutes and you look up and it’s been an hour. We’ve all experienced that. Some people call it the zone. Some people just go, “No man, I guess time flies.” There’s a researcher who’s dedicated his entire career to figuring out what that is.

Gregg Goodhart: His name is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It’s spelled just like it sounds. I always have to say that. What he is found, he calls it flow. What he has found is that’s just not a random state that occurs. That’s a state that you’re in control of and that you can make yours. And I do it all the time now and I do it with students. Once you get lost in the plan do reflect, time melts off the clock. You feel good because you’re constantly challenged. It’s a curiosity, by the way, this is the highest state of learning for the brain. What your brain wants more than anything else is to be rich and be, not just learning, but in being involved in the act of learning. But if we never get over that hump and we always think school sucks and right, I don’t like it. And learning isn’t fun because we’d never done it this way.

Gregg Goodhart: Then once you start doing enough of it that way, you get into flow states where you get so wrapped up in what you’re doing. That time melts off the clock. I had a friend over for a party about a week ago and we were talking about this, and he’s in the recording industry out here in Los Angeles, and he does all sorts of television series and voiceover work and stuff. And he always tells me how much he doesn’t like his job. “Eh, I don’t like my job. It’s a grind, it’s a grind.” Listening to someone say something 90 times in a row and having to edit stuff out there. And I’m just talking about flow he goes, “You know, that happens to me sometimes at work, but I don’t like work.” And I said, “So when that hour goes off the clock, you stop and go, boy, I hated every second of that?”

Gregg Goodhart: “No, I guess that I don’t”, he was even experiencing flow in a place where he thought he wasn’t experiencing enjoyment. I will tell you at the very least, if you have unpleasant work you want to do, losing time is enjoyable. Let’s just start with that. That an hour feels like 10 minutes. But if you really think about it, the reason you lost time is because you were so involved in problem solving, the essence of high efficiency learning. So that’s I guess the basics of deliberate practice.

Christopher: Thank you. Yeah, you’ve just kind of bridged to what I find so fascinating about the Practiclass as you run because often when I see deliberate practice talked about, it’s simplified down to you’ve got to work on the bits that are difficult. So in the music context I think a lot of musicians immediately think, okay so we don’t get to play the whole piece, which you can play these two bars and if I flub it then I’ll think about, well maybe I should finger it this way instead. Or maybe I should try playing it that way instead. Which is all true and all genuinely characteristic of deliberate practice.

Christopher: But what you just said about flow, I think points to what I find so fascinating about the Practiclass, which is that you also introduced this idea of contextual interference, which in a sense fabricates that zone of the perfect level of difficulty in a way that I think is difficult to do otherwise. We want to be just focusing on the tricky part, but that gets pretty boring and you have to really try to think of new ways to tackle it. And it’s quite limited compared to what you do in the Practiclass. So I’d love if you could share what is contextual interference and what’s the relevance here?

Gregg Goodhart: Well, contextual interference is basically doing something but in a new way that is confusing. I’ll elaborate. I know that sounds confusing, but in a new way that confuses you. It’s been called by one researcher at UCLA, a two of them actually Roberts and Elizabeth, your desirable difficulty. One article they wrote was called Making Things Hard on Yourself, but in a Good Way. There are ways, and this is a very prescriptive, you can’t just make something harder on yourself. You can’t go outside and practice in a downpour and expect that to work. Though actually it probably won’t be that bad. Anything that makes you focus harder, right?

Gregg Goodhart: So what has been found is that, by the way, Bjork isn’t the only one. And some of these scientific findings go back to the late 19th century and we’re still not using them in most learning. So when I talk about doing something in a different way, you want it once everyone probably knows the experience most people, and if you’re just starting out playing, you will know if you start doing deliberate practice, you will experience this as well. You’ll slow down, you’ll work something out, we’ll figure out the fingering and now you can play it. You can’t play it fast, you can’t play it the way you want, but technically your fingers are all going to the right spot.

Gregg Goodhart: Old thinking was, and by that I mean the way I practiced for a long time and it will work to some extent, was now do that thing a hundred times in a row every day until it feels good. And I would do that. I used to have what I call a hundred rep scheme that I used to go through keeping track of my rep and it worked. But boy, Oh boy, if I only knew how much time I was wasting and having my students waste by doing that. There is a place for mass repetition and we don’t have time to get into it here, but there is a master repetition, then contextual interference, then spacing and all this other stuff. There is a place for mass repetition one after another help refine and initially get it in, but we all know that we seem to hit plateaus, we do repetition and we wait with all music teachers and anyone who’s been studying music for a while knows about the plateaus.

Gregg Goodhart: The thing about the plateau is it can be broken. I know for years when I taught, especially in my music store days when I didn’t know very much about teaching at all, I would say just stay with it. I’ve been at this long enough to know that plateaus break over time. They do. It may take 14 months, but they, I’ve experienced them but they do. Oh my gosh, every time you hit a plateau, just use the cure. And the cure is some sort of contextual interference that is making it slightly harder, making you reload it into your brain. One of the ones you’ll see me using a lot in a Practiclass is dotted rhythms. The reason I use this is because they’re a little bit easier to teach. Because there’s a good 30 or 40 things I have that work this way and once, and I will tell you once you use this, will become less and less effective as you get better at doing it.

Gregg Goodhart: So you have to find new ways to make it more difficult. It’s funny, I’ve run into this on the East coast and Southeast a lot when I’ve taught out there in the United States. I say, well, do you try different rhythms? And I will for anyone curious, explain this process. It’s also on that handout on my website, which is called practical ways to play better now, right now come on, go do it. That’s really how I feel about all this stuff. Just go do it. Stop your whining and complaining, just try this. It takes 10 minutes a day for five days. It’s free. You don’t have to pay me anything. Then go to Musical U and do what they say in that way. There you go. Just try it. Please get better.

Gregg Goodhart: So, I’m sorry. I lost my train of thought. But applying deliberate practice. So what we start with is, I generally start with dotted rhythms. If you’re playing a melody, here’s the melody and if the melody has different rhythms in it, okay, straighten them out, one note at a time. That alone for some people will cause desirable difficulty. If you have trouble doing that, be very happy. That’s exactly what you want. If you are not having trouble, you are not getting what you want now that’s okay. You might not have trouble with the first step, then relearn it with a dotted rhythm. Now play. This is where you started. Now play it like this.

Gregg Goodhart: In almost every case, everywhere, people will start to have a lot of problems and they won’t be able to do it. That’s what we want. Now, in some cases, I had people do dotted rhythms very quickly and very easily. Usually people who play jazz, they know dotted rhythms inside and out.

Christopher: Was that the East Coast thing you mentioned?

Gregg Goodhart: Oh, then the East coast thing. So I say, have you been, and so anyway, then I do what I call a reverse dot, music history calls it the scotch snaps, which is very uncommon and that trips everyone up. So sometimes I ask the people, do you do different? “Oh yes,” what do you do? “Oh, I do rhythms.” I say, “Well, show me.” And they do once with a dot, once with like a triplet, and they had this specific set where you already learned those. They’re not working anymore. So what happens is, and it all is in the communication, how do we teach deliberate practice as we were saying, what is, is their teacher taught them a manifestation of the concept of desirable difficulty. He did not teach them about desirable difficulty.

Gregg Goodhart: So that they gave them a fish, and they ate for a day instead of teaching them how to fish, so they could eat for a lifetime. So yes, it worked because you can bet when they first showed it to these people it works spectacularly well. Then what happened? It worked less and less, and now we’re right back where we started. How was it that you didn’t give them the, well just keep looking for something different to do. So that’s what we do in the Practiclass. Sometimes it will be a different situation. Sometimes I want them to play it backwards. Backwards is great. Usually after we do that we play it backwards, and I can usually tell I’ve gotten it right when someone goes, that’s what I wanted to do. If it’s going to cause you that kind of distress, that’s what you’re looking for.

Gregg Goodhart: We just go through whatever variations we need to go through, and you’ll watch, they will struggle. I will point it out to the group, look at them struggle. In fact, I talk about the universal sign of learning. There really is a universal sign of learning. For instance, this, everyone around the world knows what this is. It means you’re choking it’s universal, a smile is universal. Everyone knows that means happy everywhere. You don’t need language. There is truly, and I’m not joking about this, a universal sign of learning, and you can see my videos when I point to it happened. It looks like this.

Gregg Goodhart: The brow furrows, the eyes narrow, the lips purse. When someone starts doing that, losing track of their facial expressions and has to focus so hard, then you know you’ve hit the sweet spot. I call it the international sign of learning and that is the manifestation of desirable difficulty, which is kind of a moving target. If you’ve learned rhythms, you better learn some other ones after that comes something called spacing and interleaving, but that’s probably going too far. Just try this much. It will get you so far and then you’ll have the tools to investigate it further.

Christopher: Fantastic and I want to make sure we are giving people the concepts, not just the fish as it were. Something else you use in the Practiclass is to slow things right down to the point where the student almost can’t help but get it right on the basis that practicing it perfectly is what creates the connections in the brain that we’re looking for rather than trying it at full speed and stumbling half the time. That might seem that, I think to some people at odds with this idea of playing it a whole bunch of different ways. Is that not confusing the brain and teaching it different correct performances?

Gregg Goodhart: This is what we see in a lot of this stuff. Everything is true at the same time, and you have to know when to use what. In other words, you have to work hard and take breaks – but when, that’s the key.

Gregg Goodhart: So you were asking about the seemingly contradictory information that well, we should get it really, really slow and then well, why should we get it slow and do it differently? And it seems contradictory. Well, this is how it works. You first, in fact, I wish I had the graphic with me. It may even be on our old interview, I might’ve sent of the three images of the brain learning a task, it’s on my website. It’s a FMR imaging of how a brain learns a task at the very beginning, basic moves. It was a fine motor skill task, and it shows the brain lit up like crazy trying to figure out what’s going on, right?

Gregg Goodhart: We only use 10% of my brain. No one knows where that came from. It’s a myth. I think what it really means is we only use 10% of our effort. It’s actually better to use more of your brain in the beginning and less later. If you watch is the skill becomes more and more automatized, which is what we want, not having to think about it. Less and less of the brain is used until it collapses down in what is called a process efficiency change. That is the most efficient small area retro. Why use more of the brain when you can do it more efficiently and use less? The brain cannot store energy. It’s glucose that it recruits from the rest of the body. It cannot store energy. The less energy it uses, the better. It already uses the most energy of anything in your body and that’s a good thing.

Gregg Goodhart: That is a neural network. I wish I had the, please ask me. I’ll send you graphics for this. The way neural networks work is everything that we do, everything that we think are represented by a neural network, that is neurons, brain cells, talking to other brain cells. They do this by sending a little electrical chemical impulse back and forth between each other. But to get the neurons to communicate, you have to tell them which ones need to be communicating. That’s the initial slowing it down process. If you’re playing too fast, if you’re doing something wrong, those are the neurons that will communicate. Those are the neurons that will say, this is what we want to do when we come to this part of the music.

Gregg Goodhart: Think of this. If you’re never really focusing, and you’re just doing reps, and you do it four different ways and none of them are probably exactly right. Which of those four are you going to get in the performance? Is it any wonder we have so many problems. So the first thing you want to do in order to get the neural network, which is the movement, which represents the movement, is you want to get the movement absolutely correct. You can’t know what you’re going to apply contextual interference to until you know what you’re going to apply contextual interference to. You have to be able to do it. So that is the first process. Now what’s really interesting is you go, and you can only do it slowly.

