Author: musicalitywrld

Nick’s teaching is deep. Depending on your background it may seem very odd, or it may be exactly what you’ve been desperate to hear someone put clearly into words.

His successful techniques are rooted in long-standing spiritual traditions yet there’s no dogma or belief system required to benefit from these ideas. Nick brings it all home to roost with practical ways to shift your mindset and successfully achieve the musical levels you desire.

For example we talk about:

• Why most musicians never feel fully settled or at home in their musical lives or identity as a musician, and how that relates to performance anxiety and impostor syndrome.
• The “elephant in the room” when it comes to modern performance psychology – and what the alternative is.
• Two unorthodox but effective ways to flip how you approach music practice – and, unlike some of what you may have heard on this show in the past, this is not about “enjoying practice more.”

The lessons in this episode can positively affect not just your musicality and musical potential, but your life and potential in general. That’s why we’re so excited to share this with you. Enjoy!

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Links and Resources

• Nick Bottini Online
• Nick Bottini – Just Play: The Simple Truth Behind Musical Excellence
• Musicality Now – How to Stop Doubting and Start Performing, with Brent Vaartstra
• Musicality Now – More Mindful, More Musical, with Susanne Olbrich

Transcript

Nick: Hi, I’m Nick Bottini, author of Just Play: The Simple Truth Behind Musical Excellence, and this is Musicality Now.

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

Nick: Hi Christopher. It’s great to be here.

Christopher: So, you had a line on your website that really jumped out at me, and I think summarizes what we’re going to be talking about today, which was, “I help people discover their full potential by understanding the mind.” And here on Musicality Now and at Musical U, in general, we are all about helping musicians achieve their full potential. You have some really fascinating insights and a different way of thinking about a lot of the performance and psychology concepts musicians are grappling with, so I’m excited to dive into this with you today. But I do want to start out with a bit about your own story and how you got started in music, and in particular, what did learning music look like for you?

Nick: I came from a family where music was encouraged, and I started playing the violin at the age of nine. Did quite nicely. It became my little party trick for my family and yeah, I really enjoyed playing violin and went through the grade system in the UK. I was lucky to be involved in a really thriving music department where classical music and jazz were part of the scene. Later along the line I also got involved in playing saxophone, which is a slightly weird combination of instruments, but a combination that I ended up playing nevertheless. It was a big part of my school life, I guess, and went on tours with various different groups at school and so it was a big part of my social development at school. Yeah, it was fun.

Christopher: And you mentioned jazz was part of the picture there, was it free, creative, expressive music making? Was it sheet music focused? Were you doing exam grades and learning repertoire? What kind of music learning were you doing?

Nick: The jazz stuff was improvisation of 12-Bar Blues and standards and sort of funky tunes and stuff, so I definitely learnt to improvise and copy the styles of other players as well.

Christopher: And you went on to study music at a fairly high level, in fact after that, focusing on violin?

Nick: Yes, yeah. I studied violin in the UK and in Germany as a violinist at the Franz Liszt Hochschule für Musik, in Weimar and at Leeds University, and in Manchester as well with some of the string teachers there.

Christopher: Gotcha, and I don’t know if you can think back this far and put yourself back in that mindset, but I’m always curious to know, for people who are on that career trajectory, how were you thinking about your own musicality, your own natural ability, your own potential in music? Were you feeling, you know, “Yes, this is for me, I’ve got what it takes, I’m going to take on the world,” were you, tell me. I won’t put words in your mouth.

Nick: It’s a really fascinating question and, you know, reflecting on it, it’s something that I realize now that has changed. It’s constantly been a very variable thing and I would say that that’s the case for every single musician, you know? When I first started playing the violin, I felt frightfully proud of the fact that I could produce this music and I was the only person in my family that could play the violin. But as I went through the different stages of musical study, I realized that actually, there were some other musicians who were more skilled than me, or there were certain things that other people could do that I couldn’t do. And so there’s so many different insecurities and as I became more, I guess, serious about playing violin, I also, because I was practicing for a number of hours a day, then had an overuse problem with my shoulder and that kind of became an inner battle that I felt I needed to fight.

Nick: So there’s a whole load of thinking about how I should be as a musician, how I should be feeling relaxed, I should be feeling comfortable. So a kind of emotional roller coaster I think is probably the truth of how it felt. Sometimes very good, sometimes very reflective and self deprecating, you know?

Christopher: Interesting. And it sounds like at this point you’re able to look back and be quite conscious of all of that mental stuff that was going on. Was that something you were aware of at the time? Were you kind of consciously trying to manage that mindset and that sense of self as you learned?

Nick: I think I was aware that something wasn’t quite right. I had a sense that there were some musicians who seemed very comfortable, and I noticed that I didn’t seem quite so comfortable, both physically and psychologically, I guess. So I was aware in as much as I maybe noticed that I wasn’t as comfortable as I maybe could be, but I didn’t know how to do anything about it, or didn’t understand what was causing that discomfort. And didn’t really want to talk about it, probably because it felt like it would have opened up a can of worms, you know, I felt I wasn’t good enough or what have you. I’m sure, like many musicians.

Christopher: Yeah, I know a lot of people in our audience, including myself can relate to that, and we’re here today to really open that can of worms because you’ve actually-

Nick: It’s what I do.

Christopher: Exactly. This is your area of expertise.

Christopher: I’d love if we could just broaden out for a moment, from your own story, to talking generally about these kinds of emotional and psychological issues that many musicians, many people in general, encounter and what the symptoms might be that the work you do in performance psychology can maybe assist with?

Nick: I think that it’s very common, or what I observe among musicians is that they may have a degree of skill, no matter how rudimentary that is or advanced it is, but they often don’t feel settled in some way in the way that they’re showing up, in the way that they’re expressing their own musicality. They feel that there’s more that they can give. They feel that there’s something getting in the way. And that manifests in all kind of different ways.

Nick: It might be something that they might call performance anxiety, or it might be that they feel uncomfortable calling themselves a musician at all, or calling themselves a professional musician. You know, so they’re happy being a hobbyist, but making that transition and saying, “Do you know what? I want to make a career of this.” Or saying that they compete on an even footing with someone that calls them self a professional musician. So kind of like what you might call impostor syndrome. Those are very common, I guess, issues if you want to call them that.

Christopher: Yeah, and that impostor syndrome is something that’s come up on the show a few times because I know how common it is, and how helpful it can be to know it’s a thing. You know, these are not thoughts you’re having because you are genuinely insufficient and inadequate. It’s a psychological phenomenon that all of us, to some extent, will experience. And in your book you talk about how this can come through, as you say, in performance anxiety and also even just fear of sounding bad during practice, right?

Nick: Yeah, absolutely. As musicians, I certainly was sort of trained into the idea that you must sound good, and even tolerating for a single moment sounding bad meant that you somehow don’t have the ears for it that you should have, you know? For a number of reasons that can be a really, I don’t know, a bad place to start say, improvising, because you need to be prepared to take risks. There needs to be a part of you that needs to be able just to let go and make some sound and not be too fearful about whether it sounds perfect or doesn’t sound perfect.

Christopher: In the past on this show, we’ve touched on this area and talked mostly about the kind of scientific research on performance psychology, and things like flow and deliberate practice, and some kind of neurolinguistic or cognitive behavioral therapy type approaches to managing your thoughts. We’ve had a couple of interviews also, or episodes, that focus on mindfulness and how that can also help you become aware of these thoughts. You actually take this all in a very specific and different direction, which is why I’m so eager to talk to you today, and before we talk about that, let’s just pick up on your story. You’ve mentioned you had a pain in your shoulder, and you talk in your book, Just Play, about how that actually led to a bit of an epiphany in terms of what the mind is capable of. Could you share that story?

Nick: Yeah. So I went to a prom concert one summer. This was the year that I had been studying in a German music college and had been probably playing for five, six hours a day, but had been in quite severe pain from my overuse problem that I was struggling with as a student. Over the summer I took a break from playing because I felt that my body needed to repair. I went to the prom concert to see Maxim Vengerov play Lalo: Symphonie Espagnole, big violin concerto, was very excited about seeing this world class violinist and I hadn’t been playing the violin for probably several weeks at that point, I’d been having a rest. But as the concert unfolded, I noticed myself experiencing the same kind of pain that I would have been experiencing had I been playing the violin.

Nick: So I went from walking into the concert hall, not really thinking about my body, not even thinking that I had a body, but walking in, and then as the concerto unfolded my mind was, I don’t know, running around with all sorts of thoughts, imagining what it would be like to be playing the violin right there, thinking about my own playing ability and all that kind of thing. Halfway through the concerto I found myself sort of knotted up and quite painful, you know? Which I found very, very annoying at the time. It was like, “Am I really so messed up that I don’t even need to play the violin to be in this kind of pain?”

Nick: But then I realized actually the implications for that because what it showed me was that if I can walk into a concert hall with one experience of my body and then a series of thoughts later, I have a completely different experience of my body, it must mean that my whole experience of my physicality is an experience. It’s thought. It’s thought up. It’s a creation that takes place within, you know? It’s a very realistic experience, and it’s very vivid and it’s important to be able to have, but what I noticed, I guess, was that there was a gap between the details of how I was experiencing my body and the fact that I was experiencing it. In other words, that there was a space, there was a place that wasn’t really touched by my pain. The ability to experience the physical wasn’t touched by the details of what I was experiencing so there was freedom that I hadn’t realized I had access to physically because I realized I was more than just a body.

Nick: That might sound terribly hippy and maybe a little bit woo-woo but it felt very, very liberating because I’d always thought that if I was in pain, it meant that something was broken or, if I didn’t feel like I was okay, that meant that I wasn’t okay. And it seemed like that moment was particularly impactful because it didn’t make sense anymore.

Christopher: That’s fascinating and it reminds me a little bit of the idea from Buddhist mindfulness meditation that, “You are not your thoughts. You are the thinker of your thoughts.” And it sounds like a pithy little idea and I think, probably when I first encountered that I just dismissed it. But when you really sit with it, or you read material that kind of talks you through the implications of that and encourages you to practice experiencing that, you realize that as you say, there’s a gap.

Christopher: You know, you’ve been lost in this world where you identify, “I am all of my thoughts. I am, like that’s all there is.” Just stepping back and being like, “Okay, well if I’m observing my thoughts then I must be something separate from them.”

Christopher: It sounds like you had that same kind of experience with the physical world where it was, “I’m not my body. I’m not the fact that I’m in pain. I’m able to step back and observe that as something that’s happening, and even create that pain in this case.”

Nick: Well, that’s the thing, you know, in those times when someone describes that they have like a flow experience, or they’re in the zone, you know, people say that they lose themselves or that their sense of self sort of dissolves and I guess it’s another way of saying the same sort of thing. That the idea that we’re a body, the idea that we are that physicality is a thought, is a perception.

Nick: I know it’s a very fundamental thought but if we realize that that perception of this physical character is so variable, moment to moment to moment, and that it’s being created within, there’s a whole lot of freedom there. There’s no need to kind of protect it anymore because it’s not a fixed thing, it’s a very dynamic transient thing. But the awareness of it is timeless, is very stable.

Christopher: I want to circle back to that idea of flow in due course because that’s kind of one of the hot topics among musicians who are asking themselves, “How can I enjoy practice more, and get more out of it?” And you have an interesting perspective on that.

Christopher: But this epiphany led to some exploration and ultimately kind of challenging the trajectory performance psychology has been on when it comes to the scientific research and the popular understanding of, “How do we become the best we can be?” You talk in your book about paradigm shifts and there being a kind of elephant in the room when it comes to the understanding of psychology, could you share that perspective?

Nick: Yeah. I might get into trouble now.

Christopher: Go for it.

Nick: If we’re brutally honest, and I mean, the scientific community and the musical community, if we’re brutally honest with ourselves there’s too much that psychology doesn’t know about how the mind works. If we’re really honest there are conflicting theories about what’s going on, you know? There’s originally back when psychology was a fairly new field, you know, psyche-ology was the study of the soul, or the spirit. Then gradually as we feel that we’ve got more scientific, then it’s become more and more about sort of neuroscience and biology.

Nick: But yet, there’s no clear, as it stands at the moment, among those people that think that the mind is a biological thing, there’s no proof to take us from the biological functions to how those biological functions create a lived, felt, sort of spiritual experience or the experience of what it’s actually like to be this living entity that we know that we are. So there’s this gap that it’s referred to as the hard problem of consciousness.

Nick: There’s also kind of a crisis within psychology as well, the replication crisis, which means that when famous psychological research parameters are reapplied, the same results can’t be generated again. I can’t remember what the statistics are like, but the chances of being able to get the same results are quite low in psychology compared to some of the other sciences.

Nick: So if we’re brutally honest, although there’s some fabulously intelligent people and wonderful explorations and theorizing going on, there’s not consensus about how the mind works at all. It’s still relatively early days in that. I guess that’s what I would call the elephant in the room, is that although there’s seemingly established pillars when people talk about the triggers that get people into a certain state of mind. Like, there’s lots of work that’s gone into studying the flow state, as if the flow state is a particular place to get to. But it’s difficult for the field to definitely say that certain actions cause a state of mind. We just don’t know that.

Nick: There’s correlation and there’s causation and from what I can tell in the psychological studies that I’ve read, the scientists themselves don’t directly say that there is a causative link, but yet it gets kind of reported in the media, or it gets reported by musicians or teachers as if there is a causative link. So that if you do this practice, you will get into the flow state. Or you will have this certain experience and that’s not what anybody’s actually observed. If you trace it back to the actual research, it’s not established, which is a bit of pickle because many of us are talking as if we know for a fact of how to get into a certain state of mind. Or even that it’s better to be in a certain state of mind to perform in than another one, and again, there’s not evidence for that either.

Christopher: That’s so fascinating isn’t it? I know that for me, reading your book, it really hammered home that point because I think I, like a lot of people in society, and I’m sure a lot of listeners and viewers of this show, we haven’t really studied psychology as a science. We’re not really psychologists and so we get these kind of news media ideas or prominent bloggers or authors even, writing about these ideas. And we can kind of see, “Okay, that’s cool,” and in our head we’re like, “This is science, therefore I should trust it. And these are the big ideas in the science of psychology at the moment, therefore they must be right.”

Christopher: But as you talk about in your book, like the fact that we classify it as a science doesn’t mean it’s really established and we really understand the laws, and we really have a firm basis for our hypotheses and tests. I think you make a very compelling case that, as much good as there may be in the field of psychology, and as it applies to musicians, we should definitely take it with a bit of a pinch of salt because we’re at a stage of the evolution of that understanding that means we’re still really figuring out some of the very basics, right?

Nick: Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I point to in the book is that other sciences have well established laws that are non-negotiables that everybody builds the whole field on and that’s not the case for psychology, you know, in the same way that physics has the laws of gravity. Or the work that Einstein did, you know, there are formulas that apply all of the time but yet mainstream psychology at least doesn’t have a set of laws or principles that underpin or explain what gives rise to our feelings or what gives rise to our experience.

Nick: So that gap that I was talking about that was called the hard problem of consciousness, explaining how it gets from biology to experience, it’s only a problem because they’re starting from the wrong place. This is the way that it looks to me is that they’re starting in the wrong place. They’re starting with biology and trying to get to consciousness and trying to get to the experience rather than starting with the experience itself and that’s the flip. That’s the distinction I guess that is the basis for the work I do with musicians and the basis for the transformation of a field that has helped me as a musician too.

Christopher: And so, let’s dive into that. What is the right way to think about all this and to get to some kind of practical implications for our musical lives if it’s not this field of performance psychology and the scientific literature, and trying to be very biological and neurological about our understanding of how to manage ourselves, how to approach the world? What’s the alternative?

Nick: Let me first say that I suppose I’m not wanting to completely negate the whole of performance psychology because there is some outstanding work and there is some really great questions being asked, so I don’t want to tar the whole field, but I do invite people to be curious about the foundations that it’s built on because the foundations are shaky.

Nick: I think the key thing is that if, as a musician, if we overlook the fact that we are constantly having an experience, and by experience I mean a felt experience. You know, what we’re hearing, what we’re feeling, what we’re seeing, what we’re imagining, what we’re thinking about. If we don’t notice the fact that we are constantly thinking, constantly having experience, constantly creating our own experience, then we, even subtly, we get it into our minds that there are, there’s this external world that can make me feel a certain way.

Nick: And this is so fundamental that most people don’t even stop to consider that this could be a thing. But I’m talking about something, you know, if it’s performance anxiety, even that phrase has got a misunderstanding embedded in it because it sounds like there is this separate state called performance, which is definitely a real separate thing that happens. So you can’t be in the same state of mind when you’re practicing as when you’re performing. They have to be different. It kind of implies it’s a separate, distinct activity. And that there’s this experience called anxiety and the anxiety seems to be coming from this thing called performance. But the thing called performance is a thought, it’s kind of a categorization in our mind. And this thing called anxiety is a thought, is a kind of, I guess like resistance to the fact that we’re feeling a little bit out of sorts and we don’t like that. It shouldn’t be that way.

Nick: We don’t notice the fact that all those feelings that are occurring within us. They’re not given to us by the performance or they’re not given to us by our personality or something. They are creations. Moment to moment they’re being created. If we overlook the fact that we are the epicenter of where all that creation is taking place, then we think that we’re victims of circumstance, or we think we’re victims of not having a good enough training, or we’re victims of our history, or we’re victims of what might happen in the future. And those are thoughts. They’re creations that we are part of.

Nick: Most people, to a greater or lesser extent, they miss the fact that the problem that they think they’re experiencing is being created by them. I don’t mean deliberately. It’s not anybody’s fault, but it’s just how the human experience works. It’s just how the musical experience works. It’s an inside creation.

Christopher: Absolutely, and I’m keen to hang on to you after the interview end and do a little book club because I think we’ve probably read a lot of the same impactful books that help with this kind of thing.

Christopher: For me I know that one thing that, you know, it’s no exaggeration to say it transformed my experience of life, was an idea in a book by Michael Singer, talking about the fact that your emotions come from within you and when something happens and makes you feel angry, it’s not that that thing has made you feel angry. It hasn’t created anger in you. There is some anger in you and that thing has triggered it.

Christopher: That just flips your concept completely or how to relate to the world as you described there, you know, instead of thinking, “I am at the mercy of this terrible world and anything could happen. I am prone to performance anxiety, I am going to behave and react in a certain way if I’m in that situation.” Suddenly you realize, “Actually, I have total responsibility and total control to whatever extent I choose in terms of how I respond and react and how I feel in any given situation.”

Nick: Absolutely. There’s so much more freedom there than most of us stop to even consider. But it’s well worth considering it. I think that’s the thing that I can’t emphasize enough. It seems so fundamental how our mind works and how feelings work, why we feel a certain way but that’s the foundation that behavior is then built, or a career is then built on, or a musical skill-set is built on. If that foundation isn’t built on anything that’s solid, or you know, isn’t made of anything solid then we’ll be laboring in a superstitious way to some extent and we need to kind of not take that out but be aware of the fact that we can be prone to superstitious behavior.

Christopher: Awesome. So you mentioned the word superstition there and I know that if I remember myself 10 years ago, I was ultra sensitive and resistant to anything woo-woo. Like anything spiritual, except like, the clear Catholic upbringing I’d had. To be honest I was very skeptical of philosophy as a whole because it just seemed so wishy-washy compared to the kind of hard sciences like physics that I’d studied, and I’m sure that there are some people in our audience who can relate to that and are thinking, “Okay, that all sounds interesting conceptually but does it work? Does it help us at all?”

Christopher: So I wonder if we can take these concepts and really talk about the nitty gritty specifics or you know, your average adult musician who’s practicing for half an hour evenings and weekends, they love their instrument, and they really want to become the best they can be. They really want to understand how to practice and how to approach their practice to enjoy it and get the most out of it. How do all of these ideas apply?

Nick: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I guess that there’s so many different directions that a musician might need to be sort of nudged in to help them develop, but I’m imagining say, an adult, a beginner or an amateur who has achieved some level of musical skill but they want to get to the next level of performance. And unknowingly there’s a whole felt experience taking place. So they might be practicing their scales, or they might have been told by a teacher to practice scales and maybe their intonation is not quite what it could be. Or their sense of time’s not quite what it could be. And when they’re practicing in a practice session, they might have a feeling of boredom come up. Or they might have a feeling of like, “It’s a bit too obsessive. I’ve got a life outside playing the violin and really I just want to do my bit of practice and get better,” without realizing that in that moment there’s a sort of infinite depth of detail of awareness that they could hear in a single note or in the way that two notes connect to each other.

Nick: And if we were to really get granular, if someone feels that they have this sense of boredom or they have this sense of, “Oh, I’m being too obsessive about my intonation, it’s not worth spending half an hour making sure my F sharp is really properly an F sharp.” Which I’ve kind of been there. I had some rather heated arguments with teachers about making sure the intonation is really properly in tune. If there’s that feeling of boredom or that they’re being too obsessive and they take that feeling as an instruction that, “I’m feeling bored, therefore I should stop practicing.” Or, “I’m bored, therefore that means that this isn’t the right practice for me,” then that’s a misunderstanding because if we know that any feeling, any experience in the moment is a creation then it means that boredom is telling you about the fact that boredom is being created. It’s not telling you about the actual task at hand and what needs to be done, you know?

Nick: There’s kind of these surface level feelings that we have and there’s, like you said, there’s this more sort of fundamental like bigger picture desire to improve what we need to do. And sometimes we’re afraid, and I mean me in my own practice still, sometimes I’m afraid of going into the kind of depth that I need to go into, based on how I’m feeling in a particular moment. But when I don’t take those feelings quite so seriously and I guess like, pour myself into the moment, you know so, “Is that in tune? Or I’m curious about whether that could be slightly more beautiful tone, how do I make a beautiful tone?” And kind of pouring myself into the moment of making music, that’s a very different experience to thinking, “Oh, I’ve done my fill of practice. I’m feeling bored so I need to move on.” Or, “I like playing fast and it makes me feel good when I play fast so that means I should do more of what makes me feel good in a practice session.”

Nick: What we don’t want to be is completely controlled by feeling good, or not feeling good. Or feeling motivated or not feeling motivated. I guess, being present with the instrument or being present with the people you’re making the music with and doing the job at hand. I know it sounds very, very simple, but if we’re confused by what our feelings mean, we’re sort of prone to take these tangents and it wastes time. It wastes effort because we’re basically sort of fortifying this idea, we’ve got to make ourselves, we can’t be too bored or we can’t be too obsessive or we can’t be, like we’re saying about sounding bad, “If I feel bad because I play badly, that’s a sign I’m practicing badly.” It’s just not true.

Christopher: Absolutely, and if I may, I think one of the common reasons too to, “I’m feeling bored or frustrated,” isn’t just resentment of the practice regime I’ve been trying to do, it’s also, “I’m not good as a musician,” right? Like, “If I was better, this would be easy so I’m just going to be a bit disappointed in myself.” I know that’s something that comes up a lot for our members at Musical U and something I definitely went through in my teenage years, for sure.

Christopher: There is so much packed into your book and I think for me, this was the crux of it. Like if I had to point to one or two things that would be the most impactful for people, it was these two ideas for practice. One of which we’ve just touched on, and I love the way you just described it. It’s almost a short circuit or a way to sidestep all of this stuff around, “How can I make practice more fun, or what should I do to keep up my motivation or boredom?” Having that understanding that I am separate from my emotions and the fact that an emotion has come up in me, doesn’t necessarily mean anything or doesn’t necessarily mean I should change anything about what I’m doing in my practice.

Christopher: There’s such elegant purity to that way of approaching practice that, I’m here to do the thing. I know what I should do. I’m going to do it, and if I get a bit bored, it’s not about pushing through that boredom and forcing myself to be okay with it and trying to transform it into joy. It’s just about identifying, “Oh, there’s some boredom, let’s continue.” It sounds, as you say, it sounds so simple but it genuinely is an option for people that I think most of us even realize is a possibility.

Nick: Yeah, that’s right. It’s also an incredible sort of subtly to the way that our moment to moment experience changes as well. I was practicing saxophone yesterday and noticed that I was feeling quite conscious of how it must sound to my neighbors. I hadn’t really noticed that sort of coming and going in my practice before but I’m sure that’s something that a lot of people can relate to, or people that you live with.

Nick: I’m thinking of like, when I was sort of practicing the violin much more intensively, sometimes there were movements that you need to practice because the body needs to learn a movement. When you’re at the stage of learning the movement itself, the sound that movement produces isn’t good. But actually, it’s kind of a developmental stage that you need to go through to kind of get the smoothness of the movement or to join a movement up. So there’ll be a time when it has to sound bad, but if you don’t go through that stage of sounding bad then you won’t refine the movement required in order to sound good.

Nick: But people can shy away from that stage of sounding bad because they’re very conscious of what the neighbors next door will think, or what Mum or Dad thinks, if they’re watching TV downstairs or something. Being able to just notice that’s a little bit of insecurity and like we said, just do the work anyway, whilst feeling embarrassed or whist feeling insecure, which is the truth of our experience if we’re honest with ourselves. Then we’re able to tune into what needs to be done rather than just be at the mercy of our feelings.

Nick: Yeah, it’s been a real game changer for me. On stage too actually. And for clients as well because they often come to me and think that because they are having these feelings of not enjoying their performance experience that that must be something wrong with their whole music career or who they are as a musician, and it’s just not true. Because we misunderstand what the feelings mean.

Christopher: Absolutely. And I don’t want to labor the point, or belabor the point, but I think it’s important to be clear, we’re not talking about suffering through those bad emotions. I think a lot of the, how to become a great musician material will talk about, “You’ve just got to push through, you’ve got to force yourself, do it even though it’s terrible.” And you have a lot of suffering musicians, and really what we’re talking about is kind of looking at that emotion and being okay with it and not being immersed in it and suffering through it, just letting it go. And you’ve a Miles Davis poster behind you, I’m reminded like, we’re kind of talking about seeing that boredom or frustration and being like, “So what? It doesn’t need to mean anything about what I’m doing.”

Nick: It comes and goes, yeah, it comes and goes.

Christopher: It comes and goes if you allow it to. I think that was a big epiphany for me was when you start taking this approach, it’s not, a lot of the things that we assume are big and important and barriers like, “I’m getting bored of my music practice.” Actually, if you can just observe it and accept it, it goes away pretty quick and you’re back to being okay and at peace, and enjoying what you’re doing.

Nick: And you’re fine if doesn’t go away as well, you know, that’s the thing. It feels like we’re suffering but really the suffering is the resisting of the in the moment experience. It’s not the fact that we have a momentary sort of feeling we don’t like. It’s how much of a fight we’re putting up against our experience. So that’s really the thing, that we don’t even need bad feelings to pass, we can continue doing what we’re doing in any feeling. We’re safe as musicians, we’re safe as human beings, we’re safe as who we are, no matter what feeling we’re having. Whether we’re on stage, or in the practice room or in a lesson with someone we want to impress, or anything, we’re fundamentally safe, but convince ourselves that we’re not.

