Author: musicalitywrld

Not everything is in 4/4! Learn about polyrhythms, or rhythms where two (or more) rhythms occur simultaneously. Musical U’s Anastasia Voitinskaia gives a rundown of polyrhythms, where they’re found, and how to count them, and why you should make them a part of your musical repertoire. 

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Links and Resources

• Polyrhythm for Beginners
• Playlist of songs with polyrhythm

Transcript

Christopher: Have you heard of polyrhythms? I have to admit that until recently, they were something that I had heard of, and knew basically what the definition was, but I really didn’t know much more than that.
Today I’m joined on the show by Anastasia Voitinskaia from the Musical U team. Anastasia works with Andrew on the publishing side of things, and she helps put together the great articles and tutorials you see coming out on our website each week; as well as putting together the show notes for this podcast.

We recently tasked Anastasia with taking an old and simple article we had on the topic of polyrhythms, and turning it into something much more comprehensive and useful. So I thought I’d invite her onto the show to share with you what she learned. Anastasia, thanks for joining us on the podcast.

Anastasia: Thank you for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

Christopher: So before we dive into polyrhythms, maybe you can just give a quick bio and intro to yourself and your musical life so people have an idea of who you are.

Anastasia: Sure. I work at Musical U as an assistant content editor, which again, means I work on the editorial team researching, writing, creating content, such as this remaster of the polyrhythm article I’m about to talk about, formatting text, and images, and essentially wrangling raw content into the finished articles that you see on the Musical U blog.

As for my personal music life, I began playing the piano at the age of three at the request… Actually, well my mom basically made me start piano lessons. However, I’m very glad she did because that piano lesson… those piano lessons then turned into me picking up more and more instruments later in my life, starting guitar… at about 10 or 11 years of age, and then picking up the bass guitar more recently, the synthesizer.

In more recent years, I’ve taken the focus away from piano and more towards guitar, and bass, and synth as I began to play in bands. I currently play the bass guitar in a band, and have a solo kind of experimental electronic project that I’m working on.

Christopher: Very cool. As part of all of that music learning, did you know very much about polyrhythms?

Anastasia: Here’s the funny thing: I really didn’t, because… in classical piano training, you don’t really come across them very much. They are definitely there, but really polyrhythms prevail in genres such as jazz and traditional African music, and some metal, and some experimental music; for example, Nine Inch Nails makes a lot of use of them. However, in Bach and Beethoven, not so much. So actually, when it came time for me to research this article and put together a cohesive piece on polyrhythms, there was a lot of work to do.

Christopher: Cool, and what did you learn about where they do come up, if it’s not Bach and Beethoven? You mentioned a couple of genres there. Is there a particular source of polyrhythms? Why are they a big topic that you might come across if they’re not part of the kind of the classical history?

Anastasia: So they originated in African music, in traditional African music because you’ll notice that when they drum, it’s really … It’s not in four/four time. It’s like a complicated cross rhythm with a lot of overlap, and these kind of like rolling, almost like conflicting rhythms, which sound really cool but it’s just like not something that you’ll hear so much in Western music; at first glance.

However, you then realize that traditional African music has influenced so much of Western music, like rock and roll, like folk music, like jazz especially, blues for sure. You kind of will find these vestiges of polyrhythms in these genres. Something that I learned that really struck me, because I listen to so much dance music, but I’ve never considered polyrhythms in dance music before, is just how much things like house will contain polyrhythms. Because again, this dance music was partially influenced by African music.

Christopher: Interesting, and we’ve kind of I guess teased a little bit there in some of what you’ve described, but what is a polyrhythm? For anyone listening who’s only heard the word, or maybe not even that. What is a polyrhythm in music?

Anastasia: A polyrhythm is essentially two rhythms played simultaneously, one on top of the other, giving a feeling of conflict, kind of. They’re defined as one number over the other, and these two numbers represent the two rhythms that are being played simultaneously.

Christopher: And are there not always rhythms being played simultaneously in music? Why isn’t every bit of music a polyrhythm?

Anastasia: The thing that sets polyrhythms apart from regular rhythms is kind of like the crossover and then the conflict that occurs. It’s basically, for example, just to give a really simple example, there is something called the three over two polyrhythm where three beats are played against two. It’s almost kind of like playing in two different time signatures, however, it happens at the same time. So it’s a very different feel from something that’s like in four/four, where you have two beats against four beats, for example. It sounds completely different.