Gregg Goodhart: Learning research shows, I love this statement from one study was the first steps of learning are usually mitigated by vision. In other words, if we’re learning something, we need to look at it. You need to either watch ourselves and do it or read or look at directions and if you go too fast, your eyes aren’t going to pick it up. Why? Because you don’t have a mental model for what it should look like. You’re developing that mental model. This goes to something for all you cognitive psychology. This goes to cognitive load theory if you’re into that stuff that’s kind of new. It’s too much on your working memory to figure out what to do. So you know what? Slow it down so slow that you are in full control of everything.

Gregg Goodhart: This gets the correct neurons to fire off and create the right neural network. Now, and if you look at the way we did in the Practiclass. Now, once you have the neural network, now make it… Now it’s easy. Now you’re just going to play it over and over again. That’s great for a little while. That produces something called myelin, which insulates your axons and helps the electro chemical impulse, called action potential move faster. But then it only goes so far and then we hit the plateau.

Gregg Goodhart: So first do it right, get the neural representation right then gradually introduced contextual interference. I will tell you, we don’t have time for it here. There’s actually a step after that where you do something else different on top of that. And that’s how you space and schedule your work that actually works beyond that. If anyone really gets into this stuff, I would encourage them in their investigations to look into interleaving and spacing. A really great book for that is called Make it Stick. But believe me, you could just do what we talked about today, and it would keep you going for a couple of years.

Christopher: Absolutely. I love that you have videos of some of these Practiclasses on YouTube for people to watch and see an action how this works and see the students push themselves but in a really productive and effective way. Is this the kind of thing you get into at your practice coaching as well, where you’re working one on one with someone over a period?

Gregg Goodhart: Yes, we do the these online much like I use Zoom as you are using, and we’re never really taught how to learn. If you think about how we teach anything, if you’re an instrument teacher or if you teach anything, if you teach, you’re a manager, and you teach people at work, we don’t say figure most of it out on your own. We give very specific directions and think about how we teach an instrument. Do we teach something once? No, we go back to it next week, next week, next week and we don’t do it for a month. Then we go back to it again. Then we check to see if you got it right and when we go back to it, what do we do? We refine it. Okay, good. You got that now what you want to do is move your finger this way.

Gregg Goodhart: Now on your bull-hold, do this. Now pressure do that. What do we do with learning? At best a couple of tips and tricks. So what it is, it is the same thing as learning an instrument, but for learning practice, it’s basically practice lessons. I call them coaching sessions, and we placed them in between lessons. So you have your lesson on Thursday, you do your practice coaching session on Monday or something like that. The first thing I say is, what does your teacher wants you to learn? Well, this, okay, how are you doing it? And it always goes like this while I was doing this. Okay, let’s stop. There’s a better way to do that. And what will happen, and I think if anyone watches this or maybe downloads the document or does some of the things on your site, what will happen is over time you will get away from this stuff.

Gregg Goodhart: It’s just human nature. You won’t notice it. You’ll start to focus a little less, progress will be a little less. You’re not as curious anymore. Not only do you have to continue focusing, but you then have to ask what’s next? That’s another reason why I teach in that format, anyone could figure it out on their own, how to do this. It would take an extraordinary amount of effort and a long time. So anyone could figure out how to play the violin like a Virtuoso on their own, they’ll probably take 30 years because you would be competing against people who are going to teachers who, because it’s all trial and error, right? Plan, do, reflect, try, try again. Keep trying. All teachers do. I hope no teachers get mad at me about this. All we do is reduce the amount of trials. That’s all teaching is.

Gregg Goodhart: We get you more close more quickly without trials, what you need to do and then you can do the trials within that area. So we have this for instruments. We’re smart enough to know that theory is really important, but we need to have a several year course outside of instrument to teach music theory. We know that ear training is really important, and we use it in lessons. We have courses outside with music history, and these courses aren’t just one week they’re years long yet for practicing the single greatest determinant and probably the most difficult and mysterious area of all of them, you do nothing. Not even a week long workshop, which by the way, I teach week long workshops, one at Arkansas state and one in Louisville of all every summer that’ll be up on my website soon for teachers and students to do this.

Gregg Goodhart: We just don’t teach it, so it just doesn’t need, it doesn’t it in general. Now I have had students who show up to, this has happened at least once, who show up to a Practiclass. Oh my gosh, I get it. I’ve never talked to again who downloaded stuff up there and started doing their investigation on their own and ended up soaring. That’s very rare. That would look like talent. Most people will try and then without knowing it, move away from it and back and need to be guided. I’ve just done it with so many people. It really is, teaching is as complex as surgery and if anyone laughs at that, they don’t understand teaching. Part of the problem we have with learning how to learn and learning how to practice because most people don’t understand how involved teaching is. And at the end of the day, practice is teaching yourself. That’s all that it is.

Gregg Goodhart: It’s taking the information you got from someone and learning how to best get it inside of you so that you can use it. How well we teach ourselves really is the key. So that’s what practice coaching is a course of study. And I would like to add something that is not the best business decision in the world, but it works great. And that is, I almost never will allow anyone to stay longer than eight weeks. Even though I would get paid for it and most people will ask, things have been going so great. I say, “No, no. What you need to do is you need to start, you need to feel the desirable difficulty of figuring this out on your own,” so it’s not open-ended. It’s not well, sign up for practice coaching in the next five years you’re studying violin, and you’re studying, that might be good for my virtual studio, but it’s not the way the brain would learn best.

Gregg Goodhart: At best, I recommend, and this happened sometimes come back in six weeks or six months if you still feel that way. Most of the time they don’t come back at least for six months, or a year because they’re afraid at first, but it starts to work. They start to figure it out. They’ve learned besides the actual things that we do problem solving, which is the key, they’ve learned to think critically, and they start to figure things out on their own. So I did want to add that it’s not, “Oh great. I have to sign up for endless lessons.” It’s a pretty quick deal to get to that point, and you get better right away. It’s just like the play. It’s like a really intensive Practiclass every week.

Christopher: Tremendous. And for now at least, you’re very generously letting people get that first session free to see if it’s a good fit. I know that for a lot of people in our audience, one of the biggest challenges in learning music is feeling like they don’t have enough time and then not improving fast enough. I think I just have to echo the sentiments of the Stanford PhD I mentioned at the beginning who said, “I came across the theory, but I wasn’t really getting the benefit from it in my life.”

Christopher: I know that’s so common, these ideas around deliberate practice and different ways to approach practice are becoming a bit more known among musicians, but how many of us are actually using them and getting the benefit and improving so much faster. So I just, I call them recommend highly enough the work you do, I can’t applaud highly enough the work you do and recommend ggoodheart.com we’ll have links in the show notes, but check out the Practiclass videos. Get the free handout that tells you all the details of this contextual interference approach, well not all of them, but certainly I have left enough to keep you busy and having fun for awhile and to check out the practice coaching Gregg offers because yeah, I what better use of your time than learning to make better use of your time? Any parting words of wisdom or encouragement for audience Gregg?

Gregg Goodhart: Well, anyone who knows me, and my students know that this is a very important concept with me is I don’t do false praise. I think you’re doing wonderful work with Musicality, and I think it’s the good fight. I do appreciate what you do as well. There’s one thought I had when you brought up the guy from Stanford. I want to tell you a little bit about him. He’s an actor. He was working on getting his acting better, so it had nothing to do with music, and he didn’t tell me about this at all. He had figured out what he wanted to do and get better in this, so I show them the structure, how to do it, how to build practice, all that stuff. And said, “This is amazing.” In the very last session we had, he said, “I have to tell you something. I have a PhD from Stanford in science education.”

Gregg Goodhart: In other words, he’s the guy you want running your high school science department at the most expensive, elite private school in the country. He’s everything you want. And he said, “I never figured this stuff out like you’re doing.” I said, “But of course, Carol Dweck is at Stanford, “Mindset”! That’s where she’s at.” I said, “You must have talked about Dweck, of course, we talked about Dweck. You must’ve talked about Bjork. Yes, we talk about Bjork. But no one showed me how it all fits together and how it all works.” I think what we’re doing is truly revolutionary. And what I have found to my she grin, but to be historically accurate. Is that true revolutionary innovation is hard until it hits.

Gregg Goodhart: Most people believe in talent as an article of faith, not as an art and if you tell them it doesn’t exist, they feel that you’ve told them something is wrong in their belief system or them. It’s very hard to be in our position seeing the solutions to this stuff, but they are out there, and I will say they are just like my friend who I met in a professional capacity, and friends now they’re just like my friend from Stanford. You can have that much training, that good and still not know how to do it and guys like me and him are the ones who can show you how to, I know it sounds crazy, but guys like me and him are the ones who can show you how to do it. And if he misses it after a PhD in science education, please don’t take it as an insult to think that you’ve been missing it 10 times worse. It’s not an insult. It’s a valuable piece of information that will help you with everything you do. Thank you for your time.

Christopher: Thank you so much Gregg.

Gregg Goodhart: All right. Take care.

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The post How to Learn Like a Genius, with Gregg Goodhart appeared first on Musical U.

With over 400 publications and recordings on Alfred Music, including Alfred’s flagship piano method Premier Piano Course, Dennis is one of the world’s most prolific and popular composers of educational piano music for students at all levels. In 2015 he was awarded a “Lifetime Achievement Award” by the National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy in recognition of his extraordinary service to the music teaching profession.

Mr. Alexander provides a rich learning experience for his students by bringing awareness to the importance of musicality. Often dull topics like music theory and reading notation are brought to life with a creativity and a consciousness of musical expression.

In this conversation we talk about:

• How Dennis’ background in playing by ear and improvising feeds into how he approaches composing.
• The main difference between children and adult learners and one great way to make learning more enjoyable and improvisation less intimidating if you’re an adult learner.
• And the specific aspects which to keep in mind to bring your music from strictly-correct but unmoving through to a compelling, musical performance.

Enjoy this glimpse into what makes one of the top piano methods much more than just “playing the right notes at the right time”. Even if you’re not a piano player, you don’t want to miss all of the deep musical insight in this interview!

Watch the episode:

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Links and Resources

• • Dennis Alexander Online
  • Premier Piano Course
  • Keys to Stylistic Mastery
  • Keys to Artistic Performance
  • Dennis Alexander on Alfred Music
  • Dennis Alexander Compositions

Transcript

Dennis: Hi. My name is Dennis Alexander, and I am one of the coauthors of Alfred’s Premier Piano Course, and welcome to Musicality Now.

Christopher: Welcome to the show, Dennis. Thank you for joining us today.

Dennis: Thank you. Happy to be here.

Christopher: It’s been really great getting a chance to talk with you a little bit by email in advance of the interview, and learn a bit more about your own back story before you began this very successful publishing career. I wonder if we could share a little bit of that with our audience? How did you first get started in music and with piano?

Dennis: Well, I grew up in a very tiny little town in southwest Kansas. My father was a farmer, and it was a little town of 200 people. I was very, very fortunate to have a fantastic first teacher. I was seven years old when I began. I actually was inspired to want to learn how to play the piano from watching a very popular TV show at the time. Now, this was back in the early ’50s. And I was, as I mentioned, seven years old. And my family and I, every Saturday night, watched the Lawrence Welk Show. 

Dennis: And my favorite performer on the show was a wonderful woman, big blonde hair. She was a honky-tonk piano player. Her name was Jo Ann Castle. And every time she walked on stage during this show and sat down to play, she looked like she was having so much fun, and she just was bouncing all over the piano bench, and just playing a hundred miles an hour, and just having a ball. And I just said to myself right then and there, “If it’s that much fun to play the piano, that’s what I want to do when I grow up.”