Christopher: I mentioned there were two practice concepts that for me really stood out in the book, and that was one of them. The second, if I say it in a rush, I think it’s going to sound like an exact contradiction, so I’m going to take a moment and phrase it right, but you talk in the book also about letting go of the right way to practice and having the perfect practice plan, and actually trusting in yourself a bit more that you know what’s right to practice. I think on a surface level that kind of sounds like, go with your feelings, but it’s not quite that simple. So maybe you could explain a bit about that idea?

Nick: Yeah. This is about not giving your power away to a teacher or to a method. I think that’s what it’s fundamentally about. It’s that there is a fundamental desire to learn music, or to grow, or to develop, or to create. That’s just fundamental. Something brought us to our instrument or to this practice of music. Whatever that thing is that brought is to music, is the thing that actually is kind of driving our musical development long term, large scale, right?

Nick: That curiosity might take us to a particular teacher, or it might take us to a particular book, or method, or website, or what have you, but I’ve come across people back when I was a school teacher, the head of music, I would see some students who, one particular student that sprang to mind that learnt about how fanatical John Coltrane was as a sax player. And that he did one hour long tones and did this much time on this particular thing. This student tried to mimic exactly the kind of routine that Coltrane used, without taking too much time to think whether that was appropriate or whether that could change over the course of the next few months.

Nick: Often musicians can be very sort of focused and prepared to put the work in, but very rigid about how practice should be done because a particular school of teaching saying it has to be done this way. For every person that’s having this very draconian sort of practice regime, there are all kinds of musicians who seem, when they tell the story of how they practice, who seem to be having a more free, more easy relationship with practice. And it’s not to say that they only play when they want to, or only do the things they like to do, but there’s definitely two directions.

Nick: There’s the direction of sort of focusing on other people’s advice, external cues, validation of certificates and qualifications, that sort of thing. Or there’s the internal cues of what I have a curiosity to learn more about, or what I notice that I need to work on, or what I notice that I’m quite proud of, or our internal experience moment to moment. That same thing we were talking about, you know, whether I’m feeling a bit insecure in a practice room or feeling confident. The same thing about my curiosities or the things that get my attention and interest, and enthusiasm and passion. It’s important to be tuned into that as a direction.

Nick: I think that’s really the distinction. It’s not about feeling good or feeling bad. It’s about, am I depending on external cues or am I sort of looking within and deciding what my own opinion is and deciding what I’m drawn to?

Christopher: Yeah, so fascinating. It’s almost like, if you’re able to step back from the emotions and the instinct of reactions to everything that’s going on, the water’s clear and you can kind of get in touch with that intuition or that deeper sense that we can trust and that we can follow. It sounds like from your work with musicians, that really pays off, you know, this isn’t a fun idea that you can dabble here and dabble there and just enjoy practice a bit more, this is something that actually gets to something much more profound and powerful when it comes to how to develop as a musician.

Nick: Yeah, it seems like there’s a paradox. It seems like there’s freedom and then there’s structure and those two things are separate, but I suppose what I’m saying is that when we’re more attuned to what’s actually coming up in our experience then both those things come to the fore, so either we maybe realize, say for me and my sax practice at the moment, I’m thinking, actually, I’d like to be able to sight read some more complex material than I’ve been in the habit of reading. I’m going through a period in my own practice at the moment and thinking actually, carving out that time for reading every single day is a change of gear in my practice that I hadn’t noticed that I wanted to do, and now it’s starting to take shape in my practice as a chapter that I’m then sort of going through, just because it was a curiosity, whereas previously, I think it probably was a bit of an insecurity about.

Nick: I mentioned it in the book because it was a thing that I kind of had. It’s like, I’m not a very good sight reader. That’s definitely changed over the years for me, but to kind of go into this stage for myself as like wanting to become a real master sight reader, it’s something that’s starting to seep into my practice and it’s relatively new. And it’s born out of that kind of curiosity of like, well I’m not really practicing it and I’m wondering if I could do this slightly better? Then it becomes a scheduled thing or it becomes a structured thing and I find some time for it, so it’s not just like go with the flow man and go wherever the moment takes me. There’s the initial inspiration, and then it comes to being. It’s structured, it’s scheduled and it takes place.

Christopher: Terrific, and that’s maybe a good case in point of what we opened the conversation with, which is that you help people reach their full potential by understanding their mind. So I wonder if we could just talk a bit more broadly then about, if someone was to take these ideas away, maybe read your book in full and get this stuff inside them, what difference would that make to their musical life and their ideas about their full potential.

Nick: It’s a really difficult question to answer actually. It might sound like a slightly evasive answer but I’m struck by the fact that no matter what someone comes to me with as a coaching client, when their mind kind of clears and when their relationship with what’s going on internally is simplified, all kinds of things can happen as a result of it. I can’t, as a coach, predict precisely what they’re going to be but what is always predictable is that it’s the right thing that needs to happen for people. You know, in some cases, it could be that actually, music might not be the right career for them, you know? It could be that they have been doing something that someone else wanted them to do, so that could be the perfect thing of engaging with Nick Bottini as a coach, it could be that actually music is something that they want to stop doing, which might sound like heresy on your channel, sorry.

Nick: But equally, it could be that actually they suddenly get clear that actually they really did want to have a professional career and have been finding excuses why they couldn’t do it, and realized that actually it’s their passion and it’s worth making a major shift in their life. Or you know, my experience has been that I feel much less of a distinction between practice and performance. I feel very kind of, almost ambivalent about whether I’m performing or whether I’m practicing now. It feels to me like I’m equally comfortable and equally safe whether it’s in performance situation or a practice situation, or with doing an interview. It doesn’t feel like performance anxiety is so much of a thing. I feel nervous from time to time but it doesn’t mean anything about me anymore in the same way that it used to.

Nick: That’s been quite a sort of common reaction and people feeling a lot freer I think, to be themselves. And the implications spill into someone’s music but it’s that freedom I guess it’s the more fundamental … freedom with their own psychology, freedom with their own internal world. That’s the foundation that sort of changes and then whatever needs to come of that, comes of that, just a natural consequence, you know?

Christopher: Fantastic. And no doubt it’s clear at this point, I do highly recommend everyone check out your book, Just Play, and we’ll have a link in the show notes but you mentioned your coaching there, which is another way for people to engage with you and start to address whatever performance or musical development challenges they may be facing, or tasks they may want to accomplish, could you talk a bit more about that coaching, and also maybe your community that you have on Facebook?

Nick: So, it’s normal for sports people, you know, elite sportsmen, or even amateur sports people to consider their mindset and working on their inner game, but I noticed that there weren’t so many opportunities for musicians to do that, and yet, these foundational pieces that we’re talking about, they have a huge impact. People have skills but actually, looking at the psychological, the spiritual sort of foundations, it really unlocks what someone already has and so that’s pretty much what I do with a variety of different musicians. They tend to be professionals. They tend to be high achievers, high performers. So either a lot of musicians or classical musicians or what have you, but I’ve worked with sports people and Olympic athletes and business people as well.

Nick: What it tends to involve is this kind of conversation but really tailored to somebody’s specific needs because same for me, there are blind spots that I have in my own experience. Whether you call it life coaching or you call it performance coaching or whether you call it mentoring, we’ve all has those kind of moments. Maybe with a teacher or with a parent where someone just says something that is just obvious to everybody else but not obvious to the person. And that’s really my job, is to reflect these things back to people and to help them unpick these superstitious moments until things become easier.

Nick: That’s become my life’s work now actually because it was such a huge impact, discovering the principles in the book via my own personal journey was so transformational and when I looked for this kind of service for myself I realized that there wasn’t a thing. I just felt compelled to sort of create this movement. So the book came about and out of the book there’s been this Facebook community where people can explore the kind of principles and approach that I talk about there.

Nick: There seems to be generally I think, there’s more of an interest, certainly among professional musicians about mental health and wellbeing. But often we don’t tend to put them together with the whole domain of like achieving excellence. It’s like excellence is one thing, and wellbeing is a separate topic, but they very much are related. So that’s what my coaching’s about and that’s what the Facebook community is about, is just to explore that in some depth with people.

Christopher: Terrific. And you’re clearly someone who goes very deep and profound but is also in touch with the day to day practicalities. And on that front, you have a new course coming out, I think, which is all about the kind of practicalities of getting gigs, getting higher paid gigs, and that kind of career development, is that right?

Nick: Yeah, that’s right. There’s all kinds of musicians who either are looking to transition into professional music making or are already professionals who feel that the kind of gigs that they’re doing are not sort of the caliber that they want to, or they’re not being paid regularly enough. So the course is really an exploration of how we make the blockages that kind of get in the way of us earning the kind of money that we want to from performing, or putting ourself forward for the kind of opportunities that we could be.

Nick: So it’s an introductory dive I guess into the principles and sort of, not applying it, but we’re there for a specific purpose. It’s not the same as just personal coaching for the sake of the understanding, it’s very much, there’s a purpose which is to get gigs and to develop a professional career through the lens of the work that I do. Yeah.

Christopher: Fantastic. Well, I definitely agree that there is not enough work being done in this very important area, and I love the way you approach it in your book and with your coaching. So I definitely would highly encourage anyone who’s found something in this conversation resonated with them, run out and get Nick’s book and explore what this could mean for your own musical life because I know from personal experience, and from talking with our members, how crucial all of this stuff is in terms of how you think about yourself, how you approach your practice and how you consider your potential and what to work on next in music. So Nick, just a huge thank you for joining us on the show today.

Nick: My pleasure. It’s been great.

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The post Unlock Your Potential By Understanding Your Mind, with Nick Bottini (Just Play) appeared first on Musical U.

If you’re a member of Musical U or familiar with this show then you’ll know we have a pretty firm stance on the idea of musical “talent” and its implications for the adult music learner. We’re always excited when we have the chance to interview someone who’s considered “talented” or “gifted” and see what we can learn from their backstory and their own attitude to music learning.

On paper, Robert’s a classic case of the child prodigy, a talented musician who saw great success at an incredible pace as both a pianist and then a conductor. And I wouldn’t for a second detract from that or question his amazing abiltiies. But as you’ll be hearing, there is some interesting subtlety to the story. And as Robert would be the first to tell you, all of his accomplishments and the praise he receives – it has been earned through hard work, not just an effortless “gift”.

He’s also a very experienced music teacher and so has some very helpful insights and advice for the adult music learner in particular.

We talk about:

• How to choose the right instrument – and how to know whether you have or not.
• The particular challenges of learning music as an adult and how to overcome them – the pep talk he used to give his new adult students on day one that proved to be worth its weight in gold for them.
• Robert’s views on talent, nature versus nurture, and what that means for the average adult music learner.

It comes across clearly in his own podcast that Robert is a lovely guy with wisdom aplenty to share and so I knew this conversation would be a fascinating one. Enjoy.

Watch the episode:

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Links and Resources

• Robert Emery Online
• Backstage With Robert Emery
• How To Choose A Musical Instrument
• Asana Management Tool
• The 12 Week Year

Transcript

Robert: Hi. I’m Robert Emery from Backstage, with me, Robert Emery, and this is Musicality Now.

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

Robert: Thanks for having me on.

Christopher: So you have an incredibly impressive career as a performer, as a musical director. And I’ve read a little about your official bio, but I’d love to hear it in your own words. Where did you come from as a musician to become this top level performer, and now musical director?

Robert: That’s a loaded question if I ever heard one!

Christopher: Justify yourself, Robert!

Robert: Yeah. Justify myself. Well, I guess I fell in love with music at a really young age. I started playing the piano at about the age of seven, but I always loved music from before that. There was always a piano in my house, which was sort of passed down from generation to generation. A really bad piano; it was completely so out of tune you would not believe.

Robert: I just sort of fell into music, really, and just carried on playing and enjoying music throughout the whole of my life. I’m one of these really lucky people in life who gets to earn money doing what I love. I mean, I’ve fought for it over the years. I’ve worked bloody hard to get where I need to get. But it’s always been a very clear goal in my head of where I want to be, what I want to do, where I want to end up. And it’s been like that pretty much since, from day one.

Robert: And so, I just always knew music was my thing. It was the thing I loved doing, it’s the thing I hope I’m good at, and it’s the thing I’ll do until the day I die.

Christopher: Tremendous. And I was saying before we hit record that I’ve been really enjoying digging into your own podcast, Back Stage With Robert Emery. I think, in the midst of learning more about you and pouring through your website and listening to those interviews, I found some really interesting details on your story that, at a glance, I wouldn’t have picked up on. So, for example, I made reference to your paper bio, The Official Story of Robert Emery which, on your website, is a terrific kind of fun and self-deprecating history of where you came from.

Robert: Yeah.

Christopher: But on paper I mention it because you’re very much a classic story of the virtuoso kid, like the talented kid who goes on to have an incredible career. And you certainly are that. But, at the same time, there were little clues that there might be maybe more of an interesting backstory to it. For example, in one of your blog posts, which is really interesting … I think it was about choosing an instrument, you mentioned actually those early years where people look back, and they say, “Oh, he could just play it by ear, anything, on piano.” You said it was really more mimicking; it wasn’t that you necessarily understood music intuitively. Could you talk a little bit more about that? What did that early experience of finding your relationship with the piano look like?

Robert: I believe in something that I made up, which is called the duvet of music, or the blanket of music, or whatever analogy you want, which is surrounding yourself with so much music that you have to fight your body and your mind and your heart and your soul to be able to not have that music penetrate you and affect you in a positive way. And I was really seriously lucky that when I was young, at my primary school, we had a dedicated music teacher. We had assembly every morning where we sung every morning, there was a school orchestra that performed pretty much every morning. It wasn’t a private school. I didn’t come from a wealthy family. This was just a local Church of England school down the road in my little village.

Robert: And then when I picked up the idea of playing the piano, with the household piano that I mentioned, which was a semitone out of tune from bottom to top, I just used to listen to top of the pops each week, which was like, when I was growing up it was the big show to watch on TV to see who was Number One that week with the single, and I just … I remember quite vividly watching that program, and after seeing who was number one, going to race to this awful family piano and, just, to try and figure out how to play the tune that I heard. And I kind of remember just being able to play it, with both hands, with chords. I’m pretty sure in reality it would have been one finger at a time to start with, and then next week, maybe, I started doing two hands with two fingers.

Robert: And, just, over time, it just sort of developed naturally of being able to try and figure out what these pop tunes were. And, of course, the glorious thing about pop charts is that most of them use the same keys, they use the same tempos and most of them use the same chords as well. So, actually, once you’ve figured out actually only three of four chords, you can pretty much play 75% of the pop tunes that are out there.

Robert: And I guess the combination of going to the school where we had music thrust upon me every day, having an instrument at home which I could just have a bit of fun with and tinker, which then led me to having piano lessons. And I had them for nearly a year with a little lady down the road. Mavis, was her name. And after a year somebody put some sheet music in front of me and I could play decent … And they said, “Could you play this?” And I said, “I can’t. I can’t read music.”

Robert: And I think what had happened is every piece of music she was going to teach me, she used to play on the keyboard or on the piano beforehand, and said, “This is what you’re going to learn.” And she used to play it, and I used to watch her and listen, and I used to just remember it. And then I could just kind of go and sit there and play it from watching, so I hadn’t actually learned the skill of reading music. In hindsight, this is a blessing in disguise because at the time we thought it was a bit of disaster, because a year after I’d starting playing the piano I couldn’t read a note of music. But, in hindsight, I think it gave me a really great ear, to be able to listen to music, and to be able to recreate it very quickly, and have a good memory for that.

Robert: I even developed perfect pitch, over that time. The only problem with my perfect pitch is because my household was a semitone down, then my C in my head was actually everybody else’s B! So I had to retrain that over the years to go up to concert pitch.

Robert: But it’s all to do with this blanket of music, this just being surrounded by music. And I firmly believe that if you can do that to a child at a young age, keep him doing it, then it will pay off.

Christopher: Fantastic! I so love that metaphor of the duvet of music, and engulfing yourself in music in that way.

Christopher: And I know you’re a fellow father, and probably have been thinking very carefully about your own kids’ musical upbringing, as I have.

Christopher: And I think that’s a wonderful way to think about how to encourage them musically without imposing strict expectations on them.

Robert: The joyful thing about kids … And my son Teddy, he’s three-and-a-half or three-and-three-quarters, the joyful thing about that age is that they are just like a sponge, and they don’t know right from wrong until you tell them, and they don’t know good from bad until you tell them. And so, for Teddy, his mum used to be a choral scholar, and I love writing music for choirs, and I love choral music. Not necessarily religious choral music, but just choral music in general.

Robert: And so, from a very young age Teddy has watched Carols from King’s, which here in the U.K. is like the big event that happens on Christmas Eve. It’s the carol service which is beamed to the nation, with arguably the best children’s choir in the world, of King’s, in Cambridge. And he’s watched that since he was, well, three months old was the first time he saw that, and then he watched it a year later. And he regularly asks to watch Carols from King’s, and we’ve got it stored on the TV. And he’s now even going to the same school that the King’s … Well, he’s going to King’s, when he’s four. For him, that is music. He loves choral music.

Robert: He listens to other stuff as well. His mum was playing on the BBC Proms two nights ago, so he was listening to Mendelssohn and he loved it. But then again, we’ve put on really dodgy music, like “I’ve Got A Brand New Combine Harvester”, and all sorts of stuff. And he still listens to kids’ stuff as well, but he’s got a really wide spectrum of music, and of what music can be. And because of that, he just loves it all. And that’s a prime example of start them young. Don’t force it upon them. Don’t say, “You must learn this instrument.” Just expose them to the wonders of music and let the music do its job.

Christopher: Fantastic advice. And I think it can sound trite but children are so inspiring. And I think particularly in this context where we’re talking about musicality and how to learn music, when I look at the way my daughter will make up songs and happily sing them to herself, without ever it crossing her mind that she might sound bad to other people, or her songs might not be good, it’s just so instructive for us I think.

Christopher: And I made reference there to your article about how to choose an instrument. And you had a fantastic perspective in there, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind sharing? If a parent, or indeed an adult, is thinking for themselves about how do I choose the right instrument, what would you say on that topic?

Robert: I think this is a topic which is actually easier than people realize. I taught music for a long period of time. Everybody has probably an opinion that I went from, going from a boy to a man, and then all of a sudden I had a professional career as a conductor, as a pianist, as a composer, as an orchestrator. They miss out the gigantic step, which is I taught for 10 years. And I was doing, at the height of my teaching, 60, 65 hours a week teaching. I was pretty full on.

Robert: I think one of the reasons I taught so much is because I had so many clients. And one of the reasons because I had so many clients is because I have the opinion that there are two elements to learning a musical instrument. Actually, this is relevant whether you’re a three-year-old or a 33-year-old or a 63-year-old; the two elements are the instrument and the teacher. It’s as simple as that. If you find that you like the instrument but you’re getting bored, then that means your teacher isn’t doing their job properly and you probably want to find another teacher. It’s irrelevant what qualifications they have, in that scenario. It’s irrelevant how many recommendations they have. They might just not be right for you. We all learn in different ways, and we all teach in different ways, and so they just might not be right for you.

Robert: Likewise, you might find that you have an incredible teacher who you love going to, but actually you can’t stand playing the instrument. That probably means the instrument is not right for you. And those are the two scenarios: end of. It’s no more complicated than that. And everybody tries to … There’s a really shocking statistic, I’m not going to tell you what the percentage is because I can’t remember exactly, but it’s a really high statistic, here in the U.K., of the number of children who at one time have a music lesson and then something like 80% of those children give up within the space of 18 months. And it’s not because music is boring, it’s because they haven’t found the right instrument, or they haven’t found the right teacher, or a combination of both.

Robert: And so, that is the crux of it. If you can find the right teacher, who inspires you, who knows how you learn, who knows how you tick. And as an adult don’t forget that learning is a very different skill than what my little three-year-old, Teddy, can do. Because three-year-old Teddy is lucky that you can show him something once and he’ll absorb it and go, “Yeah, I can do this.” And he doesn’t have any inhibitions about being scared, or about thinking, “I need to put the pizza in the oven!” He’s fine. He just does what he does. And he lives in the moment. You teach an adult the same thing, they want to know why, how, who, how can they practice this, when can they schedule this in when they are in between courses, of putting the pizza in the oven, and getting the soufflé ready. Teaching an adult is such a different skill from teaching a child: we must never forget that.

Robert: And so, likewise, you get amazing teachers for children, and you get amazing teachers for adults. And sometimes they can do both, but that’s it. Anybody who tries to make it more complicated than that is just making life harder. If you find a great teacher who inspires you, if you find the right instrument that makes you tick and gives you a thrill to play, then you’re onto a winning streak.

Christopher: I love that. It’s been a small running theme on this show, as I’ve spoken to people who have achieved top professional level on an instrument, it’s remarkable how often in their backstory they started on a different instrument, thought they weren’t musical at all, experimented a bit and found, “Oh, actually, that one clicks!”

Christopher: And I love the way you broke it down there because I think, as you say, adults have their own stuff going on when it comes to learning music or learning in general, and I think we are typically a lot quicker to blame ourselves when things aren’t working, whether explicitly and consciously or not. If we’re not going well on violin we assume we’re not musical when, actually, it may just be that we’re a trumpet player at heart.

Robert: Yeah.

Christopher: So you had a great article touching on this and the challenges of learning music in general, and particularly for adults. And we like to talk on this show, both about the pros and the cons of being an adult learner, because most of our listeners are approaching this is an adult. And one of the other things you touched on there was fear of making mistakes. Could you talk a little bit about that, and what we can do about the fact that we maybe are more afraid of making mistakes than a child would be?

Robert: So I used to give adult students a pep talk on day one, and it would take up half the lesson. They used to be very annoyed and felt shortchanged, but weeks later realized that it was worth their weight in gold having this pep talk. And the pep talk went along the lines of, “You’re an adult. You’re going to ask, “Why?” I’m going to tell you it doesn’t matter. You’re going to say, “Yes, it does because I need to know.” And I’ll turn around and say, “No, you’re not ready for that yet. This is a big jigsaw puzzle that you are starting to put together, and I’m halfway through putting together my jigsaw puzzle and I’ve been doing this for 20 years. So don’t try and figure out why piece Z fits in, when you’re still at piece A.”

Robert: “And when I turn around and say, “I’m not going to tell you that yet,” you have to accept it, wipe it from your memory, and let me just carry on and do my job. Because if you do that you’ll learn quicker. You’ve got to trust me. You will learn quicker and you’ll get to where you want to be quicker.” So that’s the first thing I say. The second thing is, “What do you want to achieve?”

Robert: As a parent, when you are giving lessons, or enabling your children to have lessons, i.e., paying for a teacher for them, then what you’re trying to achieve is giving your child the opportunity to learn something that they may love. It’s kind of irrelevant if they go on to be a professional musician; that happens to one in every 20,000. But as a parent your aim is to give your child as much exposure to as many different things as possible in life, and one of that is music.

Robert: As an adult, you don’t give yourself that opportunity. And as an adult it’s very rare I find anybody who learns music and says they’re doing it because they want to give themselves exposure to many different things in life. They’re doing it because they have a goal in mind, and that goal is different for everybody. Sometimes it’s the goal that they want to be able to play one piece of music, which could be a piece of music for their son or daughter’s wedding. Or maybe their mum or dad played it to them when they were younger. For other people it’s they want to conquer a fear of performing, and they like the idea of doing that. There’s so many different reasons why an adult wants to learn music. So part of my … second part of the pep talk was always, “What do you want to achieve?” You have to have a goal here. And then, figuring that out is important.

Robert: And then, the third part of the pep talk was, “How much time do you want to give this?” Because I don’t want to be the annoying teacher who turns round and says, “You have to practice an hour a day,” when you only have five minutes. And then, for six days out of seven you feel guilty that you only did five minutes instead of an hour, and then, because you feel guilty you have a negative association with the instrument. And because you have a negative association with the instrument, you end up quitting quickly. And that’s no good for anybody.

Robert: So, how much time can you realistically give to this? And how much time do you want to give to it, I suppose, is more important. And if they say, “Five minutes a day,” then you turn around as the teacher and go, “Great. That’s brilliant. Now, I’m going to teach you what you need to do in those five minutes to maximize your time, maximize your effort to get the biggest reward possible.” And if they turn around and say they want to spend five minutes but the goal is in six months to play Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 then, likewise, it’s your job as a teacher to turn around and go, “Yeah. That ain’t going to happen!” So, you know, “You need to turn it to five hours a day and then we might- might be able to give it a chance.”

Robert: It’s all about having an open dialog, an open conversation. And, politely, I’ve forgotten what your question was now, because I’ve waffled on about what adults-

Christopher: You were sharing this pep talk you gave people on day one, and I agree, it’s worth its weight in gold. I think that jigsaw analogy is perfect. I give a similar pep talk on day one of our foundation’s course, which is trying to kind of rebuild people’s musical understanding from the ground up. And I talk about the beginner’s mind, and how this course is only going to work for you if you’re willing to come into it not understanding and be okay with that for a little while.

Robert: Yeah.

Christopher: And it will pay off, if you put a little bit of trust in us we’ll get you there. But you can’t come into it immediately questioning, and trying to connect all the dots, and worrying that it doesn’t quite make sense in your head yet, because you don’t have that opportunity. And you’re absolutely right that that’s a uniquely adult problem, isn’t it, because children don’t expect to understand everything immediately.

Christopher: So in that episode where you were talking about the challenges of learning an instrument as an adult, you gave some very specific advice for practicing that I wonder if you wouldn’t mind sharing here? One piece of it was this idea of being realistic and not too ambitious with the amount of time each day.

Robert: Yeah. I think, as adults, we like micro-achievements. You tend to find that the people who struggle with productivity, if you kind of analyze them they are the type of mindset who are always trying to achieve the big goal, and up until that point everything is irrelevant. You tend to find that the people who achieve the most and are most productive are actually the ones who spin it on its head and say the end goal is the thing that’s irrelevant, and it’s the micro-achievements that are the key to continuing on a right path.

Robert: And you can use that analogy with weight loss. You can use it with fitness in particular. I, personally, I really hate exercise. I really hate it with a passion. I’ve never been very good at it. I hate the feeling, everybody always says, “Oh, it’s great! You get endorphins and you feel on top of the world.” I go, “No. I feel tired and knackered, like I can’t possibly do any more.” And I’m such a stubborn guy. I’m the one who sits on the floor in the middle of an exercise class when everybody else is pumping away, and I go, “No! I don’t like this. I’m not doing any more.” And everybody else is looking for that micro-achievement.

