What is the pentatonic scale, and why is it so popular? Learn about the inner mechanics of this scale, discover why its notes sound so consonant and natural together, and explore how you can use it to create beautiful melodies.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the power of the pentatonic scale

Transcript

Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Musicality podcast. Today we are going to be talking about one of my favorite topics in music and musicality training which is the pentatonic scale. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for awhile you will be well familiar with the idea that we think the pentatonic scale is super useful and important for you to know about. Even though outside the world of the Musicality podcast it’s often see as niche scale just suitable for some genres or it’s kind of a beginners scale that you quickly move beyond.

Today in this episode we are going to be talking a little bit about why you might have underestimated the pentatonic scale, why it’s so valuable even for advanced musicians to spend a bit of time getting to know.
I’m joined on the episode by Adam Liette, our communications manager here at Musical U. And Andrew Bishko, our product manager and content editor. Say a quick hello Adam and Andrew and maybe introduce yourself and a line or two.

Adam: Hello. I’m Adam Liette, communications manager here at Musical U. I play the guitar and trumpet.

Andrew: Hello. I’m Andrew Bishko. I play woodwinds and keyboard instruments and especially love playing the accordion these days.

Christopher: Very nice. I always love it when a musician introduces themselves as playing a whole family of instruments. I think that makes a great impression compared to “well, I play the tenor sax.”

So, as I said the pentatonic scale packs a lot of punch for something that on the face of it is not a big deal. Why don’t we kickoff with Andrew? Maybe you could explain very briefly what is the pentatonic scale and what’s your perspective on why it’s something that we as musicians should be paying attention to?

Andrew: Well, the pentatonic scale is a five note scale plus the octave. Pentatonic scales are found throughout the world and most every musical culture. And the pentatonic scale actually seems to be hardwired in our brains. We have this video scattered across the site with Bobby McFerrin demonstrating this. It’s very natural almost neurological.

The major pentatonic scale that is most common in our culture is the bones of the other scales. You find it … those same notes in both the major and minor scales. Now, many people when you talk about learning the pentatonic scale and many instruments it’s kind of easy to play. And so they say “Oh, I know how to play the pentatonic scale. I know this pattern on my instrument” but there’s … the important thing about the pentatonic scale is not just to learn how to play it but really how to hear it.

The notes in the pentatonic scale are consonant with each other which means they all sound good together. And so when we are able to differentiate the steps in the pentatonic scale by ear we’ve accomplished something really deep musically that will help us to understand all the other scales.

In a way, it’s even more difficult to get the pentatonic scale by ear because all the notes sound so good together. None of them really pop out as, “that sound really strange here”. So, when you have that, not just on your fingers but in your ears. It’s super, super useful and expands your ability to hear music in any key and with any scale in a very powerful whale… way.

Christopher: I’m imaging a very powerful whale.

Yeah, I think that’s the critical point. Well, it was for me at least, which was that even though I learned how to play the pentatonic scale it wasn’t until I tackled it from an ear training perspective that I really understood kind of the point of it. Or what made it worth thinking about. And you know, in a nutshell, it is a five note scale or at least five or six note depending on how we’re counting. But those are notes from the major scale and we’ve talked on this podcast before about the major and minor scales and about different modes. And it took a while for it to sink in, to me, how important it is that the pentatonic scale is using notes from the major scale. It’s not just five random notes. You can come up with random five note scales all day long but the major pentatonic that we’re talking about and indeed the minor pentatonic is using a subset of that major scale which is everywhere in music in some way, shape or form.

And so just to be clear I’m going to briefly try and sing even though I haven’t warmed up or practiced but you know the pentatonic scale if we think of a major scale as DO-RE-MI-FA-SO-LA-TI-DO. The pentatonic would be DO-RE-MI-SO-LA-DO-LA-SO-MI-RE-DO.

And so you’re just pulling out that FA and that TI and as Andrew said just then those are the ones that jump out from a harmonic perspective. They’re the ones that sound a bit odd once you get used to hearing just those pentatonic notes that will kind of blend nicely together. And I think once you get that framework in your head. It’s incredibly easy to fill in that fourth and seventh, the FA and the TI, as extra notes that then jump out at you.

And so from an ear training perspective it’s a huge headstart in wrapping your head around that four major scale. There’s that bit of science that everyone always quotes that the brain can remember seven things at once and that’s why phone numbers are seven digits long. And, I don’t know, from a musical perspective I definitely found it to be the case that getting your ear around just those five notes DO-RE-MI-SO-LA or 12356 is dramatically easier than trying to tackle all seven or eight at once.

Adam, how about you? How did you first come across the pentatonic scale? Or how does it fit into your own musical life?

Adam: I’ll be honest I didn’t know it was a five-note scale until I’ve been playing them for years. I was a self-taught guitar player even though my background is very formal, classical background, conservatory music. When I started playing guitar, when I was playing guitar, to this day if you hand me a piece of standard notation and say “play this on your guitar.” I can’t do it. I never applied that skill of standard notation to my guitar playing because I grew up in the era of tab.

Those of you who are under 30 won’t remember this but we used to have these things call dial-up modems that would hog up the phone line at 14.4 kilobytes per second. And there was this disparate array of tablature music sites that you could just download these free tabs from. It was before ultimateguitar.com. And that’s how we would learn.

Me and my buddies we’re playing in my garage. We’d either learn by ear or by lead sheets that we’d find. But mostly it’s these self-made printed tabs. And then I started getting to wanting to solo. I was the lead guitarist in the band. Because I was, I don’t know, the better guitarist. For whatever that means when your thirteen.

And so I found this sheet in Guitar World, and was just the pentatonic scale up and down the fret board. And it was just these shapes, these patterns. And I would practice, going up and down the fret board, these patterns, one through five. And just by playing in the pattern, as long as you knew the key you were in, you could play anything. Absolutely anything. And it would sound right just because of what Andrew was saying: all these notes, all these pitches fit within the scale and they’re never going to be wrong.

And then from there you can start to add those passing and neighboring tones as you start to get a little more advanced. Start to get more confident in your ability to play and then as I started to continue to play and we were covering these solos, you know these songs by the bands at the time. I found that I needed the tab to learn the solo but sometimes I just look at the tab and I’d say “Oh, he’s just in pentatonic four.” So, I was able to quickly deconstruct the solos and I didn’t really need to go note by note. I needed to know the general pattern that he was playing in and from there I could … even if I wasn’t playing note for note. I could fairly confidently play through that guitar solo and no one in the crowd is going to know the difference and I would be very … I’d be able to play it well and feel good about the performance and it was great.

And even as we move on to advanced … being a more advanced musician these are fundamentals and so it’s something I continue to practice when I pick up the guitar. Every now and then you gotta go back to my pentatonics, make sure I still have this under my fingers because I still play it all the time. So, yeah, for me as a guitar player having never learned standard notation on the guitar, pentatonics were the only reason I became a good soloist. I think it was the reason at the time and really opened up a whole new world of playing for me.

Christopher: That’s super interesting. I sometimes make disparaging comments about guitarists and the pentatonic scale cause I think it is … you know there’s that cliché where you learn the pentatonic pattern or the minor pentatonic specifically and every solo just sounds like you’re playing a minor pentatonic scale.

But, obviously that is an oversimplification – it is everywhere in music. It’s as we touched on the skeleton and framework. A lot of musicians think of the major scale (or the minor scale depending on the key) as your framework. But underneath that you have this pentatonic shape, as it were, and I think tapping into that with your fingers and with your ear gives you a whole different level of understanding of what’s going on.

I think a couple of other cool things that I’ve learned over time are … to come back to my point about being easier to learn. The modes are a lot easier to wrap your head and your ears around with the pentatonic, you know, in the case of guitar like you were talking about Adam. Guitarist normally come across as the minor pentatonic and then they’re a bit surprised to realize they’ve kind of half memorized the shapes for the major pentatonic already. And that kind of clicks in the brain a little bit.

For me, I would never have imagined I’d be able to sing through the modes of the major scale that just seemed like an insurmountable task. Even once I was fine doing major and minor scales but actually I found that when I tried to singing the modes of the major pentatonic there were only five of them. They’re all pretty simple and I was able to get that into my ear within a day or two just kind of practicing singing them. And again it just gives you that headstart then when you want to sing the full mode you’ve got that pentatonic mode as a stepping stone. And the other thing I picked up over time when I was trying to kind of reconcile interval thinking with solfa thinking and again this is one that is relevant for guitarists in particular I think because there’s fret board patterns you’re always thinking about. Is it two steps up or three steps up and the shape of it?

It was really helpful with the pentatonic that there’s only really two types of interval in there. You know for the consecutive notes that were whole steps or there minor thirds and that’s it. DO-RE-MI, a couple of whole steps there, MI to SO minor third, SO to LA whole step, LA to DO again minor third. And that goes for the minor pentatonic that starts on the LA or the sixth note of the scale. It goes for all of the modes, as well. There’s just those two types of intervals in there. So again, if you’re approaching it from an ear training perspective and trying to figure out things by ear and so on. Restricting yourself to the pentatonic can be a huge headstart.
I think the last thing I wanted to touch on, Andrew I’m sure you have some thoughts on this too. Is that another place it really helps to have that simpler stepping stone is in the context of improvisation, you know Adam you were talking about guitar soloing. But for any musician we’ve already said a few times how the pentatonic scale: all the notes sound good.

And that is kind of a broad statement but the bottom line is if you’re playing over a major key chord progression or a not too wacky minor key chord progression. Playing the corresponding pentatonic scale is going to sound good all the time, any note from it. And that gives you an enormous cushion as a beginner improviser to know that you can pick any pitch from that scale and it’ll sound good. And suddenly you’re free to think about rhythm and dynamics and phrasing and all of these things without worrying, “Oh, I’m going to hit a wrong note and it’s going to clash with the chord.”

Andrew: I totally agree with you on that and I’ve been thinking about … I played a … A few years back there was a musician, a local musician, who was dying of cancer and we did a big benefit concert for him and a huge variety of amazing musicians came. And, I was … You know I’d been playing jazz and all kind of different things, and all kinds of crazy scales. But I did something where I was accompanying some people that were singing, putting counter melodies into a song. And a really amazing classical guitar player was there came up to me and said that he really appreciated the way I worked with my pentatonic scales and kept it so simple and so beautiful.

The melodies you can make with this scale are so beautiful. I wasn’t consciously doing it but it was right there. And it’s because exactly what you were saying there’s many times a beginner improvisor is freaking about out about what notes they’re going to play. “Am I going to play a wrong note?” But if there is no wrong notes, if all the notes sound good then you get into the meat of things. Like you were talking about that dynamics, the rhythm. Making something beautiful. And I think that’s such a valuable gift that we can enjoy. And sometimes it feels like it is a guilty pleasure because nothing to feel guilty about because it’s music and it sounds beautiful.

Christopher: One hundred percent. Well, I have a soft spot in my heart for the modes of the pentatonic scale and I think we’re going to have to do a separate dedicated episode on that topic because there are a bunch of really interesting things that come out of it. Including what you just touched on, Andrew, which is that this simple pattern can actually be really musically interesting.

So, I think we will save that as a topic for another day and wrap things up here.

I hope that our discussion has given you some fresh ideas about the pentatonic scale or at least encouraged you to spend a bit of time exploring it. Because it may take 30 seconds to learn how to play it in one key on your instrument but that is a tool that can be explored and developed and extended and applied throughout your musical life whether you’re a beginner, intermediate, pro, teacher, professional like, wherever you’re at and whatever instrument you play. The pentatonic scale probably has a lot more to offer you than you may have realized.

The post About Why the Pentatonic Scale is So Great appeared first on Musical U.

This month, we’re spotlighting a Musical U member who approaches her musical journey with a pointed pragmaticism while still giving herself ample room to explore instruments and musical styles. J’aimeW captured our interest with her frequent and insightful Progress Journal entries, detailing her adventures with ukulele, guitar, Irish flute, and her own singing voice, and sharing her thoughts and revelations as she progresses.

We’ll be giving you peeks into her Progress Journal interspersed with her interview answers below.

Our interview with J’aimeW is a fascinating look at how one multi-instrumentalist with a huge musical appetite structures her learning to build a foundation that can further her progress in any avenue she chooses.

I played flute and piccolo in high school band, then in college I took private lessons and played in chamber music ensembles. Besides the modern silver flute, I’ve also played around with some of the other members of the flute family: baroque flute, Irish flute, tin whistle, soprano and alto recorders. More recently I took up the ukulele. I thought it was time I learned an instrument that could play chords!