Dennis: So I asked my parents for lessons, and they found this wonderful teacher. And one of the nicest things that she did for me as a beginning level student was to sit down next to me at every lesson, and she just made up, she improvised wonderful little duet accompaniments to go along with my simple little pieces. And it was always so motivational and inspiring to me. And that’s really where my career as a pianist began, with a teacher who just made music so much fun, and inspired me, through her wonderful, creative ability to play by ear and improvise.

Christopher: Fantastic. I’m so pleased to hear that. We often have guests on the show who have a story that starts like yours, “I saw a great performer and it was inspiring and that looked exciting,” and then they get into the lessons and it does not live up to that image. It sounds like you did find the piano was fun?

Dennis: Absolutely. I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for my first piano teacher. She’s the one that really instilled a love of music in me, and got me going.

Christopher: Fantastic. And so, you were seeing her play by ear and improvise. Was she explaining to you how that worked as well? Was that part of your learning at that stage?

Dennis: No. No, it wasn’t. She just did it. Back in those days, we didn’t have these wonderful little teacher accompaniments that we have in today’s laying method books, where the secondo part is written out, or the teacher’s part’s written out for the teacher to play. And I was lucky that she had that ability back then, and it was always very impressive to me. She never talked about it. She just did it. And it just made my lessons so much more fun.

Dennis: But I realize, when I look back on those early level lessons, that what she was really teaching me was a number of things. First of all, music never stops. You keep going, no matter what. If you make a little mistake, you keep plowing right through the score until you get to the end. She taught me to listen, be very aware of sound. She was teaching me a very, very good basic rhythmic foundation. She was also teaching me keyboard choreography, if you will, which is basically having good posture, learning how to play artistically, expressively, and when you get to the end of a piece, you’ll float up slowly, or you might come off the keys with great vigor, depending on the character or the style of the music.

Dennis: So, by doing those duets with me in the beginning year of lessons, I learned an awful lot about just playing artistically, playing musically, and I learned that playing the piano involves the whole body, as well as the eyes, the mind, the feet. Everything goes together.

Christopher: Fantastic. And how long did you learn with that teacher?

Dennis: I was with her for about three years, and then she moved me onto another teacher who had a little bit more advanced training. And then, from eighth grade all through high school, I studied with a fabulous teacher. At the time, she was a nun who taught at St. Mary of the Plains College in Dodge City, Kansas, which was about 40 miles away from my hometown. So my parents drove me one way, 40 miles, every week for lessons. And her name was Sister Agnes Therese. And she was just a top-notch teacher.

Dennis: Then from there, I went to the university, and pursued a degree in piano performance.

Christopher: And I believe you were performing out and about during those university years. Is that right?

Dennis: Absolutely. Yes. In fact, my whole career, actually, when I went to the university, the only thing I thought about doing was performing and teaching. I had a performance degree, and then I got a job at the University of Montana, in Missoula, Montana. I taught there for 24 years. And it wasn’t until about 10 years … No, excuse me. Actually 14 years into my university teaching that I became involved with Alfred Music publishing, as a composer. It was strictly by chance. Maybe serendipity, if you will. I never planned on ever being a composer. I was strictly a teacher, performer, and I was very, very happy doing that.

Christopher: Well, you’re going to have to tell that story, because I’m sure everyone listening or watching is wondering, “How can you possibly not intend to become a composer, and then one day suddenly become one?”

Dennis: I know, it’s very funny. I would never have dreamed, when I was in college, that I would someday be making a living as a composer of educational materials. It was the furthest thing from my mind. But how that happened, in a nutshell, was that one of the coauthors of Alfred’s Basic Piano Library, which was a very popular course in the ’80s. It came out around 1980. And by 1985, ’86, it was really taking off. And one of the coauthors was a friend of mine. Her name was Amanda Vick Lethco. And Amanda asked me, when she was visiting in Missoula, Montana, once, if I would consider helping she and Willard Palmer market the method to teachers.

Dennis: And I was very reluctant at the time, because nobody really knew me as a clinician. I was simply teaching at the university, and very, very happy with what I was doing. Very, very busy. But I finally agreed to meet with Morty Manus, who was another coauthor of that course, who was the president of Alfred Music publishing. And I flew out to Burbank, California, where the offices were located, met with Morty, and he talked me into being a clinician that following summer. 

Dennis: And during that particular first summer of giving workshops, he and his wife, Iris, came to a presentation I was giving, and after the workshop, we had lunch. Over lunch, he asked me, he said, “Dennis,” he said, “We’d really like to have some duet books to correlate with the method, and we think it would give you more credibility as a clinician if you had something published. Would you please write those books for us?”

Dennis: And my mouth kind of fell open, and I said … Yeah, I said, “Morty,” I said, “I’ve never written a thing in my life.” And he said, “Really?” He said, “Well, why not?” I said, “Frankly,” I said, “Because no one’s ever asked me to, and I’m a performer, a teacher. Very happy with what I do. I’ve just never thought about writing music.” And he said, “Well,” he said, “Why don’t you give it a whirl?” And I agreed. I just stuck my neck out. I somehow knew in the back of my mind that I could do this, because I had a top piano pedagogy at the university for several years. I knew the materials that were out there. I knew what might be needed. 

Dennis: I also thought it was rather ironic that I was being asked to write duets for my first composition job, so to speak, because it was through duets when I was a beginner that really got me into the love of music. So I thought, “Well, this is kind of a natural thing to have happen to me.” So I wrote the duet books that correlated with Alfred’s Basic Piano Library. They ended up being very successful. And, from that moment on, Morty Manus needed to have more solo collections, and that’s where my career began as a composer. And I was very fortunate that I happened to have the background in playing by ear. I could improvise. I loved all kinds of music. When I was in college, I actually played in a nightclub every weekend, took requests. I could play, as I mentioned, play by ear, and improvise. So that was all very, very useful for me as I began this new career in composing educational teaching materials.

Dennis: I never studied composition in college. Of course, I had a very good background in theory, and in aural perception and counterpoint. But I never really took composition classes. 

Christopher: Interesting. And you’ve answered a little bit the question I was about to ask, which was: how could you know you would be up to the task of composing these duets? And, I suppose, in a sense, when you’re composing educational materials, there are boundaries laid out for you, right, in terms of the kind of-

Dennis: Absolutely.

Christopher: … technique that needs to be covered and the ability level of the student and so on? But at the same time, you’re staring at a blank piece of paper, and you’ve got to decide what notes to put on that page. 

Dennis: Exactly.

Christopher: You’ve mentioned playing by ear and improvisation there. It was something you saw your teacher do early on. You did it in the intervening years. And then when it came to composing, it sounds like that was helpful for you. How did those skills come into being for you? Was it something you worked on over the years? Was it something that was just naturally a part of your musicianship from the beginning?

Dennis: It was pretty much a natural part of my musicianship. I think when I was growing up, my parents loved music. And they were always playing music in our home, on the phonograph. They loved Ray Conniff, they loved Percy Faith, they loved all the big band sounds. And I would hear these pieces, and then I would go to the piano and figure out how to play them. I just had this kind of a natural ability, I think, to hear the harmonies, hear the melodies. I had probably an innate sense of rhythm. And it just was fairly easy for me to do this.

Dennis: So, I was probably a little unusual when I was in college as a classical pianist, because most of my friends who were also majoring in piano performance could not play Happy Birthday without the music in front of them. But I was lucky in that sense that I could improvise. I could play by ear. It gave me all kinds of opportunities to literally pave our way through college by having those particular skills.

Dennis: So, when it came time for me to jump into being a composer, it was kind of a natural process. I just had this feeling that I could do this, and it ended up being great fun for me. And I’ve been fortunate to enjoy a really successful career as an educational piano composer.

Christopher: Absolutely. And I think what first made me keen to get you on the show was, in your Premier Piano Course, the way you tackle theory is particularly interesting. But before I dive into asking you about that, maybe you could just talk about that Premier Piano Course that’s kind of the flagship program with Alfred?

Dennis: Well, the Premier Piano Course has been a very successful venture. When we first started this course, there are five of us involved in putting the course together. Me, along with Martha Mier, who’s another well-known educational composer who writes for Alfred. We are the two people who wrote all the music for the course. And then we had a piano pedagogy team, which consisted of E. L. Lancaster and his wife is Gayle Kowalchyk. And Gayle has been my music editor for many, many years. And Vicky McArthur, who was on the faculty at Florida State University in Tallahassee. 

Dennis: So they were the pedagogy team. Martha and I were the composers. And how the process worked was that they would put together a basic foundation for each level. They would draw up the pedagogical aspects that they wanted to cover. They would send Martha and I basically blank sheets of paper and it would say, “On page four, write a eight measure or 16 measure piece that uses these particular pedagogical elements.” And Martha would write her piece. I would write my piece. She lived in Florida. I lived in New Mexico. Neither one of us had any idea what the other person was writing. But it gave the pedagogy team twice as much material to examine and work with.

Dennis: But the course took about a good 12 years, I think, to put together. We spent three years working on book one before it was ever released, and with many, many, many revisions, being tested with young students. And also, we had a teacher focus group that we worked with that gave us lots of input on what they’d like to see in a new piano method. So it was a real labor of love, for sure.

Christopher: And, if you can think back to that time, what were the main things you were hearing about what would set this new course apart? What were you hearing from the teachers that they were dissatisfied with in the method books?

Dennis: Yeah. One of the things that the teachers really wanted was a new course from Alfred that did not have students playing in positions. The old, the Alfred’s Basic Piano Library was a very position-oriented course. The music was entertaining. It was excellent. But the teachers wanted something very different. And so-

Christopher: So sorry. For people who aren’t familiar with the keyboard pedagogy, what do you mean by “position-based” there?

Dennis: Students were taught, for instance, if they started a piece, it might be in a C position, so if the students would put their hands on a keyboard, and they would be in this position. If it was a G position course, they might be in that position. G major triads in both hands. Basically, in a nutshell, that’s kind of what a position-oriented course is.

Dennis: So when we did the Premier Express … or Alfred’s Premier Piano Course for children, we completely got away from any type of position-oriented program, and students were taught that the thumb could go on C or it could go on E or it could go on G, and we never associated any particular finger with a given note. So that was a big change. 

Dennis: We also introduced rhythm in patterns, and that was a rather unique approach in the Premier Course. So we found that when students saw a group of notes, or a group of rhythm patterns, and then they would see the same rhythm patterns in their music that followed that introduction, they tended to read across the page easier. They would see maybe a whole major or two majors at a time, rather than just seeing an individual note and reading that way.

Dennis: So that, I think, has been a very, very wonderful aspect of the course. We also used what we called music links, learning links, in the children’s course, which linked all kinds of things, dealing with history, science, technology, bits of information that would go along in the theory books that made learning theory a little more fun, or a little more universal, so that students were not just learning about music, but they were learning things about architecture, history, art. All of those aspects that bring, I think, all different aspects of music together to complete a whole musician, so to speak.

Christopher: Got you, yeah. And that’s what stood out to me, I think, was the theory, the way the theory books were much richer than one might assume. For my own part, growing up, the piano method books taught you technique and repertoire, so it was basically just pieces and scales. And then separate from that, you had your theory book, which was a very abstract, intellectual explanation of concepts in music theory. Talk a little bit about the theory books in the Premier Course and how they’re a bit different from that?

Dennis: Well, in the theory books, we’ve introduced, for instance, all kinds of, as I mentioned, the learning links. We have all kinds of little games that students can play, that’s all music-related. But instead of just having them draw out their letter names, for instance, the musical alphabet, they could do them in many different ways, incorporate little crossword puzzles, or little musical stories where they learn the musical alphabet through a story. And just lots of different little ways of bringing theory alive without it being so regimented and so black and white, so to speak.

Christopher: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Even to the extent of including, I believe, ear training and composition exercises in there alongside the theory. Is that right?