Robert: And so, I’ve just a got new app on my watch called Seven. And, for me, it’s great, because it says, “Let’s do seven minutes a day if we can.” And so, I do seven minutes of exercise a day, and then I feel like I’ve done some exercise, which is great. And over the week that adds up, over the month that adds up, probably not as much as it should do. But, nevertheless, it’s better than doing zero because I hate the idea of doing an hour workout.

Robert: It’s the same with learning an instrument as an adult, is that it’s the micro-achievements which are the things that are going to keep you energized, and keep you interested, and will help your productivity. So don’t look for the end goal, look for, “I want to do five minutes of practice a day. If I can do that, at the end of the week I’m going to allow myself that bottle of Rose that’s been sitting in my fridge.” Whatever it might be.

Robert: So that’s the first one, micro-achievements. Secondly, do some common sense. If you’re going to set yourself a goal for five minutes a day, what you want to do is put a timer on your watch or on your stopwatch or on your phone for five minutes. Sit down at your instrument, stand up at your instrument, play for five minutes. Do your five minutes of practice. When your timer goes off: stop. Walk away. And the stupid thing about adults, and children, is that we always want what we can’t have. And so, your watch is saying, “Your time’s up. Walk away.” So, as an adult you go, “Hold on! I could do another five minutes.” But if you set a timer for 10 minutes, then after five minutes you’d be, like, “Oh! I’ve got another five minutes left.”

Robert: So it’s just about spinning these things on its head, and walk away after five minutes. Make yourself want to do more, but you’re not allowing yourself. That’s a really great mindset to have. And carrying on through to the next day. So, micro-achievements. Small doses is great.

Robert: And then, lastly, I would say, a big generalization here, but you’ve got to find a practice method. Anybody who goes into learning an instrument who doesn’t have a practice method is just destined to fail. You don’t go into a job without having a method of how to handle the stress, or the task at hand. There’s a method for everything in life, and music and music education and learning a musical instrument is no different, you’ve got to have a method. So do your research with that. Spend a bit of time.

Robert: The method that I love is very practical, it’s creating spreadsheets for yourself. It’s micro-practicing, micro-achievements. It’s about knowing what you want to achieve, creating a plan on a spreadsheet of how to get there.

Robert: So, for instance, for me, when I was studying at the Royal College of Music, if I had a difficult passage … And I remember quite vividly the third movement of the Rach 2 Piano Concerto that I was learning, I was having trouble with one of the section because it’s so fast, and my fingers were just clumsy. And I remember creating a spreadsheet, and over the period of about three weeks, every day the spreadsheet would give me bars to learn and a metronome mark. And that metronome mark would just get faster and faster and faster every day. And if I couldn’t play it at that speed, with the metronome mark, I would have to stay on that metronome mark until I could play it. Or, I’d go back a couple of steps. And eventually, within three weeks, I reached my goal. And I do that because it’s methodical and there’s a plan in place. And I’m pretty sure without that plan I would be just the guy who just tries to play it fast from day one and it doesn’t work. And I get frustrated and eventually I give up and shout and swear at it. So, create a plan.

Christopher: Terrific! So we’ve told a little bit of your own backstory, which had you on this trajectory to become a top level concert pianist in the classical world. And you’ve also alluded to a period where you were teaching. But musical theater is huge part of what you do now. When did that first enter the picture for you?

Robert: Very early. I think I was 10. And I moved to Lon … Well, I didn’t move to London, I grew up in Birmingham. And I was in love with my swimming teacher. My swimming teacher was about 25, 26, and I was actually in love with her as a 10-year-old boy. And she was really kind, and she said, “Look, for your birthday, for your 10th birthday I’ll take you to London to see a show.” I’d never seen a show before. And I went down to London to see Joseph at the London Palladium.

Christopher: So wait, sorry. Just to interject for a moment, you managed to get a date with the swimming teacher?

Robert: Yeah! Yeah, I was a cheeky little kid!”

Robert: Yeah. I did. I mean, I swim really badly as well, so I don’t even understand how that worked.

Robert: So, anyway, she took me down to London for the day to see Joseph. And I saw a matinee performance. And I loved it. I loved the spectacle of it. I loved the music. I just loved the combination of dance, theater. Just everything about it just ticked all my boxes. And, at that moment, I had the program, and as a 10-year-old kid. There were two names in the program. One was Mike Reed, Musical Supervisor, and the other one was Mike Dixon, Musical Director. Now, as a 10-year-old kid I had no idea what the difference is, I just know that they were both involved in the music. Well, I circled their pictures, and I wrote in the program … I’ve still got it, “This is what I want to do when I grow older.”

Robert: There was something written in the stars at that moment, because eight years later I moved to London to live, to go to the Royal College of Music. And I needed to find a job to give me some cash in my pocket, to keep me going and pay for my bar bills! So I found a job as a local church organist in a place called Chiswick in West London. And the first Sunday I was there the vicar said, “I’d like to introduce to you somebody who I think you … might be useful.” And Mike Dixon walked down the aisle. And I couldn’t believe it. I thought, “God, this is the guy who was in that photo that I circled eight years ago. And he looks a bit older now, but this is incredible.” Anyway, so I got talking to him, and he was very supportive of me.

Robert: And the following Sunday the vicar came up to me and said, “Hey Robert, there’s somebody else I’d like to introduce to you.” And Mike Reed walked in. And it turns out they both lived in the local area, they both had links with the church. And I couldn’t believe that within a week of moving to London, the two people who I had circled as a 10-year-old boy, appeared in my life. And they’ve both been champions ever since. Mike Dixon gave me, I think, probably my first ever professional job in the West End, which was on Zorro. Which was a long time ago now. And Mike Reed has become one of my closest friends. He’s the godfather of my son. And I spend months and months and months a year working with him, doing so many different projects together. And they’re both just wonderful people.

Robert: My trajectory of life has been stemmed from that moment as a 10-year-old kid. And I’m not a particularly religious person, but I am a spiritual person, and I’ll let you take that however you want. But in my head there is something about, at that moment, as a 10-year-old kid, something happened to me, and the stars aligned. And eight years later, I was really lucky to have met these two people who came into my life. And, really, have substantially changed my life ever since. Yeah, I’m a lucky boy for that.

Christopher: Incredible. And you mentioned there, you weren’t sure at the time what the difference might have been between a musical director and a musical supervisor. If others in the audience are similarly confused, what is the difference?

Robert: So the musical director is also known as a conductor. So that’s the person who will conduct the performance on a daily basis. The musical supervisor is a relatively new role within the musical theater world. I would say it’s only been around for 25, 30 years or so. And the role of musical supervisor, now, is to be the link between the composer and the production. The composer is an interesting thing, because as a composer of musical theater it’s pretty rare that you write all the music. Now, I know that sounds a bit shocking for most people, but the skill of writing vocal arrangements, and the skill of writing dance arrangements, is a very different skill from being able to sit there in your own little world and compose these wonderful tunes and medleys that you hope people will sing.

Robert: So a musical supervisor is traditionally the person who has taken the work from the composer, and is working with the director and with the choreographer in putting together the show. Because the director or the choreographer might say, “We need an extra 20 bars here for a dance routine or for a quick change,” and it’s probably not going to be the composer who goes away and does that. It’s probably going to be the musical supervisor who will link all of that together. And, essentially, the supervisor is the one who is responsible for the quality of the music in the production, and he is the boss of the conductor and everybody else who is there in the production.

Christopher: Terrific! Thank you. And you’ve a great episode on your show where you really unpack the role of musical director and what it takes to bring a show to its first performance and beyond.

Robert: Yeah. It’s crazy.

Christopher: I mean, for anyone who’s curious. It does sound a bit crazy.

Robert: Yeah.

Christopher: And you mentioned conducting, there, as the heart of the musical director role. And there’s a great anecdote, or a line or two, on your bio on the website about when you first conducted. Can you talk about how you came to add that to your skill-set and what that was like for you?

Robert: That was revolved around money, actually, to start with. I was a trained pianist up until the age of, sort of, 17, I wanted to be a concert pianist and piano was my life. And what changed was me getting into the Royal College of Music. I did a quick calculation that I needed about 18 grand a year to be able to live in London. And I came from a single parent home, didn’t have any money, so I knew that I had to find 18 grand a year to live in London. And I desperately didn’t want to go and work in a bar or a McDonald’s or something. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I just wanted to make money out of the gifts that I was given.

Robert: And so, before I moved to London I decided to put on a concert series, where I would hire an orchestra and … I mean, this is the great thing about kids, and I’m classing me, as a 17-year-old, still a kid, because you don’t really think of the big consequences. So I thought do you know what? The producer gets a lot of the money here, when they’re producing concerts, and the conductor gets a lot of the money here when they’re conducting a concert. So why don’t I just do both, and then I can get more money, and I can then try and live off that whilst I’m at college. And so, that’s what I did. I hired the Birmingham Philharmonic Orchestra, or, in fact, I persuaded them to give me their services for free. And then I found a venue and did the same thing, and the venue was free.

Robert: And I carried on being a cheeky chappie young 17-year-old kid, persuading everybody to give me stuff for free. I persuaded BBC Television to do a live broadcast for me to promote the concert. And then, I thought, well, I’ve got to conduct this, and how hard can it be? Let’s get a stick. Let’s learn the beat patterns. And let’s go! I’ve got youth on my side so if I’m rubbish everybody will go, “Ah, it’s cute! He’s a 17-year-old kid.” So, you know, you can’t lose. So that’s what I did. And I did a few performances. They were sold out. I raised enough money to get me through two years worth of college.

Robert: And I just realized in that moment I loved conducting. It was something that I felt at ease with. And so, I went to the Royal College of Music as a pianist. I only did one semester and one term in conducting and that was it. And to be honest with you that was pretty useless. I came out of college going, “I don’t want to be a concert pianist.” A concert pianist has to be on the road 365 days a year, they’re by themselves. They have to practice six or seven hours a day, in a practice room, by themselves. They end up playing the same music again and again and again. I thought, that’s not a life for me.

Robert: I want to be a conductor who gets to go and meet interesting people, work with interesting people. And that way I can conduct musical theater, or I can conduct a straight classical concert, or I can conduct a concert which is broadcast on TV or radio or whatever it may be. But it’s constantly different music, and that’s what floats my boat really. It’s about keeping things interesting for me. And that’s how I became a conductor.

Christopher: Wonderful! Well, what made me want to ask the question was partly because, clearly, it was required for your transition to musical director, but also because you did a great interview with Stewart Copeland on your show, the drummer from The Police, and you talked about conducting specifically. And you unpacked it a little bit, and touched on what I think a lot of people are curious about and don’t really know about, which is, is it easy? Like, if you’re a good musician, if you have a good ear, do you just kind of pick up the baton and wave it about naturally and instinctively? And so, I was curious to know how much a learning curve was there for you?

Robert: I’m a great believer into throwing yourself into a deep end of a situation and forcing yourself to sink or swim, and hopefully you swim. For me, there wasn’t really that steep a learning curve. I mean, don’t get me wrong, as a 17-year-old I wasn’t conducting a Mahler Symphony. It was all relatively simple stuff. 1812 Overture, that sort of stuff. Which, it’s not easy, but it’s not the hardest work in the world to conduct. And there wasn’t a steep learning curve for me. I just learnt on the job. I’m the guy who runs by the rule of “Fake it till you make it.”

Robert: A conductor is the leader of a group of people, so as the leader you’ve got to be confident. Try not to be too cocky, but you’ve got to be confident, because if you don’t have confidence you are admitting to all those people around you there’s something not right here, and then that’s going to affect their performance. So I’m a great believer that as a conductor you have to have this internal confidence which is unwavering. And whether that’s as a 17-year-old kid who doesn’t know what he’s doing, or as a 27-year-old who is being thrown into the West End to conduct a musical, you’ve just got to go, “Yeah. I know what I’m doing here.” Even if you don’t, you’ve just got to say, “Yeah. I know what I’m doing.” And you’ve just got to figure it out. End of story.

Robert: And, again, people try and make these things more complicated than they are. And if you’ve got a good skill-set as an all around musician, I believe that anybody can do it. It’s not the hardest thing in the world.

Christopher: Interesting. So I’m going to try and be careful about how I word my next question, because I know you’ve done a lot of work with TV shows like The Voice, and Britain’s Got Talent. And you’ve worked with some of the people who’ve won those TV talent shows. In our conversation you’ve talked about luck quite a lot, you’ve talked about having a gift, you’ve talked about the hard work that’s required, and you’ve talked the idea that anyone can do it. I’d love to just ask you straight out, what do you think, or how do you think about talent in music?

Robert: Well, the nature versus nurture syndrome: good question. I think people look for a black-and-white answer, and I don’t think there is one. I think there are people who are born talented, and whose role it is on this Earth is create music. I think you can look at somebody like Mozart for that, who was writing symphonies at the age of seven. There’s a statistic somewhere isn’t there, about 10,000 hours is what you need to spend on any topic to become a basic expert in that topic. And there’s no way Mozart had 10,000 hours up until the age of 7, to be able to write a symphony. And 10,000 hours is roughly seven years worth of work.

Robert: So I think there is definitely something within us, that you can be born musical, and you can have that in you. And whether you choose to use it or not is another matter, but you have it in you. And I think I’m probably one of those lucky ones who, for whatever reason, was born like that, and I had it in me. Now, that doesn’t mean to say, though, that because you are born with a bit of talent means that you don’t have to work for anything, or you don’t have to learn and actively educate yourself. Because the two are very different things. Mozart still had teachers in music, he still had a piano teacher, and he was still learning all of his life. If you look at his scores, he was still writing stuff, throwing them away because they were rubbish. Writing new stuff, throwing it away and trying to improve it. So he was constantly learning. We all constantly learn. So just because you’re talented doesn’t mean that you’re lazy and that you don’t have to educate yourself.

Robert: I think there are people who are born with talent. I also think, though, that you can get to be a phenomenal musician without being born with that talent, if you are prepared to put in the hard work that is needed, and if you love it enough. You’ve got to have both. You can’t just do the hard work and actually secretly hate it, because music is about passion, and it’s about heart, it’s about soul, and if you don’t have passion and the heart and the soul for it, you’re never going to be the best musician in the world. And it just won’t click, it won’t work.

Robert: That’s why music is such a special thing. If you look at these incredible artists like … Well, anybody, like Pharrell Williams through to Simon & Garfunkel, or anybody, these people had their heart and soul into what they did. And you’ve got to have that. And if you have that, whether you’re talented or not I still believe you can be a great musician.

Christopher: That’s really interesting to hear. And I think part of what prompted me to really want to ask you this was on your podcast sometimes it seems like you use the word talented almost synonymous with skillful. Like I think you talk, for example, about having talented players with you in the pit, in the theater. And I guess because you’ve been in the world of music education in a serious way, and you’ve been in the world of musical theater, which is, alongside maybe classical orchestras, probably the epitome of this romantic notion of the superstar and that talent, as it were.

Christopher: I was curious to know, do you think everyone is seeing it in a black-and-white way, and when they say “talented” they mean born gifted and that’s that? Or do you think people have an appreciation of what you just described, which is maybe there’s a bit of a gray area or a spectrum and it’s a combination of nature and nurture?

Robert: I think those who are not a professional musician probably believe that they are not lucky enough to be talented, and they weren’t born with that gift, and therefore they have to work harder than a professional musician or a talented musician would be to get where they need to go. And I think that’s a misunderstanding, and I think that’s an inaccuracy in life. Because I know plenty of professional musicians who, I would call them very skillful but probably not the most talented in the world.

Robert: For me, somebody who is talented and gifted is somebody who is able to do things which are almost untrainable. I’ve got a friend of mine who you can say, I don’t know, “Play the Harry Potter theme in the style of Renaissance music, or in the style of George Gershwin.” And he could just do it, just there and then. There’s a talent for that. That’s a gift that my friend has got. And it’s very difficult to teach that skill. I guess it would be possible over time, but I just know he didn’t spend the time learning it like that. So that is a gift. I know plenty of musicians, professional musicians, who are skillful because they’ve worked very hard to get where they need to go, against all the odds, because they don’t have a natural God-given talent. And I know other musicians who are lazier and can get to the same place because there’s something in them that just … they can just do things.

Robert: Talent’s a really interesting topic. It’s a really interesting thing. There is a downside to being a gifted musician, and that is, it is possible and it’s very easy to become lazy. Because when I was a young kid, and I hate to say I was a talented young kid because it sounds so arrogant, but I was the kid who I could hear something once and I could play it. I could read something on a page and I could play it. And I’m sure there are plenty of other kids who could do that better than I, but I could do it pretty damn good. And so, what it meant is that I didn’t really need to practice, as a child.

Robert: And I kind of think, how great could I have been as a piano player if I’d have actually applied myself and practiced? And instead I rested on my laurels, I was a bit lazy, I hated practice. And that is an example of where having a gift isn’t the best thing in the world. Because if I’d have started at the same age with no gift and had worked bloody hard for it, then maybe I would have been a better pianist than I am today. Who knows? But there are pros and cons to both sides.

Christopher: Gotcha! Well, thank you for delving into that and being willing to be pick it apart, because as you say it’s not just black-and-white. I always want to make sure on this show we’re not oversimplifying for our audience. Our listeners, our viewers are smart, capable people who want to know the truth from these things. And I think it’s so interesting to take a case like yourself, where on paper it may seem very simple, and dive in and see, well, actually, where is there truth, where is there a bit more of back story, and what can we learn from that for our own potential in music?

Robert: As an adult learning a musical instrument, you have to put the work in. Talent or not talent, you have to put the work in. Even now if I’m lucky enough to be asked to play, I don’t know, Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue, I learnt that when I was 11, and I’ve got a recording … Look on the internet, there’s a recording of me as an 11-year-old playing that. And I juxtaposed this recording with me as an 11-year-old, with me playing it in a concert when I was about 28 or so, and I just flicked between the two constantly. And, you know, me as a 28-year-old had to work much harder than me as an 11-year-old to get there. And that’s me knowing the music for 15 years, me knowing how to play it for 15 years, me being 15 years old wiser, more experienced, and yet I had to work harder to achieve the same level as an 11-year-old kid. And that’s because as an adult, our learning capabilities, they shrink, simple as that! It’s one of the slightly twisted things in life.

Robert: So talent is almost irrelevant, I would say. You have to work at it, talent or no talent. And if you do that then you’ll be successful at whatever you want to achieve.

Christopher: Wonderful. As I know you talk about yourself, there are advantages to being an adult learner. And you like to ask on your interviews if your guest has any tips and tricks for staying productive and making the most of their time. Whether you see it as overcoming the challenges of being an adult learner, or just maximizing your potential, I think this kind of stuff is really valuable to discuss.

Christopher: So I’d love to hear, for yourself, as someone who travels, who performs, who achieves such a high level in everything you do, what are your own strategies or tactics or frameworks that help you stay at that top level?

Robert: So I’m the professional musician who turns around and says, “Music is my job and I love it. It’s not my hobby and I make money out of it.” So like any other job you have to have a tool box, exactly like you said, of ideas and ways to be able to be productive. I, personally … Incidentally, there are … Just as a little side note here, I would like to remind everybody that when I went to college, the Royal College of Music, there were, I don’t know, about a hundred people in my year at the Royal College of Music. And there are five or six colleges in the U.K. which are at that sort of same-ish standard. So that’s five or six hundred people a year, in the U.K. alone. And then of course you’ve got the big ones like the Juilliard in America.

Robert: Remember, everybody, that out of those five or six hundred professional musicians from my year, I reckon there’s probably about 10, maybe 20, who are working professionally now, 15 years after I’d left college. So it’s not like everybody trains to that high level and then they automatically become a professional musician. Because there is a massive difference between training to become a professional musician, and then actually making money out of the career that you want to achieve. And the reason why I say that is because … I’ve not gone off on a tangent, they are connected.

Robert: That you tend to find that lot of the people who have become professional musicians, and have a career as a professional musician, as a performer, have done so because they’ve realized that it is a business. They are a business. They are one man, one woman business. And for that they need that tool set of tips and tricks to be able to maximize their capability as a performer, and therefore give themselves the best chance of becoming a professional musician, and having a good career where they can have a roof over their head. And that’s why most people fall away. It’s not because they’re worse musicians. It’s almost at that stage irrelevant how good they are, it’s about the tips and tricks.

Robert: So, for me, I use lots of different things. One of them is called Asana. Asana is an online management tool, you can kind of build it however you want. My life is quite complicated because I always turn around and say, “Well, if I don’t make it as a musician, I want back-up plans to make sure that I can live the life I want to lead.” So I have a few businesses on the side. So Asana really helps me link all of those businesses together with my music, to make sure that I can keep across everything. And I set myself … I actually work on a 12 week year. So what this is, is essentially … We, as humans, with the Gregorian calendar …

Robert: Is that right? Have I made that up? It is the Gregorian calendar? Yeah. With musicians, for the Gregorian calendar, tend to appraise ourselves late December, early January. And what happens is we always have an excellent January. February we start to go downhill. Over the summer we laze off a bit, because we say. “Ah, yeah, well everybody’s away, everybody’s on holiday,” so we kind of calm down. And then, from September through to December we ramp up our work again, and then we sort of appraise ourselves again. And so, you’ve got this really long period of time where you are working. And so, I turn around and say, “Well, I’m not such a fan of that, because that’s not a healthy way for me to be able to assess how well I’m doing in what I’m choosing to do.”

Robert: So I do a 12 week year instead. So every three months is the equivalent to everybody else’s year. At the end of every three months I have an assessment for myself. I make my colleague assess me, in the businesses, and vice-versa. And so, every week is the same timescale as a month for most people on this Earth. And, for me, I manage to get more done because of that. I wake up usually very early; I’m up half past five, six-ish to work. I tend to not stop working until eight or nine at night. And that includes most of the weekends. For me, I try and not check emails all day, every day. I try and schedule three times a day, checking an email account. I’m not so good at doing that, but I try. I always keep my inbox to zero, so that’s like a really cathartic thing for me, that I can wake up in the morning and see there’s 15 emails I need to deal with. I’ll deal with them, and my email inbox will go back to zero emails in there.

Robert: I have a glamorous, wonderful, fantastic assistant who works with me to keep me on the straight and narrow. Who I couldn’t live without. I totally am aware that I’m very lucky to have her managing me and my time. And I’m a great believer in collaboration, in understanding that 50% of something is better than 100% of nothing. And so, I have several agents who do things for me. Yes, they take quite a chunk of money, but they give me opportunities that without them I wouldn’t have in the first place.

Robert: Yeah, I guess that’s about it really. I mentioned about micro-achievements, about trying to see that … For me, I’ve just been orchestrating for a concert that’s going to happen in Switzerland next month in Lucerne, and I had 12 orchestrations to do. And that’s like an hour’s worth of music to orchestrate, and for a full orchestra that’s quite a lot of work. And the goal isn’t to finish it, because then I would never finish it. For me, the goal is to finish each one.

Robert: But then I separate it into three goals, because I need to do a piano arrangement of it first, then I need to orchestrate it, and then I need to get it all laid out, and PDF’d up, and demos send to people. And so, there’s three steps with each particular track. I have 12 tracks. And so I have three goals to achieve for each track. And each one is on my Asana, online, and each one I can tick off and be proud that its gone. And I scheduled in my time over the weeks, so I know exactly what I need to achieve in the space I’ve got.

Robert: So, essentially, all of what I’m saying is just be businesslike about it. And it doesn’t actually matter if you are a professional musician or not, you can still apply a lot of these rules to an amateur musician. Because the more businesslike you can be … even as a music lover and as an amateur musician, the more businesslike you can be with how you practice, in particular, the quicker you’re going to improve.

Christopher: Fantastic! There was lots of really great, meaty, practical advice packed inside that. I’d love to ask a follow-up question, if I may? Which is you talked about the importance of a conductor having a rock solid confidence about them, and I think everything you just described is tremendous for the practicalities and logistics and organization of being a professional musician. But, obviously, you also play that role of being in the moment, at a performance, doing your thing.

Christopher: And you said something really fascinating in that course that answer, which was, “If I don’t make it in music,” I think is what you said, “If one day I don’t make it in music.”

Robert: Yes-

Christopher: And that just caused me to wonder, like, is there any emotional or mindset self-management required? In the context of all of that practical framework, are there days where you wake-up, or moments before a performance where you’re, like, “I don’t know if I’ve got this.”?

Robert: No. I think the closest thing to ever feeling that … is never the music. Working in music as a field there are two main elements to it: one is the music, the other one is the people. The music is never the problem. The music is what is written on the page, what comes out your mind, your heart and soul. If you’re orchestrating or composing, the music is never the problem because the music is my responsibility, my choice. So I know that if I go into a concert not knowing a piece of music as well as I should do, that’s purely down to me. And I don’t worry about that, because I turn around and go, “Well, that was my choice. I should have spent more time on this.” So I just know not to do that. You’re only as good as your last performance, so it’s my responsibility to have the music prepped.

Robert: The other element which is much more out of one’s control is the people who are around you, and who you have to work with. That can be harder to deal with. And that’s the only time in my life so far where I’ve had difficulties within my job, within my career, of working with tricky, prickly people. And situations occurring with those people where you turn around and go, “Phew! Do I really want to work in this industry? Do I really want, for the rest of my life, to have to work with twits like this!” And that’s the only thing that has made me come close to going, “Is this really want I want?”

Robert: But at the end of the day you always go back to the same thing, which is, well, it’s not the music’s fault. And hopefully you don’t have to work with these people again. So pick yourself up, get on, and just ride that wave.

Christopher: Love it! Well, I think, if anyone’s up to the task of coping with prickly people, it’s the guy who managed to get a date with this 20-something swimming teacher at the age of ten – and finagled a live TV broadcast from the BBC, not very long after!

Christopher: And I loved getting an insight into your world through listening to your podcast. I’d love it if we could wrap up by talking a bit about that show: what you do with it, what it’s for, who it’s for? And that’s Backstage with Robert Emery.

Robert: Sure. So I started this podcast at the beginning of the year, so it’s a really, really new venture for me. And one of the reasons why I decided to do this is because almost every gig I was doing, whether it was working with big, famous artists like Stewart Copeland, or whether it was just me, myself, conducting an orchestra, and I am the name on the stage, the same thing was happening, which is followers would be coming up to me asking for more information of what life is really like, how do you rehearse, what are these people like to work with, what’s behind the scenes. And we are all fascinated behind-the-scenes, that’s why these horrible TV things are on, following policemen around, and following ambulances around. And this awful one, 24 hours in A&E, and seeing everybody’s get their leg chopped off or something nasty! I can’t personally stand that stuff. But there are people who love it, and that’s because we all love behind-the-scenes stuff.