Christopher: Interesting. Okay, so it’s almost like having two time signatures going at the same time.

Anastasia: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Christopher: Why should anyone care about polyrhythms? They sound a bit weird.

Anastasia: They might sound a bit weird when you’re simply talking about them and saying, “oh, it’s two rhythms played at the same time.” Actually, they’re very natural sounding when you do hear them in music, because speech almost can mimic … Sorry, polyrhythms can almost mimic speech because it’s kind of just like a … non-robotic, more organic rolling kind of rhythm, which is cool because part of its origin is like in African drumming, of course; which people sang along to and spoke along to. So it wouldn’t have this four/four meter. We’d kind of mimic speech, which is polyrhythmic, probably, if you were to really listen to it and record it, maybe.

Christopher: That’s interesting. Yeah, it definitely jumped out at me reading the article and learning more about polyrhythms myself that they’re one of these topics in music; that if you approach it from one angle, seem super obscure and complex, and mathematical, and theoretical. But if you approach it from another angle, it’s kind of just natural and what happens if you do something fairly simple in music.

Anastasia: Totally.

Christopher: You mentioned the three over two there. Can you just describe in terms of notation, or in terms of what people might be thinking, looking at two … a three against two polyrhythm? What is going on there?

Anastasia: So we’ll have a link in the show notes to an article that kind of visualizes this for you, but a three over two polyrhythm would, for example, be three notes played and then two notes kind of superimposed on top of that. So one cycle of the polyrhythm would involve three notes being played, or three beats being played in one of the rhythms concurrently with two notes or two beats played in the other rhythm. However, the three notes would be played faster, so that they can take up the same amount of time as the two beats. Then, the cycle repeats, so beat one would be where both rhythms align.

Actually previously, when I mentioned that polyrhythms mimic speech a lot of the time, or that speech mimics polyrhythms, you can kind of assign a phrase to this three over two polyrhythm, and that phrase is “hot cup of tea”. Actually, it would sound a bit like this. I’m going to tap on my desk now. It would be like… with the phrase, it would be “Hot cup of tea, hot cup of tea.”

The three of the polyrhythm has the words “hot,” “cup,” and “tea.” The two of the polyrhythm has the words ‘hot’ and ‘of.’ So you can kind of speak along to it and count it out like that, just by clapping, or tapping, or whatever.

Christopher: Gotcha, okay. I mean three notes in the space of two notes is triplets, right? We’re kind of talking about a triplet part against the straight eighth notes.

Anastasia: Duplets.

Christopher: Yeah.

Anastasia: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Christopher: I guess with triplets, they’re not normally that confusing, because you don’t have them at the same time as the equivalent two notes. Whereas with the polyrhythm, we’re talking about those two things actually happening out loud at the same time.

Anastasia: Precisely, which can make a bit tricky to understand if you are used to kind of like … for example, four against two to where perhaps one hand is playing duplets and the other is playing two eighth notes per duplet.

Christopher: I think any musician hearing about polyrhythms is going to instinctively want to try it out. I know that for me, anyway, when I read about them and I was like, “Okay, so five against seven, or three against two. I’ll just … I’ll tap five times with one hand and seven times with the other, and I’ll do it at the same time.” It’s incredibly difficult. This is something that drummers get pretty good at, and particularly if they’re into jazz, or world music, and they’re really getting into polyrhythms.

Anastasia: Yes.

Christopher: But for your average musician where we’re used to thinking about a simple beat and subdividing that beat into equal parts, and that kind of being our grid for rhythm, something we’ve talked about on the show before. It’s really hard to kind of get two timelines going in your head at the same time.

Anastasia: Totally.

Christopher: And so I really love what you just described with the hot cup of tea. It’s really elegant because you can try that immediately, just take what Anastasia said; so “hot” and “of” is one of your parts. You’re just tapping on the “hot” and “of.” Your other one is “hot,” “cup,” “tea.” And it’s very easy, if you’re listening to this podcast, just get your hands and first of all, just tap the ‘hot cup of tea, hot cup of tea.’