Dennis: Yeah. We encourage students to improvise a little bit all the way through the course, in both the lesson books and the theory books. We want them to understand that music is exploring. It’s getting out of the box. And it involves much more than just playing the right notes at the right time. But it’s the ability to eventually put your personality into your performance. And I think the more different ways that a child learns theory and that it involves being creative instead of just playing a chord progression like this, they might want to play it with different rhythms, different patterns, and just, again, have more fun with the process.

Christopher: So I’m always amused when I talk to music educators who work with children, because they’re so quick to talk about games and fun and enjoyment and keeping the student engaged, and that’s stuff we so rarely hear about in the adult world, and particularly for the adults in our audience who would be trying to teach themselves from books or going on YouTube. We all tend to take it so seriously. And I know you have adult beginner students yourself, so I was really keen to ask you, how do you work with those adult beginners? Or, how are you able to adapt to these ideas from the Premier Piano Course to the adult learner?

Dennis: Well, I’m so happy that we now have what’s called Premier Express books, which come in four levels, which combine … It’s an all-in-one method that combines some of the best aspects of our performance books, our lesson books, our technique and our theory. And we’ve taken out, in those books, the little pictures that are very appealing to children, not so appealing to adults or teenagers. And although the Premier Express books work very nicely for, say, a very sharp, quick eight year old, they can be worked, or used, very, very easily with teenage beginners, certainly with adult beginners. 

Dennis: And now, at this stage in my life, I’m only working with adult students. I’ve taught children my whole life, and I’ve taught university students, performance majors. I feel lucky that I’ve had such a wide range of teaching experiences. But, because my schedule is a little chaotic at times, I feel like teaching children doesn’t make sense for me like it used to, because I travel quite a bit, and my adult students are a little more aware of the flexibility that I need as well as they need. So, working with adults is a very happy project for me in this stage of my life. 

Dennis: Adult students are very, very different from young students. Adults tend to be very hard on themselves. They’re very self-critical. They sometimes, they want to sound like Liberace after five lessons. So they’re a bit impatient. Children tend to just dive into it and they’ll do whatever you want them to do, and adults are more inquisitive, which I love. They want to know why we do certain things, and why they call it the one chord, why they call it the four chord. 

Dennis: And one of the nicest things about the Premier Express books is that they come with what’s called T&T 2 software, which they can download on their laptop, or desktop. It’s easiest on the laptop, because then what they can do with this T&T 2 software is use four different versions of sound files that go along with the music that they’re learning in their course. So they can play their pieces with a general MIDI orchestrated accompaniment, or they can play along with just an acoustical piano version. 

Dennis: But there’s four options for them to use when they’re going through the course, and it makes the whole practice routine much more fun. They’re going to be much more apt to play it with the right rhythm. They’ll hear a good role model for what the piece should sound like on acoustical piano. They’ll have the opportunity of playing with the band, so to speak.

Dennis: So it gives our students all of these options to work with when they’re at home practicing. And of course, we all know that it’s at home where all the habits start, and if the student has this option of listening to the pieces that they’re working on, it just makes the whole process so much more fun.

Dennis: Can I show you just one little example from the very beginning of the series?

Christopher: Please do, yeah.

Dennis: Where they’re learning to play on just the black keys? Can you see Hey Rock ‘n’ Roll Man?

Christopher: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dennis: Okay. In the course, the students will have the option of bringing up these accompaniments. Through the T&T 2 software, they can choose whichever these they might want to work on. But first this little piece starts students off on just the black keys. One of the nicest things about starting off on the black keys is that there is a lot of wonderful tunes that can be played on just those five notes. We have those five notes. And if they were to play this little piece, Hey Rock ‘n’ Roll Man, with the accompaniment, it’s going to sound like this. They’ll hear a little two bar introduction of rhythm pulse, and then they’ll begin to play. I’ll put it all together, it’ll sound like this. As simple as that.

Dennis: But what I like to do in my lessons is I like to have them, right off the bat, get used to improvising their own little melodies along with the background accompaniment. So I might, for instance, do something like this. See if they can go something like … Pretty simple. Very, very basic pattern. But it’s fun and it’s all on the black keys.

Christopher: Fantastic. And for those in our audience who wouldn’t be familiar with the theory, can you explain why the black keys are a good starting point?

Dennis: Well, for one thing, when you rest your hand with fingers two, three and four, on the three black keys, and you have your thumb and your fifth finger on the white keys, it forms a very natural and beautiful hand position. We have a nice little arch in the hand, and this is exactly what we want to see when students are playing the piano. But mostly, there are so many tunes that students know, folk tunes or Negro spirituals. In fact, almost all Negro spirituals are pentatonic melodies that can be played on the black keys.

Dennis: So for instance … Okay? Things like … So it’s very easy for beginning level students to get acclimated to melodies if they can play those just on the black keys, okay? Then we move from there very, very quickly into reading on the staff. But we have anchor notes, so we teach first reading skills through anchor notes. For instance, D is right between the two black keys, so that’s easy to find on the keyboard. And G and A are other anchor notes that are right between the three black keys.

Dennis: So just by starting on the black keys, it helps to form a really strong, I think, reading foundation. But mostly, becoming aware of melody and improvising.

Christopher: That’s wonderful. And I think that gives us a glimpse of how improv can be part of their learning from such an early stage. How do you think about improvisation? I ask because we’ve had various people on the show who improvise, or who specialize in teaching improv, and there’s such a variety of ways people approach it. How do you approach it in your teaching?

Dennis: In my teaching or in my composing?

Christopher: I’d be curious about both.

Dennis: Well, in my teaching, what we just demonstrated was one way. Another way is, if I have a student playing a simple piece. Let’s say it was a piece that had a simple melody, a very simple left hand. For instance, let me just play something short just as an example. Let’s say they had this simple little piece they have just with the left hand, simple melody in the right hand. I might have them look at that score and see if they can make up their own melody based on that foundation of what they see.

Dennis: For instance, this could be, instead of … sort of stuff like that, I might ask them to see if they could use different rhythms and keep that same general outline. But I just take what they see. I think it’s easier for students to learn how to improvise if they see something printed on the page, and then use that as a vehicle for adding more to it. Some adult students, especially, are very inhibited when it comes to something by ear, or something that they’ve never seen on the page. But if they’re comfortable with a piece that they’ve learned, then expanding on that piece and showing them how they can use the same basic melody but add new rhythms to it, or putting in passing tones, neighbor tones, whatever, so that they create their own piece from that example, I think is a good way to start that improvisation process, especially with adult students.

Dennis: So I like to have them improvising on black keys. I like to have them improvising in a five finger position. Sometimes that might just be taking three notes and using those three notes so that they’re not feeling like it’s too complicated as far as the range of the melody goes. It all kind of depends on the adult and the student. You can tell almost immediately what kind of adults are going to be more apt to branch out faster with improvisation, or ones who need to have a very, very conservative start in improvisation.

Christopher: I see. And is that about their abilities or their mindset, would you say, that difference?

Dennis: It’s both. It’s their ability. It’s their personality. It’s their mindset. Yeah. Every student is different, and I’ve had adult beginners who are just so quick to pick up, and eager to improvise, and then I’ve had adult students who I have to just work really hard to get them to play, or to feel confident enough, to play even five finger melodies that are not written out for them.

Dennis: They’re all so different, which is what, I think, makes teaching fun.

Christopher: Great. And you mentioned there that improvising is very closely tied to composing for you as well, and then we talked about how it was, maybe, one of the reasons composing didn’t seem as intimidating as it might seem to other people. Could you talk a bit about how those two relate and how you use improvising when it comes to composing something new?

Dennis: Well, when I start to compose something, first of all, I sometimes like to start off with a rhythmical idea. It kind of depends on the style that I’m going to write in. If it’s a fast piece, I like to have some kind of a rhythmical idea first, although there are times when I find that having a good melody line first works better. So it works both ways.

Dennis: For instance, if I were going to write something that I knew was going to teach students how to play first inversion chords with a little more success, and they were playing … Those are your first inversion chords that they might be doing in the right hand. So I might improvise for a minute and just play around for a few minutes until I hear something that makes sense to me, that I think a student might like. 

Dennis: For instance, one of my biggest hits for intermediate level students is a piece called Toccata Brilliante, which uses those … in fact, those exact chords. But it goes down the hill. So it’s very catchy. It has just broken octaves in the left hand, but the right hand is all over the keyboard, but it keeps their hand in that same position, so it feels good in the hand. It’s very, as we call it, pianistic. And, as a composer of educational materials, that’s primary consideration. It’s got to feel good in the hand. And I like to write pieces that sound harder than they really are. Teachers love that and students love that, too.

Dennis: But, for instance, that’s just one example. If I’m going to compose something that’s very lyrical, of course, then melody comes first. You’ve got to have a good melody if the piece is going to work. I recently came out with two new books of nocturnes for piano. That Romantic style is probably my favorite style to write in. So I wanted to write pieces that would help prepare students for the beautiful nocturnes by Chopin, and these two new books that just recently came out have been very, very successful, and it seems that teachers are loving them a lot.

Dennis: But, of course, those are all very melodic pieces. So in that sort of situation, I would improvise a short melody that makes sense to me, and then I’m hearing the harmonies in my head, really, underneath those melodies. And then, I’ll sketch it out. I’ll get something started. And once I get a start, then it takes off.

Christopher: Terrific. And you mentioned there you were composing these two books of nocturnes, and actually, there’s some wonderful videos on the Alfred Music site of you demonstrating these and talking through them a little bit.

Dennis: Oh, you’ve seen those?

Christopher: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Christopher: I’m sure some in our audience would be curious to know, how does one sit down and say, “I’m going to compose a bunch of nocturnes”? And you have this wonderful book called Keys to Stylistic Mastery, which actually kind of approaches the topic of, what does it mean to write or to play something from the Baroque era versus the Classical? Could you talk a little bit about that book and how it works?

Dennis: Sure. The Keys to Stylistic Mastery, that’s an older book. There are three, actually. Three volumes of those books. I have to give my friend, Ingrid Clarfield, primary credit for those books. They were really her idea. Ingrid is a fabulous teacher, and she has had award-winning students at all levels for many, many years. She teaches at Westminster Choir College, and is a very well-known, a nationally-renowned teacher, and often gives presentations at our national conferences and state conferences. But she wanted to have a series of books that would demonstrate to students all of the various stylistic elements that go into a piece of music.

Dennis: So what we did in the Keys to Stylistic Mastery, we put together a repertoire of original, that I wrote, as well as a standard teaching repertoire, that emphasized the various styles of each period. So we have pieces in Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Impressionistic and Contemporary styles. And, as I mentioned, there are three books available, and the very first book is basically kind of late elementary to early intermediate. The second book is intermediate repertoire. And the third book is late intermediate repertoire. 

Dennis: But the nicest thing about the books is that we have all of these stylistic elements that go into each style period, and we show them at the beginning of each section, in each stylistic section, how they’re different. For instance, in the Baroque period, we have aspects of technique, dynamics, texture, pedaling, rhythm, harmony, ornamentation, that’s unique to that style period.

Dennis: And then we get into the Romantic style, and we show in the book how those same elements are quite different. So that’s basically the gist of those collections. They’ve been very well-received by teachers. In fact, a lot of pedagogy programs throughout the country are using those books as part of the required reading for their college students, so that when they go out to teach, they’ll have a better understand of style in each period.

Christopher: That’s fantastic. Yeah. And, I mean, obviously these books are piano-specific, but it’s one of those things where once you see it, you wonder why all books of repertoire don’t do this kind of thing, because it’s so valuable, I think, to introduce the student to those mental frameworks for understanding, “Oh, okay. These are the things that happen differently with rhythm between these different eras.” Or, “Here’s what sets apart the ornamentation of the Baroque versus the Classical or Romantic.” And I so enjoyed looking through that book in particular, just because it is so clear for the reader how they could be thinking about these pieces, both to listen and to perform.