Robert: And I thought, okay, well, if the audience want that, I’m a great believer in I’m here to please an audience, it’s my job. And that has to be on and off the stage. I can’t expect people just to follow me and follow my career and my chosen path when I’m on the stage, I’ve got to connect with them in between those moments. And so, for me, it was a bit of a no-brainer. I had interviewed Stewart several years ago for the first podcast. It wasn’t for a podcast, I just was with him, and I just said, “Look, you’re a fascinating guy. I want to have a chat with you. Can we record it?” So that’s what we did. And it sat on my computer for two-and-a-half years doing nothing, and I just thought, okay, well that’s it, it’s a podcast. And that’s what I want to do.

Robert: To be honest with you it’s tricky, because I’m trying to juggle that with everything else. So from a time point of view it’s very tricky. But from a reward point of view my followers seems to love it. I’m getting some really great comments. And I’ve got some phenomenal guests … It’s not all guest-based, sometimes it’s just me rabbiting on about something to do with music, but some of the guests I’ve got are incredible. And I’m just … Yeah, I’m thrilled with it. I really enjoy it. Even if I’m the only one who listens to it, in the end, I kind of go, “I don’t care,” because I’m just really enjoying doing it.

Christopher: Wonderful. Well, as I said, I highly recommend the show. I’ve been enjoying digging into the back catalog, myself. And that can be found, as can all your projects, at robertemery.com. Is that right?

Robert: It is.

Christopher: Perfect. And for people who are curious to know more, what’s coming for you, apart from this podcast that you’ve launched and will be continuing in? What’s going on in the world of Robert Emery?

Robert: Oh! So I’ve got the gigs in Switzerland next month, with an artist who is quite massive actually on mainland Europe, called Seven. He’s sort of a soul singer. I’m conducting a Hans Zimmer versus John Williams concert in London, in September. And then, I’ve got a couple of gigs … I love this! The concert is called Now That’s What I Call The 80s!

Christopher: Can I come?

Robert: I think it’s going to be incredible. And you know I am a classical musician, but I love a lot of types of music, and the 80s, you put on a good 80s tune and I’m there baby! So I totally up for this when they approached me and said, “Would you be interested in conducting this gig?” So I’ve got that. And I’ve got a similar one, Now That’s What I Call Christmas, happening in December. I’m working with my old mate Russell Watson again. We’ve got a gig in Manchester.

Robert: And then, I’m in the process of writing a new musical, which will be the second musical I’ve written. And I think that will launch in the fall of next year. So that’s taken up quite a bit of my time. I’m doing quite a bit of composing, I’ve got some choral works and I’m releasing an album at the back end of next year as well. So I’m just busy writing all of the material for that.

Robert: And I’m going to start a YouTube series, which I’m really excited about. Which, I think it’s going to be called The Extreme Pianist. And we’re just going to be going into filming that in … I think it’s October. So I’ve got quite a bit of prep to do for that.

Robert: Aside from that, there are a few other projects. We’re doing Music With Art, is going to be an interesting one. That’s approaching art galleries saying we’d like to compose pieces of music dedicated to their major artworks. And that’s up and running. And the first performance of that will be next year.

Robert: Yeah. It just kind of goes on and on and on. Keep me out of trouble. Keep me moving. Yeah.

Christopher: Tremendous! Well, clearly your Asana management board is very full, so I appreciate you taking the time today to join us-

Robert: My pleasure. Thank you.

Christopher: … and sharing your perspective with our audience. Thank you again.

Robert: My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on.

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The post Nature, Nurture, and your Duvet of Music, with Robert Emery appeared first on Musical U.

In a past interview solo pianist Michele McLaughlin talked about how she and her sister refer to really touching music as music that “makes your heart hurt”. The Quebe Sisters song, “Georgia On My Mind” is a great example of music that makes the heart hurt, while simultaneously making the ears cheer with delight.

You’ll hear more about this in the interview, but just know if you’re looking for music that’s a rich and beautiful environment to explore with your ears, there are few better choices than The Quebe Sisters.

We were excited to dig into the backstory of their musicality and the sisters were honest, open and generous with what they shared.

In this conversation we talk about:

•  The challenges of starting to sing together after years of only playing fiddle – and the one practice habit that was painful – but hugely effective for helping them improve.
• How exactly they each think about writing and arranging harmony parts and the relationship between ear skills and theory.
• What the “progressive” in “progressive western swing” means and how they’ve been developing their sound for the new record.

We hope you’ll enjoy this peek behind the scenes and into the minds of The Quebe Sisters.

Watch the episode:

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Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

Links and Resources

• The Quebe Sister Online
• The Quebe Sisters – “The Quebe Sisters” on Amazon
• The Quebe Sisters – “The Quebe Sisters” on Spotify
• The Quebe Sisters – “The Quebe Sisters” on iTunes
• The Quebe Sisters – “My Love, My Life, My Friend”
• The Quebe Sisters – “Pierce the Blue”
• The Quebe Sisters – “Georgia On My Mind”
• Musicality Now – 100% Emotion, with Michele McLaughlin
• A Cappella for Ear Training: How
• Seth Riggs – “Singing For The Stars”
• Rosanna Eckert – “Singing with Expression: A Guide to Authentic & Adventurous Song Interpretation”
• Ray Price – “Night Life”

Transcript

Grace: Hi, I’m Grace.

Sophia: I’m Sophia.

Hulda: And I’m Hulda, and we’re the Quebe Sisters, and you’re listening to Musicality Now.

Christopher: Welcome to the show, Hulda, Sophia, and Grace. It’s really exciting to have you here, and I’m going to try hard not to be too much of a fanboy in this interview. We’re very lucky to have amazing guests on the show, but sometimes it’s a case where I’m just as enthusiastic personally as I am professionally, and this is one of those cases. I was looking back in preparation for this interview, to figure out where did I first come across the Quebe Sisters, and I found an email I had drafted back in 2012 to you, but never sent, which was asking if we could somehow collaborate, because your music was so fantastic, and really good for ear training. And I was running this little company called Easy Ear Training, and I thought it would be so cool if we could do something.

Christopher: Anyway, I’ve never sent it, because I was too nervous, and shy, to email these amazing musicians I was listening to every day. But, the reason I was in that direction was, I did end up featuring some of your music in an article we did all about harmonic ear training, because I was finding, you know, you have some of the best tracks for really paying attention to close harmony, and trying to like, follow a certain voice all the way through the track, or hear how they interrelate, and play together. And anyway, I wrote something about that, and that was really what I was so excited to talk to you about today, and get an insight into the women behind this amazing music that I’ve been enjoying for so many years.

Christopher: So I’m going to try not to gush too much, and be too much of a fanboy, and in that spirit, I’m going to ask my normal first question, to get us off on the right start. Which is, I would love to hear a little bit about where the Quebe Sisters came from, in your music learning, in particular, what were those early years like for you in music?

Sophia: Well, she’s looking at me, so I’ll answer this. By the way, Christopher, we really appreciate you having us on the show.

Hulda: Yeah.

Sophia: Your whole organization is really cool. Like, what you’re all about. So, with that being said, I’ll try to give you kind of a brief, you know, quick outline of where we got started, and how we are here today.

Sophia: We… You know, we went to a fiddle contest, not really knowing much about fiddling or anything, in North Texas. It was at the North Texas State Fair, and we heard… You know we heard other kids our age playing, and we had been playing the violin for what… What do y’all think, maybe like six months? Maybe?

Grace: Oh it was around a year.

Hulda: It was around a year.

Sophia: Something like that. We were doing the Suzuki Method, which is really great for ear training, especially in the beginning. You know, and…

Hulda: We honestly really just did the ear training. And y’all read a little bit, but I honestly didn’t really.

Sophia: Yeah. It was more of just like, “This note is moving up, and this one’s moving down.” But, I can hear… You know, we just listened to the recordings a lot. And so I think that method’s really great for getting a young musician started with getting their ears going. And so, we just went to check out the fiddle contest, and you know, we were really impressed by like, other kids and other adults like playing, you know, these cool tunes on the same instrument that we played, and so we went and started taking some lessons, and it sort of snowballed from there. You know, with fiddling, and fiddle contests, and-

Hulda: Yeah.

Sophia: Then playing together. Yeah, and yeah.

Christopher: And… For those in our audience who maybe aren’t country aficionados, or folk aficionados, they maybe be wondering, how is it the same instrument, violin and fiddle? Are they different, are they the same? Could you just explain what a fiddle contest was versus a violin competition, maybe?

Sophia: Yeah, yes.

Hulda: Yeah, that’s a good question.

Grace: Well, they’re generally really casual, and fun kind of things. A lot of them are outdoors, and it’s just… They’ll have age groups, so they’ll have kids age groups, and then they’ll have adult groups, and then they’ll you know, just throughout the day, they go through those groups. You play a breakdown, a waltz, and a tune of choice. So you play a variety of different styles of Texas style fiddling. And then, that is for Texas style fiddle contests. There’s old time fiddle contests, different styles of fiddle contests, and, you just compete and then have fun visiting with your friends.

Hulda: Mm-hmm. There’s a lot of jamming and stuff that happens-

Grace: Yeah.

Hulda: You know, afterwards, and at night, and so that’s a lot of the culture of fiddle contests. And contests have changed, you know, a lot over the years, but, yeah that’s still a big part of it. So.

Sophia: Mm-hmm.

Hulda: That’s kind of our first introduction to music, and musicians, was contests.

Sophia: Yeah.

Christopher: Interesting. Okay, so you were able to see this violin that you guys had been playing, played in presumably quite a different way than the Suzuki tapes had been demonstrating.

Sophia: Yes.

Christopher: And were you taking part at that stage? Or you just went, and you were inspired?

Sophia: We just went, and we were just… Well-

Hulda: Not.

Grace: We just went in listening.

Hulda: Yeah.

Sophia: Yeah, we just went and listened. When we heard everybody playing, we’re like, “No. Not, we’re not entering the contest. We don’t know what we’re doing.” But we, we just hung out, and we were in the audience.

Hulda: Yeah.

Sophia: Soaked it in, you know?

Christopher: And one thing I’m always curious about is the kind of home environment musicians are coming from, if there’s some people are born into musical families, that expected them to go on and become pros, others, not at all. It sounds like the three of you were all learning violin at the same time.

Hulda: We did, yeah, you know, usually it would be like the oldest starts, and then the middle, and the youngest, and all that. But, no, we started on the same day, playing Suzuki Method, and then we also started taking fiddle lessons on the same day, and we would always just… We didn’t take a ton of lessons in the beginning, because we lived a ways from our teacher, so we would just go like once a month. Well we would all sit in the same room. So we were all like working on the same material, and that’s obviously how I think the band kind of got started for us, was that, once we had done the contest thing for a while, we were all working and learning on the same music, and so, it made sense for us to start working on arrangements and stuff like that.

Hulda: And so, working on, here’s the lead, here’s the high, here’s the low, and just learning harmony, you know? And making arrangements and then it’s like, once you work up some arrangements, you go play them somewhere. That’s so… We just started playing little gigs around, you know, when we were pretty young, and our first album is an all instrumental album, because we didn’t sing. We just fiddled. So.

Sophia: That was pre-vocals.

Hulda: That was pre-vocals, yeah. I think we recorded that… What year did we record that, Grace?

Grace: 2003.

Sophia: Yeah.

Hulda: Yeah, so I would’ve been 12.

Sophia: Yeah.

Christopher: Amazing. And, what you just described today, you know, the lessons together, the figuring some things out by ear, the getting into arranging three part harmony so early on in your instrument learning, is that normal in that context of learning fiddle in kind of a Texas country style? Or was that unusual?

Sophia: I think what was normal about it, in the sense of like, twin fiddling has been something that a lot people would just do, mostly just kind of casual like, sometimes there’s a twin fiddle division at some contests, and so people will quickly like, be like, “Hey, I’m going to play this part, and do you know this song, and I’ll work out a quick harmony.” And it’s not real… It’s not as like…

Hulda: It’s not super competitive, but it’s really fun.

Sophia: But it’s just something fun to just do like a duo with somebody. And then, so in that sense, that has had a foothold in the tradition of fiddle contests and so forth. But, triple fiddles though, is not something you see very often. Where kind of, us, and maybe the Time Jumpers, they have triple fiddles.

Hulda: Occasionally, yeah.

Sophia: Only groups out there that have triple fiddles. And we had triple fiddles-

Grace: Well there’s probably somebody else.

Hulda: Yeah.

Grace: Listening.

Sophia: I know, I shouldn’t say the only, but, you know, I think we started doing triple fiddles because there were three of us in one house playing the fiddle, so it’s just kind of the natural thing to occur. But we got that from listening to Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, because he had triple fiddles. That was really… He had twin fiddles and triple fiddles always in his band. So, that’s where we kind of started picking up that tradition. Yeah.

Christopher: Gotcha. Well, you said something there about how you might just get together with someone in a duo and work out a harmony part on the spot. I definitely want to circle back to in due course and talk about what that actually looks like, but, those early years when you were learning, clearly you got very good very quickly, and I was reading past interviews with you and articles about you, and there were some really interesting comments. There was one from Sherry McKenzie, who I believe was one of your early teachers, is that right?

Sophia: Mm-hmm.

Grace: Mm-hmm.

Hulda: Mm-hmm.

Christopher: And she said, “Sure, they were talented, but more importantly, they were determined and studious. They aren’t prodigies, they just work really hard.”

Christopher: And I was wondering, is that something you’d agree with? Was it hard work to become as good as you became so quickly?

Grace: I mean, that’s very kind, especially from a teacher, you know, to say, you know. It makes you feel good as a student, for your teacher to say, “You’re working hard.” So, yeah. I think having the three of us to… You know, like Hulda was saying, we all started the same time. And having the three of us all playing together really kept us going. And it kept us inspired and kind of set a pace, you know. So that you know, it’s harder I think when there’s just one kid, and nobody else in the family plays. And no one else in our family plays anything. Our mom is very musically talented, and she wanted to get us started playing an instrument, but…

Hulda: She doesn’t actually play an instrument, but yeah, she does have really good ears.

Grace: She does.

Sophia: Mm-hmm.

Grace: And, so you know, we can thank her. But, we just, we had each other, so that really kept us going, and kind of motivated us, you know, to push through hard times.

Sophia: Yeah.

Hulda: Yeah.

Sophia: Yeah. And yes, I don’t think that we’re musical prodigies or anything.

Hulda: No. Not at all.

Sophia: But, you know, if you enjoy it, and you like, are into something, you can learn almost anything.

Hulda: Yeah.

Sophia: That’s kind of how I look at it. Yeah.

Christopher: Interesting. And, that’s certainly something that’s come through when I’ve watched you guys being interviewed, or read about you, is that you know, you weren’t driven by wanting to become pop stars, or pass exams, or get into a conservatory. You were studious in those years because it sounds like you genuinely really were thrilled by what you were learning.

Hulda: It was the late 1990s and early 2000s, fiddle wasn’t like the most popular thing, so…

Sophia: You have to be into it.

Hulda: You have to kind of be into it to want to do it.

Sophia: You know.

Hulda: It’s actually a lot, you know, with like acoustic music and the resurgence of it coming out, you know, starting with like bluegrass getting popular, like in the early 2000s, mid 2000s, and kind of bubbling over. Now, like acoustic music is kind of really coming back, which is cool.

Sophia: Yeah.

Hulda: But now people are like, “Oh, whoa, you play fiddle, that’s cool.” And I’m like, “Haha. Not as a child, it was not.” So yeah.

Christopher: And you mentioned that you got to recording your first album before vocals really entered the picture. Had you not been performing as vocalists? Or had you literally not been even singing together up until that point?

Grace: We didn’t sing at all, and we didn’t sing together, and it was really… We made our first record that Hulda was mentioning, because we were playing little gigs, and people would say, “Oh, do you have a CD? Do you have any recordings? And we were always like, “No, we don’t.” And enough of our friends and people that liked what we did were saying, “Y’all should record it, y’all should record some stuff.”

Grace: So we did, so that we’d have something to sell at our gigs, and people bought it. So-

Hulda: Yeah.

Grace: We’re like, “Well, we’ll make another one, I guess.” And… Well, it was actually after that, that we got some encouragement from some great musicians we know, to start singing. And so we practiced singing and really, we just started singing the harmonies that we were already playing on fiddle. And, that helped immensely to already be… Have an ear that was sort of trained for harmony, you know, to listen for parts. When we went to go to start singing, but, we were just… We were terrible.

Grace: We said to ourselves, we’ll sing if we like it, and if we sound good. And, it was really a struggle at first.

Hulda: Neither one of those happened at the beginning.

Grace: So we ended up singing and practicing for a year before we ever sang on stage. And then before we… We went for our first… We had a specific performance in mind, is like, “This is where we’re going to debut our singing, and see how it goes.” So before that, we practicing singing over a sound system. We were already used to playing over it, but, you know, it’s so different hearing yourself back through monitors, or through a PA, that-

Hulda: That’s a whole other story right there.

Grace: Yeah, we-

Hulda: Is just learning how to work as acoustic musicians, on a PA system. But, anyways, I butted in.

Grace: Yeah. So, we sang together for a year before we ever went out in public and sang, and that was really useful. And eventually we… We were like, “You know, I think we like this.”

Sophia: We’re ready for it. Yeah that-

Christopher: Amazing.

Sophia: That was a big moment for us, and we were like, “Okay. We’re doing this, this is the gig. We’re going to debut the vocals.”

Hulda: Or going to sing.

Sophia: Yeah.

Christopher: That’s so interesting to hear. So for me, your album Timeless was my first introduction to you, and it is one of my top five albums of all time. Love it. But, from the outset then, I knew you guys as three part harmony singers, and three part harmony fiddlers, and it’s part of the magic of your group, I think, that you do those two things in tracks, and you know, the ear can kind of follow from the voice just to the violins, it’s amazing.

Christopher: But, it’s so fascinating to hear that actually you… The vocals was a late, I mean relatively, to your sound and your skills.

Hulda: Well, you know what, another thing that did inspire us to want to… That kind of carried us through that period where… Because like, Sophia was going to tell a story, I know what story you were going to tell.

Sophia: You can tell it.

Hulda: We have… Because we used to record all of our stuff on tapes, you know, just like tapes in a tape player.

Grace: Cassettes.

Hulda: And we get those little, cassettes. Thank you, that’s the word. We have our early singing tapes labeled as Wretched Singing Tape Number One, Wretched Singing Tape Number Two, and just goes.

Sophia: We recorded everything.

Hulda: We recorded everything. And it sounds so bad. But anyways, I digress. The thing that honestly really inspired us to sing, is we heard the Mills Brothers.

Sophia: And the Sons of the Pioneers.

Hulda: We heard this… Yeah. We were really into the Sons of the Pioneers, and… But then, I do remember, Grace heard the Mills Brothers first, and I remember her coming home and she goes, “Y’all are going to lose your minds. This group is amazing.”

Hulda: And that, they really did it for us. And they still are, to us, probably the best vocal group that’s ever been.

Sophia: The best harmony.

Hulda: Harmony, vocal group.

Sophia: And family harmony, you know, that, and their arrangements were so… They’re so amazing. And they would imitate instruments with their voices, and…

Hulda: To me, that, the imitation thing that they did, was just like an added bonus. But they were incredible just as musicians. But, I digress. But that really is what got us to… Into singing outside of people saying, “Y’all should sing.” So.

Sophia: Yeah.

Hulda: And that was a big factor for… I remember for me-

Sophia: An inspiration.

Hulda: Yeah.

Sophia: Yeah.

Christopher: Gotcha. And, I definitely want to come back and ask you, what changed between Wretched Singing Tape Number One, and your first recorded album, and you’re at the height of your career now. Or hopefully, you know, on the upward trajectory. But I’m curious, so I said to you before we hit record, it’s a bit funny for me to get to talk to you, because I know your voices so well, and I’ve listened to you so much, but I’ve not had names to attach to each of the voices. You know, I never had one of your physical CDs to have liner notes, and know who was singing the lead, or that kind of thing, I don’t know if those are even a thing anymore.

Christopher: But, in kind of prepping for this interview, I think I’ve sleuthed out, and I think, tell me if I’m wrong. I think Grace, as the oldest, you tend to sing the lowest part, and Hulda, as the youngest, you tend to sing the highest part. And was that true on fiddle, and it then came across to voice? How true is that, as a consistent thing? I’m just curious, because I’ve followed your voices and clearly, you said you start out by singing your fiddle parts in harmony. What role do each of you play in the sense of that harmony?

Grace: When we were just playing instrumentally, and still to this day when we do and instrumental, we don’t have to stick to a specific harmony part. We switch it around intentionally when we work up a song, just so that we have some variety in our lives. But when we started singing, that kind of changed things for us, and you’re exactly right. I sang the low part, Hulda sang the lead, so by default Sophia sang… I mean Hulda sang the high parts, so by default Sophia was the lead singer. And we did that for years and years, and it’s only been in our most recent arrangements, and on our new record, that Hulda and I are singing lead parts.

Sophia: That’s great.

Grace: And these days, I… You know, as adults now, my voice, my speaking voice is actually higher, and Hulda’s is actually lower. So, as soon as I get my high voice, you know, vocal chops, in shape, Hulda will turn over some of her parts to me.

Hulda: We’re slowly transitioning right now.

Grace: Yeah. So we’ll probably end up singing those part… You know, like switching, and have Sophia singing more harmonies going forward. But, for now, we kind of share everything a little bit.

Hulda: Mm-hmm.

Sophia: Mm-hmm.

Christopher: Interesting. And I’m really curious to know… I realize to you it’s probably obvious and you take it for granted, but if we go back to that time, maybe the first year or so when you were starting to work on vocal harmony, what did the practicing for that look like? What kinds of things were you listening for, or realizing, you know, you thought sounded wretched? What kind of things was it.

Sophia: Well I’ll tackle that one.

Hulda: To start, tell him about Seth Riggs.

Sophia: Oh, of course.

Grace: Yes.

Hulda: Because-

Sophia: Okay, so the first phase of our vocals, we didn’t know anything. Our fiddle teacher is just… He sings too, but he’s not like singer per se. He’s more of an instrumentalist. But he sort of coached us some in vocals but-

Grace: Then we went to Rosanna.

Sophia: Yeah.

Hulda: Well honestly what we were doing with vocals in the very beginning, especially the Wretched Singing Tapes, we were honestly just imitating… Trying to just listen to the people we liked, and imitate them.

Grace: Yeah.

Sophia: Exactly.

Hulda: And, you know, we just-

Grace: Didn’t have vocal techniques, so we’d run out of air, and we would, you know, sing too loud, and we just didn’t know.

Hulda: Yeah.

Sophia: Yeah.

Grace: But you learn, if you just open your mouths and start singing, you’ll figure things out.

Hulda: Yeah.

Sophia: Exactly.

Hulda: So a lot of those early years for us, was just figuring it out. But, actually our bass player at the time, Drew Phelps, he was talking to us, and he was like, “Y’all should go, take a lesson.” Which, we’re so… We’re so lucky that we have the University of North Texas, which is a… It’s a school, it’s near us, it’s a college-

Sophia: With a great jazz program.

Hulda: And they have a great jazz program. So they have some really good teachers, we’ve actually found a lot of our bass players through that school. So, we… Yeah, they’re great. But, our bass player, Drew, said, “Hey why don’t y’all go take some lessons from the jazz vocal teacher.” Her name is Rosanna Eckert. And, she-

Sophia: One of the best things that we ever did.

Hulda: One of the best things ever. I’m like, “Drew, thank you.”

Sophia: So for any of you… Like, aspiring vocalists out there, I would say, find, you know, a really good teacher, and go take a couple lessons from them. Because we didn’t know… Like, when we made Timeless, I didn’t even know that you had different ranges in your voice. So I didn’t know there was a head voice, and a mid-range, and then a chest voice. Like, so, in spite of our lack of, you know, understanding of the voice and how it works, and proper technique and all, we were able to get that album made. It was a miracle. But, you know, that’s a great learning curve.

Sophia: You know a lot of musicians, a lot of my favorite singers are not really schooled, per se. But if you follow what Hulda said, you know, if you just really try to emulate the people that you like. And, so I’ll get to the Seth Riggs thing, but, I think the best thing during the Wretched Singing phase, was we just recorded our practices, and we recorded all of our lessons, and we listened back to them.

Sophia: And the thing is, is like, hearing yourself on tape, especially when you’re learning a new skill, is… It can be pretty rough. But, it is liberating, in the sense of like, it tells you the truth, and then you really know how to improve, and what to work on. And then when you hear yourself get a little bit better, like two weeks later, or three months, six months later, you’re like, “Oh, whoa, I can’t believe like how much better I sound than then.”

Sophia: Hearing it back can be discouraging in the moment, for sure.

Hulda: Yeah.

Sophia: But, it definitely is the key to really improving. And we had to work on things like, you know, just pronunciation. We had the strongest Texas accents, it was just twangville, and we… You know, and that’s cool, but-

Hulda: You don’t want it… We weren’t trying to sift out our accent, we were just trying to make it sound good-

Sophia: Sound good, you know.

Hulda: And mature, and things like that.

Sophia: And so working on things like pronunciation when we went to Rosanna Eckert-

Hulda: Tell him about speech levels.

Sophia: Yes, she was like, “Hey, you should go buy this book by this extremely famous vocal coach named Seth Riggs.” And he’s out in California, and he wrote a book called Singing for the Stars, and it has an accompanying CD.

Hulda: Sounds cheesy, but it’s actually true.

Sophia: Let me tell you, you can buy it on Amazon. It’s cheap. The book is one of the best vocal technique books, it has… It’s a complete program from A to Z of just like, getting your voice, you know, trying to learn how to have a mixed voice, getting your ranges balanced, just basic little vocal techniques and things that really help. And, that was just immensely huge for us.

Grace: And then tell him about going to

Sophia: Oh my goodness. One day-

Hulda: Well you have to tell Seth’s accolades. He was Michael Jackson’s vocal coach forever. And he… He…

Sophia: He worked with Stevie Wonder.

Hulda: Stevie Wonder.

Sophia: And like, so-

Hulda: Natalie Cole.

Sophia: Yeah.

Hulda: Every, literally when it says Singing for the Stars, he truly was the vocal coach for stars. He was incredible.

Sophia: Oh. Grace want me to tell this story, that I… We had a gig out in LA, and so, I thought, “You know what? I want to see if I can get a lesson with Seth Riggs.” And he was 82 at the time, but he was still teaching, and I thought, “Oh my goodness how incredible.”

Grace: He may still be teaching.

Sophia: He might be.

Hulda: He probably is.