One of my favorite singer-songwriters, Neil Finn, live-streamed the recording sessions from his last solo album. I love the casual feel of the videos, like we are there in the studio. Here’s one of them, beautiful song:

Neil is a really inspiring musician to me. I love his lyrics (sometimes moving, sometimes mysterious) and his interesting collaborations (this album had a whole chamber orchestra and choir in the studio at times, plus Neil’s brother and son guesting on some tracks). Plus he is a multi-instrumentalist, which I always wanted to be.

I’m working through the Playing By Ear roadmap on Musical U. I’m also learning solfa and starting to connect those skills to my flute. I’ve borrowed a guitar to try it out and see if I want to learn more. I like it so far!

I felt like the skills I had were never appropriate for the musical situations I wanted to be in. I don’t want to be in only classical, sheet-music-reading situations forever. I want to try out bluegrass jams, play folk and rock music. I want to try lots of things.

I can’t remember if I found the Musicality Podcast or the Musical U blog first, but I followed both for a while, until finally I decided: if the free resources are this good, the paid membership must be amazing! So I jumped in.

I really did not expect to be learning solfa. Only ever heard of it through that song from The Sound of Music. However, I’m really starting to see how useful it is.

I’ve been a member for three months and I have:

• Figured out why I thought I was a “bad singer” (I didn’t know what my comfortable vocal range was, or how to choose songs that weren’t difficult for me!)
• Started to put foundational skills in place for playing by ear, and
• Changed the way I think about practicing. I am so much more focused now, because I have a long term goal, plus a short term plan that tells me what to do today, and I have confidence that what I am doing today actually moves me toward my goal.

The big picture vision I wrote when I joined was so broad and rambly that I don’t think anything I could do now could count as changing my plans!

I have switched gears from singing to playing by ear, but if anything, it’s becoming more and more clear to me that the underlying skills for all these goals interlock, so working on one also supports working on the others.

Since I have a lot of varying ideas of things I want to try and experience, it’s great for me to get some solid basics in place that will serve me wherever I go musically.

The accountability of a Progress Journal has been really good for me. I set the goal of updating it about once a week, and I don’t want to write a public post saying I didn’t do anything for a whole week.

As someone with a broad, rambly big picture vision, I also appreciate the clarity of publicly stating a goal for the week. It reins me in, when I might get distracted by a bright shiny new path.

Laying A Foundation

The absolutely incredible thing about J’aimeW is how she is able to honestly assess her own abilities and goals, and follow a pragmatic, let’s-do-this approach to learning music – she can easily spot the gaps in knowledge and skill that separate her from her goals, and recognize what needs to be done to get her where she wants to go.

Realizing that she wants to play a wide range of instruments and styles and break out of just reading sheet music, J’aimeW has pinpointed that laying down a solid foundation of the basics will help her in whatever she decides to do – and so, she is working on a group of highly practical and interrelated musicality skills: playing by ear, deliberate practice, and solfa.

Though the idea of “planning” your journey is off-putting to some because it invokes feelings of rigidity and a strict path, that’s far from the truth – a well-thought-out plan will unlock numerous musical doors and encourage exploration and creativity.

The post Musical U Member Spotlight: J’aimeW appeared first on Musical U.

Aimee’s also a songwriter and recording artist and this year she’s released two tracks from a forthcoming new album. Aside from just being wonderful music, these tracks are remarkable for the way Aimee’s been openly sharing the process of writing, arranging, and recording them through videos on her YouTube channel.

In this conversation we talk about:

• One important part of Aimee’s musical upbringing which let her make improvising and playing by ear a natural part of her musical identity from a very early age
• What Aimee’s been discovering as she digs into the topic of tone deafness and helping people learn to match pitch and sing in tune.
• Aimee’s relationship with sheet music, as someone who was predominantly a by-ear player – and whichever camp you fall in yourself, we think it’ll surprise you.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Aimee Nolte’s website
• A Musical Conversation With My Mentor, Steve Call
• About Teachers, Coaches, and Mentors
• How To Figure out Chords To Songs
• How To Get Your Kids Started In Music
• Point & Sing
• Are You Tone Deaf?
• Scat Singing 101
• About Singing as a Tool
• Bruh, Do You EVEN Melody?
• The Making Of My New Single: The Loveliest Girl
• Falling Snow (In The Studio)

Transcript

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

Aimee: Thanks so much for having me Christopher.

Christopher: So I fanboyed out before we hit record because I am a huge fan of your YouTube channel, and I feel like I know you a little bit through those videos, but I don’t know all that much about your backstory. So I’d love to begin at the beginning if we could, and learn a little bit about where Aimee Nolte came from as a musician, as a music educator. What was your own musical upbringing like?

Aimee: Yeah, of course. I remember just being a very little girl and singing a lot. I had musical relatives, at least they enjoy singing silly songs, and so I remember doing that as a little girl. And then we did have a piano in the house and my first major musical memory was going to the piano and figuring out how to play Silent Night by Ear, and then calling my mom and showing her, and then she thought it might be time to get me some piano lessons. So at age five I started taking piano lessons, classical, and then I continued that until I was around 15. In the meantime, I was going to school, and I joined the band.

First I played clarinet in fourth grade and saxophone in the fifth grade and trumpet in the sixth grade, which kind of stuck with me. I joined the Jazz Band in the sixth grade and that’s when I learned that I could have a solo, and what that kind of meant. So I remember the first solo I ever had was actually written out. A lot of [inaudible 00:01:36] way to do that, especially for middle school charts. They’ll actually write out solos in case people don’t know how to improvise or want to. And so I learned that solo and then I changed it a little bit, that’s what I did for my very first solo.

But also around that time, I remember the high school coming to perform for the middle school kids, and there was a jazz choir, and I got to hear several members from that jazz choir scat singing, and I had never even known what that was, but somehow as probably a 11 or 12 year-old that excited the heck out of me, and I just wanted to start trying it. It just kind of opened up the world of jazz for me, so when I went to high school I stayed on the trumpet, and I played lead trumpet in the high school jazz band and I sang in the choir. I also decided around 15 that I probably didn’t have time for classical piano anymore because I was playing three sports also.

So I dropped the classical piano and just started studying jazz piano on my own. I got the Mark Levine jazz piano book, and my high school instructor started burning me … No, you couldn’t burn CDs in those days. He was taking his CDs, putting them on cassette for me. So I had a Sarah Vaughn cassette and Ella Fitzgerald cassette, and I was listening to them all the time. And then when I decided I wanted to study music in college, I had to choose an instrument and I felt like I was probably stronger at the piano than the trumpet, so I chose piano. Yes, studied just piano in college.

Christopher: Okay, well I want to pause the story there because I’m sure our listeners are super intrigued by a few things. You mentioned playing by ear and improvisation coming into the picture very early on, as well as picking up several instruments, these are not super normal things I think for general music education in the US or indeed in the UK. Was there anything in your home environment or anything in your personality maybe that you think made you more receptive to that or more able for that?

Aimee: I think it was so exciting to me. Any time I ever picked up an instrument and could make sense out of it, that just got me excited. I mean I can remember playing my grandfather’s guitar growing up. I’m siting in a room all by myself and figure out everything I could, and I loved that. I think I came from a very small town. Like I said, I started on the clarinet but I didn’t really like the clarinet and so I asked if I could switch to the saxophone and they said sure. There was a time, I remember in the concert band, when we didn’t have a baritone player so the director asked me if I could learn to play the baritone and the French horn at one point. I think he kind of knew that instruments were coming easily to me, and I even drummed at a Jazz Festival when the drummer didn’t show up one year.

And I loved it. I was just going to do all of that that I could. I mean having grown up a bit and raised some kids too, I think that there’s really something to … The point that I learned about improvisation when I was 11 or 12, like before puberty, so girls especially a lot of times after girls start to mature, they quit being so excited about showing off or doing what comes naturally to them, and they kind of tend to want to hide, so that the boys like them more. They pretend to be bad at things. I don’t know if I really went through that, but for sure at 11 years old I was just stoked. Nothing was scary, I was just excited. And I think my family helped with that, they always were really encouraging of me.

Christopher: Nice, and that touches on something I was keen to ask which was, you had that experience at the age of 11 or so and you discovered improvisation, after that was it that you had kind of tapped into improv so it wasn’t scary and you weren’t really making mistakes or was it just that it kind of let you sidestep that self-consciousness that you might have had, and you were experimenting and falling on your face as much as any musician does when learning to improvise, but for some reason you’d kind of factored it into your identity and you weren’t so concerned about it?

Aimee: I mean there was one boy in high school who could play the saxophone and improvise, and he was pretty good at it, but other than that, it was a very small town. So there wasn’t really anybody to intimidate me, and I thought I could do well at this. So I didn’t feel intimidated. I just tried, and at first when I started listening more, especially I remember I ordered a CD of Al Jarreau, and I remember hearing him scat sing and thinking, “This man never runs out of ideas, ever.” He could keep going for hours and hours and never run out of ideas, and I thought I want to be like that someday and I knew that I didn’t have the ideas yet.

I was just doing things that sounded good to me, and probably not really hitting any wrong notes but I didn’t sound like jazz. I just sounded like somebody noodling around who had a good ear.

Christopher: Got you, and you have some really fantastic tutorials on your YouTube channel about scat singing, which is something that really needs good tutorials because I think a lot of people kind of blunder their way through trying and then decide it’s too difficult or it’s too complicated or they don’t have what it takes, and so I love the way you break it down there and we’ll definitely put a link in the show notes. But for anyone listening who’s like, “What is scat singing?” Could you just give us a brief rundown of what you mean by that?

Aimee: Sure, so I think Louie Armstrong was the first one to really scat sing, and some people said that he did it because he forgot the words. I don’t think that’s true. I think he just felt it in his heart so he did it, but it’s the concept of being able to improvise with your voice. So instrumentalist can play all of these notes, and of course when you’re going to sing you wouldn’t make up words to … What we usually do is sing lyrics but you make up syllables to kind of imitate an instrument and get around to the chord changes. Some people say that instrumentalists are imitating vocalists when they improvise, but I think both are true.

I do teach about articulation and having a very nimble tongue, being able to say quick syllables, and that is all from my trumpet experience and being in big bands and hearing how the directors will take a line like (singing) and actually having the saxophones or the trumpets remove the instruments from their mouths and all of them say it the same way, (singing). He wants a dot on that first note and a dee on the high note, and as soon as everybody can articulate the same way, they can all play the phrase the same way. That kind of thing is magic for me and it’s what I think about a lot when I scat sing.

Christopher: That’s super interesting. And so you started telling the story of your college days there, and you were diving into piano and jazz, tell us how those colleges went and how you developed as a musician from there.

Aimee: All of a sudden I was a very small fish in a very large pond. I knew it would be that way, and I was excited for it but there were a lot of bad habits that I had from not ever having a jazz instructor that needed to be fixed. So I just started fixing things and spending hours and hours in the practice room trying to keep up with everybody else. That was really new.

Christopher: And can you cast your mind back to any particular sticking points or bad habits you’ve developed?

Aimee: Playing the root in my chords, because I had never played with a bass player. By the time I got to college it was just me playing for myself. So for me to take the roots out of my chord voicings, it was like a whole brain shift, and it was really hard. People I teach now I run across that exact same thing with them. And some people just maybe don’t want it bad enough, so they don’t end up doing it. But the people that want it, it’s a whole shift in how you think, so it takes a lot of time.

Christopher: Interesting, and were there any other kind of mindset shifts or musical epiphanies that happened during those years?

Aimee: Well the one thing that was interesting I guess was having to take all of the music courses that all of the classical musicians were taking. That was interesting for me. Some of it came really easy and some of it was a little harder. I felt like I was ahead of them in a lot of ways but in a couple of ways I was behind. So that was always a weird dichotomy of having this jazz sensibility but needing to keep up in the classical world in some ways. I remember my dictation class, I sat through the first class and I went, “This is so easy. I don’t want to sit through this the whole year.” And I ended up testing out of it that first day.

But like the sight singing class I thought I’d just have to look at notes and read them and sing them and that was easy for me, but not using hand symbols to sing solfege, that was a big challenge for me to have to … If I saw a line that went (singing), I could sing that easily, but to go (singing), even now I struggle a little bit to do that quickly, I have to think, and then to do it with hand symbols. And they made you use two hands at my school to do the hand symbols. Anyway, and then music theory, I knew the names of all kinds of chords, but I didn’t know the classical names. When you talk about a Neapolitan sixth or a French or German sixth chord, I had to give them all other names. I had to be like, “Oh, that’s actually a minor four chord in the first inversion, right? I had to make up all these different ways. So that was always a little bit of a battle, and I didn’t see that coming really but worked through it.