Dennis: Absolutely. Absolutely. I do have examples from the books, if you’d like to share those with your audience?

Christopher: Fantastic. Yeah.

Dennis: That’s book one, Keys to Stylistic Mastery. Because I have my … label on the front because I take it to work. I have to make sure I get home with it. But that’s what the cover looks like, and you can see the different style periods there on the cover. And then, inside, you’ll see printed here, the Baroque period, and this is the left side of the page, where we show elements of melody, rhythm, harmony. And then, on the right side there, we have other elements of style. Tempo, texture, of course, we talk about counterpoint and how that’s frequently used, with each voice being equally important. Technique, dynamics, expression, ornamentation, and peddling. 

Dennis: So those are the basic elements that we show within each style period. And, as the books progress in difficulty, by level three, they’re going to be more detailed information underneath each of those basic categories. This is a little example of a piece in the Impressionistic period that I wrote, and this is in book one of Keys to Stylistic Mastery, called The Lonely Sparrow.

Dennis: It’s very, very difficult to find easy impressionistic pieces. Debussy and Ravel didn’t ever do this. But for younger students, when they’re needing to learn about style, there’s no reason why they can’t learn some of these elements of Impressionistic music. And, on this little piece, it’s only a one page piece, but it uses the whole tone patterns. It uses lots of long pedaling. Could I play just a little bit of this for you?

Christopher: Please do.

Dennis: That’s a very, very simple piece. You could almost teach this piece by rote, actually, because it has those nice little patterns that repeat in different registers of the piano. So it’s a piece, I think, that very effectively shows, at a late elementary level, the aspects of Impressionistic style. And these are the things that we wanted to share with teachers and students when we wrote these books together.

Christopher: Wonderful. I so admire the clarity of the framework you’re equipping students with there, and this jumped out at me, too, with another book I believe you wrote with Ingrid, which was Keys to Artistic Performance, where again, you lay out this framework for thinking about, as you referred to earlier, how to go from just playing the right notes at the right time to something more musical. Could you just give us a quick idea of how that book works?

Dennis: Okay. Those books came out about five years later. I believe the Keys to Artistic Performance books came out around 2008, whereas the Keys to Stylistic Mastery, I believe, were around 2003. But, as I mentioned a while ago, Ingrid is a fabulous teacher. She has students, very young students, through college-age students, that all play very, very artistically, with beautiful technique, beautiful choreography, beautiful artistry. And she often likes to give workshops to teachers on these elements, how do we get our students to play with more artistic expression? How do we sell a piece to make it totally convincing, no matter what level the piece is?

Dennis: So that’s why she really wanted to do these books with me on the Keys to Artistic Performance. So what we’ve done in these three collections is we’ve stressed elements of color, choreography, rubato, pedaling, and characterization. But all of those elements go together to really create a completely musical and convincing interpretation.

Dennis: So, throughout the book, what we’ve done is, again, I’ve written some original pieces that really demonstrate these elements. And then we have lots of standard classical repertoire that Ingrid always finds the really unusual pieces, too, that nobody’s ever seen before, and includes those. And then, in some of the pieces, there might be words that go along with some of the music that helps to give it characterization to the music itself. And there’ll be elements where we will show students where they might need to lean to the right or lean to the left, or if they need to come off the keys with a dramatic gesture, or if they need to create graceful arcs with their choreography in certain places. There’s all kinds of little elements in each piece, where we simply give instruction to the student on what will make this piece work artistically to the greatest advantage.

Dennis: In a nutshell, that’s basically what the books are all about. But there’s a wonderful repertoire in all three levels, and again, they’re really, really good books, especially, I think, for pedagogy courses, as well as for students at all ages, depending on their levels, to supplement their learning.

Christopher: Excellent, yeah. And I think we’ve kind of hinted at what each of those mean. So choreography we talked about, how it would be your movement at the piano with your whole body or your arms or your gestures.

Dennis: Yes.

Christopher: I suppose rubato, our audience may be familiar with, it’s where you’re playing around with the exact rhythm and the tempo in your own way. And you mentioned characterization there is about taking a word that might be provided, to kind of give the feel for the piece. Pedaling, I suppose, is quite piano-specific and it’s going to be about dampening some of the notes, or it’s about sustaining them. I suppose the mystery, then, is maybe color. Could you explain what the color part of it is, if it comes to artistic mastery?

Dennis: Color is something that is sometimes very difficult for some students to comprehend if they’ve never had a teacher who talked about color in playing. This could be a very, very new thing for a lot of students. But to me, color, playing with color, involves articulation. Kind of a combination of articulation, of pedaling and sound. For instance, I sometimes … I could give an example of what I would consider good color connotation.

Dennis: If I had a student playing a … let’s say a Bach Invention. This is a very popular Bach Invention. If they were playing it like that, which is kind of very smooth, very legato, it doesn’t really have the character that this particular Invention should have. It doesn’t have the color that it needs. So I would tell a student, “What you played sounds kind of brown-ish to me, or green or brown. And what I’d like to hear is a bright orange color in the sound.” 

Dennis: So in order to create a bright orange effect, they would need to use … It instantly changes the character of that piece and gives it the kind of sound that it really needs to have to convey to the audience really what the color and the style and the character should be.

Dennis: In fact, I have written three collections of music for students called A Splash of Color, and three different levels, and all of the pieces have color connotations in them, the titles. For example, Turquoise, Forest Green, Blue Boogie. And all of those titles help, I think, students to understand more what color is all about in music. But it’s a complicated thing, but it simply involves combining touches with pedaling and certain chords, combinations of sounds, all create what we call beautiful color in piano performance.

Christopher: Fantastic. What a great explanation, thank you. Dennis, you’ve written such an extensive range of books over the years, but that’s actually not even all you have to offer. At your website dennisalexander.com, there’s plenty more for people to find. Could you tell us a bit about that?

Dennis: I’m sorry. Are you asking me to share the website?

Christopher: Sorry, yeah. Maybe you could our audience a little bit about what they can find on your website?

Dennis: Okay, yeah. I started this website, actually, many, many years ago, and if I could bring it up here.

Dennis: what I’ve done here, I have lots of different links on the homepage, but you’ll see third key widget down from the top, where it says “compositions”. So if students or teachers were to go to that particular link and click on it, it would bring up a whole list there of compositions in all different levels and categories. I have duet sheets, solo sheets, solo collections, duet collections, at every single level. And then, toward the bottom there, you’ll even see a link there for Christmas music, various ensemble works. 

Dennis: And then, if they were to click on, for instance, let’s just click on intermediate solo collections, that would take us to these various collections. In fact, there you see Keys to Artistic Performance, books one and two. And we keep going on down. Here’s the new nocturne book, book two. Unfortunately, on the iPad, we can’t play the recordings that I have. You’ll see the music, but the iPad doesn’t allow certain Flash players. But if you go to my website on a desktop or a laptop, you’ll always see the little play button’s right next to each PDF, where the students can open up and see, actually, the score. Here’s Nocturne No. 13. And then they could play that recording, and hear the entire nocturne.

Dennis: So I have free recordings for every single collection. There is also, there are videos, where if teachers or students want to see videos of me playing the piano, or giving instruction from our Premier Piano Course, that’s available. Reviews of the music. There’s a photo album. My schedule of events is on the website. So it’s a very extensive website. And some of your audience might enjoy going to that sometime.

Christopher: Absolutely. Well, for any piano players, or aspiring piano players, or indeed teachers, in the audience, I’d definitely highly recommend checking out all that Dennis has to offer. It’s been so fascinating, Dennis, thank you, to talk to you today and learn a little bit about the man behind this amazing range of piano books. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing so much with our audience.

Dennis: It’s been my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

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The post From The Notes On the Page To Artistry And Mastery, with Dennis Alexander (Premier Piano Course) appeared first on Musical U.

Every day inside Musical U we see the power of peer-to-peer learning, and how much we can all gain from being among the right community of music-learners. And so we’re going to be inviting the Musicality Now audience as well as our members at Musical U to come on and share their own music-learning journeys, and the resources, insights, and breakthroughs that have helped them along the way so far.

If you’ve had a musicality breakthrough – small or large – please get in touch by sending an email to hello@musicalitynow.com – we want to hear your story!

Today we’re joined by Nick Cheetham, a podcast listener who reached out to us after our recent “Intimidating – or Inspiring? You Choose” episode to share some of his thoughts on the topic, and he had such interesting things to say we decided to invite him on the show to share his journey so far.

In this conversation you’re going to hear about:

• What caused Nick to pick up the violin for the first time at age 40 despite worrying he might be “tone deaf”
• How Nick’s been able to achieve several significant goals over the last 18 months and how that relates to the choice of “intimidating vs. inspiring”
• And how after 10 years of learning Nick made some adjustments and was quickly able to get off the page and into playing by ear, improvising, and playing in groups.

We hope you’ll enjoy this new kind of episode – let us know what you think, and maybe we can share your story next!

Watch the episode:

Subscribe For Future Episodes!

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Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

Links and Resources

• • Musicality Now – Intimidating – or Inspiring? You Choose
  • Musicality Now – Explaining the Musical Ear, with Aimee Nolte
  • Musicality Now – How to Improvise For Real, with David Reed
  • Musicality Now – How to Stop Doubting and Start Performing, with Brent Vaartstra
  • Coursera – Fundamentals of Music Theory from The University of Ediinburgh
  • Carol Dweck – Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
  • Improvise For Real
  • Creative Strings Academy
  • The Mind Over Finger Podcast
  • The Jazz Violin Podcast
  • River Of Suck
  • Learn Jazz Standards

Transcript

Nick: I’m Nick Cheetham. I’m a violinist recently interested in gypsy jazz. And this the Musicality Now podcast.

Christopher: Welcome to the show Nick. Thank you for joining us today.

Nick: Welcome. Thank you for having me on.

Christopher: I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation that you got in touch by email, and there’s several really fascinating topics I want to talk about with you. But I wonder if we could set the scene a little for our listeners who don’t know anything about you or your backstory. Tell us a little bit about how you got started in music.

Nick: Late, I think is the short answer. I started playing the violin at age 40. That was 20 years ago so you can do the maths yourself. Prior to that I don’t come from a particularly musical family. I have had one term of learning classical guitar at age 12 then nothing at all after that. And the start for it was actually my son, my youngest who was age six, came home from school saying, “Dad, there doing music lessons at school can I try, can I start?”

Nick: I expected it to be the recorder but it was violin. So I took him down to the music shop to rent this tiny quarter sized violin for him and the music shop said it was ten pounds per term, so I just pointed to another big one on the shelves and said, “How much for that one?” “Ten pounds a term.” “Okay, I’ll hire one and practice with you just to keep you honest.” He stopped doing it after two years and I carried it on.

Christopher: Terrific. And were you nervous at all to start something new, if this was the first time you’d tried playing an instrument.

Nick: I was intrigued. Particularly on an instrument such as a violin where there are no frets. One of the thoughts I had, “Am I tone deaf? Can I hear the tones, can I get the right tuning?” And actually after a couple of goes on the thing I realized, Yes, I can actually hear and I can move the fingers to the correct position to get something moderately pleasing, it took a while before it became really pleasing but with the violin it’s that scratchy… it’s awful scratchy stage when you’re learning the violin at first. So nervous no, intrigued, yes.