But then, try and allocate your hands like that, and you’ll find that it’s actually fairly easy to get your hands to do what they’re meant to. Then, the kind of mental gymnastics is to work back from that to thinking, “Okay, so this one is just doing the two beats, and this one is managing the three.” You can kind of … I don’t know, retrofit those two timelines onto what you’ve managed to make yourself do.

So is this something that works for any polyrhythm? Is there always a nice word-y way to figure it out?

Anastasia: “I wish” is the short answer. I wish because that would make it quite easy to tap out any polyrhythm and then translate it to your playing. However, that’s not always the case. There are definitely a few that work for simpler polyrhythms. For example, there’s a phrase for the four over three polyrhythm that is saying, “what atrocious weather,” over and over to the beat of the polyrhythm. You can hear a sound example of that in our article on polyrhythms, which we’ll have a link to in the show notes.

However, polyrhythms can get really, really complicated, as you’ll hear in music. There can be, as Christopher just mentioned, five over seven, or two over seven, or three over… 144, if you would want to play such a thing. I don’t know. It can get very bad.

So they’re – in the same way that we kind of learn according to a grid, some simpler patterns. For example, the most basic rock beat, which is kind of the kick snare, or kick, high hat, snare, high hat. We can put that in a grid and understand it visually.

In that same way, we can put pretty much any polyrhythm into a grid, even the more complex ones, and count it out like that. This definitely involves starting quite slow, as you figure out when exactly to place each hit. But again, with enough practice, you start to internalize the polyrhythm and really understand it.

If you’re already a drummer, this will, of course, be easier for you. If you’re not, it’ll be a bit of a steeper learning curve. It’s definitely possible, as I learned to internalize them with enough practice. Even if you’re practicing with just a metronome to get started, or if you’re having more difficulty, try a polyrhythm metronome, which kind of counts out each beat of each polyrhythm, which I actually found really helpful for understanding the more difficult ones.

Christopher: That’s great advice, and I have to say I loved the visual representations in that article you put together. They definitely make it easier to get your head around what is going on, and how the two rhythms co-exist. I have to admit, I’m very comfortable with traditional notation, but it can be quite tricky to look at that and figure out the relative timings of the different notes; whereas when you put it on-

Anastasia: For sure.

Christopher: … a grid where they have some kind of common time element to them, I found that a lot easier to fit in.

Anastasia: Totally.

Christopher: Terrific. So you gave some tips there for how people can go away and practice some polyrhythms. We talked about speaking them out, or looking at visualizations. You mentioned working with a metronome, or a polyrhythm metronome is a good way to do it. And we’ll have links in the show notes for more on those.

Why would someone bother? I’m hoping that people listening to this have found it interesting, but they might still be wondering what does this have to offer me if I’m not going to and join, say, an African drum circle?

Anastasia: Well, you should absolutely be going to join an African drum circle. They look like the most fun anyone could ever have, to be honest. However, other than that, it’s basically like polyrhythms are what I would describe to be like a pleasant surprise to the ear. I think making music is all about pleasantly surprising your listeners. And a big way to do that is obviously through rhythm. Even though writing a rock song in four/four time is going to be pleasant and familiar, imagine how you can mix things up by maybe occasionally throwing a polyrhythm there maybe during the bridge, or something like that.

In things like dance music, which is kind of repetitive, again, you can really add a lot of interest just by throwing a polyrhythm in there. Maybe make the song based on the polyrhythm, like for example, so many African songs are. Again, this will really, I think, make your music stand out from the traditional Western four/four time; because everyone does tend to write in that.

Basically, it’s really just a tool to set your music apart from the masses, in my opinion. For example, I definitely notice if a song has a polyrhythm in it. You can always tell when a song has interesting structure, because you’re kind of like, “Oh, what’s that? That’s interesting.” It really makes your ear perk up. It makes you listen.

Christopher: Definitely. We’re so used to everything slotting in together perfectly, and repetitively. I think when one part of the music goes off on its own tempo, as it were, like a different rhythm grid. That does really stand out to us. Cool, so song writers definitely, there’s a lot there that we can learn. I think music fans, just to open your ears a bit to what’s possible. And to be honest, for myself, it’s maybe a geeky angle on it, but I just find the mental challenge of trying to track what’s going on when you listen to one these polyrhythms is actually just really fun in itself.