Christopher: And I have to ask the bland question then of looking back, are you glad you had to learn those things? Is this the kind of, “Oh, I did it at the time and that was fine,” or was this, “I finally learned this stuff that has served me well,”?

Aimee: Those classical things like German sixths or whatever, I don’t think I’ve ever used that again, and nobody ever makes you analyze a figured bass after you leave college. But for my own purposes, of course I analyze things all the time but no, I don’t use those classical terms that I use. You learn about form in analysis, that was helpful to learn about, but I’ve never had to say, “Oh, that’s a sonatina,” or, “This is a concerto.” I just don’t dive into that world very often. I know a lot of people do. I tend to stay more on the jazz side of things.

Christopher: Sure, and I have seen mention of solfa and solfege, however you’d like to call it, on your YouTube channel, is that something you continue to use or you’ve internalized? Or was that kind of a detour from how you were naturally hearing things and thinking about things?

Aimee: I’ve realized that solfege is important for many singers, especially singers who don’t play an instrument. I haven’t actually taught for … I taught on and off, but not very regularly until the last couple of years so I’m kind of figuring out things like that about different people and what they need, especially people from other countries.

They grow up singing solfege, not so much America, and then they use a fixed “Do”, right? So in America we move our “Do”. If we’re in the key of G major “Do” is G. If I’m from France “Do” will always be C, and if I’m in the key of G I’m still going to call C “Do”. So when I teach other people I try to tap into those things so that I can connect with them and talk in their language.

Christopher: Interesting. Yeah, we’ve past episode of this podcast, unpacking that fixed versus movable “Do” thing and it definitely trips up members that musically you occasionally … because we use movable “Do” and that to me is the most useful kind of solfa, solfege. I feel like a fixed “Do” you’re just putting different names on the CDE notes, but when you’re coming from that world, I guess like you found with the classical terminology, it can be quite hard to divorce your mental associations and attach a new name to things.

Aimee: Absolutely. Even the fact that Westerners call the distance between one note to another a whole step or a half step, but we’re the only ones that do that, everybody else says semitone and tone, right? And quaver and semiquaver.

Christopher: I see, fantastic. So that kind of broadened your horizons in some ways that were useful and some ways that were maybe not so useful. Were there any particularly memorable experiences or people that you connected with at that time that shaped who you went on to become as a musician and music educator?

Aimee: Absolutely, and when people ask me if they should go to college to study music, I always tell them that the main reason to go to college is to meet people, that was it for me. I met other people finally that we’re interested in the same things that I was. They study music all the time and get excited by music, and want to play all the time and want to write and all of that was just all of us finally … It felt like we were all somewhere else and then we all would just come together and somehow you’ve got these instant friends who want to do the same thing you do, that was so fun.

I had several bands that I played in. One in particular, we were called The Brian Neil Quartet, and my friend Brian played tenor and soprano saxophones and we were very all on guard. We were all writing things like, “This whole song is based around the note B, and that’s all we’re going to say about this song,” or, “This whole song is on this one episode of Star Trek.” I don’t watch Star Trek but my bass player did and so he had to explain the whole episode and then we we would all play our impressions of this episode of Star Trek.

Christopher: Tremendous. I love that.

Aimee: Yeah, so I mean we had so much fun just kind of figuring things out. And in those days one of the guys in our band decided … He was actually an Osmond. His uncle was Donny Osmond, and his aunt was Marie Osmond and they said he could come live in Branson, Missouri and play for them and do all of their country shows and that was going to be his living. And we all thought that he was the biggest sellout. The big question was, “If Kenny G was going to hire you right now, would you take the job and you could have the job the rest of your life?” And we all said, “Absolutely not.” That would be just like prostituting yourself for music. Anyway, you grow up a little bit and you realize that absolutely, you should have taken that job in Branson, Missouri and he did and made way more money than the rest of us.

Anyway, that’s kind of a tangent but I had some great experiences meeting people that helped me my whole life.

Christopher: One video I really enjoyed on your channel recently was a conversation with a chap named, Steve cool, who you referred to as a mentor, and I’d love if you could just speak to why you chose that word in the title of your video because it’s something we’ve touched on on the podcast before and something I think gets bandied about among musicians. They think they just need the right mentor and they’ll break into the music industry or they think they’re stumbling so much because they have a teacher but what they really need is a mentor. I’d love to hear your perspective on that. Maybe the difference between a teacher and a mentor or the different roles those can be.

Aimee: That’s a great question. Steve is the one who got me in to BYU. I auditioned for him, and I think from the beginning I kind of knew that he saw some potential in me, and that made him special to me from the beginning. Sometimes you have teachers that don’t particularly pay attention to you and you can still learn a lot from them, but Steve did pay particular attention to me and let me know that he had hopes for my growth. I think that’s kind of key. And then I tried out to be in the combo that he coached which was the Dixieland band, and I did that because I have a big love of ragtime music and I thought I could put in some of that, what I already knew.

And then Steve, he was just a champion for everybody in that Dixieland group. He got us gigs everywhere. I almost had as many gigs with that group that was associated with the university than other gigs, even traveling gigs. He got us like a tour, we went to Washington DC. And also what he did was he sold me his 73 Suitcase Fender Rhodes for $300. He said, “Aimee, I’m going to get rid of this and I think you could use it.” I’ve still got it. I’ll never sell it. And then he would just give me all kinds of opportunities. He’d say, “I think you can sing. You should sing with my band.” Because I wasn’t really singing in those days and then he’d feature me on a couple of tunes and gave me things to listen to. He’d say, “You need to learn this whole record. Take it home, listen to it.” Extra projects, coming up with ways to challenge you.

And I think hope is probably a key word in a mentor, that they’ve got some hope for your development.

Christopher: Wonderful. I love that description. I think you’ve painted a really lovely picture of what a good mentor can be like and the kinds of things they can do for you, and I should say it’s a reciprocal relationship. I’m sure he would speak very highly of you and be very glad to have adopted you or taken you under his wing in that way.

Aimee: I don’t know you have to ask him.

Christopher: So I think from what we’ve talked about so far, the listener is probably thinking Aimee is a very free and creative musician, and she just always kind of pick things up by ear and figured it out herself. What was your relationship with sheet music during this whole time? Were you someone that that all came easy to or was that just a totally different world or somewhere in between?

Aimee: Well I did grow up playing classical piano, so that was always the world where my teacher would put a new piece of music in front of me and tell me to do my best, and that’s always been important. I always knew that was important. I especially knew what a great skill that was when I remember being in my form and analysis class, my last year in college, and whenever we would look at a piece of music the professor would call out, he would say, “Can anybody sight-read this?” And there was one girl in particular that could come and she could sight-read anything. I would look at it and in my head I’d say, “I probably could,” and then she would get up and play it and I’d be like, “No, but I can’t do it like her.” So I never raised my hand for that. It was always that one girl. But that was a pretty cool skill.

I think I didn’t use it so much until I started accompanying, so that was several years after high school when I decided to make some money by accompanying choirs. And I realized that in order to be a good sight-reader you need to sight-read a lot. So even right now I keep a job where I accompany five choirs from one school, and I go do that one day a week. I’m not really doing it for the money anymore. I’m doing it for the sight-reading. The summer will pass and then I’ll have to go back and do it again at the fall and I’ve lost some of my skill, but by the end of the school year I’m pretty darn good at it. So there are times when it’s important to sight-read. For me, I’m not playing big band charts anymore, people aren’t throwing charts in front of me, but that was also important in college when I had to play big band charts. I was so glad for my ability to read, especially for the rhythms.

Christopher: Interesting. Yeah, I love how it comes across in your YouTube videos. Your attitude to sheet music I think is a really healthy and admirable one, in the sense that if you look up some jazz piano tutorials on YouTube there won’t be a note symbol in sight, and everything is just oral and they are kind of anti notation or at least anti staff notation. They’re like, “As long as you can read a lead sheet or chord chart rather, that’s all you need. And obviously you have people at the other end of the spectrum who are just more on the classical end, who are like, “Note by note, if it’s not on the page, it’s not happening.” And I think there are a several of your videos where it comes across that you’re like, “This is a useful tool.” You can jot ideas down in whatever way makes sense to you. It doesn’t have to be note-perfect, classical staff notation, but this is part of who you should be as a musician or who you can be and the toolkit you can have.

Aimee: Absolutely, it is a toolkit. There are ways to write that we all need to be aware of. There are ways to listen we all need to be aware of. There are ways to speak to each other that we need to be aware of. Yeah, it’s a whole mess of things we need to be well versed in.

Christopher: Absolutely. I would say in the middle of that mess, but certainly somewhere in that mess is singing, and you are one of the few people I feel is as passionate about tackling this question of helping people start singing or get past any mental barriers around thinking they can’t sing. And so I’d love to unpack that a little because on your channel it comes across in two ways. One is you’re obviously a singer yourself, you have say, scat singing tutorials which are terrific and you’re speaking to people who consider themselves able to sing, but you also have say, piano tutorials where you’re talking about figuring things out by ear or arranging. And it’s very clear you consider the voice a tool in that toolkit, it’s not just an instrument that you perform with, it’s something you can use.

So I’d love to hear how you approach that and how you help people understand the usefulness of their voice.

Aimee: It’s funny. Some people just sing, and they do it and they’re not nervous about it and they’re pretty good at it. When I say good at it I don’t mean that they have a good voice, I mean that they can hear a G and sing a G. But some people have never really tried or seen the purpose of it, and that’s a hard thing to tackle. I’m realizing that if they’re not used to using their voice to match pitches, music comes much more difficult to them. So I mean I have a whole video. I think it’s my most successful YouTube video called, How To Figure Out Chords To Songs, where I just have it playing on a speaker, like a Billy Joel song and a Beatles song, and I think we chose Eleanor Rigby and I actually play the music and then I stop it and I say, “Okay, we’re listening for the bass note, so listen close to it. What’s the lowest tone that you can hear?”

But then my rule is before you go poking around on the piano to try to figure out that that’s an E or something, before you even touch your piano you have to sing the note first. So you’re listening, (singing). You’re listening for that low note. You could hear. You stop the music. You think for a second and you sing it and then … But there are many people who can’t hear that low note and reproduce it with their voice. If they can do it, it gives them such a head start, which is why I have another video called, How to Get Your Kids Into Music, and it all has to do with singing. People ask when their kids should start taking lessons on an instrument and five is a good answer because I think that’s when your fingers can respond to what your brain wants them to do a little better, but until then and after then, sing and sing and sing.

Yeah, so another thing I do now is for people who have trouble with that, and for people who don’t have trouble with it, I think it’s a good exercise for everybody. To take some time every day and do what I call point and sing, and I do have a video about that too. It’s where you touch notes on your instrument and you sing them. So first maybe you don’t know where C is so you want to find it and then you sing it, and then you just kind of move your finger to a D but you don’t play it and you sing it and then you check, “Am I right?” “Yeah, I’m right.” Okay, now you try an E, C, D, E, and then you check and then you try skip, C, G, then you check. Oh, good. Okay, let’s try a C to A-flat. (singing). Oh no, I’m wrong. (singing). Like that, and you’ll make some mistakes and sometimes you’ll get it right.

I love that, because I think to sing and play your instrument is a way to guarantee that when you improvise, you’re playing the beautiful melody that you want to be playing.

Christopher: Love it. That’s a terrific exercise and yeah, couldn’t agree more with that framing of where singing fits into the picture even if you’re not, first and foremost, a singer. I’d love to take one step backwards and tackle this topic of someone who was listening to you say all that and thinking to themselves, “Well that does sound kind of useful and I can see how I would benefit from that but I can’t sing. I can’t sing that note. If I hear it, I can’t sing it back.” And you have this tremendous video called I think, Are You Tone Deaf? Where you go out in the streets and you literally check if people can match pitch, and I won’t spoil the ending but we’ll have a link in the show notes.

You have to go and watch Aimee do this, it’s tremendous. But most interestingly perhaps, you’ve done a follow-up video recently. Particularly, in the context of using your voice to help you play by ear and you sat down with a gentleman who was concerned he couldn’t match pitch and kind of worked through it a bit with him.

Could you talk about that a little?