Sophia: But he has the fountain of youth or something going on. But, I picked up the phone one morning, and you know, it’s two hours earlier from Texas, to California. And he answered the phone. He was in his office, and he has a separate office in his backyard, beautiful place, and he just picked up the phone, and I talked… I almost just passed out. It was Seth Riggs on the phone. And we set up a lesson, and we had an hour with him, and it was incredible. He ran us through our vocal ranges, talked to us about, you know, proper pronunciation, and bridging your voice breaks, and…

Hulda: One of the best hours ever of instruction.

Sophia: Yeah.

Hulda: He’s incredible.

Sophia: So, that was immensely helpful.

Hulda: Yeah. And we’re still… caveat. We’re still learning all of these technique things, and-

Sophia: Oh sure.

Hulda: Especially with us trying to switch parts and different things, you know, where some of our ranges, like me, sometimes I tend to get stuck in head voice too much.

Grace: I get stuck in chest sometimes.

Hulda: And then sometimes Grace gets too stuck in chest. So she and I are working on stretching our mixes now, so, you know, there’s stuff on our new record that you know, we took chances and sang things that we were kind of out of our comfort zones, if you will. And so that was… vocally, that was a big challenge for us, for our latest record. And we were… We’re really happy with how it came out, but we… You know, we… Of course we always listen back and we’re like, “The next one’s going to be better.” So, lots of practice.

Sophia: Exactly.

Christopher: Fantastic. And I’m curious to know, you said you took some lessons with a jazz vocal teacher. Some people would see jazz and country as almost polar opposites in terms of style. Why a jazz vocal teacher?

Grace: Really, we already knew stylistically what songs we wanted… What we wanted our songs to sound like. So, we honestly went for technique lessons, and our teacher that Sophia was mentioning, Rosanna Eckert, is fantastic.

Hulda: She actually just wrote a book, too.

Grace: Yeah she did.

Sophia: Yeah.

Grace: And, so she was… Just helped us with technique, because the technique, no matter what you’re singing, you know, will help you. So, really it was, if you have a good technique thing, you can just do… Plug it in where you need it.

Sophia: Exactly.

Hulda: Mm-hmm. That’s what she was teaching us.

Grace: Yes.

Sophia: We never learned any songs, we sang our own songs when going to lessons and stuff, and she was just like, “What do you want to work on?” And so-

Hulda: Yeah.

Sophia: That’s what we did.

Hulda: I think that’s what’s really special about the speech level singing technique, is exactly what Grace said. It’s not genre specific, and we were wanting to find a teacher that could help us with our genres, but we didn’t know a lot of people that specialize in the music of the Sons of the Pioneers.

Sophia: Exactly.

Hulda: So, yeah. Anyways.

Christopher: Gotcha. And, if you don’t mind me asking, how did a trio of fairly young women put all of that together? Clearly you were studious and diligent, but, you know, you were choosing repertoire, you were learning fiddle, and improving, you were arranging things, you were learning to sing as well as fiddle at a top level, you were, I think already touring quite a lot. Did you have like a strong manager who was helping make you stay organized? Because I know at that age, I was not… I would not have been capable of half of that.

Grace: I mean we did, the three of us didn’t have like, a goal of like starting a band when we started playing. We were just playing music, and that was just part of our daily life. And it was really just because like, Hulda and Sophia were saying, we took lessons together, and we would sit in on each other’s lesson part of that. And, so we kind of stayed up to speed, and then our teacher was like, “You know, why don’t y’all learn something in harmony? That’d be fun.” And we’re like, “Yeah, that sounds fun.”

Grace: So we started playing together, and it really was our teacher, Joey McKenzie, who was, you know, had it in his mind like, this would be a good song as a next song to learn. This next song that we’ll work out, will teach you this next skill. And so, those kind of things. It was really his thinking ahead, and being like, “This will build on this.” And then, helping us, you know, go out and play. He would play with us, as you know, and he played in our band for years. So it was really him that got us going.

Hulda: Yeah.

Sophia: And he did our arrangements for us while we were… While he was in the band and everything.

Grace: But we did it-

Hulda: It was collaborative.

Grace: We learned because we did it during our lessons.

Sophia: Mm-hmm.

Grace: So, he would work out stuff, and we would learn it, and then he would work out another part. So we really learned just by watching and doing it with him, how that works.

Hulda: And I think for people that aren’t, you know, students, because everybody’s different and not everyone has access to a great teacher, or you can’t afford it, you know? There’s elements of those things at play. But I think if you really do want to study music, being able to find people just to play with, that are, maybe, you know, little bit better than you, or a lot better than you. And, people that maybe they’re not exactly into your style of music, but at least you can play together, and you know, bounce things off each other and learn. Because, you know, not everyone has access to a teacher.

Hulda: But for us, I think also a big thing to add onto what Grace said, is they really introduce us to a lot of different music. And that is… That, honestly, is probably the biggest thing that, looking back, I’m like, “Well how did we get into these styles of music?” Because, our family didn’t play music. You know, our mom liked music, but it wasn’t like a huge thing in our household.

Sophia: Yeah.

Hulda: So it wasn’t like, you know, our parents had some amazing record collection, and we found all this stuff. But it was really our teacher just going, “Well, you like fiddle, you like fiddle music. Why don’t you listen to western swing? Why don’t you listen to swing music? Why don’t you listen to some jazz? Why don’t you listen to some country?”

Hulda: I remember we had a bass player, this guy that was playing bass with us, who’s really nice, and his name was Mike Grimes. He’s such a sweetheart. But, he introduced us to the Beatles. He was like, “I think you girls would like this record. Here’s Sergeant Pepper’s.”

Hulda: We were just like, “What?”

Sophia: This is awesome.

Hulda: Is this? I remember we went into our lesson, and we were like, “Hey, Joey, Sherry, have you heard of this band called the Beatles?”

Hulda: And I just remember the looks on their faces, were like, “Yeah. Yes, we have.”

Hulda: “They’re really good.” And the obsession began from there, with like, not only listening to American roots music, but like listening to you know, rock and roll, and…

Sophia: We were listening to Ella Fitzgerald, too, early on.

Hulda: They really did curate and introduce us to people. Like Sherry was the one that pulled out the Mills Brothers and was like, “You would like this.”

Sophia: They burned off CDs and they would give us. Now I know-

Hulda: We’re not supposed to do that.

Sophia: Well, just you know, as good-

Hulda: They did, they would rip records, and take records that’s like recordings that you can’t find, or you know, this is also early 2000s, so stuff wasn’t as accessible.

Sophia: Well, when I mean burned off CDs, I’m saying like, take, make compilation CDs of like, this is the best of George Jones, or this is the best of like, you know, the Sons of the Pioneers, or, Fair and Young. And so, we got you know, a catalog of music as young musicians just learning, soaking things in, that really I think set us up for just developing your ear, and I think it’s also really important to listen to kind of, really try to listen to kind of the highest quality of whatever music is available in that genre that you’re interested in. Because, whatever you listen to really does… It seeps into you, and it’s going to come out in your playing. So it’s just sort of like…

Hulda: It’s building your taste.

Sophia: It’s building your taste. It’s really important just to build good taste, and i think that’s what you were saying, you know? They really introduced us to a lot of great music, and that still-

Grace: That shaped us.

Sophia: Yeah.

Hulda: Yeah.

Christopher: That’s so interesting to hear, and I love that you mentioned the Beatles there. We did a series of episodes on this show earlier this year all about the Beatles, where I interviewed like the world’s top experts on the Beatles to try and figure out, like, where did these aliens come from? And how were they so incredible?

Christopher: And I think you’d be pleased to hear, like if I had to sum up in one line, the conclusion of that series, it was, they spent five years exposing themselves to all kinds of different music, and getting incredible ears, and everything kind of followed from there. And it sounds like you had a similar experience there, where you weren’t just… Because Joey, I believe, was like a champion, multi time champion fiddle player, right? World champion. So it wasn’t just that you had an amazing teacher, it was also that they were exposing you in this way, to a much broader range than just the style you knew you wanted to do.

Hulda: And then, once you know, once the internet entered our home, and our… We had a computer, and then it was like, “Oh, well, let’s start what we really do.” And honestly, literally this is what I do today. Whenever I get into an artist, we all three do this, is you get into somebody, you hear a song, and then you’re like, “Oh, I love this.”

Hulda: Well I go to Wikipedia, and I read who are their influences, who do they talk about. And then it’s just backtracking, because that’s how we found the Boswell Sisters. I remember we were listening to Ella Fitzgerald, and I Googled her, and she said one of her favorite vocalists was Connie Boswell. Which, the Boswell Sisters, for your listeners and viewers, they were also a three sister sibling act. And they were really early in the days of early jazz, and so… But their arranging was very progressive. So-

Sophia: Vocal wise for sure.

Hulda: Vocal wise for sure. And they were great vocalists. So anyways, Connie Boswell was a huge influence on Ella. So I was like, “Well of course, I’m going to go listen to Connie.” So, that’s what we did, and I still do that to this day. I’m… Yeah. It’s… That’s the never ending fun of the internet.

Christopher: That is awesome. The Quebe Sisters were how I discovered the Andrews Sisters, was how I discovered the Boswell Sisters, so that’s awesome.

Sophia: Wow cool. See? Yeah.

Christopher: I’d love to talk a bit about your style then. So you were immersed in this world of Texas style fiddling, and being exposed to all kinds of different music. And these days, I believe you would describe your style as progressive western swing. Can you explain for the listener, what that means? What kind of music are we talking about? Because I’m sure by this point, if they haven’t already run off to QuebeSisters.com to hear, they’re wondering, like, well what does this all sound like?

Grace: Well, the reason we give that moniker to what we do, is because I feel like what we’re doing in our band, is really keeping alive the tradition that was really started by Bob Wills, and that is he took everything that was presently around him, and all of his influences, and put them together. And, so today, if we’re really going to be authentic to western swing, you have to keep bringing in. And we’ve spent many years listening, and working to play stylistically correct, but then, we want to not just play those old songs exactly in the same way, or only play those old songs, because that’s not stylistically what they were doing. That makes the style into a museum piece, and, if we want it to be alive in the future, which, we love western swing, we do. So we want to keep bringing stuff in, we want to keep… We want to be just like they were, which is, where are we right now, and what are our influences?

Hulda: We want to be relatable today.

Grace: Play from our roots, and then bring stuff in, and that’s why it was popular then, it was pop music of it’s time. And so, I mean, I think the way to keep it alive is it should be, you know, flourishing right now. So we want to be exactly like them. And, because there is a lot of, I would say a lot of recordings out there in the western swing category, we just want to kind of give ourselves a bit of differentiation, or a bit of a explanation, for folks that might think western swing, and just think, “Oh I’m only going to hear Bob Wills arrangements, or something.” To kind of give them a heads up. Hey, you are going to hear that, I mean obviously we play triple fiddles. But-

Sophia: Yeah.

Grace: You’re also going to hear us bringing in new stuff, and keeping it, trying to keep it fresh.

Sophia: New songs, yeah.

Hulda: Yeah.

Sophia: Mm-hmm.

Christopher: Gotcha. And for the death metal fans, in out audience, who’ve never heard western swing, what does western swing mean? Like what kind of music are we talking about here? It’s something related to country, clearly, but what would define it?

Sophia: Well-

Hulda: Oh, man.

Sophia: I would say, western swing is… It’s an amalgamation of the blues, folk, for lack of… For like the most broad term, like old time string band.

Hulda: Like early folk. Yeah.

Sophia: Where you… It was just like banjos, and guitars, and that sort of thing. Not bluegrass. Like early, early string band.

Hulda: Like Jimmy Rogers.

Sophia: Early string band kind of music. And then, western swing brought in drums, because it was extremely influenced by the pop music of the day, which was like, swing. It was the big band era, it was like Benny Goodman, and so, they were like the country version of Benny Goodman. Everybody’s… Bob Wills actually wanted to call it country jazz, and it got dubbed western swing, and that name has stuck.

Sophia: But, it was basically swing music played on country instruments, and it was a mixture between hard percussion like the big bands had, acoustic string instruments and electrified instruments. Which, was something that had never really been blended together. So like the steel guitar kind of got its…

Hulda: Hawaiian music got it… Was brought in-

Sophia: Exactly.

Hulda: Because they were musicians that went to war, and they traveled across different places, and they found the steel guitar, and you know, stationed in Hawaii and different things like that. And so they brought that back. Guitar players started playing steel guitar. So that’s a huge… And one day, we would love to have a steel guitar in our band. It’s kind of… That might be a next step for us, but…

Grace: But back to western swing, there’s a couple of genres she missed. So, there’s also western music.

Sophia: That’s true.

Grace: You mentioned swing music. I feel like that a big influence-

Hulda: Dixieland.

Grace: Yes.

Sophia: Dixieland. Blues, I did mention blues.

Grace: A big influence on western swing is just geographically where it’s located. There’s a lot of cool Spanish tunes in the music, too, and there’s a lot influence, so you hear like Spanish two-step…

Sophia: Mariachi tunes, like-

Grace: Like Jesse Polka. All of those are… They’re in Texas style fiddling, and they’re also in western swing. So there’s a big influence of that, as well. So they took their regional, and then they took whatever they heard on records, and just stuffed it all in there.

Sophia: Yeah.

Hulda: Mm-hmm. It’s really truly like a melting pot. Which is kind of funny, because rock and roll did kind of kill western swing, as far as the popularity of it, because everyone heard rock and roll, and they went into that, and the dance style changed, because western swing is basically, at the end of the day-

Grace: It’s dance music.

Hulda: It’s dance music. Just like all the other styles that they were mentioning, are all dance styles. So, but, that’s kind of, the dance style changed, and I was actually talking to a friend of mine, his name is Ray Bingham, he’s booked, he’s a booker, and he books tons of people. But-

Sophia: Booking agent.

Hulda: Yeah, he’s a booking agent. Not a booker. That sounds like a… Gambling. But, no, we were just… I was just talking to him, and he goes, “Yeah, you know, when western swing kind of got killed off by rock and roll…” And he kind of lived it, because he’s a little bit older, and so, I just thought that was interesting way of describing like, why it kind of isn’t as popular now. But I feel like we’re… Especially with the way acoustic music is going, it’s a really cool time for us to be a band, because so many people in their own way are kind of… Because everyone has access to everything now, because of the internet, everyone’s kind of throwing different things into their style.

Hulda: So you know, like bluegrass has gotten really progressive. So for us to say we’re a progressive western swing band, is… It’s fun. And I feel like at a lot of festivals and stuff, are being really open-minded, having us, you know, bluegrass festivals are now hiring, get this western swing band to come play. And so, and we fit in at folk festivals, and you know, all kinds of different things. And we played a blues cruise, we played Delbert McClinton’s cruise.

Sophia: That was so fun.

Hulda: And that was so fun, and we’re not like a… We’re not a blues band. So, you know, for them to have us, it just kind of felt like a good validation, that what we’re trying to aspire to do, you know, people are getting excited about, which is cool.

Sophia: Yeah.

Christopher: It’s so cool to hear about that, and, to me, like country as a genre, where the artists of today are particularly respectful of everyone that’s gone before them, like much more so than you’d see in rock and roll, or pop. Like there’s a real reverence I feel, for the traditions of country, and rightly so. But, it’s so cool to hear that actually that progressive nature, and that melting pot that you guys are bringing to the table, is actually right there in the roots. It’s not that you’re going against the tradition, you’re very much keeping to it.

Sophia: Yeah, they were writing songs, and they weren’t just like, “Oh this is our little pool of repertoire and we’re only going to play out of that.” They were writing songs, and, you know, throwing in new instruments, and shaking things up.

Hulda: I mean Bob Wills was the first person to bring drums on the Grand Ole Opry.

Sophia: Yeah.

Hulda: And if anyone knows the history of the Grand Ole Opry, it’s like the mother radio show of all country music. And it’s like, wow, so.

Sophia: Yeah.

Hulda: That kind of sums it up.

Christopher: Awesome, well, I want to hear, maybe some of the specifics or examples of what you guys are bringing to the mix now, when we talk in a moment about your new album. But before we do, I’d love to talk a little bit more about harmony, because we’ve touched on the fact that you guys started out with Joey, your teacher, arranging them with you, arranging the songs, and the harmony parts. But you also made reference to how, you know, at a festival, you might just get together with another fiddle player and figure out some harmony. And I think what our audience would be most curious to know is, how do you guys think about harmony? Are you coming at it, for example, from a very music theory perspective, where you’re thinking about what the chord is, and what the progressions are allowed to be? Are you thinking in terms of intervals? Are you just trusting your ear, and experimenting? What does it look like for you guys to put together a new arrangement?

Hulda: I’m going to let Sophia answer this.

Hulda: Me personally, I am… I do everything by ear. I’m not that educated when it comes to chords and things. I’m actually in the process of learning more about that. It’s not an element of music that comes easily to me, if we’re being real honest. But, all the harmony and chords and stuff, I do, especially because we have been exposed to so much of music, that I just kind of naturally think, and I’m starting now to learn, like, oh, where are my ear naturally goes in arranging. It’s like, “Oh, that’s a common thing in western swing.” Like, we have six chords, and all that stuff. So, that’s me. But they, Sophia and Grace too, can talk more about it. And I’m learning, so I just kind of take a second step to them on this one.

Sophia: Well, so about our harmonies, Hulda kind of gave me the foundation there. We have always just done everything by ear. But over the past few years, I’ve started to like, teach myself some piano, and guitar chords and stuff, so that I can… I think that it’s really important to start to get a grasp of like, the chords that you’re working with, just because it can start to open up new ways to stack harmonies, you know? With, you know, if you put the lead in the middle, which is what we typically do with our vocals, at least, and then have a third above, you know, and maybe a fifth below, that’s often how we stack things, but we’re experimenting now with other ways to stack things.

Sophia: We’re experimenting with harmonies that aren’t necessarily parallel. I call it parallel, I don’t know if that’s the, you know, the textbook term, but it’s basically like, the harmonies follow exactly where the melody is going. But, some songs, you know, just for diversity, we’re doing harmonies that sort of weave in and out of each other. And that’s really beautiful.

Hulda: Playing with octaves, too. Like sometimes-

Sophia: Yeah.

Hulda: Taking a second harmony, and since Grace and I are trying to switch parts, actually what I’ve been doing in order to kind of take our sound and make it a little less high sounding, because we’re all three with the… Kind a… I guess we all have what you would say soprano voices.

Sophia: Mm-hmm.

Grace: Mm-hmm.

Hulda: So what I’ve done recently on, especially some of our old arrangements, is just take my second harmony, and sing a lower octave of it. And you know, like some of the notes are a little too low, but you know, for a live show, you can ghost one or two notes. But of course, you know, in recordings you can’t do that. But, that’s kind of been a fun thing that I’ve been doing recently.

Sophia: But I think now, it’s… When we’re working on arrangements now, I think what we generally do first is, you know, if we want to do it, let’s say if we want to kind of follow the way we have done it, as far as where our strengths lie, Hulda’s really fast with hearing the high harmony part. You can grab those real quick. Grace is really fast with grabbing the low harmony part. I feel like my ear hears harmony really well, but I’ve sung tons of lead, but one thing I always did, was I always followed everything that my sisters were doing, and kind of like, memorized it along with them, just because I wanted to know, and hear what was going on.

Hulda: Yeah. We can play each other’s parts.

Sophia: Yeah. And so, that you know, that just develops your ears. I think now, when we’re trying to branch out from sort of like, the way we used to always stack our harmonies, sandwich harmony with the lead in the middle, and sort of like the parallel, you know, sometimes it does… Most of the time, we can just let our ears tell us what we want, you know, what we need to do. But sometimes, you run into a spot where there’s several different chord inversions that you could try, and so, our bass player Daniel Parr, and our guitar, Simon Step, you know, they’ll sit there, and they’ll be… They’ll try all kinds of different chords, and when we get to a place with the song, that where, we’re satisfied, and they’re satisfied as the rhythm section, with the chord voicings that they’re using, and choices for the song, then we’ll go, “Okay. Now in this one spot where, there’s several different ways you could do the harmony, now we’ve got the chord nailed down, and, then usually, we just hear what it is. You know, Simon will play, or Dan will play on the piano. He’s a good piano player.

Hulda: Yeah, he is.

Sophia: And if we get stumped though, Dan is actually… He’s a very-

Hulda: He’s real fast at it.

Sophia: Good musician. And he’ll go to the piano, and he’ll be like, “You know, maybe one of you try this note or that note.” But a lot of times we can hear it, even though we might not technically know all the theory behind it.

Hulda: Yeah.

Sophia: But we’re getting to a point where, just writing off our ears, is holding us back a little bit. So that’s why we’re all trying to learn some theory, and that sort of thing. Because it just can kind of… Ears are the most important thing when it comes to hearing harmony. But the second thing is just a little bit of knowledge-

Hulda: Knowledge is helpful.

Sophia: Of what’s going on, can help just open up more different ways to approach your harmony.

Hulda: Yeah.

Sophia: And different…

Hulda: Well it was fun for the album.

Sophia: Voice leading and stuff.

Hulda: We did a song called, well Sophia and Dan wrote, and we were kind of all involved with you know, just listening and bouncing back ideas, but it’s called, song called “Load at 7 (Leave at 8)”. It’s an instrumental tune, it’s just fun. And, the inspiration for that song originally was we were just listening to a lot of steel guitar players. And we were like, “Oh it’d be fun to do something that had…” You know, maybe a sound that, you know, we can kind of echo a little bit what a steel guitar would sound like, in the way that we write the song, and in the way that we arrange the harmonies in the parts over it.

Hulda: So, I mean, we had some… We just were… It was basically just riff based arranging. So, we were just kind of playing and coming up with ideas, and we would listen to some recordings, and you know, there’s so many great… That’s a subgenre, of a subgenre, but, instrumental steel guitar music, is really cool.

Grace: It’s cool.

Sophia: That tune was more of like, we wanted to write, Dan and I were like, “Let’s write a western swing instrumental.” So we went and listened to a bunch of stuff, and then we were like, “Well blues form is probably one of the easiest forms to just start humming ideas over.” So we started just like, you know humming things, and you know, just noodling around on our instruments and stuff. And then recording licks and ideas and putting it together. And then we did steel… Some steel guitar stuff.

Hulda: Yeah.

Sophia: And threw it in there, and, you know, you can just draw. Steel guitar has really weird harmony. Now that, Load at 7 doesn’t have that much weird harmony. But, we did…

Hulda: That was the original idea-

Sophia: Get the inspiration. That’s true.

Hulda: And then it kind of led in to… And it morphed in, which I mean, that’s how all writing and arranging goes.

Sophia: A lot of it is editing. Editing out what doesn’t work. You know? You have to be willing… I love this quote from Paul McCartney, where he was like, “Having a co-writer,” He was talking about John Lennon, he’s like, “You just need somebody to tell you when it’s rubbish.” And I was like, what a great way to look at it. That’s just so true, you know, with your band mates or whatever. So.

Christopher: That is so cool to get an insight into how you guys approach your arranging. And that Wretched Singing Tape Series, sticking in my head, because you said, you know, the ears are the most important thing. And clearly at that point you had an ear for harmony, from playing fiddle, where, you know, the tuning of each note is 100% up to you, and, you know, literally one of my happiest memories in my 20s, is when I first started doing ear training, and my ears started waking up. And I would listen to that Timeless album, and a track like Georgia On My Mind, and I would just be like, “Wow.” But, it was really challenging, because, there are moments where your voices blend so beautifully it can be hard to pick apart the three notes, and to follow just one of them. Or to understand, what’s the relationship between them.

Christopher: And that makes me want to ask like, clearly at that time, you had the ear to be singing the right notes, and getting them in tune, like in a technical sense. But, something we talk about a lot here on the show, is that, you know, music, like really great music making, isn’t just about hitting the right notes at the right time. There’s a lot more to it, and a lot more to the difference between a good performance, and an amazing one. And, I wonder if you can think back, or even think about it now, and the transition you’ve all gone through in terms of your style. What do you listen for? And what have you improved in to go from those earliest days, where you were probably technically correct, but not happy with how it was sounding, to how you sound now?

Sophia: Yeah.

Hulda: Grace, you got to talk about Duffy.

Grace: Making our recent record, we really wanted to have a great dance feel, and we feel like we’re still striving for that as a band. But, we wanted to find, you know, we wanted to really… We want to be authentic in that respect, because that’s where western swing is, that’s its bedrock, is dance music. And so, we felt like, because people aren’t going out and dancing to music you know, we play you know, concert.

Hulda: Yeah, it’s turned into a concert hall type music.

Grace: And so, it’s not… It’s not the same thing anymore. It’s not the same venues, and so, for us, we’re kind of fish out of water, trying to learn it. It’s not like we just get on bandstand with older musicians and they show us, and we learn, and you know. So we were really fortunate that our bass player, Daniel Parr, like you mentioned, he was doing some research and came across a YouTube comment, mentioning this great drummer named Duffy Jackson. So he started looking him up and found these amazing videos of him playing with Count Basie, and then, we started trying to find where he was, and Dan got in touch with him.

Grace: He lives in Nashville, and, we’ve made several trips out there over the past year to see him. And we sat down with him, and, just learned a wealth of information from him, and to hear him play, he’s still playing amazing, and to hear him play, and to hear his stories about scatting with Ella Fitzgerald, is… It’s amazing. And then, really, but to feel him play, is what… You start to feel, this is what dance music is supposed to feel like when it’s live. And, so that has been a huge influence on our rhythm section, and ourselves as well. We studied it all together just as much. And, but having, like the whole band focusing on that same thing, has been really revolutionary, and we’re still on that road. We feel like we got some of that feel, and like a happiness in our new album. But, it’s not like, pure raging swing music. But, one of these days, hopefully, that people will just get up and start dancing at our shows, because they can’t help it.

Hulda: Yeah, that’s honestly our goal.

Sophia: Yeah.

Hulda: But, you know what Grace was saying, and what you were asking, you know, talking about, you were saying you know, harmony is more than just notes, and intonation. And for us, with our new arranging, with the songs that we picked, just everything, this kind of shift for us, with this new album, started with us, with the feel thing. And I know it sounds kind of… It’s hard to kind of explain a little bit, but, we’re approaching everything from a feel based mindset, so all of the way that we sing together. We used to be… We used to say things like, “Well, we need to be tight. Well we need to be together, or-”

Sophia: Or you’re dragging-

Hulda: Or you’re dragging, or you’re rushing. And so different things like that. Well, you know the typical things that you would think of that you would need to work on when you’re singing close harmony, of different forms and shapes.

Sophia: Or playing.

Hulda: Or playing.

Hulda: But, you do need to think about some of those things, but, we’re learning, and especially working with Duffy, that, the more you understand about rhythm, that actually the better-

Sophia: The groove.