Nick: The nerves came probably later when you first say, “Right okay, let’s fire the teachers.” And then you obviously want to… you’ve got the nerves of working with anybody new, but after that, no, I played purely for my own pleasure rather than in of front of other people and so, it’s probably about 15 years before I realized that I played for my own pleasure and just with a teacher, there was a whole world out there I wasn’t exploring. That I was perhaps letting myself off things in terms of timing, in terms of intonation, whereas when you play with other people, you can’t get away with those things, you have to play with them, in tune, in time. So that was the nervous stage, to actually go outside of the practice room and go out and play with other people.

Christopher: Well, I want to come back to that in just a minute, but before we do, where you a music fan all your life? Where you someone who was… because you mentioned worrying you were tone deaf, did you think of yourself as someone who had a connection with music even though you didn’t play an instrument, or not even that?

Nick: I always listened to music and I always enjoyed music, I’d been to see live music and some of the band, I was of sufficient vintage that I could tell the kids, “I saw all the good bands.” I went to see the Boom Town Rats, I grew up at university in the early punk era, Blondie, Boom Town Rats, Clash, all of these iconic names. I’ve always listened to music throughout. But not necessarily classical. I’ve enjoyed classical, but it’s been more of the popular and the enduring music, like Dylan, stuff like this.

Christopher: And you mentioned classical there. Were your lessons on violin when you started with the teacher, was that classical?

Nick: Primarily. In England, I know your listenership is largely US, but in England, the teaching, particularly for new people tends to be very much around the grade system. There’s various examples, you take Grade 1 which is the starter one, through to Grade 8. Grades 1 to 5 there’s the theory and a practical paper. So initially, yes it was taking the grade piece and saying, “Okay we’re going to do these two scales because that supports this grade and then we are going to do things in these positions because that supports this grade.”

Nick: But, I was very lucky in finding the music teacher I had. Linda Simcot, she played in a ceilidh band and one of the things she was… and she almost regarded me as, I think, an anti-dote against the children playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star badly. Because she said, “You don’t need to go through the exams, I can take you through the steps, but don’t do the exams, we’ll do the repertoire and we’ll mix in some traditional English music which we play at ceilidh.

Christopher: You might have to explain for our audience what a ceilidh is.

Nick: Oh, sorry, a ceilidh? It’s a dance where you come together and it’s… you play traditional jigs, reels, strathspeys and again that other equivalent in America of possibly a hoe-down. That type of thing where everyone comes together. There’s usually drink involved and lot of sweat.

Christopher: For the musicians and the dancers alike. And so, how did you find that learning experience, it sounds like your teacher had the sense and the creativity to give you a bit more than the classical strict grade system. But where you finding it came easy to you? Was it something you felt like you were putting in hard work because it would pay off? You learned for ten or 15 years with that teacher I believe, what was that like for you?

Nick: Well in fact, I learned with her for about ten years and it was hard at first and I found I had to work at it and again, it’s interesting… it was very much more, and we’ll come to this later, like playing as an engineer. Saying, “Here’s a sheet of music and here’s a dot like assembling a piece of furniture, play that note, play the next note, play the next note, that sounds pleasing.” I don’t know why it sounded pleasing, I don’t know what the harmony underneath it was, but I could get these notes out in a sequence, so yes it was hard because, and I think it was made more hard because I didn’t necessarily have the understanding at the time of how harmony, et cetera, fitted together.

Nick: I worked with that teacher for about ten years and then I got… I picked up repetitive strain injury through over-use of the keyboard and mouse and I had to take about three years out whilst that sorted itself out. And at that point, I switched teacher because she had retired at that point.

Nick: So again, that was interesting going to a different teacher, different perspective on things. But coming back to it, it really brought home to me how much I’d enjoyed it and how much I missed it and at the time I was doing a very stressful job, quite a bit of traveling and I found this was the best anti-dote to stress. It was almost a form of meditation to get totally lost in something which requires your full attention. If your attention wanders, then you don’t play correctly.

Christopher: Absolutely. And you mentioned there something which we hear a lot from our members and our audience of this podcast, which is that experience of playing music, particularly from sheet music and getting officially quite good at it, but feeling frustrated because you don’t really understand the music. You feel like you don’t know why those dots are on the page or why the melody does this. Or why the composer made these choices. There’s definitely a sense of, “I’m playing what I’m told to, but I don’t really get it.” Could you talk a bit about how you experienced that and what changed over time?

Nick: How I experienced that is exactly as you say. There was a sheet of music which had certain things in a certain time, I used to find the most useful piece of information on a piece of classical music, to me certainly, was when it said, “Rubato.” And for those who are not classical, it means you don’t need to bother about the timing, you do it and feel and go faster and slower as you see fit, which is great because that let me off the hook on so many things.

Nick: But perversely, equally, while that actually does require you to play with feel, it doesn’t mean to say, “When you get to a tricky bit you slow down.” It’s like a ballad, a love song, when you can see the singer just about to break into tears after you’ve slowed down and then you accelerate to and introduces a bit more drama. So I found it difficult moving from, understanding the piece other than Rubato, and I looked in awe at guitar players who would just look at a chord sheet and just say look here, just play G7, G7, D minor, whatever the chord structure is.

Nick: And how they did that. There’s no melody there. How do you play that, what is it that tells you to play that? Interestingly enough talking to some guitar players they said, “I can’t do without the chord charts, I just have to play the things in sequence and so practice that.” To a certain extent they were at the same place as me. What intrigued me was those people who could hear the changes and hear what was going on and play something over the top of it. And I think that’s what interested me about five years ago to say, “Yeah, okay, I’d like to do that as well.”

Nick: Because I see violinists, I mean just for instance, Jackson Brown has a really good violinist doing back-up for him. Rod Stewart had a lot of violin background. Dylan had some really good violin backing and I could see that it was different on different recordings. How did they play that and make it work with the underlying harmony? That was the real bit that got my interest.

Christopher: And was there a particular moment, or a particular insight that made things start to shift once you had that interest and you had that curiosity to know if a different way was possible?

Nick: Yeah, I think it was two things happened together. As I was approaching retirement, I had a little more time to do these things and we moved to Edinburgh. We lived in the city of Edinburgh for two years, which involved me looking at another new teacher in the new city. And I set some of my criteria, rather than people who could teach adults were very competent, nice people, but somebody who could do some improvisation work and help me with this question about, “So how do you play over something rather than just doing this straight grain pieces or classical repertoire.”

Nick: And I was very fortunate to find a lady, she was the daughter of one of the main jazz educators in Scotland. A guy called Richard Michaels. So she was able to recognize exactly what I’d want because she’d grown up with it in her house and she could do exactly what I wanted to do and I could see her doing it, so that was great to hook up with her. 

Christopher: And what was different about how she taught you in terms of what the lessons looked like or what you focused on?

Nick: Well, it’s interesting because there was not purely improvisation, we still did classical repertoire and used that as a vehicle for getting technique and keeping the technique sharp. But there was more of a, “I’m going to play something, you respond. Here’s something like Rock Around The Clock, very clear, easy to hear changes of chord.” Even I at that stage could hear the changes in Rock Around The Clock, I think there’s a basic blues structure isn’t it? Yeah.

Nick: And saying, “Okay, when this changes, what’s it’s changing from and two? I’m going to play a note on the piano, is that higher or lower and then until we actually got the basis of the tone structure within the song.” And then she’d have me doing things basically such as, “Okay, don’t play any chords, just play the note you recognized.” It’s going to be a G and play an A and play another G and then an A and then go an F or whatever it was. And then expanding on to something which I had never understood the reason for, is arpeggios.

Nick: So, okay you have an arpeggio around a G, so I would have thought okay, it’s skip a note, skip a note, skip a note, one. Said, “Okay, if you play that, that’s your chord and here’s how your basic chord structure works, it’s a stacking of the notes of it within a chord.” So, by doing that she was able to immediately cement for me all the stuff that I’d been learning with the scale and the arpeggios and saying, “This is why they’re used. And that’s what they’re used for.” And that was real eye-opener for me.

Christopher: Absolutely, it’s funny, I laughed a bit when you said that because I remember exactly the same perspective. I grew up playing a lot of scales and arpeggios were just a modification of the scale, like it was another exercise you did and it was years and years before anyone pointed out that, “Oh, you’re playing the notes of that chord.” And obviously like on violin that’s your connection to playing the harmony or relating to the harmony. That’s wonderful.

Christopher: We talk at Musical U often about this trifecta of music learning where the instrument technique is one thing, but then there’s also the music theory and the ear skills and we feel you have kind of need to cover all three of those to some extent to feel like you know what’s going on in music and you’re capable of doing things in music. It sounds like she was introducing some of the ear skills there where you… had you already studied music theory, was that something she was covering, have you continued just focusing on technique and ear skills, how do you see those three things?

Nick: Yeah. I recognize the triangle and for me, the vertex of the triangle, that I was missing was very much the theory, well I was missing the theory, and the ear training, so let’s do the ear training first. She was introducing this ear training, she was also said, “You need to get a keyboard.” So I just got a cheap Casio keyboard, and practiced to say playing minor second, playing a major chord and a minor chord, getting used to the sound of it, playing a seventh chord or a major chord, get used to the sound of it, and introducing me to some apps on the iPhone, there are any number of them out there, which will do you a little quiz, saying “What is this a major third, fifth, is it flat five?” 

Nick: So that was something that I continued to do and continued to struggle with to get it absolutely nailed. The other thing that she did and in fact I also did by joining a… in Scotland, I was in Edinburgh, of course, which is home of the Scottish fiddle, there’s a fiddle tradition, there was a Scottish music group which met on a Thursday evening and the teaching method was that you sat in a room with 20 or so other people and they said, “We’re going to do a bonny tune tonight.” And the teacher would play two bars and you had to play it back by ear, no music, play it back by ear. Slow. Then we do the next two bars, play those two back, then he say, “Okay we’re going to put those four together now, play them as a group back.”

Nick: Of course by the time you’ve got to here, you’ve forgotten what the first two were, so we went back around again. But that hugely difficult, but I found that just by doing that, trying to learn things purely by ear, it really did sharpen up the ability to do so. I’m by no means there yet, but I can actually now, start to niggle around with a violin and pick out a tonal center and to pick up basic patterns and basic music.

Nick: So that was one apex of the triangle. So we’ve covered the theory, practice and the technical ability. Okay, so the theory one is only one which is missing, because like you, I was doing scales and arpeggios purely just as an exercise, just to warm my fingers up and to understand the tonal environment. But none of the stuff around harmony, cadences, all of this stuff. I did buy the theory book but I found it just so intense that I very quickly put it to one side. 

Nick: The one thing that helped me greatly is there’s a resource called Coursera which is available in the US and it’s where universities and centers of learning put out free, often free, video material and there’s an excellent one put up by Edinburgh University which is understanding music theory I think is the name, I’ll give you the correct title afterwards, but it’s a… it takes you from the very basics. Absolutely basic level, through to understanding cadences and it’s free and it’s about a ten week course. And I did that, in fact I did it twice to be able to drive some of this home. It’s still a weakness and it’s something I need to really work on. I’ve joined in the Foundations of a Musical Mind Course through yourselves and I’m finding that’s a great way to fill in some of the gaps.

Christopher: Terrific. Well Yeah. It’s worrying when a Civil Engineer by trade struggles to get through a music theory text book. That kind of suggests something is a bit wrong with how theory is taught.

Nick: Yeah.

Christopher: Because yeah. I think you kind of touched on the solution there too, which is that your teacher was showing you why the theory mattered, and why something abstract like an arpeggio actually was highly practical. And it sounds like you’ve been finding good ways to meld all of those together.

Christopher: You mentioned something about practicing for yourself and your own enjoyment kind of in a bubble for a long time and then you stepped out into playing in a group and having to tighten up timing and intonation, was that when you went along to those local jam sessions and were learning by ear or was it something else?