So if any of those things appeal to you, I definitely encourage going to the link in the show notes for this episode at MusicalityPodcast.com, where you will find that the show notes for this episode that Anastasia has lovingly put together, which will link to the article that she is also behind.

Thank you very much for joining us on the show today, Anastasia, to talk a little bit about polyrhythms.

Anastasia: Thank you for having me. I think I learned even a bit more, actually, through doing this, so that’s great. Also, I’d like to bring up that I’ll make a little playlist of songs that contain polyrhythms. You can try counting along with them, and spotting which ones have which rhythms. Thank you for having me.

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The post About Polyrhythms appeared first on Musical U.

However, traditional in-person music lessons are not a one-size-fits-all model, and there’s various reasons why they may not be the best option for you.

Do you live in a rural area with no music schools around? Do you have a work schedule that leaves you little time to drive to a music lesson once a week? Do you have young children that you often need to be at home with? Do you already have a home studio set up, and would simply prefer not to travel for lessons?

Why Online Lessons?

Enter: an online teacher.

Online teachers use live video chat to work with their students. This means that there is a real person on the other end of your FaceTime/Skype/Google Hangout who is watching you, talking to you, teaching you. They can send or share resources electronically and give you feedback and guidance during the lesson. It’s like having a real life teacher in your home (except you get to take lessons in your pajamas).

An added benefit of online teachers is that they are typically less expensive. Since the teacher doesn’t have to pay overhead costs for a studio or for travel, they can charge less for the actual lesson. This is great if you are on a budget, or want to put more money towards saving up for that new flute.

Best of all, online lessons are just as effective or even more effective than in-person for many students, depending on their goals and learning style. For example, you can set up your camera to focus close-up on a specific part of your instrument or on your hands, so your teacher can correct your placement and technique.

How to Find an Online Teacher

In the age of the internet, our world has gotten much smaller. You no longer need to check out the local bulletin board for teacher ads, or ask your best friend’s grandmother for a recommendation.

Quite the opposite: there is a plethora of resources to find a music teacher. A quick search will pull up websites that have listings for teachers. Some websites, like TakeLessons, are dedicated to helping connect students and teachers. You can also search for individual music studios and see if any of their instructors happen to offer online lessons.

Types of Lessons

Not all types of online lessons are created equal. An individual teacher may be best for some, whereas others do better in a group class. Concurrently, some students love the ease and convenience of pre-recorded lessons. Let’s look at the pros and cons of each of these options:

One on One

Pros: An individual online teacher can offer you one-on-one assistance and guidance, ensuring you get exactly what you need from the lesson. They can tailor the lessons to your needs and can adjust the lesson plans as you go. If you have a question, they’re able to answer it immediately, and spend more or less time on various aspects of the lesson depending on your abilities.

Cons: Individual teachers are not always readily available. Teachers have lives and busy schedules as well, so finding a time that works for both of you may be a challenge.

Group Lessons

Pros: Online group lessons are great if you’d like to work with others at your level. This allows you to meet new people who share your interests, as well as learn from your peers. This can be an excellent opportunity to discover a technique you didn’t know, or hear a question you didn’t even think of.

Cons: A downfall of group lessons, though, is that the instruction is not personalized. The speed of the class is determined by the group as a whole, so you might not get to move onto other topics as quickly as you’d like, or your question might not necessarily be answered.

Just Press “Play”

Pros: Pre-recorded lessons, such as those on YouTube, are perfect when you have a specific question and you’d like it answered immediately. YouTube has thousands of videos that focus on specific aspects of music learning, offer tips and tricks, or even teach you how to play a song. They’re always available no matter the day or time and are great for quick instruction.

Cons: Since they are pre-recorded, there isn’t a live teacher to help if you’re stuck on a particular concept and you don’t have the ability to ask questions.

Look at your musical needs and goals frankly and honestly, and assess which of these online options is likely to be a good fit. You may even find that a combination of all three types might just be the best way to go!

Choosing Your Teacher

Once you’ve narrowed down your search and are ready to choose a teacher, how do you know if that person is a good fit for you? Everyone has a different learning style, and each instructor has a different teaching style. It’s important to make sure that the two align, so that you can get the most out of your online lessons.