Aimee: Yeah, he wrote to me and said … Because I do have that, Are You Tone Deaf? Video, and then I also have a video called, Asking People If They Can Melody, and that means, can you think of melody in your head and then play it? And he wrote to me and said, “Aimee, you’re presenting this like anybody can learn it and I’m here to tell you that I don’t think I can.” But he was really cool in his email and so I could tell he was a pretty chill dude, and so I said, “Let’s do a lesson. I’ll give you a free lesson and put it on Skype if you’ll let me record it.” I said, “I don’t know what will happen. Maybe I’ll fail. Maybe you’re right.” And in that case I won’t publish the video, but maybe we’ll discover something and it’ll be of use to people, and we did. It was kind of crazy.

I was trying to have him match my voice and I do find that when you have a man who has trouble matching pitch, it’s often because he can’t match the timbre of the female voice. So I always shoot for a really high note because that’s when a man’s voice sounds like a woman’s voice is if we’re both up in our falsettos. So anyway, I was trying to get him to go (singing) I think, and he was going, (singing), and I’d say, “It’s got to be higher than that and he’d go, (singing). So my trick usually is to say start at the bottom and we’re going to go all the way up till we get there, so (singing), and usually people can do that.

So I spent too much time trying to get him to do that in that lesson before we realized that … I think at one point in the lesson I just plucked a note on the piano and then he plucked the same note, and I went, “How did you do that?” And he goes, “I don’t know,” and I said, “How about this one?” And I pluck another note and he hits the same note. I was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s almost like perfect pitch.” And he goes, “Well, with the piano.” I said, “Really.” So I hadn’t run across that before, but since then people are writing to me saying, “It’s the same for me. I play the trumpet, and if I hear Miles Davis play a note, I’ll find that note on my trumpet and it’s not that hard.” So that kind of blew my mind and I’m not done thinking about that yet because it’s a lot to take in, but it did help me to know that maybe some people who have trouble singing are good at it but just with a certain timbre.

Christopher: Yeah, absolutely. I think it was when we had Ben Parry on the podcast, he was pointing out that asking singers, asking a choir to tune accord to the piano is kind of a futile exercise in some sense because it’s actually really hard for us to tune our voice to the timbre of the piano, and it’s something about that audiating yourself singing the note. It’s hard to imagine yourself when the timbre is so different I think. And one thing that we found helpful anyway is kind of what you just described, which is separating out, can your ear do it? From, can your voice do it? Because we found a lot of people actually their ear is hearing what they should be singing but they don’t have the vocal control to make it happen themselves or in some cases the reverse, like they can move their voice around fine but they’re not taking a moment to hear or imagine what they’re trying to hit.

It’s certainly not a simple question, and I think the more people that are talking about it and experimenting, the more we can get past that kind of cultural baggage of, “I’m tone deaf, I’m just not a singer.” And then so I love the videos you’ve been putting out for that reason. They’re just kind of breaking this open in a really interesting way.

Aimee: Thanks, that’s nice. Yeah, I think so too. I was going to say, if people have a hard time like that guy couldn’t match with his voice what I was doing, I don’t spend a lot of time on that. I’ll typically tell people, “You should take some voice lessons,” and I know that’s expensive but it’s so much more helpful to have somebody who … I’m not a trained vocalist, so to have somebody who can explain to you about all of the physiology of your body then I think it’s better. So yeah, you need to be careful when you start to try to learn to sing if you never have before. Taking a few voice lessons can go a long way.

Christopher: So one of the things I really admire about your channel is although you are a jazz specialist, you are not kind of pigeonholing yourself and your viewers in the advanced end of music and music theory and technique as, with all due respect, some jazz educators do, and that I think can leave a lot of people feeling a bit left out or like jazz is out of reach for them because just to get started seems like a big leap compared with diving into pop or rock music or even classical. I wonder if you could share some of that kind of inclusive spirit with our listeners when it comes to jazz. If someone is listening and has always enjoyed jazz and would love to get into it in their own music making, are there any avenues or ideas you found helpful to help people kind of get a grip on jazz?

Aimee: Good questions. I think the reason that I don’t … I mean some of my videos are fairly advanced I’d say, but it’s always been important to me not just in music but in life to try to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes. I think that’s really, as humans, the best way to understand each other. So if there’s ever something that you don’t understand, whether it’s in any kind of subject of academia or maybe socially, to really try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes, to come at it from their angle, and that always helps you to understand better. So when I teach music I try not to teach it as somebody who already knows a lot of stuff, but I try to put myself in the place of the person who doesn’t know much stuff yet.

I try not to talk down to people, but I’ve had teachers before and you ask them, “I don’t really understand about how to solo over a half diminished chord,” and they just start playing, “Oh, I did this.” And they just play for 10 minutes straight, and you’re left feeling like, “I’m never going to be able to do that, and I don’t know what you just did. You didn’t teach me anything.” I hate that. So in my tutorials, I kind of rarely play and I think it turns some people off. They tell me I talk too much. Sometimes that’s like a comment I get, “Too much talking. I unsubscribed,” or, “I clicked away.” But to me, to be able to explain something to somebody is so much more than just showing them. Sometimes you need to show, but I don’t want to show off to people I’m trying to teach and make them think that they’re never going to get to that level. I try not to do that as much as I can, so as not to intimidate people.

Christopher: Well I think one beautiful example of that was actually with your recent single, The Loveliest Girl. You put together this amazing video showing behind the scenes of how you arranged and then recorded what is quite a distinctive orchestration, and some musicians would have done that as a promotional thing and just kind of demonstrated or just kind of shown what they did, and been like, “Aren’t I so great?” But you did not, you did the opposite as you just talked about. You really kind of took the time to break it down and explain to someone. Like if someone was curious to know how did I do this, here’s how I did it. And I just thought it worked beautifully and we’ll definitely link to that in the show notes because I think it was really instructional, not just in its material but in the way you taught it, and that you were willing to take the time to break it down like that.

Aimee: Thank you. Maybe that’s kind of backwards, isn’t it? In that instance I wanted the viewers to be able to step into my shoes and see how I came at that, because I mean people might think that I wrote for bass clarinet, clarinet, bass flute, alto flute, and flute. And I knew that I wanted that kind of woody sound in the song and I wanted it to sound orchestral, but I had never written for woodwind quartet or quintet before, and so I thought I’d kind of share my thought process and tell people what I tried that worked, what I thought of that didn’t work and why it didn’t work, and how exciting it was when it came together, that’s because that was my journey with that song. So yeah, I wanted to share that.

Christopher: And let’s step back and talk a little bit more about that journey because this was your first release as a musician in several years I believe, is that right?

Aimee: Yeah, I think since 2009.

Christopher: And where did the song come from?

Aimee: It actually came from a friend of mine, Matthew Clark wrote it, and he had sent me his SoundCloud link, because we were just friends and he said, “Oh, I doubt it a little bit,” and then I went to his SoundCloud and I started listening to the songs that he had written and they blew me away. Not just this song, but he’s got a handful of songs that are just very clever. So the song, the story of it is what grabbed me, the lyric. It’s about a young man, young woman laying in the grass together and he tells her that he notices how there’s shadows on her face from the sunlight, and she asks him what he’s thinking about and then he tells her a story. And it’s actually the story of what if you were the sun beam, the little photon that had a dream of how his life would be and then he died on a dark moon somewhere, hundreds of years from now, but somehow you were lucky enough to make it down to earth and fall right on the face of the loveliest girl.

I love that, and then of course the cords and the melody were so beautiful also. I just thought that I really wanted to make something out of it.

Christopher: And I think it’s so interesting, I think you mentioned this in that video I referred to but I thought it was really interesting that what captured your imagination there wasn’t a jazz standard. It wasn’t ragtime like you referred to before. It wasn’t your normal ballpark or your normal home ground but it stretched you in a different way, and particularly you mentioned there a woodwind orchestration, that’s a bit of a departure for someone who is a jazz piano player.

Aimee: Yeah, good thoughts. He only played his acoustic guitar and sang it, and it was kind of singer-songwriter folk, kind of sounding like a picking guitar, so that was a struggle for me. But there was actually a record that came out not too many years ago by Laura Mvula, I don’t know if you know that record, where she wrote a whole lot of songs and they really were songs that could have been any genre, but the way that they were orchestrated made them fit into the Jazz category. And I’ve also listened a lot to Ginga. He’s a guitar player, a songwriter, an arranger, singer from Brazil who writes these very beautiful complicated melodies and chord changes and usually orchestrates them for like six flutes or woodwind quartet or something like that, and I’ve also been listening to [inaudible 00:44:33] Pascal.

And so I had all these influences up in my brain, rattling around, and I thought you can. You can take any song even if it just sounds like a singer-songwriter song and arrange it in a way that you fit your idiom. And actually the newer single that I’m writing for right now … It’s not going to be a single, it’ll just be part of the album. But it’s a song I wrote a long time ago that by all means should be a pop song, but I’m exploring with it to see how I can make it fit to become more jazz-like. I think that’s really fun to do.

Christopher: And your latest single is again a bit different, Falling Snow is similarly lyrically really interesting which you might not acknowledge since I think on this one you wrote the lyrics yourself, but for me anyway as a dad of a young kid, definitely moving lyrics, and could you talk a little about the origin story of that one maybe and how it’s different from The Loveliest Girl?

Aimee: Yeah, absolutely. That was just a melody that came to me. A large part of the melody just came to me very quickly, and it’s not very special. It goes, (singing). That came to me pretty quickly and just those chords in and of themselves can be found in Autumn Leaves or Fly Me To The Moon, they’re very common kind of chords. So the melody I probably knew 16 bars of it when I sat down, but I said to myself, “This is boring. I need to take it somewhere,” and then the rest of the song becomes much more interesting but hopefully in a very melodic, organic kind of way. And then I finished it and sat on it for a couple of years because I couldn’t think of a lyric to go with it, and I kept trying really hard to write a lyric and I couldn’t do it, and then my oldest son went away to college and I thought, what if I wrote about that.

I had actually written the first line. The first line says, “I watch you walk away, your footprints filled with snow, and icy silence falls upon my troubled heart.” My husband helped me come up with that first line and I always liked it but I just couldn’t think of anything to finish the story. And so I thought, well my son’s kind of walking away, and then it just came from there. I wrote the whole thing in about an hour or two while I drove to Arizona at 2:00 in the morning one night.

Christopher: Well I was going to ask you what your songwriting process looks like but I feel like it’s probably a redundant question having just talked through those two songs. You are working on an album, can we assume that every song is going to be as different and interesting as those two examples?

Aimee: Yes, for sure. That’s why I chose, The Falling Snow, as my second single because it was very different from the first one. I was actually talking to my son Miles, my oldest son, and I said, “I do want to bring back the woodwind orchestration for other songs on the album, but do you think I ought to do that for the second single?” And he goes, “Well are you going to do it for every song?” I said, “No.” He said, “Well then don’t do it otherwise they’re going to expect it.” He was right. So I said okay good, there is going to be some more elements of fundamental jazz like bossa nova and some swing on my album that maybe jazz listeners can identify with, but there’ll also be things that stretch.

I saw this Eric Reed quote in DownBeat Magazine maybe six months ago, where he basically said, “If you want to do it and it makes you happy, don’t be afraid of what other people are going to say.” At least in music. I mean I guess you could apply that in life too, but I thought, “All right, that’s what I’m doing.” So I have some songs that are more like pop songs that I’m reworking to make them interesting and beautiful I hope. There’s a lot of searching going on in this album for me and I won’t give away my album title yet but it is kind of a search.

Christopher: Fantastic. Well I always feel a little bit guilty on this show when I interview someone and they talk about this really interesting music they’re making, and we don’t include a clip for people to actually hear it, but then I remember that the best thing to do is just send them to listen to the song properly. And so we’ll have links in the show notes to both of those songs, as well as really great videos. Aimee has done behind the scenes kind of video for Falling Snow as well, and so we’ll have direct links to those in the show notes, as well as where you can go to buy those songs and listen to them properly.

Aimee it has been such a pleasure to talk with you. Just leave our listeners with a pointer to where they can go to learn more about you, maybe watch some of these amazing videos we’ve been talking about and hear your music properly.

Aimee: Absolutely. I feel bad for you because that’s a lot of links to look up and copy and paste, but the best place is my website aimeenolte.com. I’ve got a wonderful man named Marco who runs that website for me, and every single new thing that I put out on YouTube, he makes a page for it right away on my website. So anything you want is there, even some MP3s to download. Worksheets that go along with my videos are there. Yeah, that’s the best spot.

Christopher: Terrific, thank you again Aimee. It’s been a real pleasure.

Aimee: No problem. Thank you so much.

The post Explaining the Musical Ear, with Aimee Nolte appeared first on Musical U.