Nick: I did it twice, once was about eight years ago when I joined… with the encouragement Linda at the time, I joined in the Macclesfield Light Orchestra which is very welcoming. They would take students of all abilities and I sat in the second violins and it was a blur, I just couldn’t follow it, it was just going too fast and I couldn’t sight read quickly enough. The conductor was really helpful, he kept calling out, bar 37, bar 50 across because he could see me having just lost the plot. Anyway I did a bit for two or three weeks and just stopped I was just overwhelmed. Playing outside the bubble, the first time I did it was through another musical group which we’re very fortunate to have in Macclesfield, is a group called the Macclesfield Music Center which has a training orchestra as well as a main orchestra and lots of other feed-in groups and it’s for adults and children. And they have Music for Minis, so you get five year olds down there as well. 

Nick: So I joined the training orchestra on a Saturday morning and again there was a bowed instrumental sectional, which they ran through the pieces for the violins, the cellos, the violas, and then you came together for half an hour to play some nice music, very straightforward music, just pitched at the right level.

Christopher: And that stretched you in a different way then, in terms of, I suppose listening and collaborating with other musicians rather than just reading the notes on the page?

Nick: Absolutely, and it made me realize quite how much, when you get a fast run, of a Vivaldi piece or something like that, how much I’d be letting myself on the timing. I slowed myself down, I thought it was sounding fine when they’re off, and you’ve got to catch up again. But again, that’s where you listen, and you think, “Yeah, okay, I recognize that bit of melody, I’ll join in on two bars ahead and catch up.”

Christopher: And that step into joining an orchestra or going along to a local jam session, is one that a lot in our audience would feel intimidated by, and it was actually our recent episode on intimidation versus inspiration, that caused you to get in touch by email. What was it about that episode that resonated with you?

Nick: The main thing I picked up was… well, it was exactly as your title suggests is that by either joining in with others or singing a virtuoso, or whatever the experience you have, you have a choice to be either intimidated or inspired. Obviously, let’s do jam sessions first. The important thing is to choose something which is risk free. So it’s a friendly environment and as I say, you go to a local folk group in your pub or bar rather than going to an open microphone where you’re standing up on stage solo in front of 200 people who may have paid a small amount, but have paid to see something. The latter is far more risky.

Nick: So, the intimidation certainly is there in both settings, but by sitting down and being a part of that, then you get the inspiration from others to say, “I play okay, some things I did wrong.” I saw a couple of good players and you kind of say, “I want to be like them, I can’t be, I’m rubbish.” Or I say, “Actually, I’ve sat here and played along with them, they didn’t say ‘stop playing’ but I could see they did something really interesting at the end of that piece or that bit I struggled at, I can see how they played and did something nice across the top of that tune.”

Nick: It’s the same with the virtuoso, we all go, like to see good, professional musicians, but again you have a choice to say, “I’m seeing Nicola Benedetti, the famous violinist, and I will never be as good as her, I’m rubbish, or I can pick up two or three things from her which will help me. I’m watching how she does.” In violin, it’s a very technical instrument, how you hold your wrist, or how high your elbow is on certain points you can change the sound greatly. So again, just by watching her, you can say, “Yeah, I can see she does it like this, rather than like this, I’ll try that when I get home.” So inspiration.

Christopher: That relates, I think a little bit to something we don’t talk a lot about, but think a lot about here at Musical U in terms of how we can help people like yourself and our members and our audience which is, there’s a book by Carol Dweck, called Mindset, which puts forward the hypothesis that people basically are growth mindset or fixed mindset, the former meaning, I could learn anything if I set my mind to it, and the latter meaning, I have certain abilities, I’m restricted to those and the most I could hope to do is optimize within that. And it sounds like you’re more in the former camp. Would you say that’s true, is that an attitude you’ve taken to life in general that whatever you wanted to learn you could if you put in the effort.

Nick: Yeah, I would agree with that. Obviously there are the certain physical limitations that one may have, I mean for instance if you’re born, unfortunate to have one arm, you’re not going to become a violin virtuoso. And equally well, there are certain things which are time limiting as well. There’s a certain… “I can try as hard as I like, but I can’t put in the seven, eight hours that other people may do get to a certain pitch because I’ve got the financial limitations that means you’ve got to do other things, than play music.”

Christopher: Well, yeah. Let’s talk a little bit more about practice in due course. But you mentioned something in the context of that episode relating to goal setting. What was it in that idea of intimidating versus inspiring, that related to goals for you?

Nick: Well, I think it’s, depending on… we’ve already mentioned the thing about a goal, if you don’t… what I find is if I haven’t got some idea of what I want to do, or become, then you can go into a situation such as watching a violin virtuoso in a concert, and because you haven’t got a point of reference, your goal immediately goes, “I want to be like them.” And do everything that they are going to do. Rather than saying, previously, having said yeah, “I within a year’s time, I want to be able to master six out of the twelve scales around me in the musical world.” And I want to be able to play this piece by Debussy or whatever it is.

Nick: If you have that frame of reference you can then go to a concert by a virtuoso and see immediately how it relates to the goals that you are setting. So, okay, I can see that they played that piece by Debussy and this is how they did the fingering on that tricky passage. If you don’t have those things set in advance, then you do get into this awful mindset of, “I don’t have any goals set, but the goal I have set for myself which is to be as good as them, I’m never going to achieve.”

Nick: So, if you like, to have a bit of a foundation. I mean we talked earlier Chris on the pre-interview about some of the things that I’ve set for myself over the 12, 18 months and they’ve sort of aligned to that in the I moved from classical into playing more free. I wanted to become more free, get away from the page, be able to learn things by ear and to play without sheet music and play with others. All very loose, wooly goals, but I sort of pinned those down into, “Within the next 18 months, and this was 18 months ago, to play three tunes by ear without music, to play three tunes with others without music and to attend at least one jam session and play something without having to listen to it, listen to the music on the spot and to be able to play along, not at a virtuoso level, but just play along and make something which means that people don’t say, ‘stop playing.’”

Nick: Attend live music… an event once a month. In Macclesfield we have lots of just small pub and club venues where people can come along and watch and see just a girl and a guitar. So those are the things which I set previously and having them, and then it gives me a really good safety net to say, “I’ve seen something there which is outside of my comfort zone, how does it relate to the goals I’ve set and can I pick anything from that to bolster or meet these goals that I’ve given to myself.”

Christopher: Fantastic. And how did you go about relating those goals to your practicing. I know you made a comment about how virtuosos sometimes talk about practicing umpteen hours a day and playing things in all twelve keys. Did you find it tricky to think, “Okay, if I want to play three songs by ear, a year from now, what does that look like now when I sit down with my fiddle?”

Nick: Yeah. And this is something I’m still struggling with and I’d be very interested on seeing on a future podcast, this perhaps as a discussion point. If I could take that point, if you want to learn three fiddle tunes, do you just do just three fiddle tunes, you don’t do anything else until you’ve actually got those nailed and in your head and you can play them fluently, or is it more productive to say, “Okay, I’m going to split my practice into, probably the three elements, technique, intonation, a bit of theory and also a bit of the repertoire, to be able to get these nailed?” And I’m finding that just doing purely one of them by themselves doesn’t really work. You’ve got to… you could maybe be able to play the tune by ear, but it sounds awful because you’ve neglected some of your intonation aspects.

Nick: Or if somebody else is, “Okay, I’m a stinger, I want to move it up a key, would you be able to do that because of your understanding of music theory, for instance.” And that’s really hard on the violin, it’s not quite like putting a capo on a guitar. I wish someone would invent the violin capo. So does that answer your question.

Christopher: It does yeah and I think you’re right that I think that it’s something that we could talk about more on the podcast. I think there’s a few really interesting facets to it and one is the kind of engineering or scientific perspective which talks about things like deliberate practice or interleaved practice and how you structure your practice sessions to make sure your attention and your energy are going to pay of in the biggest possible way.

Christopher: And I think that relates to, to what you were saying about goal setting in the sense that you kind of need to make sure that’s pointed in the right direction as it where, if it’s going to pay off and get you to those goals. But I think equally important is, particularly with adult learners, the motivational aspect and what you were saying there about, “Do you just focus on one thing versus doing lots?”

Christopher: I had a really interesting conversation recently with Robert Emery for the podcast I in which, and he’s a professional concert pianist and a musical director in theater and we were talking about the peculiarities of adults when it comes to learning music and particularly if it’s the first time you’re learning music. And he was saying how we really have this natural tendance a) to over-commit ourselves and be too ambitious and b) to want to know all of the answers right away on day one, and I think whether we’re conscious of it or not, this is often actually the biggest barrier to achieving what we want to in practice.

Christopher: You know with our intellectual minds we get sucked into all of this exciting stuff like deliberate practice, and how do I schedule these three minutes of the 30 minute session and not to disparage that. There’s value in it, but I think it often distracts us from the fact that actually if we go too far down that path, three weeks from now we’re not going to want to look at our instrument, let alone pick it up and the variety you talked about I think is the really valuable piece. Whether or not you’re thinking of interleaved practice and mixing and matching actually helps you learn faster, or you’re just thinking about the fact that you’re going to be bored if you do that six scales practice for 30 minutes every day for the next two weeks. So I think some self-awareness of the value of motivation and keeping your genuine enthusiasm. 

Christopher: In another recent interview a chap called Nick Bottini was really looking at that emotional side of practicing and questioning whether… basically questioning the way we think about our emotions during practice and their importance versus not. And I think I’d like to do a lot more on the podcast on that side of things because as I said, it’s easy to think the solution is perfect optimization of your practice routine, but I think actually that might be a bit of a red herring and we might all succeed faster if we paid a bit more attention to the kind of fluffier side of it.

Nick: Yeah. Interesting, there was to come to the gypsy the gypsy jazz stuff, there was a gypsy jazz camp I went to two weeks ago, there’s a professional musician there, Max Bedwell who was French guy and he was talking about exactly this topic. He is also a lecturer at one of the universities in France and his time is constrained. So he says he has, say the thing is happening next weekend, a gig, he’s got to perform at and so he has to get the repertoire for that. But in the theory and the things he has to practice, he’s very disciplined, he’ll a bunch of arpeggios, arpeggios on fourths, on thirds, and he’ll time it down, half hour down to the two minutes or three minute chunks. But he lets the scales that he practices on, and the chords he practices on, be the things that are in the repertoire that he’s going to have to perform on Saturday. So it’s not… the two are actually linked and so he does a theory thing, but in support of the piece he has to produce.

Christopher: Yeah. I think that’s really key. It’s kind of analogous to what we talked about earlier in terms of relating the theory to the ear training, in the same way, when you can relate those technical exercises to the actual music you’re making, whether that’s through approaching your scales practice by, “How can I make this scale sound like music?” Or, as you say, basing what the details of those technical exercises are on the repertoire you actually care about playing. It’s an enormous thing and again one I think we don’t think enough about because we all… well maybe not all, but a lot of us come from this kind of grade system where you have a syllabus, you should do these things because these are the boxes to tick.

Christopher: And I think once you step outside of that, there are these ideas like, “Well, why don’t you practice the scales from the piece you’re working on?” It’s obviously the right way to go. So you mentioned there a gypsy jazz camp. Talk a little bit about that transition into gypsy jazz and then I definitely want to hear more about that camp, because I know that’s something a lot of our audience would be curious about.

Nick: Okay. About, it must have been six years ago, one of our local arts festivals in a small town called Bollington, there was an event run by a guy called Tim Kliphuis, a Dutch violinist who was there with his trio, and they were running a gypsy and gypsy swing concert in the evening. And they opened the doors up in the afternoon for a workshop. Come along and play and learn some of this stuff, and you will all perform a small improvised piece, just four bars after the interval in the concert in the evening.