Hulda: The groove, the better you sing together. But it’s not like, it’s not where… Because we used to do things like, the lead person, we’re going to follow you, as harmony singers. I need to follow whatever Sophia leads. Well now we’re learning that, if Sophia is currently… If she’s in the right pocket, I don’t need to follow her anymore, we will automatically sync up. And so, a lot of our… Just the way that we worked on the album, everything, all of the technical elements, we have put them through the lens of feel, if that makes any sense.

Grace: Specifically the feel that Hulda is talking about, I mean we’re talking about swing feel. We’re talking about a triplet based feel. And, growing up, you know, in a non-dance environment, you know, you just… There are things that’ve been lost, and we’re trying to get those back. Because we miss, when we hear our playing, we miss that, that we feel from the old recordings. So, we… Well I remember one of the most revolutionary things Duffy’s ever told us, was, you know, that the band is syncing, you know, it’s not the one and the three, it’s the lees of a triplet. So, if a triplet’s like, “Do-di-lee”, it’s “Do-di-lee.” So, “Do-di-lee, do-di-lee, do-di-lee, do-di-lee.

Grace: Yeah, so, it’s like this moving thing, so you can have like, the low end has this continuity to it, and the one can move. It’s not a metronomic thing, so, if you’re going to try to do swing music, what the whole band is anchoring on, is like the lee.

Sophia: The and.

Grace: The and of the triplet. One and a two, and a three. So-

Sophia: So I guess for the listeners, if this sounds like gibberish, it would be like, if you have like a bar of rhythm, so like every… A quarter note would be like, one, two, three, four. If you think of the ands, but you swing them, it’s like, a one, a two, a three, a four, a one. And the inside of that, is the triplet. So, a do-di-lee, do-di-lee, do-di-lee, do-di-lee, do. And so Duffy just was giving us these basic things. We don’t feel like we have it down yet, but it just… If you go back to like, tying all of this in to like what you’re listening for, and then Grace, I didn’t want to hijack your story, you can go back to that. But, it really… Learning this stuff has changed how we listen to music.

Grace: And how we talk about it.

Sophia: Listen to each other while we’re playing with each other.

Grace: Yes. So it’s really influenced-

Hulda: It’s a lot more fun way to practice.

Grace: The vocabulary that we use, as a band.

Sophia: It’s kind of more simple.

Grace: It’s been really fun, and we’ve all done it together, which I feel like is one of the reasons why we were able to go in the studio. It was also part of the reason we did this. We had a goal to go in and record all together in one room, and we were so fortunate to find a studio where… In Austin.

Sophia: So great.

Grace: It’s an amazing place, and, they… All their gear, everything, nothing that we used in the whole session, I think is any newer than like the 40s. It’s all amazing vintage gear. And so, there… Obviously it’s going to come out sounding like an old record, but in order for it to feel like an old record-

Hulda: We had to play.

Grace: Yeah, in order for us to be able to do it all together in one room, the whole band had to be like focused on feeling stuff the same way. So we’ve all been doing this together, and growing, and that’s been really fun.

Sophia: Yeah. And as you… I feel like as you start to be more aware of feel, and when we say feel, we’re talking about, how does it make you feel when you listen to like your favorite records. One of my favorite songs that we were listening to for inspiration, on… I’ll jump back to, or you could tell them about like, the song list that we had for…

Hulda: Oh yeah, where is that?

Sophia: But, jumping back-

Hulda: I need to get that.

Sophia: To kind of what Hulda was saying, all the songs that we listened to for inspiration, particularly there’s this one tune called Moanin’. That was written by this great jazz piano player named Bobby Timmons. And, that recording is with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. And that recording of Moanin’ is so great. And we listened to that a lot, because it helped us get the feel for one of the songs that we were doing, Lullaby of the Leaves. And, we’re nowhere as good as Art Blakey and his band, but, you know, you can dream, right? You know?

Sophia: And, but we listened to that, and we would sit there, and we would just groove before we started the song. And you start to feel like… You don’t try to make your body move, you just let your body move to the music, however it wants to move to the music. And then, you pick up your instrument, and you count off the song, and you try to just keep that same feeling going. Because often, we realized, and we started to play, our attentions, and our efforts would go into trying to execute the song. You have all these desires, and you know, how you want it to sound and I’m worried I’m going to-

Hulda: You think about performance related stuff.

Sophia: Yeah. And you get away from like the pure flow of the music coming out, and you actually hinder your own groove. And so, we used a lot of these songs to try to… As a little, because we feel like we’re-

Grace: Like a springboard.

Sophia: Beginners at it.

Hulda: Like a springboard, yeah.

Sophia: It’s sort of like a little runway, to get you going. And I think, it’s not only a really fun way to practice, and it’s inspiring, but, it really helps you tap in to the real artistry of what’s going on beneath all of the mechanics of you know, just playing the song, and trying to be in tune, and stuff like that, you know.

Hulda: Yeah.

Sophia: Yeah.

Christopher: Fantastic. I… I’m sure our audience are already convinced to run off to QuebeSisters.com and or Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, wherever they can buy the new album, which is self titled, The Quebe Sisters. But I wonder if we can just tell them a little bit more to whet their appetite. You know, if they’re in the car driving, and they can’t do that right now, let’s get them even more excited. And it was really cool to hear a little bit of the story behind Load at 7 (Leave at 8). Are there any other kind of origin stories of the songs, or songs that demonstrate how you guys are bringing a new flare to western swing, or anything like that?

Hulda: Yeah. The album, it definitely does have a diverse kind of song list on it. One song was written by Jesse Harris, great songwriter. He’s wrote for Nora Jones, Willie Nelson supported his stuff. So he sent us some tunes, and it’s called Always Seem to Get Things Wrong. It was not a western swing tune, it was just a singer songwriter, I mean you can go pull it up on Spotify, and listen to Willie’s version of it. But, we heard it, and we said, “Yeah. This could… We could turn this into something that’s a western swing tune.” So, that was fun for us, that was new.

Hulda: Lullaby of the Leaves is a swing tune, it… So, but we-

Sophia: An old jazz tune.

Hulda: Like an old jazz tune. But we did it, you know, a little bit more western swing feel. The original… There’s, we have some originals on the album. One of them was, a tune you wrote My Love, My Life, My Friend. It’s a great song, and Sophia just wrote it, and you brought it to the table, you were playing guitar. And, it was just kind of… it sounded just like a country tune. Like maybe-

Sophia: Just a simple country tune.

Hulda: Yeah, just a simple country tune, and I… It was either me, or it might’ve been Grace, I don’t remember, but, we said, “Why don’t you turn that into a country shuffle?” Because shuffle music, we actually… Shuffle music was probably my favorite genre of as a child growing up. And I’m being for real.

Sophia: You’ve got to tell him what shuffle music is.

Hulda: Shuffle music is like Ray Price. That is, Ray Price, Night Life.

Sophia: Or country shuffle.

Hulda: Country shuffle.

Sophia: There’s jazz shuffle, and blues shuffle.

Grace: That’s a great country shuffle right there.

Hulda: Yeah, Ray Price, Night Life album, that’s a great country shuffle album. There are a lot of country shuffle artists. Ray Price being probably the pinnacle, you know, there’s Faron Young, there’s all these different artists. But we loved Johnny Paycheck. Love Paycheck. And, we listened to them a lot, because they have a lot of fiddling. There’s a great fiddle player, his name is Tommy Jackson, and, he kind of started the country shuffle fiddling. And it was this single note-

Hulda: Kind of long bow fiddling. If you’re really nerdy about styles, it’s different than Texas style. It’s different than old time.

Sophia: Or western swing.

Hulda: Or western swing. It is it’s own thing. We really got into that. But triple fiddles are also popular in country shuffle music. So, we also, we were, when we first started out playing, I think the… One more time?

Hulda: We played shuffles really early on. Because we’ve always liked shuffles. So when Sophia brought that tune at the table, I was like, “Do it as a shuffle.” And of course Simon and Dan laid down a shuffle beat, and that’s what it turned in to. So.

Sophia: I thought that made it, that really kind of made it a little more interesting. And then, the other… We have three originals on the record, and then the third one is one called Pierce the Blue, that I wrote. And it’s… It’s kind of… It actually is a waltz. I didn’t realize that until after it was written, and then I realized that it was actually a waltz, but, it’s more of a… It, I guess it is a country tune, but it doesn’t really fall in that vein so much. It more has a little bit of, what would y’all say?

Hulda: It’s a little more singer songwriter-y.

Sophia: Yeah, it has a little bit of that element because, you know, I probably was listening to some Bob Dylan at the time, or something like that. And it has very simple-

Hulda: We listened to a lot of Willie Nelson songs, songwriting, which is like-

Sophia: Oh yeah. We love(Willie Nelson).

Hulda: The pinnacle of country singer songwriter music. I mean, like, the IRS Tapes is one of my favorite albums. It’s just him and a guitar, and it’s devastatingly gorgeous.

Sophia: I think that that, like listening to Willie and his songwriting, really influenced like, that tune, too. That, thank you for remembering that. But then, you know, I… I wasn’t fully satisfied with all the lyrics, and so, Grace, you know, I kind of… We had a little writing sesh and she just threw me a bunch of really great ideas and we built, you know, some lyrics off of that, that finished the song out. So, that’s our… That’s what you were saying.

Grace: That’s the story of it.

Hulda: That’s the story of it.

Christopher: Fantastic. And you have videos, really great videos for My Love, My Life, My Friend, and Pierce the Blue on YouTube now, that I would definitely recommend people check out, because like I said, you know I… I was about to say “I grew up listening to your music”, I’m not sure that’s quite true, it was a bit more recent than that! But, I listened to your music mostly just pure audio, but now we have YouTube, you can go and watch the Quebe Sisters perform.

Christopher: Speaking of which, are you out on tour? I know you’re some of the busiest musicians I’ve come across in times of tour dates. Which, I’m always like kicking myself, you’re in the US, rather than Europe, or I would be there. But, what’s coming up for you apart from the very exciting album release?

Hulda: I mean, we’re touring in Texas right now. We’re going to be going to the East Coast some this fall, we’re going out to California, we actually just booked a bunch of dates in California. Just touring everywhere. New Mexico, Arizona…

Grace: We’re going to be on a cruise in January? That’ll be fun.

Hulda: January, yeah. The Cayamo? Am I saying it right?

Sophia: Yeah.

Hulda: Cayamo Cruise, that’s going to be really fun if anybody wants to splurge and come on a cruise with us. It is going to be really fun.

Sophia: I mean there’s so many musicians on that cruise, of all genres.

Hulda: Oh, it’s going to be great.

Sophia: It’s going to be really cool.

Grace: So we’re staying busy.

Hulda: Yeah.

Sophia: Yeah.

Grace: And we’d love to come back over to your side of the water.

Hulda: Yeah.

Grace: We have had so much fun touring over in England and Europe, and hopefully we’ll make it back over there.

Sophia: We would love to.

Hulda: It’s a goal. It’s probably… Hopefully within the next couple years we’ll be able to do that for sure.

Christopher: Terrific. Well I will be front and center, clearly, in the audience.

Christopher: Thank you so much, ladies. You have an album coming out tomorrow, I can’t imagine how busy you are, but you’ve made the time today and shared so generously with our audience. So, we’d just, a huge thank you, and a last recommendation for everyone to head to QuebeSisters.com, and of course we’ll have a link in the show notes tonight. To hear the new album, the Quebe Sisters, thank you so much.

Hulda: Thank you so much.

Grace: Thank you so much.

Sophia: Thank you so much.

Hulda: This was fun.

Sophia: We appreciate it, thanks Christopher.

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The post In Perfect Swinging Harmony, with The Quebe Sisters appeared first on Musical U.

Jeffrey was a professional French horn player, to the level of becoming a college professor in horn at the University of Iowa in 2000 – before realising that his heart just wasn’t in it for years and decades of repeating the same classical music repertoire and performances. That led to his exploring and developing ways for classical music players to begin improvising, not by switching their attention to jazz, but in ways that were fully compatible with their classical music perspective but set them free of the sheet music.

When we interviewed Jeffrey for EasyEarTraining.com back in 2016, we called the post “Game Your Way To Impressive Improvising” – because we wanted to make the point that a game-based approach to learning to improvise is not just a frivolous way to have fun but a highly effective way to learn to improvise. Improvising is not a distraction or diversion from becoming a great musician, but in fact could be a critical and generally-missing part of it.

Jeffrey is a master of metaphors and analogies and this conversation is packed with taxi drivers, fish on bicycles, talking babies, brontosaurus anatomy, 10,000 eggs and more. He paints vivid pictures of the limitations and problems with traditional classical music training and what learning to improvise can look like.

He shares:

• A simple idea and range of examples of how you can transform practicing scales into something enjoyable, creative, and ultimately even more effective for improving your technique.
• Exactly how much theory knowledge, instrument technique and aural skills are required to improvise music.
• How and why to learn improv with a musical friend, even if neither of you have any knowledge or experience of improvisation before starting.

Whatever your relationship with improvising, whether non-existent or highly developed, you’re going to discover some fresh inspiration and guidance in this episode for how to more fully express the musician you have inside through the art of improvisation.

Watch the episode:

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Links and Resources

• Jeffrey Agrell – Educator, Performer, Composer, Author
• Jeffrey Agrell – Improvisation Games For Classical Musicians
• Musicality Now – Game Your Way to Impressive Improvising
• Classical Improv Jam

Transcript

Jeffrey: Hi, this is Jeffrey Agrell, I’m the author of Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians and you’re watching Musicality Now.

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

Jeffrey: Great to be here, thank you.

Christopher: I was saying to you before we hit record that I consider your interview on our web site one of the best pieces of material we have on improvisation and I often think of you in the context of learning improv for a couple of reasons. The first is that you approach it not from a jazz perspective but specifically from a classical perspective, something that I think a lot of people imagine is the antithesis of improvisation. You also specialize in improvisational games which to me is maybe the epitome of what learning improv should feel like and how we should approach it. You’re always at the back of my mind and I regret that we have not had you on the show much sooner, so I’m delighted to have you with us today and I’ve love to dive into all of this and unpack it with you.

Christopher: Before we do, though, I know only kind of a nutshell summary bio of where you’ve come from yourself as a musician. I wonder if we could go all the way back to the beginning and talk about how you learned music yourself.

Jeffrey: Well, the very first thing I did was sing a solo in a children’s operetta when I was in the fifth grade. In the sixth grade I started playing horn in band. In the ninth grade, I was messing around at a party on a guitar and then I said, “I’ve got to have one of these,” so I started on that. I started the two channels, the two, I don’t know, rivers of music in my life that have flowed along in parallel ever since. One is the classical horn world and the other one is the, I don’t know what you call it, folk do-it-yourself one which was, I’ve done many things, mostly guitar. Guitar, banjo, little mandolin, I had a little time with a fiddle, Autoharp, dulcimer, all that stuff. Later on, even while I was playing in the orchestra I was learning jazz guitar and bluegrass and all that.

Jeffrey: Like I said, it was these two parallel rivers that really didn’t mix because I learned classical the way everybody else does, everything is written down. In the other one, nothing is written down, although I did play classical guitar for a while and that was written down of course. I had these two worlds that didn’t mix until very late and I would love to help people start mixing them many decades earlier than I did.

Christopher: Gotcha. It’s fascinating and I think in my experience, there aren’t many people who study classical music to the level you have and on an instrument like French horn who keep that second river flowing, as it were. You described fairly early on dabbling on guitar and really finding an affinity for that side of music making too. Was there anything in your family or education or maybe your personality that meant you kind of juggled the two in a way that not many classical musicians do?

Jeffrey: Well, most people play piano. Fewer play guitar. I also had, in a way I did a lot of things that were kind of just waiting for this to happen. It just took a long time. I also did improvisational theater when I was in college, just fell into that in some ways. They were just separate. There was no roadmap for doing anything any different that way. The guitar didn’t seem to mix with anything unless you were playing in a pit orchestra and sitting next to the classical musicians and classical was very well defined. You didn’t do anything except what someone else had prepared for you. That was it. Everything was, and still is almost everywhere, all defined, the way we do it. The way I got out of, should I mention how I got out of that?

Christopher: Please do. I was about to ask.

Jeffrey: Boredom. You worked very hard on classical because it’s a tough business, a tough business to get into and you have to show up and do things the same, be very consistent every day over and over. You’re only good as your last performance and the performance is ranked on how perfectly did you play, how perfectly did you follow orders? The score and the conductor, did you do exactly what they said? We do not want to hear your ideas, we want to hear their ideas and can you recreate them?

Jeffrey: Early on, that’s very exciting to play in a orchestra and do all that stuff but the problem is it’s always the same. After a while it comes around again, the repertoire comes around again and you, “Okay, that was really fun the first time.” It was really fun, the first 70 performances of that, but gradually it is, for me anyway, it was less interesting because it was predictable. It was also stressful. Predictable gives you boring, stressful means you can’t do it any other way and you can’t miss anything. You do it 5,000 times right, you don’t get to miss it on 5,001. It was a toxic mix of stressful and boring most of the time. I mean there were wonderful times with certain conductors, certain pieces of course, but after doing that for many years and then starting university teaching, I had to start doing something dangerous.

Jeffrey: I started thinking. Because you don’t have to think, you just have to follow orders when you’re doing only classical all the time. Well, I didn’t only do that because you, that part of the day that you may have a morning rehearsal and an evening performance but you have the afternoon free. If you’re already playing six or seven hours a day, you’re probably not going to practice much so you have time to do whatever you want. I spent that time working on guitar, doing composing, I composed a lot, writing, I like to write, and developing that side of it. When I started teaching at the University of Iowa 20 years ago, I had to deal with this very terrible attitude of mine, which was bored. I didn’t even like to play the horn anymore. I mean really. You can’t do that as a teacher, so what are you going to do?

Jeffrey: What I did was to, “All right, what if I combine these two things that I have done all my life? How do you do that?” How do you combine this thing which is all this and the other thing which is none of that? Later, I gave those names. The classical side I called the literate side which is you only deal with notated things, things that are written down, things that are by somebody else, and the aural/creative side which is where you don’t use notation or very seldom you write down. You do things different every time, exact opposite of classical music. What I tell them in my classes, I said, “When you’re improvising creative music, you try to do it differently every time.” No matter how wonderful and creative and beautiful and amazing that last improv was, don’t ever do it again. Do something new. In classical, it’s exactly the opposite. You do it one way and then you do that the same way every time.

Jeffrey: I didn’t really know what to do but I just started experimenting. I had a wonderful collaborator who was a student, he was a jazz pianist, and he for some strange reason agreed to work with me. We experimented and we tried things but not jazz. I mean I was a jazz guitarist but that wasn’t me on the horn. I didn’t want to, there are some amazing jazz horn players but I’m not one of them and I didn’t really want to try to fit into that repertoire and that technique and things. I wanted to use what I already had.

Jeffrey: We tried this, we tried that. He was a composer, I was a composer, so we came up with ways to do it. I felt like a guy with a machete in a jungle, just trying to slash away and carve a path somehow. If there were paths out there, I couldn’t see them. I had to invent something that I could live with and enjoy and do something with. Then I was very lucky because I got to give a course because they needed somebody to jump in and give an improv course. It was the intro jazz course so I made it half jazz and half not jazz. That didn’t really work because people who wanted to do the jazz part, this was not enough jazz, and people who didn’t want to do the jazz part, way too much jazz. It was solved the following year when we split that into two sections. I was the non jazz, somebody else did the jazz one.

Jeffrey: That student became my TA. He went to grad school and got his master’s in jazz piano. The first five years of that course of what the discoveries were became the first volume of my book, Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians. It was a scary time. I was terrified to start. I had to. I only did it because I had, people don’t like change. I didn’t like change. You change only if you’re forced to, if you have to and I had to. I just, I was that much more curious and bored than I was terrified. I was still terrified because what is the worst thing you can do in classical music? Make a mistake. Don’t miss the note, oh, especially with horn players. Don’t make a mistake. That’s all we’re obsessed with and that is one of the things that keeps us from trying anything, this terror of making a mistake.

Jeffrey: When you’re doing creative music, you go, “Oh boy, something I didn’t expect, wonderful! Now I’m going to discover something new I could have never planned for,” and so it’s a happy occasion. You turn that into something brand new, something interesting. It’s a completely different mindset. I discovered pretty early on the barrier to anyone making their own music has nothing to do with your technique. It doesn’t matter, the level of your playing. We are deceived in that because we think improv is jazz and jazz, you need years of hard study absolutely because we don’t want to play a wrong note. Although in jazz they say you’re never more than a half step from a good note.

Jeffrey: Even jazz players work with that but classical players, it’s like sticking your finger in an electric socket if you make any kind of mistake. You hate it and you don’t want to do it so you’re not going to play something new that you don’t see written down. That’s just too terrifying to even contemplate. That is the biggest hurdle to get over, how do I start? How do I get beyond the terror I feel for not playing what the note somebody told me so I can feel safe?”

Christopher: I have such admiration for you hacking away at that jungle, as it were. Here at Musicality we often talk about how learning an instrument often just means instrument technique and repertoire and reading the notes on the page and being pigeonholed whatever the genre. Often that’s what learning music seems to boil down to for people. It takes, as you say, confidence or courage rather to depart from that and try something creative where all of your lessons to date have told you that mistakes are bad and you shouldn’t play a wrong note. It does take courage to explore a different option and I think that goes doubly in your case where you weren’t just coming away from instrument technique, you were coming away from a very high level career in classical music, a university post no less and breaking new ground when it comes to what improv can be. Obviously we now all enjoy the fruits of that through your books.

Christopher: You’ve raised that major barrier, that fear of mistakes. I don’t want to put words in your mouth but from my perspective, the fact that you specialize not in improvisational methods or the theory of improv but in improv games is a big part of the solution to that. Would you agree?

Jeffrey: Improv games is packaging the subject so that it is easily, it helps people start. You could do just fine without the book if you wanted to. Now I hope everybody buys the book but you don’t need it to start. You don’t need anything to start except a new attitude, that you feel you have permission to try something. That, I think the biggest problem and I think my biggest area, I have nine books now on the improv games and everything. What I’m more focused on these days is being a, I don’t know, rabble rouser a little bit in the entire focus of musical curricula, especially instrumental curricula. I think there’s so many either inefficient or downright toxic traditions that we’re used to. They’re just no good or they don’t do what they should. They just are there because they’re easy to do. Did we ever talk about why the typewriter keyboard is the way it is?

Christopher: No.

Jeffrey: Because that has a direct parallel to the way we study music. The reason that the QWERTY, Q-W-E-R-T-Y, is laid out that way is to be purposefully bad. Because it was designed for typewriters, I don’t know if anyone still remembers what they, you can find them in museums, because you press down a key and then a little key goes forward and it hits a ribbon which puts the imprint of a letter on there. Now on the early typewriters and even the later ones, if you type too fast you will jam the keys. The inventors thought, “How could we make this really bad so that we slow them down? Because it takes time to then fix that if you jam the keys. You have to stop, so let’s make this as awful as possible so we can slow them down.”

Jeffrey: Of course today, there’s a much better system called the Dvorak system in which the most used keys are in the home row under the strongest fingers so you don’t have to move. Almost no one does that because we’re all raised in the way that we have been. It’s tradition. We don’t think about it. Electronic keyboards make it a lot easier but nevertheless it’s an extremely inefficient way to do things that we have done. There are many things in not just music but in lots of traditions that are built into the curriculum and the way of teaching that everybody knows. I learned, you learned, everybody learned, but we don’t question because in classical music, one of the toxic paradigms is you only take orders. You don’t have permission or it’s never mentioned to you that you can try things and explore and discover and maybe there’s something different.

Jeffrey: That is maybe the number one awful part of this kind of music study, is that we’re just really good parrots. We are excellent re-creators and repeaters. Boy, are we good at that. Man, we get so good at that, but we have a creative art without creativity in general. English majors write essays and poems. Art students, can you imagine if art was only copying over the Mona Lisa and other masterpieces, that’s all you do? That’s what we do in music. No, they paint pictures, they paint their own pictures, they do sculpting, dance, do choreographed dances but they also improv dance, a thing called contact improv. I have worked with dancers in that way.

Jeffrey: The most fun concert I ever did in my life was improvised. Five improvised players and a stage full of dancers and we were watching the other one, listening to the other one and improvising from what we saw and they heard. That was just amazing.

Jeffrey: Anyway, theater people, they learn plays but they all learn improv. When we come to music, nobody does anything except recreate and boy, we’re good at that. That’s all we do. We’ve left out half of being a complete musician. We’ve left out this aural creative side. I had the two sides but not together on my one instrument. If you want more examples of the really, let’s say, toxic is maybe too strong but less efficient? A QWERTY keyboard is still a keyboard but it’s just not very efficient.

Jeffrey: One of them is aural skills, which everybody takes in school. We do it only on singing and piano. Great, wonderful. What about our instrument? That’s the most important thing. I should be learning that on my horn. I shouldn’t be spending all this time at the expense of doing it on the horn. There’s many ways. In the book of course I have a, well there’s two books now, volume one, volume two. I have many, many, many examples of how you can do aural games on the instrument, any instrument, horn of course is mine. That’s another one.

Jeffrey: Another one, one of my favorite pet peeves, I don’t know if you need to let me keep going here. I apologize.

Christopher: Let’s do one more and then move on.

Jeffrey: All right. One more is scales. The revered way of doing scales is to play octave scales. Octave scale, keep going up, keep going up. Don’t we feel good about ourselves? We can just play these long scales and we’re just so wonderful, but tell me a piece, at least for horn, tell me a piece for horn that has a three octave scale in it. There aren’t any. Tell me a piece that has a two octave scale in it. There aren’t any there either. There are some that have a one direction, one octave scale. Not many but there are some, okay.

Jeffrey: You are a veterinarian and you’re studying brontosaurs anatomy and then you’re going to go out and work on dogs and cats? Why aren’t you doing something that you’re going to do later? Why are we doing these really useless things? It’s great, it’s wonderful to memorize a page of the dictionary. Oh, isn’t that great, you can remember that. What are you going to use that for? Well, aren’t you wonderful, you can do that. Very easy to grade you, having you spit back those words that you’ve memorized. Sorry, I’m getting snarky again.

Jeffrey: We’re practicing very hard, years and years, have to play it in proficiencies, something that tells you almost nothing about your technique and zero about your musicality. What could we do to make that different? That would be another topic. I won’t answer the question unless you beg me to. Sorry, I go on too long. I know, I’m sorry.

Christopher: Not at all. One thing I love about you is you are not just standing on a soapbox complaining as some people do.

Jeffrey: I am doing that, but I agree.

Christopher: You’re not just doing that by any means. You are far more constructive and positive in how you actually go about exacting change in this area. I want to talk a lot more about your games in particular, but before we move on to that I’d like to just underscore something that was underlying some of what you talked about there, which is the status quo in terms of focusing purely on technique and adopting the doctrines and methodologies of the past just on faith that they must be good because they’ve been around so long.