When choosing a teacher, determine what you need from the person. Examine teaching credentials, level of experience, availability, and overall personality. If your goal is to become a concert pianist, someone who is used to teaching beginner-level children probably won’t be the best fit for you. Similarly, if you’re looking to learn to play your favourite popular music, a teacher who specializes in teaching classical probably isn’t the way to go. Establish your goals and wants, and discuss them with your teacher before you begin taking lessons.

When determining if you’ve made the right choice or if you’d like to switch teachers, ask yourself the following:

• Do I look forward to my lessons?
• Do I leave my lessons feeling challenged and motivated?
• Is my instructor open to feedback?
• Does my instructor have my best interests at heart?
• Has my desire to play changed?

Your honest answers will let you know if the teacher you’ve chosen is the right one for you.

Setting the Scene

Once you’ve chosen your teacher, it’s time to start preparing for your lessons. Before your first lesson, make sure that you have a quiet space set up where you can completely focus on your lesson without distractions. Determine the best time of day for your lessons (your neighbors probably won’t appreciate you playing the drums at midnight), and communicate that with your teacher.

These days, video calling has become easy and smooth on multiple platforms and devices.

You and your teacher should discuss and agree on what platform you’d like to use for your lessons, whether it be Skype or FaceTime or any of the many other video platforms available. You will most likely need a computer or phone with a built-in camera and microphone, or a webcam. Test your video and microphone settings prior to your lesson so that you can begin right away.

You’ll want the lessons to go as smooth as possible, so make sure you have a decent internet connection. If you’re not sure how to do this, your online teacher is likely to be able to help – the most important thing is to communicate with them to make the process as easy and smooth as possible.

Getting Started

Your teacher is chosen, your computer and playing space is all set up, and you’re ready to go.

Remember: this is a music lesson, and it’s as important to be punctual and professional in an online setting as it is in-person. This will help establish rapport with your teacher from the start, and show them that you’re reliable, engaged, and ready to learn.

In return, your teacher will help you stay motivated, introduce you to new concepts and ways of playing, and maybe even become a friend and mentor.

So are you ready to give online music lessons a try?

The TakeLessons community has been connecting students with experienced teachers since 2006. They offer music and language lessons, sports, and academic tutoring. Feel free to check out their private lessons or online classes.

The post Finding an Online Music Teacher appeared first on Musical U.

Kendra is a perfect example of a musician that will be called “talented” and whose music will make you think she has gifts that make it all come easily. But as you’ll hear in this interview, those abilities have come through dedication and very thoughtful pursuit of music-making, and the opportunities and projects she’s enjoyed haven’t been dropped in her lap by luck or fate, she’s been out there putting in the time and efforts and making it happen.

In this conversation we talk about:

• Kendra’s musical upbringing and the one pivotal experience that made it suddenly clear that she wanted to be a musical performer as a career
• The process of recording her first album, Treat, and why it turned out to be such a wonderfully varied “buffet” of songs
• Her recent artist residency in Big Sur, an incredible and unique experience that produced a new EP and helped inform who she’s becoming as a musician

Kendra’s album, Treat, really lives up to its name, as being a treat for your ears to enjoy, and this conversation was no different. It was fascinating to get to speak with Kendra and understand where this music has come from and what she has coming up next, so we hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did.

Listen to the episode:

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Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

Links and Resources

• Kendra’s website
• Kendra’s Facebook
• Kendra’s Instagram
• Musical U’s interview with Kendra

Transcript

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

Kendra: Thank you so much for having me. I’m delighted to speak with you.

Christopher: So I have so enjoyed listening to your music over the last year or two and I’ve dug a little bit into your back story but I’d love to hear you tell it. Where did you come form as a musician and what was learning music like for you?

Kendra: Sure. So I’m originally from Santa Cruz, California, a little beach town in the central coast and I grew up in an artistic household. So music was a big part of my family’s culture but I didn’t start playing until, I mean, I really didn’t start playing seriously until the final months of high school, though I did get a guitar when I was 11 years old, I was playing Beatles songs in the privacy of my room, but it was, kind of, a more private extracurricular activity. So during my senior year of high school I had an interesting experience where my P.E. teacher wrote this play called In the Flow that was supposed to be half play, half talent show. It was about a girl named Freedom that realizes that if we recycle, we’ll save the world and if you, you know, haven’t made the connection between that play and Santa Cruz, California, a quick Google search will fill in all of these crunchy granola hippy-dippy elements, but about this play.