The Musical U team talks about setbacks and negative experiences in music, and how to move past them to maintain a positive musical trajectory.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Get Confident module at Musical U
• About Mindfulness for Musicians
• About Exploring Without Self-Judgement
• About Recovering From Mistakes
• About Your Voice Sounding Weird

Transcript

Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Musicality Podcast. I’m joined today by three members of the Musical U team. Stewart Hilton, our community conductor, Adam Liette, our communications manager, and Andrew Bishko, our product manager and content editor.
We’re here to talk about moving past negative musical moments in our past. And doing so to reach our musical goals. This is a topic that we on the team grapple with fairly often in our work at Musical U because when people come to Musical U they generally come with a fairly long musical back story. Whether that is feeling like you’re not a musician for most of your life and then finally taking the plunge in retirement. Or playing music every day of your life but never really feeling like you’ve quite cracked it.
Our members come from a wide range of backgrounds, but what they all have in common is that there is some part of them that doesn’t feel 100% awesome about their musical identity. And of course we step into the picture to try and fill in some of those concrete skills that can let you feel like a confident natural. Let you express yourself and let you really enjoy every aspect of your musical life.
So of course we end up talking a lot with members about some of the past experiences they’ve had. Things that may have happened to give them the idea that they’re not musical. And this comes in a range of guises, from family situations to early music education or indeed lack of it. To gigging with bands and having a negative atmosphere. All kinds of places that can show up in your musical life. And I’m sure that as I’ve been talking now, you’ve had moments pop into your own head of sticking points or painful experiences or those bits of your musical back story that you’re maybe not so delighted with. Or that you feel if you could just put that one to rest maybe you could move forwards.
So I’m really excited to have this chance to talk with Stewart, Adam and Andrew about their thoughts on this topic. And what we can maybe do to acknowledge those negative moments and then move past them. So let’s kick things off with Stewart. Stewart, say a quick hello and then tell us, what do you think about this topic of moving past negative musical experiences?
Stewart: Hi I’m Stewart Hilton, and I’m the community conductor inside this site. You may all know me as my other personality, GTRSTU777. That is what you see in there. And also outside I play guitar in a few different groups so that keeps me busy.
Yeah, this topic is pretty dear to me as I’ve gone through a lot of things in my own life. Stemming all the way back from even being in band in schools, in 5th and 6th grade. And things that happened with teachers of all people. But that can happen and I’m sure there are probably many people that have had similar experiences where sometimes the ones that we’re looking to, our mentors can turn into being our biggest negative input. Which is, since I teach and I know others on here teach too. I think that’s something we all love teaching for is because we want to be that other side of the coin. And to encourage and be the positive thing in people to bring you into your own musicality. Which is a great thing and we love seeing everybody on this site doing that.
One is, as I was thinking, we have no control over thing that are said to us. Actions that affect us, however we are able to find ways and how to handle them to help us move forward and not let them disable us from our dreams. And we’ll get to all that. Also there’s things we do I think in our lives and I heard someone discuss it as a ledger living. And what that means is like a ledger book where you keep all your finances.
In our head we tend to keep certain instances of our past in our heads. And it kind of directs our life. So finding ways to fix that or be inspired by that is a good thing. Some other things I found online, this study shows it takes 12 positive reviews. If you have a business and we all see the reviews online for different things. For 1 negative review, it takes 12 positive reviews to negate those 12 negative ones. Or to, yeah, the 1 negative one, it takes 12 positive ones. That makes a lot better sense.
Also, a Harvard and Business Report I was reading did a study found the best performing teams are pro teams almost on average 5 positive remarks opposite a negative comment. This also includes sarcastic comments or disparaging comments. So it just shows how that negativity affects us. And then how we have to figure ways out to move past that.
Christopher: Yeah, and that’s a really critical thing isn’t it? No pun intended, but that feedback. There’s all kinds of negative musical experiences you might have. But hearing someone say something rude or critical or negative about your music making can cut you straight to the heart, can’t it?
Stewart: Oh, yeah.
Christopher: And 100% agree with those studies in the sense that we all intellectually might think that one positive comment balances out a negative one. But I think all of us as human beings have found that that is not the case.
Stewart: Yeah.
Christopher: If you perform in public and one person comes up to you and points out a mistake you made. And then 10 come up and say how great it was. You’re gonna be thinking about that one negative when you go to bed and that can be really tough. I think particularly for young musicians. Stewart, you were talking about your teaching there and I know you’ve taught some youngsters as well as adults. And when it’s so much a part of the identity you’re trying to build up and the ego development, it can be yeah, brutal to hear that one negative comment. And I’d love to hear from Andrew about some of these things. How has this come up in your own musical life, whether through feedback or other experiences?
Andrew: Well, as Stew was speaking, I was thinking about one of the most cutting remarks that was made to me about my music, really turned me around. Because I deserved it, and I realized that I deserved it. This was when I was at the Conservatory. And basically, while I had classical training growing up, for a great part of my musical life at that point, I had been improvising and creating things myself and I hadn’t really been relying on a whole bunch of training, and I learned some tricks, I had learned some things that you know I was very, very comfortable with and was really my comfort zone to play in certain keys, in certain things. But I wasn’t able to play in all keys. I wasn’t really hearing a lot of the music that I was playing. I hadn’t really developed my ears to a certain point.
I remember my mentor there at the New England Conservatory saying, you know, it was like, basically I don’t remember exactly the words but, he’s like saying you know you gotta do this basic stuff. And I realized I had just been faking a whole bunch of stuff. And I was kind of ego about, you know I can do this, cuz I had been performing with a band, you know I was dancing on stage and doing all this stuff you know. But I won’t tell you what I was wearing. But you know it was, but I did have these really cool platform shoes, these green platform shoes that I would wear with these yellow pants, you know.
And so, like it wasn’t about the platform shoes and the yellow pants. It was about the music and there was a place where, okay, I had to. There was things for me to learn. And I buckled down and you know I was really also was like, wow, I had gotten into the conservatory. I had somehow did this but you know that didn’t insure that I was really the real deal.
I made a lot of changes in my music. It had gotten a lot more disciplined. I got a lot more humble. And I, and I really, um, buckled down and did the work. So in that case, because I was mentally prepared for it, it wasn’t like I was a youngster, you know, I was almost thirty years old and I was ready for that. That was a very good experience.
Another experience that built a lot of strength for me, that I wanted to share, built a lot of strength in me, was when I, in the eighties I was living in Italy, and this is how I got back into music. I got back in as a street musician. I was playing the flute in the street and I had bells on my feet and I’d dance around. But that was my source of support. And you know I met this girl and we were traveling together and we were sleeping on this beautiful beach. And in the night some hooligans came and they cut our sleeping bags were we had our valuables and they took my flute. And, um, that was pretty devastating to me because that was like my life line at the time. But I went and I bought a plastic flute, little plastic pipe for a few bucks. And that’s what I played on until I saved up enough to buy a real one.
And I realized then, and then of course, I broke up with the girlfriend, that made it doubly worse. But, and it gets, oh. I don’t want to go down there. Anyway, but here I am. I am here with this plastic flute. And I remember where I was. I was in Sorrento where they were having this big classical music festival. And there was all these classical players walking around with their nice flutes and here I am on the corner with a little piece of plastic. And I remember asking this one girl, “Can I just play your flute? I’d love to play a flute again.” And she’s just like, “no, no, don’t touch that.”
Anyway, so I’m playing this plastic flute and I did it. And I realized it wasn’t the instrument. It was me that was making the music. I was the one who was making in and I had a lot of fun with that little thing and I made a lot of the music and I made enough money to buy myself another flute. So that built a lot of strength in me to over come various setbacks. A lot of instrumental set backs that I had afterwords.
Christopher: Gotcha. Well I think you’re the master of coming up with podcast episode titles. I think this one’s gonna be, It’s Not About the Green Platform Shoes, It’s About the Music. Adam, without wanting to sound too mean, Adam, I would love to hear about some of your negative experiences in music and how you tackled them at the time.
Adam: Oh man, I mean, how many do we all have? There’s all, if you’ve been playing music for long enough, it’s not about how many times you made it, or it’s not about IF you ever made a mistake, it’s how many times you did. Because that’s the reality of this art. You will make a mistake, if you put yourself out there, if you’re performing and playing for people, it’s going to happen. And I’m really happy we’re talking about this because it can be so crushing to someone who is just coming along and trying something new. You know I think it speaks broader to where our society is right now with social media, anonymous people just ripping each other apart. I mean, Twitter, it’s, it makes me sad when I go on Twitter sometimes because it’s you know it’s just like a black hole of despair at times. And in music specifically, you know, we have Simon Cowell, you know, American Icon, and Simon Cowell is paid millions of dollars a year to just rip people apart. And I wonder like what does that do to our psyche as musicians when we’re then listening to other people.
And I had this wonderful teacher, I’ve talked about him on the show before, my trumpet teacher. And he gave us this poem, and we had to put it on our practice journal. And One line from it is, Promise yourself to give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticize others.
That really stuck with me. It’s like if I’m going around and nit picking other people’s mistakes, the little things that they’re doing wrong in their music, I mean, what can they say about me? But if I’m focused solely on what I’m trying to do, you know, that’s the better way to achieve your goals, to become the musician that you want to be.
And one of the things I have really been focusing on as I get a little bit older and start to shift in my life is, you know, this idea of mind set and maintaining like this positive perception on life. And it’s kind of funny because if you go to Amazon and you search for like Positive Thinking, there will be like, what, ten million books about positive thinking, because we have to teach it right. But if you search for like negative thinking, I mean how many books? We already know how to do that. We know how to think bad about ourselves, we know how to criticize others. No one has to teach us how to do that. We know.
And it kind of reminded me, because I want to leave you with something that you can start doing today. And it reminded me of a phrase, it’s from the Bible. It says, “that which we gaze upon, we become.” And I think if we purposely put ourself out there in a positive way, then that will reflect back upon us.
And so what I try to do now, whether it’s through music, whether it’s in some of my business work or the other types of stuff I’m doing, if I’m asked for feedback on someone else’s work or if I’m working with someone, I try to purposely start by looking at the positive things that they are doing. And even if there are corrections that need to be made, you know, if we try to frame it in a positive manor, like look this was great, why don’t you try to do it this way? Or it would sound really good if, as apposed to Simon Cowl “That was terrible. You should just quit.”
You know that doesn’t help anyone and I think that if we just take the moment to become a cheerleader for others, to help realize not only that everyone faces this, but they can move on past these negative moments, these mistakes that they’re going to make, that will in turn help us realize that we can move on as well.
Christopher: Fantastic. Yeah, I think that, that point about it impacting your confidence is a huge one and also that it’s a two way street. You know the way you treat others has a huge impact on the way you respond when someone treats you similarly. It reminds me a lot of our get confident module at Musical U, where we have like a grab bag of techniques you can use to help develop your musical confidence. And one of the tips in there is to practice giving compliments because we tend to be rubbish at receiving compliments as a musician. And so one of the other exercises is to practice receiving compliments well. But first it’s abut just finding opportunities to go out and say nice things to people whether in the world of music or elsewhere, because I think societally we are, as you say, very good at negative comments and not so good at the positive comments a lot of the time. And particularly when it can be under the guise of critique or you know, helpful feedback. When in reality, for that person emotionally, it’s just gonna come like a ton of bricks.
Adam: And the great thing is, this is one of those non-musical skills that we sometimes talk about in Musical U. When you adopt this ideology, this positive mindset, it can have a great impact on every aspect of your life. You know at the time we’re recording this there’s, you know, some things going on in my life, and I could look at this as, I had plans and this ruined it. But instead, you know, there are other people that are facing more difficult circumstances that are resolved of what’s going on, and I’m still pretty lucky. Focus on what I can do, what I can control, as opposed to what I can’t.
Christopher: Yeah, and that was the other thing that I really wanted to pick up on from what you said was that focusing on the positive, and trying to find the positive, because you know, you were talking about doing it with other people, you know, before you critique, say something nice. But also, as you just said, it can come up in the sense of finding the silver lining in a situation.
But it’s come up several times on this show before in the context of recording yourself. Because one of the really painful things about using this amazing technique of recording your practice and listening back, is at first, none of us like the way we sound. And that goes double if you’re singing and really listening to your voice.
But probably the most helpful tip, apart from just do it, is when you do it, listen for something specific. Listen for something specific you’re trying to improve. And just focusing on was that what it meant to be? And of course you can also take a moment to appreciate all of the things you did right. And that can transform what, on the face of it, would just be a very painful listening and being like, oh, I don’t sound amazing, into something that is both positive and constructive.
Stewart: Yeah, I was just thinking, with what Andrew said and Adam with what you just said, um, the difference, you know, yeah, I always thing there’s two different types of criticism. One is the destructive, you know, which we’ve all had, versus, in words and actions. But the other one is constructive, which is the better.
And, uh, you know, when I was younger, I still have a destructive tenancy in my head to like nitpick myself, but I’ve gotten a whole heck of a lot better over time. Um, and now, you know because my wife knows, knows me, you know, I was like at the end of a show, I start like saying and really mean that one part was bad. She was like, are you getting negative on yourself? I’m like no, no, no. I’d say I also had some really good points, you know, or I did this right or did that right.
We were talking about experiences. I grew up and I stated playing in the metal scene in the eighties. And as Adam knows, the eighties was a metal shred fest and I was not a good shredder. I was more of a Blues guy trying to do metal. Although I did the rhythms, I could do a lot of the rhythmical stuff real good when it came to the lead, I was more of the bluesy guy. Because of that, you know, certain things were said, and that sort of thing.
But I had to just kind of wait through it and I had a few people say, oh, you know, I love shredders, but you know sometimes I like to hear some blues stuff with you guys that you do. But it has, you know, over time I’ve gotten better at listening through and going “I can work on that, this is, but this is good”. And that becomes a really good part of getting over some of that stuff that happened when we were kids.
Christopher: Yeah, for sure. And I think we’ve touched on a few times here that it is, it can be so personal. You know, if you’re doing music right it is a personal thing and it can be so bound up in your identity and your self image and your confidence and your capabilities.
You know for me one of the stand-out painful moments in my musical past was when I was getting ready to audition for the chapel choir at my school. And up until then I had been a decent, quiet singer. I had taken a few singing lessons, but I wasn’t really pursuing singing. And anyway, so I went and took a couple of lessons with a teacher at my sister’s school, so that I could come back to my own school and audition.
And anyway, we did a couple of lessons, it was fine. She was happy enough. I did my pieces. And then at the end of it, she was like, “listen, I’m going to say something to you and feel free to hate me afterwords, but the way you say your S’s is a bit weird and your choir director might have a problem with that. So that’s maybe just something to think about.”
And I, to give you the context, I was like I think ten or eleven at the time. So, you know my voice wasn’t breaking, I wasn’t dealing with that stuff, but a really painful age to be told something like that. And obviously I had been aware, I had had teasing like kids at school saying I had a lisp and all of that. And you know, I hope it doesn’t come across too much on this podcast, I think I said in the first episode, sorry if it does. Because I do still say my “S’s” weird, and it’s less bad than it was. But that singing teacher pointing this out to me, and that being, like my, that was my takeaway from those singing lessons. It wasn’t, “Hey, you’re prepped for this audition. Hey, you’re a pretty good singer.” It was, “You’re weird about the way you say your “s’s.” And so, I auditioned, I got into the choir. It was all fairly happy and plain sailing, but I was never a soloist in that choir. I was a good singer. I played my part. I was never asked to stand at the front and sing. And, I’m confident that was at least, in part, because of this issue with the way I said my “s’s.”
And anyway, long story short, I gradually got better at it. I got to the point of doing a solo performance in a theater production at school. And later in my 20s, I kind of grappled with this and was like, “Oh, I should really fix this.” And so, I went to a speech and language therapist, and she showed me, you know, there was a different way to say my “s’s.” Again she wasn’t delighted with the way it turned out, and I was satisfied. And I now have a way of tackling this that let me feel comfortable starting a podcast.
But, you know, it’s still an issue for me. It’s still part of my identity as a singer, as a person. And I can trace it all back to that one bit of feedback, which was very well intentioned and very well put but still really cut me deep and had an impact on who I was as singer for the next ten plus years.
And I think I would just want to share that to make the point that it’s not, you know, negative things come along, and you just have to deal with them and find the silver lining and everything’s great after that. That’s not what we’re trying to say here today, I don’t think. It really is more complex than that. Whether you’re a kid, and it’s, you know, it’s someone commenting on your voice breaking. Or your first performance doesn’t go well, and someone notices. Or, you’re an adult, and you’re carrying this baggage around with you and trying to be okay with that and trying to still feel confident and capable as a musician.
And I think, if there’s one thing I’m proudest of with this podcast and the fifty plus interviews we’ve done so for, it’s that I think you could pick any single one of them and point to how that person’s musical journey was not a smooth road. You know, these people aren’t coming on and saying, “Well, I was born with a trumpet in my hand, and I played for the next thirty years. And I was a world-leading artist.” You know there is always a twist or turn in there, and I hope that anyone listening. Aside from the stories, we’ve all shared today. I hope you’ve taken it encouragement from those interviews every week. That even the very best musicians have had those negative experiences. We all handle it in our different ways, and sometimes, there’s a nice way to package it up and feel like you’ve made it constructive and move on. And sometimes, it’s something you’re gonna carry around with you, and it’s going to be a part of who you are as a musician. But it doesn’t need to hold you back from reaching your goals.
Before we wrap things up, any last minute thoughts or painful stories about platform shoes anyone would like to share?
Stewart: The other thing that I had to learn because of that is the whole topic of forgiveness. And it may seem like a small thing, but it’s actually, a pretty heavy thing as I did some studying. Because we tend to hold on to those things, and they can direct us in so many different ways.
But if we forgive, it’s actually healthy for us, you know. If we forgive some of those things that have happened to us from other people, and let those go. It’s an amazing thing. They say your blood pressure goes down. Sicknesses start getting better. So, it’s amazing. You know, I’ve seen … My wife and I have seen people who hold on to things just completely self destruct. And it’s a sad thing to watch, but you can watch it. It’s like just let go of it. But they can’t let go.
Christopher: That’s a really powerful thing. [crosstalk 00:35:21] You know, it’s a hundred percent within your control to decide whether to carry these things around with you in the future or not.
Adam: And also, sometimes things happen in our life, we don’t really know why they happen at the time. Just a story from my past. I was a bugler in the United States Army Band, and I had to play in front of twenty-five thousand troops and the sergeant major of the entire Army. And I butchered it. It was one of the worst performances of my entire life. The entire band was sitting there looking at me, like, “Oh my God!” Even the sergeant major was looking at me like, “What the heck was that?” And what happened was that I had gotten a little bit arrogant in my playing, and I hadn’t properly prepared, hadn’t properly warmed up that morning. You know it was like six-thirty in the morning, and I had to perform. Not the easiest time.
Two months later, I had to perform the same thing in front of President Obama. So, little bit of … But if I hadn’t made that major mistake, I don’t know if I would have prepared the way I did when I finally had to do it in front of the big boss. And I did do well in that performance.
But, like I said, sometimes these things happen. These mistakes happen, and if we choose to learn from them. Apply the next level of thinking to it and our preparation, it can lead to great things.
Christopher: Yeah, absolutely. I think that, that notion of taking something positive away. That idea of forgiving anyone you are carrying blame against, and also just, I think, the recognition that all of us as musicians are going to have these setbacks, these twists and turns, these painful moments. Those all go a long way, and I think the last thing I’d throw in there is just what we touched on earlier in this conversation which is … You know, Stewart called it the “ledger living.” That idea of a balance sheet, I think, is a useful one. Because, as we noted, one negative comment will outweigh ten positive ones. And that’s a trite little observation in itself, but you can make use of it. You know, you can actually act on that, which means storing up those positive comments. Giving yourself some way to remember them and making sure that when the negative one comes along that you remind yourself of all of those positive ones.
I know when I first released an app on the App Store, and for the first time, I was receiving public reviews of something I’d made. I really had to learn that lesson because it hit me hard every time someone left a critical review. Even if was just four star instead of five star. That was the one that I remembered. And I learned that if I kept a little printout of all of the positive ones, it was a lot easier to bounce back. And it think, so you know, you can stock up on the good so that it’s a lot easier to keep your momentum and keep your stride when those little setbacks occur.
And I don’t want to end this episode by being totally self-serving, but I will just touch on one of our major themes at Musical U which is community and support because I think we’d be remiss if we talked as if you are all alone in this. You know, everything we’ve discussed is great stuff you can do in your own head to help with this. But the bottom lines is whether it’s a teacher or a coach or a mentor, someone you can look to and be like, “Oh, this went terrible! Help!” And can give you some good guidance. Or a community of musicians, like-minded peers, friends and family, people who you can turn to and show a little bit of vulnerability and know that they’re going to come back at you with positive feedback and reinforcement and encouragement. That is an enormous benefit for you in your musical life.
Christopher: Thanks so much guys. It’s been really fun to unpack this with you. I hope that everyone listening has enjoyed hearing us bare our painful musical moments. I’m sure we could all reel off several more. And as I’ve said, the back catalog of this podcast will provide plenty more raw fodder for anytime you’re sitting there thinking, “It’s just me who isn’t amazing at music.” Or, “It’s just me who makes mistakes.” Or, “It’s just me who gets stuck.” Go back and listen to a few interviews, and I guarantee you will find yourself well corrected.