Christopher: I think part of what keeps a lot of people trapped in that and stops us from questioning it is this idea that that is the route to best results. Okay, maybe we could dabble in that more creative stuff or maybe play with some improv, and I think in particular people listening and hearing us talk about games may already be thinking, “That just sounds like a waste of time or a pastime. I want to get good on my instrument.” I think what was underlying a lot of what you just said was we’re not talking about a distraction from accomplishing and achieving and becoming a great musician. Actually, a lot of this stuff could and should be central to becoming a great musician.

Jeffrey: Oh boy, what a good question. Oh my goodness. Which one is the better taxi driver, the one who drives up and down Main Street only or the one who takes a little more time and investigates all the side streets this way and that way and other ways? The way we learn, we learn basically very few ways, very few paths to study, say, technique and we do them over and over long after we need to, long after it serves any purpose except to, that’s all we know. We think we’re done because that is the paradigm. Here’s your scale, one, two, three octaves, go up and down, that’s all you will do for the rest of your life.

Jeffrey: Now what improv is, one useful definition is that it is making your own decisions about what to do next. Here’s the funny thing. The ironic thing is that everyone does this all day long. It’s called conversation and it’s easy and it’s very useful, it expresses what you want, you don’t break into a sweat, you don’t worry about missing a word or something. You’re not paralyzed by, “Did I speak perfectly?” It gets that part of the job done. Imagine a world where you could only speak and memorize sentences that the great orators had said? Oh, isn’t, well how nice for you, but you can’t get anything done or it’s in a much more limited way.

Jeffrey: There’s another saying in education that is if you want your students to get smarter, you want their IQ to go up, let them make some decisions. They don’t make any decisions in the traditional classical way. They only follow orders, they only do what their teacher tells them. Now that’s not to say students should learn what their teacher’s teaching, but there has to be the side where they make their own decisions. That I can easily see and I’ve heard it before and that was, one, that it was taking a big risk when I used the word “games” in the title. You think because music is serious, “We don’t play games, we’re serious. We only do what’s serious, no fun, things we have to endure,” sorry, I’m doing it again, “to get through,” but in fact the best way to learn something is to make it playful like children.

Jeffrey: If they had to be serious about the way they learn to speak and the way they learn to interact with people and they’re growing up, they would never get any of it done. If you make it a game, suddenly it is fun, fun is motivating, I know we’re not supposed to have fun. Fun is motivating. If it’s motivating, you do more of it. If you do more of it, you get better at it. If you’re not worried about mistakes so much, like babies don’t worry about if they said, “Goo goo ga ga,” instead of chrysanthemum, they learn pretty fast. You don’t criticize them. You applaud their efforts. You cheer when they say, “Ma ma.” One of the toxic things about classical study is that we have defined the reason to do music and the way to do music, and you should feel bad if you do it any other way, is to get virtuoso, is to play many notes very well and perfectly.

Jeffrey: That means lots of study and that makes amateurs say, “Oh, why do I even bother?” Actually this happened to me once. One of my projects, it was years ago but one of my grad students took the devil’s advocate and I said, “We’re going to compose a piece. Everyone’s going to learn to get their feet wet in composition.” He said, “Why should I compose? I’m not Beethoven. Nothing I write will be as good as what the great masters have done. Why should I bother?”

Jeffrey: I mumbled something that I’m embarrassed about now. I don’t think I did very well but later it occurred to me that that was the perfection trap. What it does is it prevents you from doing anything. The reason you do it is, A, because it’s interesting and fun and it’s personally enriching. Beethoven’s not composing anymore, he’s only decomposing. I’m sorry about that one. Engaging in the arts is for everyone. The virtuoso perfection trap is going to discourage a lot of people from trying it. The reason you do sports is not because, well you don’t say, “I’m not going to do any sports because there are better people than me.” There’s better people, I don’t care who you are, there’s better people than you in anything. Sports, cooking, anything you can think of, there’s better people so that is not the reason that you don’t do it. You do it because it’s interesting, it’s fun, it’s personally enriching. It’s healthy, mind and body. We can’t let that part of it stop us.

Jeffrey: Now you’re, you’re part of, the frivolous nature of the game nature, I just was trying to make the point that playful behavior, actually you’ll learn much faster. I just read something the other day that if you do something in a routine way, it takes 800 repetitions to learn it. If you do it in a playful way, it only takes like 40 repetitions. It’s a much stronger, faster way actually, doing it in a playful manner than doing it in a serious manner.

Jeffrey: The thing is that we, like the taxi driver, and this is something that everybody could use, is the easiest way to become a creative musician, assuming you are in the old model of, “You don’t do anything,” is to take anything you’re doing right now and change one thing. If you’re playing octave scales, you don’t have to change everything and turn it into a virtuoso cadenza. Just change one thing. Start today.

Jeffrey: How about playing it a little louder, that’s a change, than you usually do? Play it a little faster, a little slower, a little softer. How about not making all the notes the same length? Why do we do everything in four four? Put on a metronome, see if you can play between the beats. We play everything in octaves, pick a different length. Try every length. See how different it feels if you play only six notes or four notes or you’re playing a pattern of notes that doesn’t match the metronome click. It’s clicking four and you play a three over that, play tuplets, play in a different meter. There’s a million ways that you can, just do a little bit, just do one thing that’s just a little bit harder and watch what happens.

Jeffrey: The first thing I notice is they wake up and become more alert. “Wow, that was a little harder! I had to pay attention.” When I do things I’ve done 10,000 times, “Oh, aren’t I wonderful doing this again,” I am asleep, I’m not even paying attention. I’m getting worse. When you add one little, little tweak, one little different thing, it gets interesting again. It’s like the first day is like being in love a little bit and a way to even enhance that more is to do it with somebody else. Here’s another part of the paradigm that is not very good and that’s our paradigm for practice is alone, like a monk in a cell, a lighthouse keeper, only by yourself. You can do almost everything with somebody else and it doesn’t even have to be your same instrument.

Jeffrey: Now it really gets interesting because now you do the most important part of improvisation, which has nothing to do with technique. It’s just listening, like your conversation. A good conversation is someone listening to what’s going on, responding and then carrying the conversation a little farther. What you do, you listen to your partner, you listen to yourself. What just happened? Can I, should I repeat that? Should I twist it a little bit? Have we been doing this a long time, now let’s do something different? How can I support that? Should I be in the foreground, the background? Should I make it a little louder? Should I respond? Should we have a little conversation back and forth? He says something, I say something?

Jeffrey: There are so many ways that we are kept entirely innocent of in classical playing, it doesn’t happen unless somebody else says it, that when you start doing this you find out, A, it’s easy, B, it’s fun, C, why the hell haven’t we been doing this since the first day we started on our instruments?

Christopher: Amazing. That’s a wonderful illustration, I think, of the possibilities and the payoff. Before we dive into games, because I like that you clarified that the games are a way of framing this overall attitude, this approach, this concept of what improv can be, it’s not that games are the be all and end all. It’s that they capture the playfulness and they give people an easy way in. Before we talk specifically about the games, I wonder if you could share that philosophy in a nutshell or your own definition of what improv can be that makes it accessible in that way?

Jeffrey: Well, if we want a definition that maybe helps the people who are trying to make the transition, and it is a procedure, it’s a technique to work on both your technique and your musicality at the same time. We separate the two, that’s another problem with classical music is everything is separated. History, theory, composition, your instrumental technique. What have I left out? All of the things are studied separately and you can play all your pieces and not know anything about the harmony or the composer or anything else, just get the notes right.

Jeffrey: What improvisation does as really a very, a much more useful technique in studying anything you’re working on, is it brings everything together. It integrates all of those things. You need everything, theory, you need all the theory you can get to understand what you’re doing. You cannot play anything unless you understand what you’re doing and you know what you’re doing. You don’t just make blind noises in the air, you make a conscious intention, a decision about what to play and it doesn’t matter what that is. It can be one note.

Jeffrey: That’s the problem, classical musicians try to do too many notes at first and then the choke and they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re playing just like they do scales, they have no intention when they play the scales except following orders. When you have to make decisions, now you have to think and you have to respond and you have to listen and that’s all new at first, although they do it every day when they converse. You do exactly that when you talk to somebody. It’s hardest to start but once you start and restrict yourself to things that are easy, one note is fine, then it becomes easier to choose the next note and then suddenly you can go on from there.

Jeffrey: What the games do is they provide little sandboxes to play in and not choke on too much, trying to do too much too soon. People don’t expect when they first study Mandarin to be auctioneers in Mandarin the first week. Unfortunately, classical players pretty much expect that of themselves when they start playing. They think, “I should be exactly at the same level when I start doing this new thing I’ve never done before.” That chokes them off because they’re using the wrong standard. They’re trying to see how good the fish is on the bicycle. They’re trying to say, “Well, the standard is lots of notes and very fast and all perfect,” because they’re using the standard of classical music, but nobody told them what to play so they choke. They don’t know what to talk about because they don’t know how to listen.

Jeffrey: What the games do is any creative artist’s best friend, which is restrictions. Limitations. Like Stravinsky said, he said, “If you give me any note in the universe, I can’t write anything, but if you give me five notes, restrict me to five notes, I can write a symphony, no problem.” That’s exactly what this is. We very often, one of the games when we start in our class with the brave people that actually dare to take my improv class, we do only rhythm for the first couple weeks because there’s no pitches to worry about. You can’t play any wrong notes which usually means wrong pitches. We do lots of rhythm which is notoriously the weakest point of any classical musician’s training, is rhythm because we get it around the edges and we’re mainly concerned with, “Get the note, don’t miss the note,” so all pitch. I wrote a 447 page book on horn technique. There is zero about rhythm in that. It’s all about how do you get the note, so guilty as charged.

Jeffrey: They say, “Well, I need lots of notes to make something interesting.” No you don’t. Drummers every day make up amazing things with just one sound, with one note pitch. A proto pitch is then timbre change. If you hit the side of the drum, that’s kind of like changing notes in a way.

Jeffrey: We start off and then we play a game invented by Walter Mathieu in his wonderful book The Listening Book. It’s called AMAPFALAP, as much as possible from as little as possible, you have one note, go wild. What can you do with that one note? Can you just change the rhythms, change dynamics, change what you can change but now you don’t have to worry about pitches, which is the big bugaboo. “How can I play a lot of pitches,” because the old fish bicycle thing.

Jeffrey: What the games do is they supply limitations in various ways so that it’s much easier to make a choice. If you have 10,000 eggs, which ones are you going to pick? That’s a tough choice but if you have three eggs, pick two, okay, a lot easier to make the choice. That’s what the games do. They are divided up into categories somewhat arbitrarily but it’s melody games, rhythms games, harmony games, depiction games, about 30-some categories. In the second book I added a new one, movement games because movement games are still making choices about what to do and it’s a great way to warm up. It’s a great way, a great transition for classical musicians into making decisions about what to do. Just start with something you can do very well, very easy. Move. Move your arms, move your legs, and then you say, “Well, this is not hard. Okay, got that.”

Jeffrey: There’s also spoken games. Everybody knows how to speak pretty much, so we use some of those, make decisions on what to say next. “You have 30 seconds to talk about bananas, go.” Easy, easy. Just doesn’t matter what you say, say something. We ease into it a little bit. Another thing that I also do in my classes, I do with my art students as well, is we do sound painting. They can go to soundpainting.com, look on YouTube, look for videos, just do a search for sound painting, which is a gestural system of improvisation invented by New Yorker Walter Thompson 40 some years ago. It like whole group, long tone, play, and then you could say volume up, volume down, pitch up, pitch down. There are many, many ways to do that and it’s a very easy transition for a classical player because the conductor asks for something general and then the player just picks something specific. Play a long note, which note? You choose. All right, not too difficult.

Jeffrey: We use that. We give actually, my art students, we give two concerts at the end of the semester. The first concert is entirely improvised and it has sound painting in it, it has all these games. Then the second concert is their repertoire piece they’ve worked on all semester. Doing an improv concert sounds terrifying but once you’ve started and see how easy it is, you can’t wait to get up there and show everybody what you can do and how you can make up stuff on the spot. My students have stopped asking me even for permission, they just put it in their recitals. They do it themselves. They add their own improv. They drive the other people in band, two minutes before band they’ll start making up a horn quartet on the spot and everybody goes, “What? How do you do that?” They just smile and look superior. They have so much fun doing it. I just love that. It’s far enough long that they do this without a qualm.

Christopher: That was wonderful. I should clarify for the sake of our audio only listeners that when Jeffrey was talking about the sound painting there, there were specific hand gestures and movements that he was using to conduct the players. Am I right in understanding one person is acting as conductor with those gestures and the player or players are responding?

Jeffrey: Yes, exactly. You’re making these predefined gestures, although if you want to you can make up your own. There’s 1,500 gestures in the language but you don’t need more than, I can teach somebody 20 in an hour. We can learn 30-some in, if we have two rehearsals. I’ve done improv in other schools for instance where I come in and we have two rehearsals and then they do it in concert that evening because gesture is everyone’s native language. Everyone understands body language, facial expression, so gesture you learn immediately. You can learn many gestures. You only have to make a choice on what you do specifically for a general gesture.

Jeffrey: I just got back from, every other year I teach a improv course in Nova Scotia at Acadia University for masters students, a very special creative music masters program. I’m just the last, I’m the very tail end of it. I’m giving this capstone course three hours a day and doing improv and so everybody learns to be a sound painting conductor. Now there have been a hundred of these students, mostly Canadians, and now they’re all over Canada using sound painting, using all of these improv games in their daily life. It’s really interesting to hear from them. You get your band, you’re working on a contest piece and at the end of the hour they’re kind of flagging and suddenly you make the, “Everybody play,” gesture in sound painting and boy do they wake up. “Now what’s going to happen?” Then you do something and you can use your instrument, you can use your voice, it could be only certain people.

Jeffrey: As soon as you’re doing creative music, people wake up because they don’t know what’s coming. Because that’s one of the problems with classical music, you know what’s coming. You have worked on it, you better know what’s coming, although we need to be good sight readers as well. The point is not that one is better than the other or anything else but what we need is both of them. As I say, don’t let school get in the way of your education. It’s up to you not to wait for school to right all wrongs and do everything it should be doing. It does what is easy to do, not necessarily what’s any good and that is the aural creative side of music. That’s what interests me, to add that to all the stuff we do anyway, we have to do as part of the thing. We’re all in that system but we can add the other one.

Jeffrey: Now just one more thing and I’ll stop. You do hear people, especially band directors who I totally admire, unbelievable job they have to do. They say, “I don’t have any time for this creative crap, I’ve got way too much to do. I’ve got to do this and that and organize the Normandy invasion every day. It’s just amazing. I don’t have time for this.” Well, you don’t have time not to do it because when you start doing creative activities, what happens is your students, the ownership of the music, now it’s their music. Now they are learning how to create their own music that they want to do. It’s very motivating, very fun. Now that’s a short step to composition. If you know how to improvise, all you do is write it down and polish it and you have a composition.

Jeffrey: Pretty soon, your students are doing stuff that you could use in concerts. They’re doing little arrangements, doing compositions. You could add 10 seconds of sound painting in the middle of a piece. What’s also fun is in a piece where, I’ve done this with even sixth graders, in the middle of a regular concert you can turn around and you sound paint the audience, who having watched you a little bit has figured out some of the simple ones. They can do a long note and just hum a thing and they love it. Suddenly they’re paying attention. They’re not just checking their iPhone. Now they’re part of the act and it transforms the audience’s experience as well.

Jeffrey: There is not enough time not to add creativity and make everybody’s lives richer, better and want to do what you want to do music.

Christopher: Tremendous. That sounds so much fun but I’m conscious that I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. I’m definitely a convert on this. If I know our audience, there are probably a few thoughts in their head right now and one is, “Working with someone? That sounds scary. Could I really do it with a buddy if neither of us really know what we’re doing?” The second is, “That sounds great but I don’t really have the aural skills. I don’t have the ear to know what to do improvisationally.” The third is probably just, “Tell us some more improv games because it does sound a little bit fun.”

Jeffrey: The barrier, as I said, has nothing to do with anyone’s level or instrument. The barrier is entirely mental. It’s in our attitudes and the way we’ve been trained. We’ve been trained to think a certain way. The paradigm of classical music is what, or of the educational system and classical music is what you do, you as a student, what you do has no value except as far as you are able to parrot what you’re supposed to parrot and repeat back perfectly. We are very reluctant to try anything because we might make a mistake. We’re back to that again. The reason we don’t try is because the dreaded mistake.

Jeffrey: Now I have to say in all the years I’ve been doing this, many, many workshops and lessons and everything, I’ve only had one complete failure. That was, I was doing a workshop for some clarinets and doing all the usual things. It was going great but there was one person. She was a grad student, a wonderful player and I couldn’t get her to put the clarinet in her mouth to play. I said, “Pick any note, the easiest note, the most comfortable note you want to and just play that. You choose.” She wouldn’t do it. She was so terrified of doing anything that somebody didn’t dictate every aspect that she couldn’t even take a breath and play any note of her choice.

Jeffrey: Every other one person, the hardest part is starting and getting past your education. I say, “Just forget everything you’ve done.” That’s why we play a lot of these warm up games like the movement and the speaking and AMAPFALAP. Just get started. Now if you want to start and you have a buddy who you, first you have to get past the barrier and just say, “Can we dare to do this? Are we brave enough to start?”

Jeffrey: I would say a great way to start is do glacier music, I call it. That is just play long notes, assuming you have an instrument that plays long notes or do a tremolo if it doesn’t. Pick any note, pick your easiest note, pick your most comfortable note and play that as long as you, till you run out of breath or whatever, and then listen. Then listen to the, because the biggest thing is listening. It doesn’t have anything to do with your technique. It has to do with listening and responding. You listen to what’s going on. Listen to what they’re playing and what you’re playing. Stop any time you want, take a breath. It’s okay if you’re both silent or are the only ones playing, that’s fine, and listen some more.

Jeffrey: Listen to the, oh, now when you take a breath, when you start over, take a new note. If you want. You can go do the same note. At some point, you’ll say, “Okay, I’m a little not quite so terrified of this thing, making a decision on what to play, so I’ll pick another note.” Pick a note right next to it, pick your second most comfortable note. All right? Now you’re settling in a little bit. “Okay, I got this, but I’m getting a little bored. What if I make it swell a little bit?” Okay, so add some swells. What if you squeeze your lips or your mouthpiece or whatever and you make it wiggle a little bit. Oh, that’s fun.

Jeffrey: You have my permission to have fun, all right? Everybody has my, if you need permission, you got it. You have my permission, you have Christopher’s permission, go ahead and try something. If you need to, lock the doors, don’t let anybody hear you. I know you’re terrified of someone judging you by your new effort. Everyone is allowed to learn. Try it and then see what, oh, now he’s doing that and I’m doing that. Okay, now let’s try something.

Jeffrey: Let’s do a new game, it’s only long notes but you both take a breath and you pick a note independently. Then as soon as you play, see if you can both find the same note as quickly as possible. Just move around diatonically, pick a scale so you know what you’re in if you want. C major, that’s fine. Okay, he picked a note, you picked a note and unless you were lucky enough to pick the same note, you’re on different notes. Now find each other. Hide and go seek. Oh man, how quick can you do that? Do it slurred, do it tongued, try the other one soft, you loud, switch. Let’s do it. Now let’s do the same thing only let’s do it with short notes, really short notes. Okay, what was his note, what was your note? Okay, come together, see if you can find the same note.

Jeffrey: Okay, let’s do another game. Let’s do, pick your note but let’s play the fastest notes you can play on that one. That was great. That sounded amazing. Now let’s do one where you pick, just make it sound random like marbles falling down a wooden staircase where he’s random and you’re random. Okay, good. Now let’s do that game again and this time every once in a while, hold one of the notes longer whenever you want. Good, all right. That was interesting. Now let’s do this. Now this time let’s change the game and if you both are long at the same time, you have to hold it until you run out of breath or eight seconds, whichever comes first.

Jeffrey: You can see. You can go on and on like that. There are two rules to improvisation and it has nothing to do with virtuosity. The first rule is pick something. You’re on the note committee, pick something that is comfortable and safe and easy for you. Oh, just find the easiest thing you can do. Stay safe, stay secure, keep your blood pressure down. Gradually you will overcome that terrible disease known as perfectionism and worrying about being judged and all the things that are stopping you from having a voice in music, which everybody has and school has never told you that you have your own voice the same way you have a conversational voice. Okay, that’s rule one, pick something safe, comfortable.

Jeffrey: Rule two for later is ignore or break rule one as often as possible. Go wild, try any thing and just see what happens. Nobody going to die. Wow, you might discover something really amazing but you got to get through one where you’re not worried so much about your ego. We involve our ego in everything because it’s about perfection. Nobody’s perfect so you’re going to lose that one right away. Now it’s just about being interesting and listening. “Okay, that happened. What might we do next? Hm, that was interesting.”

Jeffrey: The first thing we do after in my class always, after we do an improv we say, we don’t say, “Was that bad or good?” We don’t say, “Do we like it or not like it?” We say, “Hm, what just happened,” and we try to develop a memory for what happens because like in a conversation, you need to remember what you’ve talked about and not make up a new topic on every sentence. You talk about a subject. You try to remember, “What did I do? How do we start? Then what happened? Where did it go?”

Christopher: Wonderful. That did exactly what I hoped it would, which was paint a really vivid picture for people, I think, of how easy and fun this can be as well as giving them some very specific suggestions they can go away and try immediately. I know that for those who are feeling captivated by this and eager to go and put this into action, they’re going to quickly want more examples, more instruction, and obviously the spirit of this is to get away from someone telling you exactly what to do but at the same time your books are an incredible treasure trove of ideas to play around with. I’d love if you could talk a little bit about those books and what they have in store for people.

Jeffrey: What the books do is, like any book or method, what would hopes is it saves you time. You could rediscover all the stuff I did on your own. I’m sure you could, but I can save you a lot of time because, especially in the first volume, it says it’s a lot of how to. How do you make a melody? I don’t know about you but nobody ever told me to make a melody in school, you may just copy somebody else’s melody or play it like somebody else. How do you make a melody? It’s interesting. We play 10,000 of them and we have no idea how to do it. Try that. Try a student, ask a student, “How do you play a melody?” Or, “What are some principles on how to make a melody?” “Well, I don’t know. No one ever asked me.”

Jeffrey: Then how about, “How do you be an accompaniment? We have to think about you’re not always the soloist, how do you accompany people?” What about, there are some pointers for working on technique in this way. How about motivic development? As usually, you start very simple and then you build step by step, goo goo ga ga, ma ma, horsey, ducky. You build on that, but it’s fun and interesting every step of the way partly because it’s social. Improv is social, you do it by yourself and you can and should but you’ll still working with your metronome, your rhythm source. Very soon, preferably from the very beginning with your enlightened teacher, is you play duets and you can then expand that into chamber music and so on.

Jeffrey: What the book has, it has explanatory material and how to do things and then it has many, many, many, many different kind of games. Some are for one person. Some two, three, four, five, as many as you can fit in the room games. They’re all mixed together. There’s, I don’t know, a hundred melody games, I don’t remember. Then the different categories. They’re arranged, it drives some people crazy because it’s not in alphabetical order. It’s in the order that I kind of thought was the most important. I think it starts with rhythm, which I think is the most, best way to start. Don’t worry about pitch.

Jeffrey: The harder one, which basically we just start on on the end of my course, is harmony because harmony is about right note, wrong note. There’s a way to do that and be much simpler, not worry about pitch, missing notes so much. Harmony is a more complex topic that we wait on a little bit, on that one.

Jeffrey: Then there’s many kinds of notes like depictions where you don’t have to worry about notes at all and you get to use extended techniques. Extended techniques are a real pain in the butt in classical music. They’re hard to notate, hard to reproduce what you think that little squiggle’s supposed to mean and it’s just annoying basically. There’s lot of them that are just impossible or the composers have gotten a little drunk on writing extended techniques and really come up with a lot of nonsense. If you choose them, it’s amazing because you can choose the ones that work for you that are easy, you don’t have to notate them and you can use those in the depiction games. The typical one is adjective noun. Now in the back of the book, there’s a, I call the improv generator. There’s a huge list of adjectives, nouns and then musical styles and you can put those together at random. The philosophical gorilla, for instance. Start playing. What does that sound like? Who knows? You figure it out as you go. You can use that and you can use extended techniques there. You can do whatever you want.

Jeffrey: There’s a lot of resource material in the back. There’s all the books I collected. Books, articles, magazine articles, web sites, dissertations, a ton of stuff. There’s even more in the second book. The second book, which is even longer, came out in 2016, has 642 games I think but less explanatory material because I will have assumed you have volume one, and even more resources in the back, things that have been collected in the eight years since. Lots of, if you want to do further study you can use that. There’s really material enough for a lifetime. Then the other books are broken down into smaller areas. One for piano teachers, one for vocal teachers. I did those with a collaborator. There’s one for duets, one for one person. Those are thinner so you can carry in a case.

Jeffrey: These are a little annoyingly big, the volume one and volume two. The good thing is they have a lot of material. The bad thing is that they have a lot of material. They’re heavy to lug around, maybe healthy to lug around. Anyway, it’s like in the old days, the complete Whole Earth Catalog. It’s as everything you can imagine to get started and refer to but it should be considered, everything in there should only be considered a beginning. Everyone should say, “You have permission, you are actually ordered to change anything in any of them, tweak them, combine them, put two together, put four together, change whatever it is to whatever your situation is and adapt them. Use that as a springboard to your own version of it.”

Jeffrey: Nothing, I don’t want it to be the classical written in stone thing. You don’t have to do anything I say there except be inspired by it and change it and use it to your own purposes. Just start and that’s the only, just start. Anybody, you should feel free to send me an email if they have questions or if they want to tell me about their experiences. I’m always happy to hear about what other people are doing.

Christopher: Tremendous. Well Jeffrey, I so admire and applaud the work you’re doing and the books you’ve put out there into the world. All that remains is to say a huge thank you for coming on the show and sharing these ideas with our audience today.

Jeffrey: Well, thank you for letting me go on far too long about it. I just love to talk about it almost as much as I love to do it.

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The post Making Improv a Game, with Jeffrey Agrell appeared first on Musical U.

The Circle Of Fifths is simply the 12 notes of Western music arranged in a certain order around a circle: C G D, A E B, F♯ C♯ G♯, D♯ A♯ and F – and of course those sharps can be named with flats too.

Write those notes in that order around a circle in 12 positions like a clock – and you have the circle. Simple as that.

So why all the fuss?