So my teacher wanted me to play the Brother Iz rendition of “Over the Rainbow” on ukulele that I believe was made popular from the 50 First Dates soundtrack, the romantic comedy with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore. So I agreed to do this performance and when I was driving home from the rehearsal I made the fatal mistake of leaving my ukulele on roof of my car. The instrument was totalled but through the death of this ukulele I ended up performing on guitar instead in this play which was the first time in my life that I played guitar and sang publicly.

I had, you know, lived full life as a performer doing theater and choir and dance but this was the first instance of combining a passion for music with stage performance and it was an absolute a-ha moment because it was the combination of my two favorite things and from that moment on I just made a shift where I decided I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to write songs. I wanted to be a musical performer so I started studying classical guitar at university, was writing all throughout, and, yeah, that’s kind of where it started.

Christopher: Amazing, and it sounds like a real epiphany moment for you, then. Was it a very successful performance? Were you able to just, kind of, nail it and walk away very delighted with yourself? Because I imagine people listening are, like, “Whoa. Wait, you had to step in at the last minute and play on guitar instead of the ukulele? You must have been, like, terrified.”

Kendra: Well, that’s a really interesting question because since I grew up doing stage performance I felt really comfortable in that medium and I don’t know, I guess I was comfortable enough in my private practice that I believed that I could play through a song in its entirety without biffing it, but that was another, sort of, element of this a-ha moment was the comfort and the fulfillment of performing in music onstage. It’s, like, I actually had a preference for it because I loved imitation, I loved performing but I didn’t really study theater very seriously. I didn’t follow actors. I didn’t read plays. I was always pursuing music but, you know, the actual activities I was pursuing were theatrical.

So, yeah, it was unexpected both in how enjoyable it was and also, I guess, how easy it was or, just, like, you know, the feeling of ease, of being in that position was unexpected and reassuring.

Christopher: Hm. Fascinating. I feel like we could dwell on this and unpack it some more because it is such a challenge for a lot of musicians. I’m sure a lot of our listeners have felt that stage fright and terror at the prospect of performing but to hear you describe it, as well, you practiced privately at home and you also got experience being comfortable on the stage and in front of an audience. It makes perfect sense. You just shoved the two together.

Kendra: Sure.

Christopher: So that’s what — it sounds like it lead on to a new trajectory for you there, going on to university to study music, is that right?

Kendra: Entirely different. I mean, it was interesting too because it wasn’t that my life was unmusical before that moment. I was always singing in choir; I was always listening. But pursuing music in a serious way in university was fascinating because I was able to assign vocabulary and music theory to these concepts that I already understood just through listening so that made it really valuable because I was able to, you know, suddenly communicate ideas that I had in my head instead of trying to sing as an example to say specifically what was happening theoretically or figuring out how to relate that to another player so that a collaboration could occur or listening back to the music that was so formative in my early years and understanding what it was that I liked about it, so then in my attempts to replicate it through my own music I had a deeper comprehension of what was happening.

Christopher: Terrific. That must be the most compelling and exciting description of a college music course I’ve heard in a long time, particularly, you know, given that you were mentioning music theory, specifically.

Kendra: Just like banging your head against the wall?

Christopher: Exactly, and I think for a lot of people the music theory or the ear training becomes a real, kind of, chore because they’re missing out on what you just described, which is the benefit that it can bring to your musical life if you really get your head and your ears around it. Maybe you can give an example of the kind of thing you were wanting to communicate or the kind of thing that you’ve, you know, you’ve listened back to some childhood tracks and were able to pick out after college that you maybe would have been oblivious to as a child or at least not able to explain.

Kendra: Sure. Well, I remember the day that we learned about secondary dominance, which, you know, just to kind of touch on it briefly in a way that’s not too esoteric or cryptic, it’s like the temporary tonicization of a chord in a progression which I’m almost wondering if that’s too much to try and unpack for the listeners but just, you know, learning that you can create a gravitational pull through particular chord choices that add a different weight or gravity to a chord in a progression and I remember learning about that and suddenly realizing that that was a tool used in just about every single Beatles song and as I mentioned in past interviews, you know, the Beatles were my religious preference. They were what made me excited about music and sort of, like, the prism through which I understood music so to have someone say, “Well, this is what they’re doing. This is why these particular chord choices feel so powerful, why there’s almost, like a physical response,” or, you know, maybe how they managed to add a certain dosage of complexity to an otherwise seemingly simple progression.