Nick: And I went along with an open mind, frankly again feeling very intimidated. I’d never come across this music before and I turned up and there were about 15 people there ranging from 12 year olds all the way through to a couple of guitar players in their 70s.

Nick: So we did it and it was great. I saw this new genre of music and started listening to it more. So that was the Stephan Grapelli and Django Reinhardt type of music obviously with links in America with Joe Venuti and obviously the more modern proponents of that. I mean you’ve got people like the  Turtle Island Quartet, Pearl Django, in the US. So this sort of thirties swing, that sort of style, interested me. It also interested me because it was very much a freer way of playing very fast. But there was soloing there, there was improvisation, so that sparked my interest and about three years ago Tim Kliphuis again came to Edinburgh to do a concert and in the afternoon he also gave a workshop, similar thing. And I now knew the music and this is where it’s interesting that Tim when we were trying to do a bit of improvisation, told me that I play like an engineer in his very direct Dutch way.

Nick: So I thought, “Yeah, okay, maybe I need to do something about this to free things up.” So, cutting to the chase, there is in Europe, in Amsterdam at the end of August a three day camp, which is called Grapelli Django Camp, you can Google it, where musicians come together and learn to play and hone their skills in gypsy jazz. I asked asked Tim, “I’m a bit nervous about this, I’m not sure it’s the right standard.” He reassured me that I would be okay, so with that reassurance I then booked my flights.

Nick: So I went to this last year, as a beginner, I was in the lowest of the five violin groups, there were 40 violins and another 40 assorted instruments, mainly guitars, double-basses, even harp. And it was fantastic. Three days of really open communication between some of the stars of this genre of music where in Europe there working as tutors, leading jam sessions and doing a super concert on Saturday. And also being with people, who from across Europe the US who love this music. 

Nick: There was plenty of time free for people just to get in a corner and sit down and say, “Does anybody know Dinah, one of the standards, let’s play it.” Even if you didn’t know it, they’d encourage you to just sit down and just play something which would suit, which would sound good across the top of the chord structure and what the rhythm section were playing. So it was absolutely fantastic. I repeated again this year. So it was tremendously inspirational and my Facebook friend list now was absolutely full of the people from those two camps.

Christopher: Terrific. And you mentioned inspirational there, obviously you’d taken a few steps into playing out already. You’d gone to jam sessions, you’d been in a training orchestra and I’m sure that reduced the intimidation factor a little bit and you said it was also helpful if you could check the standard before you signed up, but was there anything else about that meant you could see it as inspiring rather than intimidating?

Nick: I think yes. Let’s see. So there were two things. One is inspiring because just having gone the second year, and I’m seeing the people on the periphery of a jam session wondering, “Should I come and join in?” And speaking to them and saying, “Look come on in, it’s not so frightening.” You realize, Yeah, actually I’ve moved on a lot in 12 months because I was that person 12 months ago, just hovering on the circle waiting to be inviting in.

Nick: It doesn’t mean by any means that I’m sounding great now, I’m not saying I’m a virtuoso, I’ve got a huge amount to learn but, with confidence in anything, with confidence then you can play better, certainly on a violin less scratchy and squeaky, and so there was inspiration there, but equally the inspiration came from seeing people who were passionate about their music who were willing to sit down next to someone like me and other beginners in this genre and teach them. And take the time to teach them, and take the time to just pull apart the things that you’re doing. Pick out the good and point out the things which are less good, but always in a positive way.

Nick: And also, to see them enjoying themselves. It’s a genre of music, which the musicians seem to enjoy themselves a lot more than some of the other genres of music where it seems to be almost like an angst thing, you’ve got to get this music out, and you watch some classical orchestras, people don’t seem to be enjoying themselves very much.

Christopher: For sure. Not to hammer home a theme to hard, but there is one more aspect to your musical life that I personally find intimidating, but clearly it’s been inspiring for you, which is that you’ve actually built your own violin. Could you tell us about that?

Nick: It was from the Scots… in Edinburgh the Scot’s music group, the tutor there had taken her violin to repair to a guy called Neil McWilliam at Haymarket in Edinburgh, for anyone who knows it. And she said, “There are people there, he’s running a night class on building your violin, he’s got three people there building your own violin, you can build your violin with Neil.” And this sparked my interest, I thought, yeah, I’ll go along and speak to him.

Nick: And he opened his workshop, he’s a professional luthier, he opened his workshop on two evenings a week to no more than three students and basically took me from a block of wood through to finishing your violin. I had to… it took two years to finish mine. The first 12 months with Neil, then we moved, changed location, we’re back near Manchester now, and I finished it with a guy called John Colburn, again another luthier who opened his workshop so that I could use his tools and his expertise. And it’s finished and it’s here.

Christopher: You have to show it to us.

Nick: So this is my violin which plays very nicely. So maple back sides, spruce front and the usual hardwoods and ebony for the finger board and yes, it’s lovely. It’s modeled… templated off the Stradivarius Messiah. The one which is not played which is in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. And in the world of luthering, I hadn’t realized quite how much science there was behind this.

Nick: They’ve taken CT scans and X-rays of this violin, so all of the elements of the components are known. How thick the wood is here, as opposed here and it does vary all the way around the instrument, but the fascinating thing for me was, by taking a piece of wood, or several pieces of wood, and making something like this, is you still need the skill, not as a engineer, but as a craftsman. Things such as shaping the front, we got it down with calipers to the right thickness, a millimeter and a half in some places, five millimeters in others where the pressure points are, and Neil for instance said, “Give me the piece of wood you’ve got for your back.” And he just twisted it like this, and flexed it and said, “No, no, you need to take a little bit off here.” We’re only talking a little bit, it’s just a few little scrapings again, did this. And he said, “Right, okay, that’s okay now.”

Nick: And he gave it to me, and it’ amazing, it suddenly came alive. It sort of flexed, twisty more. He said, “That’ll sound good now and it was just a variation in the wood and material, which no amount of engineering could say, if it’s one millimeter all the way across, in some areas it may be need to be nought point nine of a millimeter in order to make this thing spring and sound good. So, fascinating.

Christopher: I feel like I could talk to you all day just about this, but I’ll try not to. I do want to ask though, were there any experiences or aspects to that, that fed back into your music playing. Because I think for me, as someone who’s never built an instrument, there’s a question of, “Does it matter that you’re a fiddle player to build that violin?” And does it matter to you as a fiddle player that you have built that instrument. Is there any kind of feedback or interplay between the two?

Nick: Yeah, definitely there is. I think now, there’s much interest as anything else. So now that I know, I used to think that the pieces around here on the edge of the violin, you see these, the little sort of black edges on cellos and violas you have this, I used to just think that was drawn with a sharp marker pen as a decoration. But again, that’s inlay, it’s three layers, it’s three layers of willow on this which are inlaid and the purpose is that if you drop any instrument on it’s bottom, you will crack along the grain. And the purpose of this is to stop the crack spreading. Very functional.

Nick: But things like that, now that I know it, I always look at other people’s violins and instruments now with an appreciative eye to say, “Gosh you’ve got a beautiful instrument here, or I can tell, I would never say this, the person who made this wasn’t quite as careful as putting the purfling right as they could do.” So, there’s an interest aspect to, but equally well, it’s satisfied my interest to see well, what’s the physics, how is sound made by dragging a piece of horse hair across a steel or wound string in order to project it in this way.

Nick: And also understand the physics a little more about how then you can use that to play music in a different way. So, by playing close to the bridge you get louder, that louder noise can be a little bit more scratchy, why is that? So you think, “Okay, yeah, I now understand why that’s happening, therefore I can make a better… I get a better understanding of why my teacher is saying, “Don’t play too close to the bridge, play this distance away.”

Nick: So it’s a little bit like having the theory and the practice. If I understand what scales are for, you will practice them if you know they’re going to support harmony. If you know what your instrument is capable of and how it was built to do that, you can then play it… adjust your playing to take advantage of those aspects.

Christopher: Wonderful. We have this list of skills that contribute to musicality and one of them is knowing your instrument inside and out and it’s one that we don’t talk nearly enough about. But this is really the epitome of that to have actually built it yourself, so that is fantastic to hear about. Nick, I know you know, we’re big believers in kind of peer to peer learning and being in the right community and learning from one another, not just from an expert guru teacher when it comes to music. And I know our audience will have really appreciated hearing your story today, but I know they’d be annoyed if I didn’t take the opportunity to ask you what else have you found out there. You’re a listener to this podcast as are they, what else have you found in the world of music learning that’s really made a difference for you?

Nick: Okay. The online resource… the online world is fantastic, but again, there are a lot of things that are not so good. You can spend a lot of time looking at bad YouTube videos. But the things I particularly found useful are, I came across your site probably a little bit later. Musical U, you’ve got some really good resources there, I enjoyed circle of fifth piece you have, and also the regular podcasts and the summary that you do at the end of those is really, really good.

Nick: One thing I found really inspirational, something called Improvise For Real. Which is a guy based out in Spain and he again for me, really nailed this concept of, rather than having scales, you just have seven notes, some of them half half tones between them, and it’s a continuous spectrum and you can put yourself anywhere on here and bingo, the scales are just how you describe it and the chords. That’s great. He’s got some really good material there and he has a really good book and training materials as well, like you have, to purchase, but there’s a lot of free material on Improvise For Real.

Nick: Christian Howes, Creative Strings, Creative Strings Academy, he’s an interesting chap and he has, he is very much a proponent of freedom in playing, not necessarily jazz, but in other styles and he focuses very much on bowed instruments and electric bowed instruments too. There’s a podcast about mindful practice which I came across, called Mind Over Finger. Mind Over Finger podcast. And again, it’s conversation, often virtuoso performers, but talking very much about how do they get their practice effective and what barriers have they overcome in order to get as good as they’ve got.

Nick: I found that tremendously inspirational, because there are lots of common things and lots of things which I thought, “Well, if they’re struggling with that, or they have struggled, I struggle with it also, maybe it’s not so hard, we just need to… and move forward.” And Gypsy jazz is a guy called Matt Holborn, The Gypsy Jazz Violin Podcast and I think Learn Jazz Standards. I think you’ve been on the Learn Jazz Standards podcast haven’t you?

Christopher: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Nick: That’s where I came across you.

Christopher: I see. Terrific. Yeah Brent’s doing great work over there.

Nick: Yeah and again there’s lot of really useful information from there. Perhaps the more off-beat one is, there’s a podcast called River of Suck, which was introduced by Christian Howes, and the basis is, if you want to… everyone stand at the bank of a river and across the river where you actually want to get to, and then going across there, you’ve got to go  “It’s my way, you suck”.

Nick: Either recognize that you’re swimming, and you’re swimming through it and you’re going to get to the bank and then there’s going to be another river, but it’s quite an interesting podcast too. Those are the main things that I found useful. Obviously as well, each of these guys have video material as well. Oh, Aimee Nolte as well. Aimee Nolte is really good. She’s got some really good material on YouTube.

Christopher: Fantastic, thank you. There’s a lot of interesting things there for people to dive into and we’ll make sure to have links in the show notes, including interviews with David, Brent and Amy on this show, we’ll have all the links on the show notes. Nick, it’s been so fantastic to have the chance to talk with you an thank you. You sent an email and I knew we’d have a fascinating conversation and we certainly did and I know our audience will have appreciated hearing your story. Any parting words for the audience out there?

Nick: No, I think keep enjoying it. That’s the most important thing.

Christopher: Fantastic, thank you so much Nick.

Nick: All right. Thank you.

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