In this episode Christopher, Andrew, and Anastasia from the MU team get together for an informal and unscripted chat about why most musicians have been missing out on the full power, beauty and potential of the circle in their musical lives – and what you can do about it.

Watch the episode:

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Links and Resources

• The Circle Mastery Experience

Transcript

Christopher: Hello, and welcome to Musicality Now. My name’s Christopher Sutton, I’m the founder and director of Musical U. And I’m here today for a special episode with Andrew Bishko and Anastasia Voitinskaia from the Musical U team to talk about the Circle of Fifths.

Christopher: Now, if you’re like most musicians, if I asked you if you’d heard of the Circle of Fifths you would say, “Yep, totally.” If I asked you if you understood it, you’d say, “Errrm, maybe a little bit.” And if I asked you if you used the Circle of Fifths, you’d probably hesitate and then maybe admit, “No.” And that’s certainly where I found myself for a long, long time in my musical journey. 

It’s time to do something about that, because the Circle of Fifths is packed full of valuable stuff that can actually help you in a practical way in your musical life, day-to-day, and that’s what we’re here today to talk about. Before I blither on any further, I’d ask Andrew to please introduce yourself for those watching and listening.

Andrew: Hi, I’m Andrew Bishko. I’m product manager at a Musical U, and I work on developing new products, on polishing up old ones, and I talk to a lot of members.

Christopher: Terrific. And Anastasia?

Anastasia: Hi, my name is Anastasia Voitinskaia, and I am a graphic designer, content creator, writer, and community member here at Musical U.

Christopher: So, there was a good reason that we decided to talk about the Circle of Fifths today, and I’m going to just be totally up front and say, we have a product coming out this week all about the Circle of Fifths. But we are not here to pitch on that product, really, we are here because, in the course of developing that product, it turns out there’s kind of an elephant in the room when it comes to the Circle of Fifths, and I wanted to just share a little bit about how this product came to be, and why we feel there is an elephant in the room, because I think it’s something that a lot of people who listen to or watch this show will be able to relate to.

Christopher: So, for my part, I definitely came across the Circle of Fifths early in music learning, but it was under a heading of music theory. And a couple of years ago we discovered that people were coming to the Musical U website because they’d searched for Circle of Fifths online, and it was mentioned in some of our articles, and they’d end up on our website, but we didn’t have anything very good about the Circle of Fifths. And, in all honesty, it’s always a little tricky for us to decide at Musical U how much we want to talk about music theory, because we’re not a music theory education company, and it can be hard to know where to draw the line between musicality and music theory. So, we decided in the end we would put something together about the Circle of Fifths, because it was clearly such a key topic to many of the things we were talking about, like chord progressions, and scales, and basically anything to do with pitch and music. But we didn’t really have a good tutorial.

Christopher: And so, I asked Andrew and Anastasia to put together the ultimate guide to the Circle of Fifths, not just a little tutorial, but a really full-on explanation. Fast forward, and that article is one of the top results on Google these days for Circle of Fifths. And I realized we had a responsibility at that point to make sure we were serving the people who ended up on that page the best we possibly could. And we started asking the people who came to that page, “Why are you interested in the Circle of Fifths? And what’s one thing that’s always frustrated you about it, or that you’ve struggled with?” And the picture that’s emerged is so clear we couldn’t help but go the next step and want to do a podcast episode about it. Because I think once I explain it, you’ll understand why I said it’s an elephant in the room.

Christopher: So, the picture that emerged was that literally 96% of musicians had heard of the Circle of Fifths in their musical life before arriving on that page. So, almost everyone’s heard of it. And I said at the beginning of this episode that probably includes you too. Whatever kind of musician you are, you’ve probably heard that phrase, Circle of Fifths. But it turns out that the vast majority of people have tried learning it, and they didn’t really get the hang of it. So, three quarters of people hadn’t learned it to the point where they could actually do anything with it. And that, obviously, is worrying given that the Circle of Fifths comes up in every theory textbook, any music theory course, any YouTube tutorials, there’s plenty of YouTube tutorials on the Circle of Fifths, yet the vast majority of musicians can’t actually do anything with it.

Christopher: And I know that, for me, it was just in a box labeled, “How to remember key signatures,” because that’s how I first came across it, and there were sharps and flats, and they went round in a circle. That’s all I really knew. But I won’t go into the whole story. I wrote an email to go out this week about how I realized for the first time there was a bit more to it than that, but just to cut to the chase a little bit, what else came out of this survey was really the explanation for why so many musicians are interested, but have not managed to wrap their heads around it and actually do anything with it.

Christopher: And in a nutshell, it comes down to three things. The first is, it’s hard to understand, and that’s what we were really trying to tackle with our Ultimate Guide to the Circle of Fifths. We were like, “Can we explain this thing? Can we put together the theory in a way that makes sense to people?” But that’s actually only one of three problems that people have been having with it. When we asked, “What have you struggled with,” that was only one of the three things. The second was memorizing it, and a lot of people were talking about how complicated it is, and there’s so much in the diagram, and there’s so much detail, and, “I understand it, but I can’t really remember it when I’m playing my instrument.” And then the third, even worse, is coming back to what I said about key signatures there, it turns out the vast majority of people don’t know that it can be used for more than just key signatures, and even for key signatures, people struggle to really use that for anything useful.

Christopher: And so, the upshot is the Circle of Fifths has just been this oddity, and maybe that’s how you’ve related to it. I know that it was for me, this curiosity, “Okay, that’s a kind of clever little diagram. I see how it fits together.” I never did anything with it for a long time. And what emerged was that this is the picture for the vast majority of musicians out there. And it’s nuts because as we’re going to be talking about in this episode, this is not an intellectual curiosity, and it arguably shouldn’t even be pigeonholed as music theory.

Christopher: And I wanted to get together with Andrew and Anastasia because what they’ve put together in this new course, and, again, I’m not here to pitch you on the course, but it’s the reason this is so front-of-mind for us. What they’ve put together is so just polar opposite of a dry theory explanation. It’s really hammered home to us just how much potential there is in the circle for the everyday musician, the music learner who wants to be able to play freely, and improvise, and write their own music, and understand how music works. It’s all in there. But you wouldn’t guess it from looking at the average theory textbook.

Christopher: So, without further ado, I’m going to stop talking a little bit, and I’m really here to play the part of you guys, the listeners, our audience. Because, as I said for a long time, the circle for me was just this opaque curiosity. It was a diagram. That’s as much as I knew. Andrew and Anastasia have been neck-deep in the Circle of Fifths for months now, and I wanted to invite them onto the show to really get their perspective on why this matters, and maybe Anastasia you can start, start us off just by talking about, what did we do once we realized we had this ultimate guide, and so many people were interested? What got us started down this road of immersion in the Circle of Fifths?

Anastasia: Well, what we did was we essentially asked, “What have you always wondered about the Circle of Fifths,” otherwise known as, “Where are the gaps in your knowledge?” And when we got back a bunch of answers ranging from, “What is the Circle of Fifths,” to, “How can I use it to understand chords,” we saw that there was a lot of question overlap. So, a lot of people were wondering the same stuff. And, in creating a bigger guide, we sought to kind fill in those gaps, and also bridge the gap between, “here’s a Circle of Fifths, I can look at it and understand it,” and, “I can actually use the Circle of Fifths and have it be really, really applicable in my music practice.”

Christopher: Yeah. There’s that famous Steve Jobs quote about only being able to join up the dots looking backwards, and this is definitely a case of that for us, I think, where, at the time, we were just, like, “How can we do better than a simple article about the circle of fifths? We could put together a 10-day course to teach about it.” And now, in retrospect, it’s obvious what we were doing was saying, “Let’s diverge from the typical music theory that’s kind of dry and factual and leaves the musician wondering what to do about all that, and actually approach it from the musicality perspective,” and that’s what I was keen to share today.

Christopher: Whether or not you pay any attention to our course, and go off and check it out, I just want everyone listening or watching now to take away from this episode that this is not just a diagram. This is a thing you can use, and it’s a thing you can use to play and to listen and to enjoy music. And I don’t know anyone who talks more effusively about that than Andrew, so I’ll ask Andrew to weigh-in and say how this shaped up and what it’s turned into.

Andrew: Well, we started out with that ultimate guide, and then Anastasia put together, 10 Days with the Circle of Fifths, which was a wonderful course that she had put together in a PDF form. And we thought, “Now, let’s release this. What can we do to really make this sing?” And, really, that’s what it’s all about. It’s about making it sing, because it’s music. This thing is music. And, Christopher, we were talking about it, and he described it, he said, “This is the heart of how music works.” Okay? So knowing the heart of how music works, don’t you think it’s going to have some kind of effect on your musicality, on the music that you make?

Andrew: And so, we took Anastasia’s first thing and then we’d said, “Okay, how can we make this into more of an experience where it’s not just, we’re going to learn what this does, we’re not going to just memorize it, and we’re not going to do exercises on paper, we’re going to be picking up our instruments, pulling out our voices, and making this thing sing, making this thing really musical.” And so, we looked at some of the things that we’re doing on Musical U in terms of our format, like we have these modules that are called Learn Modules, where they’re informational. And then, we have another category of modules, which is Practice Modules, where you’re taking the information that you got in the Learn Modules, and you’re practicing it, you’re putting on your instrument, you’re getting physical with it.

Andrew: And then, the Apply Modules, where you’re taking this and putting it onto your music. And we take the same format and put it together with the … and really experiencing the circle fifths in this way. Okay, so one of the things that came really clear to me about one of the big peeves that people have about the Circle of Fifths looking too complicated, is that they usually see the Circle of Fifths, and it’s this multicolored diagram, it’s got a bunch of key signatures wrapping around this way and that way, it’s got major chords here, minor chords here, and it’s got all these things kind of shooting off in different directions. And they see this whole thing, and it’s like, “Yeah, it’s complicated. It looks really complicated.”

Andrew: But the truth is, all that stuff, all that stuff that’s shooting off in all these different directions, and little key signatures, and this-es and that-s, and arrows and stuff, it all just comes down to a circle with 12 points on it. Okay? That’s it. That’s where it all comes from. And if you know how to get from a circle, and making 12 points on a circle, just like you do on a clock, if you know how to get from there and experience the process of building it from there, all the way out to having all that other stuff there, and seeing how all that links together, and all that evolves one thing from another, from one step another. And if you’re doing that in a way where you’re exploring, and you’re experiencing it all the way, then memorizing it’s not going to be an issue, because it won’t be like, “I’ve got ago memorize this thing,” and … what is it? Like, elephants brag on something or other, where I’m trying to figure all these different words to memorize it.

Andrew: You’ve built the thing, you’ve made it, you know it inside out. And you’re like, “I’ve built my own house here you’re looking at. I’m still building it. I know things about this house.” Okay? I don’t know about any other house, because I built it. I got in there with my hands. I nailed the boards together. I mixed the paint that was on the wall, and I know stuff about it, and I know all the nooks and crannies of it because I built it. And so, it’s like that is a really good way to learn about this thing. And then to learn about what this thing’s going to do in your own music.

Christopher: And I’m sure the listener at this point, and our audience, that all sounds great in the abstract, but I’m sure people are curious, what does that actually mean? And I think one of the things that’s impressed me most about what you guys have put together is it’s not just lesson one, lesson two, lesson three. You must go in this order. And each lesson is a bit more complicated than the last. I don’t want to be too poetic with it, but it’s like the circle, in the sense that each module, each day, is approaching things from a different angle, and giving you a different perspective on the same material. So, even though it is sequential … Yeah, I just really love the way it gives you different insights in. And I think maybe that’s a good way for us to illustrate for people, “What does it mean to say, ‘You can experience this thing’?”

Christopher: Anastasia, maybe you can just share two or three of your favorite exercises, or angles on it, where we unpack the circle, or how people could think about it beyond just, “It’s a bunch of squiggles on a piece of paper”?

Anastasia: For sure. Something that immediately comes to mind for me, because when I was learning the circle, I did basically take the memorization route, because the way my piano teacher taught it wasn’t, I’m sad to say, particularly creative. I really do think that the fact that the circle follows a certain pattern all the way around is extremely helpful. And it does this in more ways than we know because, yes, it is complicated to look at, and there’s two rings, and there’s a bunch of key signatures wrapping around, and there’s sharps and nurse flats. And, at first, you’re not quite sure how everything works together. But I can’t pinpoint the exact exercise, I forgot where it was, but there is one that focuses in on the patterns, and just points out just how crazily interconnected the circle is, that, whether you start clockwise or counterclockwise, you see the exact same thing.

Anastasia: So, I think though it’s maybe not the most like holistic way of understanding the circle, I think just for beginners seeing that the patterns exist, and that they can derive the circle if they just go around the 12 steps doing the same thing, can be incredibly encouraging, and incredibly helpful. And then, on the flip side of that, we have an exercise where we actually have the reader build the circle themselves from the major scale. And that’s maybe one of my favorite parts of the whole course, because, in that exercise, there’s this enormous Eureka moment where you realize that, based on your knowledge of a simple major scale, and whole steps and half steps, you’ve effectively built the circle by yourself.

Anastasia: And I think in that Eureka moment there’s something really powerful where it takes it from the circle being a mere theoretic abstraction, to an actual logical manifestation of the major scale and the music theory that you already know. And it was Andrew actually that came up with that exercise of deriving a circle that’s from the major scale. And I still think it’s like so elegant, quite simple, but so brilliant. And it’s perhaps one of my favorite bits of the whole course.

Christopher: Nice. And I think from my perspective, if there was one mindset shift we wanted to send people away with today, it’s this idea that we’re not just talking about, learn the circle and memorize it, and then go off and do things with it, because that’s kind of what we’ve always tried to do, musicians throughout the decades, they’ve been like, “I understand this thing. I’ll try and memorize it, and then I’ll be able to remember the key signatures,” or, “And then I’ll know which notes I can use when improvising,” or, “Then I’ll know what chord progressions work.” The mindset shift I’d really encourage people to reach for is to shove all those things together, for lack of a more eloquent explanation. It’s not a sequential thing where you must understand it before you can memorize it, before you can use it.

Christopher: Because ultimately we’ve seen from our survey responses, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of musicians have told us that doesn’t work. So few find an explanation that clicks. And so few of those manage to actually memorize, and even fewer manage to actually use it. So, if you find yourself in that situation, it’s not just you, and it’s not your fault. And really the solution, yes, we’ve put our own unique framing on it, and I think we’re well-positioned to do so, because we specialize in musicality training, but ultimately it’s just this point that it’s not, “One, two, three. You must do it in this order,” it’s, “Let’s immerse in this thing, and experience it, and do little bits of each of those until it starts to all gel together.” And, Andrew, maybe you can talk about some parts of the course that you think people could try out, or relate to, in terms of not just looking at, or writing the circle, but actually listening to it and playing it.

Andrew: Okay. Well, one of the biggest things that makes this thing a dynamic… when you’re looking when you’re looking at this thing on paper, it’s a circle, it has 12 points on it, and with any circle, you can go one direction or you can go around the other direction. But one of the things that drives it that, one of the key secrets of the Circle of Fifths is that, when you go around one direction, it sounds different than when you will go around the other direction. So, let’s say you think of this Circle of Fifths, you’d have a C on top, and if you’re going clockwise around the circle, you’re going to go from C, to G, to D, to A. Okay?

Andrew: And if you don’t have that memorized, that’s fine. Just find one and look at it. You go around these basic numbers, forget about all the key signatures, and the minors, nothing like that, just the basic circle, the basic notes. You’re going around. And play those notes. Play here, C, G, D, A, E, B. Okay? So that’s going clockwise around the circle. All right?

Andrew: So now, go the other way. Play it the other way. We go C, F, B flat, E flat, A flat. They sound different. It sounds different going one way or another. And to get ahold of what that difference is, and what that sounds like, and what it feels like, and the different sensations that you get from going one way or going the other way. Trying to define that, trying to describe that. And there’s descriptions out there of it, but it’s like discovering it for yourself. Like what does that feel like? Just doing that alone. If you do nothing else with a Circle of Fifths, but just take those notes, and play them around in order clockwise, and play them counter-clockwise. And you never do anything, you never do a major scale, you never do a key signature, you never do an interval, you never do a chord progression. You never do anything like that. That is going to change the way you hear music. That is going to change the way you feel music.

Andrew: And that’s because the Circle of Fifths, it’s not just something that somebody dreamt up, it’s a natural law. It’s like gravity. And it’s like, we all experience gravity. We work with gravity all day, every day. Some of us are winning, some of us are losing. But we have this relationship with gravity. All right? Whether you think of it or not, you have a relationship with the Circle of Fifths already, because you hear music, you hear sounds. It’s just a law of nature. And so, you have this relationship, and just like any law of nature, if you understand a little bit more about how it works, then you can do more stuff with it. If you understand gravity, you can make a chair, or you could build a house, or you could build a rocket ship. You know?

Andrew: If you understand the Circle of Fifths a little bit better, you’re going to feel music differently, you’re going to hear music differently, even if that’s the only thing you ever do with it. And then, everything comes from that, it all comes from that. All the rest of it. It’s not two-dimensional. It exists in time, it exists in space, it exists in sound, it exists in nature. And so, the more you get into it, the more you understand that simple thing of going on one direction, going another direction, the more you’re going to have from your music, whether you’re conscious of it or not.

Christopher: Absolutely.

Andrew: Did I answer your question?

Christopher: And more. I’m really glad you hit upon that point of the relationship, because I think that’s one of these things … I don’t know. I think working on this, and I’ve only been hands off with it myself, but the two of you have been immersed, I think it’s been a bit mind blowing for all of us, because we’ve approached it from this different angle, and that’s turned out to reveal all kinds of power, and depth, and complexity, and life that I don’t know if any of us were really appreciating before going neck-deep. And what you said just there about the relationship, that’s something I would never have dreamt of. When I first encountered the circle, when I first memorized it to figure out key signatures, it was so purely factual, and logical, and mathematical. It was like, “I can either learn this or I can’t.”

Christopher: And every musician out there they can either know it, or they can’t. But, as you say, Andrew, because it is the heart of music, and because it’s something you can listen to, and play, and apply in so many different ways, each musician is going to have as unique a relationship with it as musicians themselves are unique. And, maybe, Anastasia, you can shed some light on what this could look like in practice, if we imagine, I don’t know, a guitarist, a saxophone player, and an aspiring songwriter, off the top of my head. I’m sure we have some of each of those in our audience. Maybe you can just paint a picture of, what would this do for them in their musical life if they approached it from this very different perspective?

Anastasia: What have we got? A guitarist, a saxophone, and a songwriter?

Christopher: Yeah.

Anastasia: Okay. Sure. So, off the bat we have a monophonic instrument, the saxophone, a polyphonic instrument, the guitarist. And then, a songwriter. So, they’re all going to use the circle differently. And I think one of the coolest things about the circle is that, even though it does talk a lot about chords and chord progressions, it’s also incredibly useful for a monophonic instrument. I play the flute, not very well, but I did pick one up, and I kind of was going around the circle a little bit, and arpeggiating stuff.

Anastasia: So, first of all, the cool thing about the circle is that it can do you a lot of good even if you play a monophonic instrument, because it shows you … we were talking about relationships a little bit, and I think one of the most flooring things about the circle is just how elegantly it illustrates the relationships between notes, the relationships between keys, between chords, and between chord progressions, and it ties them all together so neatly.

Anastasia: So, off the top of my head, I’m a piano player as well. And so, I deal with chords a lot. Obviously. Whether I’m playing them in my left hand, or whether I’m kind of tinkering around with a progression to see if it sounds good. So, off the bat I can use the circle, I can read directly off the circle, to see what chords might sound good together, because what the circle does is it very conveniently groups them around the same place so that you can literally look and see a cluster of chords and know that, maybe nine times out of 10 if you play that together, it will sound good in some way.

Anastasia: And that’s amazing, because considering that when you’re starting out, for example, writing a song, you often don’t know where to start, or you have an idea in your head of, “I want a four-chord song maybe, and I want it to be upbeat, and poppy, and sound good, but I don’t know what chords to use.” Again, the circle is pretty much just there for you, waiting for you to just pick a spot on it, look at the chords around it, and you’re going to be able to come up with something pretty good, and that’s an excellent basis for songwriting, too.

Anastasia: As for, for example, a saxophone player, this is maybe something I’m less well versed in, because my primary instruments are not monophonic instruments. But, yeah, the circle, also, each point on the circle is more than one thing. It’s a key, but it’s also a note, and it’s also chord. And even monophonic instrument players deal with chords in some way, whether it’s arpeggiation, or taking a root note. So, the circle is also incredibly helpful for anyone that just plays a single note at once. Sorry, for the lack of good wording in this. So, it can also help write melodies, is what I’m saying. Because everything is five steps apart, and we know that fifths sounds good together. So, simply by looking at the circle, and by learning certain patterns on the circle, you can have a basis for writing melodies that’s more effective, and more interesting than just picking notes at random and seeing if they sound good.

Christopher: Absolutely. Anything to add to that, Andrew?

Andrew: Yes. I was thinking as you were talking about songwriting, the idea that there are, as we talk about this in terms of relationships, the stuff that’s close together on the circle is closely related. And so, it tends to harmonize better, get along better. But there’s also those more distant relations. On the other side of the circle. The ones way down the creek there. And but they’re related too, they’re just related more distantly, and you can … so let’s say if you want to write a song, and you don’t want it to sound so quite nicey-nicey, you can bring in those neighbors down the road, and see how they’re going to fit in, and you can know, “Okay, they’re not going to fit in quite, as well.” So you can create stuff … it gives you this control. If you want to create something weird, it’s like, “Okay, I can just go on to the other side of the circle. It’s going to sound weird, and I know how weird it’s going to sound. It’s going to sound just this much weird.”

Andrew: And you can experiment, because you’ve got the whole spectrum that you know, “Okay, everything in the 12-tone universe of Western music is all going to be related, or distantly related in such a way.” And then, as you were saying about for the monophonic instruments, one of the things is that harmony is something that … I’m going to backtrack just a little bit. You were saying that each station on the circle is a note. It’s a single note. It’s a chord. It’s a group of chords, it’s a key. So it’s like, this thing doesn’t just go flat, it goes deep.

Andrew: And when you’re playing any single note, there is a harmonic structure, there’s a harmonic universe that it lives in. Okay? So, even if you’re only playing one note, if you’re playing classical music, and you’re only playing one note at a time, and you’re never going to improvise, and you’re never going to do any of this stuff, but you want to understand the note you’re playing, and play it with full meaning, if you understand the depth of that note, not just, “Okay, this is the next note in my scale,” but, “This is how this note’s relating to everything else that’s going on around it,” that’s there at a glance, as you said. At a glance, in the Circle of Fifths, you can see, and feel, and hear those relationships. They’re all there. And so, it’s going to give a lot more depth and meaning to the note that you produced.

Andrew: We’ve all experienced players, and where two people can play the same music, the same notes, the same melody, the same rhythm, and it just doesn’t sound the same. And of course we attribute that to, “Oh, well this person has more of a feeling for it. They have more emotion, and stuff like that.” And that’s all true. But it also is was because this person who’s playing it is hearing and feeling this note on more depth. And that depth is there in the Circle of Fifths. It’s there when you perceive it.

Andrew: And so, yes, you can go through this thing, and if you go through and do all these exercises, and if you use it for improvisation, and use it for practicing your scales and all these things, it’s going to be an extremely useful tool to you. But the thing that’s coming more and more clear to me with this whole Circle of Fifths experience that we’ve been having, and that I’ve been having putting this together, is that this is about how I feel music. This is about the depth to which I feel music, and can feel music in which it’s penetrating into my inner most being. And then I’m bringing that out, you know?

Andrew: So, and it’s more than just an intellectual exercise, or even a conscious comprehension. It goes beyond that. And so, that’s why I’m like, “Yeah, everyone, let’s do this,” and you go out, grab a Circle of Fifths, and start playing around with it, and just how it feels, and don’t worry if you understand it, or if you know, or if you’re going to memorize it, just play around with it. And then just go on with your merry life, and it’s going to make a difference.

Christopher: Awesome. Well, I have a toddler meltdown in the background here that I have to apologize for, if that’s leaking through. But rather than have everyone wait for 10 minutes until life is okay in the three-year-old universe again, I will push on through.

Christopher: Thank you, Andrew. I think it’s just been staggering how much emotion, and feeling, and meaning has come out of approaching the circle in this way. And I think that was a fitting place to start wrapping things up, because that’s really what we wanted to send people away with today. It’s not, “Hey, go buy our course,” and it’s not, “You should learn the Circle of Fifths because it’s useful”. It’s really, “You have a relationship with music. The Circle of Fifths is right there at the heart of music, at work, in the notes, in the chords, in the scales, in the keys, whether you know it or not. So why not equip yourself with that deep understanding, so that you can relate to all of those things, both intellectually, and emotionally, and in every other way.”

Christopher: And I just hope everyone will take this episode as an inspiration and encouragement to go out there and try playing the circle, and try listening to the circle. And we’ve given you a few practical ideas there. You’ll find plenty more online, like “Circle of Fifths exercises”. There’s probably people who’ve written about that, right? Apart from just us? But, really, the key to it is to not see it in the sequential way. So, don’t think, “I need to understand this thing inside out. And then I need to memorize it, so it’s just like that. And then I can start using it for X, Y, and Z.”

Christopher: Dive in. Immerse yourself. We’ve got this new course, The Circle Mastery Experience that we’re clearly all very excited about, and that release is happening today, as we record this – no, as we air this episode. So, circlemastery.com is the place to go if you want more info about that course, in particular, or of course if you’re a member of Musical U, you’ll be hearing about it from us by email. And, yeah, any final words, Andrew, Anastasia, for people to go out there and immerse themselves in the Circle of Fifths in this new way?

Anastasia: As we were saying, there’s really no one way to use the circle. Wherever you drop the needle is good. The fact that you’re just looking at it and using it is itself great. So, start wherever. Again, you don’t have to understand all the theory behind it. I find that the understanding kind of comes the more you play around with it. So, actually, start with your instrument. Don’t even start with a piece of paper and the circle. Pick up your instrument, and pick a key, and play with the notes around it, play with the chords around it, and see what it sounds like. And the encouraging thing that you’ll find is that it’s going to sound pretty good. And just keep at it.

Christopher: Andrew?

Andrew: Very cool. Yeah, get into it. Roll up your sleeves and get muddy. And the one thing I want to leave you with is that, it is all about relationships. I mean, you have that little tri-tone that you call the toddler dancing around in the back there, Christopher, that was definitely a distant relationship going on there, but we’re going to bring that relationship a little closer. Right? And, it’s all about relationships. The Circle of Fifths is about relationships. It’s about your relationship with music, your relationship with nature, with the natural law of music. And it’s like, getting into experiencing that relationship is where to go with that. And just like any relationship, you’ve got to dive in.

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