The post About Negative Musical Experiences appeared first on Musical U.

From the traditional sounds of a pipe organ (at a haunted house, perhaps):

To eerie creepy music boxes:

We could spend ages talking about the theory behind mode, minor key songs that are actually joyful-sounding, and the debate on whether or not it’s a biological response or solely the result of how Western musical culture dictates how our ear perceives the minor key… but it’s already Halloween, and you don’t have much time (cue door slamming and tick-tocking of clock).

If you want to know about how to summon the spirit of All Hallow’s Eve in your own music (or just how to make some poppy bubblegum song turn dreary), then read on.

Simply put, the minor key is often synonymous with:

• Sadness
• Negativity
• Something going wrong, terribly wrong
• Frightening

But why?

The Science Behind the Creep Factor

According to Dr. Vicky Williamson, lecturer in Music Psychology at Goldsmiths University, we are culturally conditioned to perceive major key music as happy and minor key music as… not. She writes, “Constantly touching base with our musical memory back catalogue helps to generate expectations of what might come next in a tune, which is an important source of enjoyment in musical listening.”

However, new evidence has emerged, indicating that we may be wired to listen for sadness in the minor key after all. Meagan Curtis of Tufts University’s Music Cognition Lab led a study whose results study revealed that the relationship between pitches serves as an important cue for conveying emotion in music. The musical interval referred to as the minor third is generally thought to convey sadness, and that minor third also occurs in the pitch contour of speech conveying sadness. Her findings support the theory that human vocal expressions and music share an acoustic code for communicating sadness.

Yet another study suggests that there is a connection between horror music and the screeches of young frightened animals. Such nonlinear sounds – a dissonant chord, a child’s cry, a baby animal’s scream – trigger a biologically-ingrained response by making us think our young are threatened, according to Blumstein’s study, sponsored by the University of California at Los Angeles and published in the journal Biology Letters.

Take A Listen

It doesn’t matter whether you subscribe to the nature or the nurture theory: when a happy song takes on a minor key, the sound summons a bit of the sinister. Check these out:

1.  Hey Jude

This cover by Tyler Ward & KHS takes a sad song and makes it sadder:

2.  Blackbird

The most mournful take on Blackbird ever, thanks to Major to Minor’s Chase Holfelder, the true master of tampering with otherwise happy tunes and bringing them all down a notch… or a million:

3.  Wrecking Ball

Instrumentation and the minor key implementation bring on the frightening ghoulishness. You can just see the mascara running everywhere and the revenge-filled girlfriend making this a demented theme song:

4. YMCA

This new approach to YMCA carries the feeling of dread and warning in the introduction:

5. Imagine

The totally depressing and supremely pessimistic take on imagining the future ahead:

Fathoming Minor

So how can you begin to create your own creepiness and unease? To begin with, we must understand what constitutes a minor key. Essentially, we know if a song uses a minor key by seeing if it’s using a minor scale. The pattern of a minor scale takes the following steps up from the starting note (also known as the base note or tonic note). It goes a little something like this:

Whole-Half-Whole-Whole-Half-Whole-Whole

For example, if you wanted to turn a regular A major scale into a something a bit more, shall we say, haunting, simply follow the pattern of whole-half-whole-whole-half-whole-whole up the scale and back. You’d end up playing (starting from A, remember): A-B-C-E-D-F-G-A. And there’s your minor scale.

Now would be a good time to point out that major keys share the same key signature with their relative minor keys – in this example, A minor shares the same key signature of having zero sharps or flats with C major. Because they share something in common – musical DNA, so to speak – the minor is a relative to the major, hence the name relative minor.  

If you want to use a major key to find the relative minor key, just find the name of the major key and move three half-steps backwards (or down). Three half-steps down from C is A, so A is the relative minor of C major. And that, boys and ghouls, is knowledge, and knowledge found here is musical power.

Spookifying A Major Key

Now that we’re familiar with the relationship between major and minor, let’s use the example of cousins C major and A minor to see how we can go from a cheery major to a foreboding minor.

1. To turn a C major into a song evoking a sad or melancholy, wistful feeling, sub in the 1-4-5 chords from C major with 1-4-5 chords from A minor.

Instead of this:

C – F – G  
(I – IV – V)

Use this:

Am – Dm – Em
(i – iv – v)

2.    To bring an even spookier feel to an A minor song, use the following chord progression: i – ii dim V – i.

Example:  Am – Bdim – E – Am

For more exercises in creating your own minor chord progressions, head over to this guide to discovering more minor chord progressions.

Build-Your-Own Creepy Tune

Armed with some minor key theory and emboldened by the spirit of Halloween, you are now ready to take on the sacred task of writing your own frightening magnum opus.

1. Use a minor key (see above and be sure to reference the related links for more in-depth info and cheat sheets).
2. Consider your tempo. What kind of effect will increasing or decreasing the tempo have on your song? Play around with it and see what gives you the effect you’re after.
3. Determine your instrumentation. A song can sound totally different when you play it in a minor key on a xylophone or harpsichord. If you have access to a keyboard (or hey, said harpsichord), you can use different sounds to heighten the dreadful vibe. Try:
   • Strings
   • Tuba
   • Oboe
   • Chimes/xylophone/music-box instruments
   • Organ
   • Piano
   • harp/harpsichord
   • Bass guitar
   • The waterphone
   • Theremin
   • Pipe organ
   • Ondes martenot
   • Blaster beam

Embracing the Macabre

If this was your first taste of the world of the spooky minor… welcome! There’s a bottomless hole of possible chord progressions, melodies, and modalities to add the scare factor to your music.

If you want to delve further into the world of minor, be sure to check out the aptly named The Ultimate Guide to Minor Keys. For a lesson on the minor modes and how to use them, head over to The Many Moods of Musical Modes to further expand your minor vocabulary.

As we celebrate the faithful departed and embrace the darker months ahead, there’s no better time to explore the sad, frightening, and tense side of music. Happy Halloween!

The post The Creepy Minor Key appeared first on Musical U.

We had been keen to invite a Music Learning Theory expert onto the show for a while because we’ve covered some of the other “biggies” in terms of music education methodologies that really cultivate musicality, like Kodály, Dalcroze, and Orff, and we also talk a lot about audiation at Musical U, a word that Gordon himself invented.

So we were delighted when Professor Crump Taggart agreed to come on the show and this conversation was really fruitful and fascinating.

We talk about:
• Her own musical upbringing and her first experiences learning from Edwin Gordon himself
• The slightly imprecise way we tend to use the word “audiation” at Musical U and what it should really be used to mean
• And the two simple activities Professor Taggart recommends if you want to incorporate Music Learning Theory into your own life as an adult musician.

This was a super cool glimpse into both the history and roots of Music Learning Theory, as well as the practicalities of what it does and how.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Jump Right In: The Music Curriculum Grades K-6
• Music Play: The Early Childhood Music Curriculum
• The Gordon Institute for Music Learning
• Color In My Piano

Transcript

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

Cynthia: Thank you very much for inviting me.

Christopher: I have really been looking forward to picking the brains of one of the top people in the world of Music Learning Theory, but before we dive into all that juicy goodness, I’d love to just find out where you came from as a musician. What was your own music education like?

Cynthia: It was fairly traditional, but I had some advantages as well. Music teacher and my dad, although he was an attorney, also was a singer, so there was a lot of music in my childhood that supported my classical music training. I had elementary general music in the schools. I began French horn when I was in fourth grade. I took piano from about second grade to about eleventh grade, and then I went and majored in French horn performance at the beginning and eventually music education at the University of Michigan to get my formal education and to get me ready to teach music in the schools. Since then, obviously, I’ve gone on and gotten a master’s degree and a doctorate in music education.

Christopher: I see. That sounds like a very nice, clear, straight path. Was it always obvious to you that you were going to go into music education and do it step by step like that?

Cynthia: It was obvious to me that I was going to go into music. The teaching part of it, actually, came fairly late. I didn’t decide I wanted to teach until about halfway through college, so that was a late discovery.

Christopher: Could you tell us a little bit about the kind of musician you were? You mentioned that you had a fairly classical, traditional music education. What do you mean by that, and maybe what elements of being a musician would you say you were particularly strong in and less focused on?

Cynthia: I actually had a fairly good aural skills foundation, but that was something that came not through my classical music training, but, really, through my informal home environment and just, I think, through my basic aptitude for music. I really had very traditional lessons that were very much notation focused and realizing what was on the page, both in French horn and in piano. Those were the kinds of musicianship skills that were really focused on through most of my music education, although I actually don’t think that those are the most important kinds of musicianship skills now.

Christopher: I see. Well, that’s definitely something we’re going to be digging into a little bit. I thought it was interesting that you used the word “realized” there to talk about going from notation to performance. Is that right?

Cynthia: Right. Yeah, realizing the ideas of others, to some extent, rather than having ideas of my own, which is what I value now in musicianship, but which I’ve had to figure out mostly on my own.

Christopher: Interesting. Were you conscious of that as a musician growing up? Was this something you felt like you were missing out on or was this just something you later discovered was a whole other part of musicianship?

Cynthia: It was something that I really discovered later, and I’ve watched some of my doctoral students at the university discover it as well. They take this class called Songwriting, and in this songwriting class, there are people who are not classically trained musicians, like engineering students and arts and letters students and our music educators. Many of our music educators are humbled by the fact that these informally trained musicians have all of these skills that our classically trained music educators don’t have and wish very much that they had. I think it would make them better overall musicians.

Christopher: Interesting. Yeah, that’s a kind of false dichotomy we often talk about in Musical U, that the sheet music musicians feel left out of the playing by ear world and the play by ear musicians feel jealous of the sheet music readers being able to do that, and of course, there are strengths to both and both are part of being an all-round musician.

Cynthia: I very much was trained to be the sheet musician person, but I trained myself, sort of informally, to be some of the other things, so my aural skills, I think, actually, are better than many of the people who rely primarily on notation, but that was not because of any of the teaching I received until much later in my career.

Christopher: That’s super interesting. I realize we’re going back a little bit in your career, but maybe could you paint a picture or give examples of the kind of things you were doing to learn those skills by yourself if they weren’t being imparted to you in lessons?

Cynthia: Well, my parents, actually, were doing a lot of that thing. I remember taking car trips. My grandparents lived about an hour away, and we would drive and see them almost every single week. We had song sheets that were just the lyrics in the car, and we as a family would sing the entire trip all of these old World War I, World War II Roaring 20s songs. My parents would harmonize, sometimes we would harmonize. We did a lot of music making in the home, and we always had music playing in my home. Lots of jazz, lots of show tunes, lots of classical music. I still laugh because I graduated from high school really having almost no exposure to the popular music scene. It was really more the music of my parents that I listened to.

Christopher: Wow. I’m sure this is something we’ll touch on later, but it’s so interesting to hear that singing is something you credit so much with developing that inner musicality. It’s come up a lot on this show, to be honest, even though a lot of musicians feel locked out of that world of singing. They feel like they can’t sing. We often try and explain how it’s part of your musicality, whether you consider yourself a singer or not.

Cynthia: Right. It’s not about how good your singing instrument is. It’s really more about, can you sing in tune, can you express yourself through your voice? I learned to do that at a very young age, and when I teach, I actually … When I was a beginning band director for a while, in our concerts, we actually had the kids sing what they were going to play before they played them. I want to make sure that the music is going on in their head, not just in their fingers. Singing is a way to get some evidence of that.

Christopher: Fantastic. You had this strand of inner musicality training going on alongside the notation and the instrument technique. When did that start to factor in to your perspective on music education?

Cynthia: A little bit in my undergraduate work, because I actually studied with a professor who had done his doctorate with Ed Gordon. Some of the things he had us do had us playing by ear, but it was the first time I’d ever encountered playing by ear in the university. I look back and think, I should have been doing that from the time I started all of my instruments. So, a little bit there.

I think I really began to understand it as I saw some of the musicians whose skills I just admired. I look at Chris Thile, for instance, who is a tremendous, tremendous mandolin player, member of Punch Brothers, hosting Prairie Home Companion now in the US, and just a terrific vernacular musician, but he’s also classically trained. Some of the musicians that I admired the most had both of those pieces in place. They brought a different kind of musicianship to the classical repertoire, even, than the people who didn’t have that sort of musicianship that really laid the fundamentals down for everything that they should be hearing and doing.

Christopher: I see, and so you had this opportunity with a professor to start exploring playing by ear and see how it could be taught and how it could be learned. Where did things go from there?

Cynthia: They really sort of just laid there for a while.

Christopher: I see, yeah.

Cynthia: And I started exploring that a little bit more in my teaching. Now he, when he was helping us understand how children learned, did understand and really stress the importance of aural musicianship as in A-U-R-A-L as well as O-R-A-L musicianship. So, hearing as well as doing. That was part of why I did a lot of playing for my students. I had them listening to CDs of the things that they were learning. Actually, it was records back then. That was also one of the reasons I had them singing. So I was sort of playing with some of those ideas, but again, I didn’t really feel like I knew how to put that all together in some kind of coherence package to help my students move forward successfully.

Christopher: Interesting. This is something that’s come up a few times when talking to music teachers in the US, is that although there are these traditional philosophies or approaches such as Kodály and Dalcroze and Orff and Music Learning Theory maybe can be put alongside them in some sense, a lot of music teachers get to their first day of teaching and realize they don’t actually have a clear structure or framework for how to impart these skills they want to. What was your own experience with that? It sounds like you had some kind of sense of the toolkit you wanted to bring to your teaching.

Cynthia: Yeah, a little bit. I had an eclectic university education in relation to that. The elementary general music class that I took didn’t really try to support or wasn’t underpinned by a single approach to learning. We had the two weeks on Orff, and the two weeks on Kodály, and not at all on Learning Theory. It ended up giving me a collection of activities, but no real structure to hang those activities on. The instrumental music class, the methods class that I took, actually was the one that had that aural focus, and so I was sort of having to figure out how to take those things that I learned in an instrumental setting and move it down into my elementary general music teaching. I didn’t have as much trouble with my instrumental teaching, doing that, because I’d seen it modeled. I knew what that looked like a little bit.

Christopher: Got you. How did you address that as you began to teach and have to figure it all out?

Cynthia: About halfway through my first year of teaching, I got a letter from one of my friends, who said, “I am at this workshop,” or, “I just did this workshop, and it changed my life. You need to do this.” And it was actually one of Ed Gordon’s Sugarloaf workshops in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania. This was someone I trusted a great deal. It was also someone I knew that knew valued the kinds of approaches to music teaching and learning that I valued, and so I thought, okay, this is definitely worth checking out, and I did that the next summer. It really paid big dividends. It changed, really, the course of my life.

Christopher: Wow. It may be a slightly funny question, but Professor Gordon passed away a few years ago, and I’m sure our listeners are curious to know, what was he like? You worked quite closely with him, and this was your first opportunity to study with him. What kind of a person was he that invented this amazing theory that so many people now practice?

Cynthia: He was brilliant. He loved ideas. He loved music, he loved artistry, but he loved it broadly defined. It wasn’t just classical music that he liked. He was on the road with Gene Krupa when he was in his late teens, one of the great jazz drummers of all time. He also played classical bass. He studied at Eastman. But beyond that, he had a brilliant mind and a creative mind. He loved playing with ideas. He loved thinking through things. He read broadly in philosophy and in art, well outside of music. So, a brilliant mind who used that brilliant mind to the benefit of music education.

Christopher: Wonderful. What was that first experience like, that first workshop where you studied with him? What was the workshop experience like? And also, you mentioned how much of an impact it had. Can you give us a sense of what that transformation was? What was the before and after that this workshop brought about?

Cynthia: Well, the workshop itself was really stressful, actually, but also incredible. We got up very early every morning, had breakfast, and started lectures at about 8:00 in the morning. We had lectures until noon, a little bit of lectures after lunch, a couple of hours to practice our musicianship, develop musicianship skills. Mid-afternoon, a little bit more lecture, then we had dinner, and he went until 10:00 lecturing. So, long, long, long days, but it was clear that everything that he had to say was so important, and I never, ever got bored, because it was such important information and it was answering all these questions that teaching had raised for me.

It was resonating with how I, not just in my music lessons, but I as an individual really learned music. Sort of that amalgamation of my informal music learning and my formal music learning, and it put it together a little bit for me and helped me understand what it was that I had accomplished and what it was that I still needed.

Now, in terms of the impact that it had on my teaching, a lot of the ideas were very cerebral and not very practically oriented. If you’ll read Learning Sequences in Music, which is Ed’s definitive book, you’ll see that that is the case. Translating that to practice has been a life’s work, and the publications that I’ve done with Ed, Jump Right In, the music curriculum, which is designed for K-5, K-6, as well as Music Play, which is designed for early childhood, those are the outgrowth of that. They are the translating Ed’s theories and ideas into practical application for different age groups. It’s also been translated into piano instruction, into instrumental instruction, but those are not the things that I have had the major role in, although I’m familiar with them.

Christopher: Got you. I was about to ask you if you could give a particular example of something you took away from that workshop and put into practice, but it sounds like maybe it took a little longer for it to sink in and for you to see how these abstract frameworks could all be beneficial for your teaching.

Cynthia: Although one thing that it really made me understand is the importance of aural musicianship, the importance of listening, the importance of playing by ear, and responding to music first, away from the page, really in sophisticated ways before and at the same time you’re responding to music on the page.

Christopher: I see. Maybe we could dwell on that for a moment, because you said something very interesting a few minutes ago when talking about your professor who started introducing you to playing by ear. You said you suddenly thought this should have been part of my instrument learning from the first day I picked up the instrument. I’m paraphrasing. But, that would be surprising to a lot of musicians, particularly in that group we talked about before who are very sheet music oriented, they haven’t explored the aural skills side of things. Can you give a sense of how that can work for someone who’s never tried playing by ear and sees it as a very advanced or magical skill? What would that look like to incorporate from day one?

Cynthia: I actually got to see that in my own children as they began piano, because they had a piano teacher who started with a really aural approach. What this piano teacher did, Jerry [Asheri 00:18:48], who was just fantastic, was he had them just take songs that they already knew, showed them what the five finger positions were on. “So here’s where you put your thumb, which means here’s what you do for the rest of these fingers.” And had them figure out how to play these tunes. He just took songs that the kids already knew, had them play them, and then the next step was actually to harmonize. Still all with no notation at all, and he would move them into key centers, so they were transposing and taking this song and playing them in different keys. There were fairly easy harmonies, like just one and five or one, four, and five, and the kids learned how to play chords in each of the hands and figured out where the chords went in the melodies, and they knew several songs in both major and minor before they ever saw one stitch of notation.

Christopher: That’s beautiful. This is a topic I really wanted to dig into with you, because the approaches I mentioned before, Kodály and Orff, they’re often boxed as early music education stuff. I know that some of our listeners, having just heard us talk about how playing by ear isn’t magical and heard you describe how it can be learned by children, probably still thinking, okay, if you’re a kid and you start very early, maybe you can learn those skills, but for me, as an adult, it’s far too late. Would you just speak to that a little, the relevance of Music Learning Theory and the stuff we’ve been talking about for adults versus children?

Cynthia: It’s relevant for everyone. Now, I do think that it comes more quickly and more easily for children. Children just learn things faster than adults do. When you think about all the things that are learned in the first two years of life for a child, they go from this little blob hardly able to do anything to walking and talking and doing all of those kinds of things. So if we learned that much every two years, we’d be pretty remarkable. So, we don’t.

But, that aural musicianship is still really fundamental for music learning. The process may a little bit slower, but we also are bringing, as adults, a lifetime of music listening that kids don’t bring. We also bring some cognitive skills that kids haven’t developed yet. Some things will come a little more slowly for us and other things will come a little bit more quickly than they come with kids, and that’s fine.

Christopher: Fantastic. I love that you touched on that, that we do actually bring advantages to the table, not just a brain that’s a bit slower to learn. Yeah, it’s something, I think, adult musicians often underestimate, is the value of that mental database of music and everything they’ve been absorbing passively over the years.

Cynthia: We also bring, I think, a motivation that in school settings not all kids bring. We’re doing music because we want to do music, because we love music, because we want to engage in these things that make us happy, and that alone is a real plus for us as adults.

Christopher: I think we’ve touched on a few of the themes in Music Learning Theory and talked about how it is the framework, it’s a way of thinking about these things. One thing I wanted to ask you in particular because I think it confuses some people is, would you say this is a model of how people learn music? Or is it more a recipe for how we could or should learn music?

Cynthia: I would say both. I think many people have learned music in spite of their education musically rather than because of their education musically, and so I think there are many persons just like me who had their classical music education, but there were a lot of other things that were happening in the background that allowed them to learn some of the things that they’ve learned. I think it is a model for how music is learned. It’s also how music should be learned, which is kind of a mixture of informal and formal music training, but with informal music training laying the foundation, really, for more formal music training.

Christopher: I see. And-

Cynthia: And I would really actually prefer the word education rather than training.

Christopher: Sure. We’ve touched on a couple of things that are big, I think, in this way of thinking about learning music. One is singing and using your voice and the other is aural skills, the A-U-R-A-L sense of the word.

But you can’t dive very far into Music Learning Theory without coming across the word audiation. I actually had an email recently from Joy Morin over at Color In My Piano, someone I really love and respect, but she was very, in a friendly way, pointing out that we had been a bit too fast and loose with the way we use the word audiation at Musical U.

In short, we tend to use it to just mean the musical equivalent of visualization. We say, it means imagining music in your mind. She was reminding me that there’s a lot more depth to it when that word is used in the context of Music Learning Theory. I’d love if you could just explain a little bit, what are we missing out on if we think audiation is just imagining music in our head?

Cynthia: It’s also giving meaning to that music that we imagine. So, audiation is sort of a matter of degree in some ways. Audiation is not a yes or no question. Audiation is a skill, and it’s a skill that we develop. I could ask you to audiate Happy Birthday, the song Happy Birthday. Okay, now I could ask you to audiate it in minor. Now I could ask you to audiate it in minor with the harmonization underneath it. There are lots of different ways in which we audiate, the depth with which we audiate.

When I say give meaning, what I’m saying is, do you have some sort of informal aural understanding of the syntactical context of what’s happening tonally and rhythmically? Can you feel a beat and multiple levels of beat? Can you hear where home is, where the tonic or the resting tone or the most important pitch is? Those are sort of the most fundamental levels of audiation that allow you to bring meaning to what it is that you’re listening to or performing, even.

Christopher: Fantastic. Why is this important?

Cynthia: Because if you can’t do that, you are not really going to be expressive as a musician, because it’s your ability to hear where home is and pull away from home and return to home and stretch the beat and push the beat. Those are the kinds of things that we … To be expressive musically, and if you don’t have those syntactical systems underpinning your musicianship as you perform or even as you listen, you are not going to be as expressive musically as you could be.

Christopher: I think it’s probably fair to say that the traditional approach to music education, the kind of very sheet music based or notation based and very focused on instrument technique, I think it’s fair to say that that doesn’t do an awful lot to cultivate this skill of audiation, and certainly not to the degree you just described in terms of actually understanding and being able to play with and experiment and explore in your mind’s ear. What does it look like if this is done right? If we imagine, let’s say, an adult musician, or, say, an adult who is just beginning to learn music, and they’re going to go to classes with a teacher who has studied Music Learning Theory. How would they be developing that ability to audiate?

Cynthia: Through singing, through moving, through some playing instruments, but through a lot of listening. Listening, however, not just to recorded music, but listening to one another, listening to the music teacher who needs to be a really fine musician in and of him or herself or theirself. So, it’s going to be a lot more like how we learned language. When you think about how you learned language, you learned language through listening to language, through speaking language, playing with language yourself, babbling, and that’s how music really should be learned in the beginning as well. By listening to it, by playing around with it, by hearing others with whom you have a meaningful relationship perform and engage with you musically.

Christopher: With this kind of philosophy or approach or methodology, I think it’s easy for the listener to understand how this might work in a classroom context or if they were studying in person with a teacher, and they’ll get very excited about that idea and the kind of impact it could have on their musicality, but at the other end of the spectrum, we have people who are kind of cobbling together their own music education, often online. We live in an incredible age for accessing resources online, but they’re not always packaged up in a way that makes them effective for people. Obviously, I have a slightly biased viewpoint in that we try and address this to some extent at Musical U.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on what an interested adult could usefully do. If they’re getting excited about these ideas from Music Learning Theory and what it would be like to be able to audiate and that kind of stuff, what could they do today to incorporate some of this into their music education?

Cynthia: Learning to play tunes by ear. Listening to recordings that they really like. Figuring out the melody, playing around with it until they get it on their instrument or on their keyboard or vocally. Listening enough to really immerse themselves so that they can learn things aurally first. But I would also recommend listening broadly. Laying a very rich foundation of music listening in a variety of styles, in a variety of cultures, in a variety of tonalities, in a variety of meters, because it will allow you to bring a deeper understanding to the music, then, that you choose to engage with. Playing by ear, listening are really the foundations of it all.

Christopher: Wonderful, and I so admire and respect that you gave that answer and you didn’t just say, “Go study with an MLT professional,” which some people might have been expecting to hear. At the same time, obviously there is tremendous value in learning from those who’ve really immersed in what it means to learn music and how to incorporate all of these things. I think there’s a risk that someone gets excited, plays around with these ideas, but doesn’t really have a sense of the progression they should be looking for or how to self-assess or how to know if they’re making any progress. If we imagine that person who’s tried playing by ear a few times and they’ve been trying to listen more, but then a few weeks later they’re like, “Is this working?”, what would [crosstalk 00:31:31] would you say?

Cynthia: Well, if they’re learning songs, it is working, for starters. But, that being said, I think to really make the jump into becoming really, truly proficient, it does help to have a teacher to serve as a guide. Someone who can assess where your strengths and weaknesses are, can really challenge you in the ways in which you’re strong, but can provide scaffolding for you in the ways in which you maybe are struggling a little bit. I think teachers can really serve in Music Learning Theory and in any approach, really, to guide the music learners so that they’re more efficient, more effective learners, and can plug in some of the holes that they come with naturally, partly as a result of who they are and their background and their experience.

Christopher: Terrific. Is this something that is studied as its own thing? You know, if someone’s like, “Okay, I’m going to get a teacher, they’re going to know all about Music Learning Theory.” Would that be part of, say, an instrument lesson? Would it be studied in its own right? What would that look like?

Cynthia: It could be part of an instrument lesson. There are many, many piano teachers now in the United States who have a Music Learning Theory base for their instruction. There are lots of private instrument teachers as well. Music Learning Theory has a very strong home in early childhood curricula, as well as in elementary general music, beginning instrumental music settings. I think the numbers of ways in which Learning Theory has been applied will continue to grow. I know that someone’s working on a guitar curriculum.

Someone’s working on a choral curriculum. These are all taking that Music Learning Theory framework and translating them to practice in a specific way, knowing that that framework could be translated to practice in other ways as well, so there’s no single way in which Music Learning Theory takes life.

Christopher: And I guess it comes back to what you were saying about Gordon himself being very broadminded when it came to music and music education. You’re soon going to be the President of the Gordon Institute for Music Learning. Could you talk a bit about the work you do there and what people can find on the GIML website?

Cynthia: They can find some theoretical information about what Music Learning Theory is, so just the fundamentals about what is this Music Learning Theory thing, what does it mean to be a Music Learning theorist? But there are also professional development activities, so there are lists of workshops of people who are Music Learning Theory practitioners who are presenting around the country and around the world. There are also professional development workshop opportunities that are on that website. You can become certified in Music Learning Theory and to teach using a Music Learning Theory approach. Those are two-week workshops that happen primarily in the United States, although we are expanding internationally as well. Those are all listed, as well as the dates and contact information.

Christopher: Tremendous. Well, it’s been such a pleasure to have the chance to talk with you, Professor Taggart, and hear the inside story on Music Learning Theory and the positive benefits it can bring to a musician’s life, and I’m particularly glad to have had the opportunity to ask you about its relevance for adults, because I think that’s something people are often a bit confused about.

Cynthia: One thing I’d like to add, too, is that one really fundamental principle of Music Learning Theory is that everyone is musical. Every single person is musical, and we have different strengths and weaknesses within our own musicianship. We’re all unique musicians, and we all have something to say musically.

Christopher: Wonderful. Well, I’m so glad we ended on that point. Tremendous. Thank you so much, Professor Taggart.

Cynthia: Thank you very much for inviting me.

The post Audiation and Thinking Music, with Cynthia Crump Taggart appeared first on Musical U.