So just that day, learning that that was a concept, I didn’t know that that could be articulated and so then going back and listening to this music that was already so familiar there was this whole new depth and richness to it that I never would have known if I didn’t go to school.

Christopher: Very cool. Something we talk a lot about at Musical U and I think we’ve mentioned a couple of times on the podcast which is a lot of ear training can end up just being putting labels on things. You already kind of instinctively know, you know, that there is that kind of pure drilling of exercises but a lot of it is just about putting the mental frameworks in place and it sounds like it really served that purpose for you to kind of give you a window into understanding what you had already appreciated and enjoyed and taken on board in music.

Kendra: Sure. I mean, it kind of had the feeling of, as if I had grown up, you know, listening to and enjoying poetry and then someone suddenly taught me how to spell and so, then, like, through learning how to spell I could then read, I could write it myself so, really just having the tools to replicate and understand something that was just mysterious, magical and mysterious.

Christopher: Wonderful, and so you were having this great, kind of, brain-expanding experience in college. What did your musical life become from there?

Kendra: Well, beyond learning music theory I was taking classical guitar instruction because that was one of the requirements of the program that I went through, is that you had to have private classical instrument study and reach a certain level of performance proficiency by the end of the program and I hated studying classical guitar, I mean, I had no background in it, I had zero intention of becoming a classical performer and I really just wanted to write songs so it was kind of like pulling teeth but the blessing in disguise is that I was spending so much time in the music center and, you know, practicing guitar that I started playing piano instead just because I was procrastinating and wanting to still be musical and no one was telling me I had to play piano so beyond just clocking in many hours of practicing and exploring different instruments I was also being exposed to new music both through, you know, a western classical music department and also just meeting other people in college so I was, I started listening to more jazz music. As I mentioned to you in the past, like, I sang in a gypsy jazz ensemble just, like, in a side job so I was learning to sing all of, you know, Django Reinhardt’s repertoires, sometimes singing in other languages but also having that sort of harmonic information informing the way that I thought about harmony, my own musical interests and instincts and, you know, through that is was kind of like a gateway drug into other forms of jazz music, like I realized that I had an affinity for bossa nova music and that exploration started to inform my songwriting.

So all of this to say that my life had just become predominantly musical. Everything that I thought of, everything that I was pursuing, everything that I was interested in was music-based so whether it was an informal gathering of friends sharing music that they were passionate about or learning about, you know, Franz Liszt or Ravel in class I was able to access these new musical concepts, these new sonic palettes that, you know, just found their way of showing up in different ways, if that answers the question.

Christopher: It does and I think it paints a really vivid and varied picture of what that musical life was becoming. I think one front of the things that is most remarkable about your music is the sheer creativity and variety of each song and your album “”Treat”” as a whole is it’s constantly, kind of, keeping the listener interested and engaged in different ways and, you know, that’s very different from, say, a singer-songwriter who sits and strums guitar and every song sounds, kind of, more or less the same.

Kendra: Yeah.

Christopher: And so I think I was really curious to know what was it that allowed you to develop such a varied palette, as you put it, whether it was an upbringing thing or a mindset thing or a, purely the experiences that you went through, do you have any feeling on that? What’s led you to become this particular type of singer-songwriter?

Kendra: Sure. Well, I think that what’s been true of me as a person throughout my entire life and was true when I did theater as much as when I did music is that I loved imitation as an art form and was really fascinated by that, so with “”Treat”” it was kind of an example of my quest for self-discovery through music because I was interested in all these different musical genres and also had the first experience of recording my own music and realizing it was an elaborate production and so instead of having this definitive statement about who I was and the music that I wanted to make I was just, kind of, saying, like, “Here’s an example of all of the different music that has influenced me. This is me trying on all these different hats and this is how I’ve tried to imitate all of these influential artists or particular songs.”

So for me personally when I listened back to “Treat” it just feels like a catalog of my own quest to figure out who I was as a musician and through that process, you know, I felt a stronger pull toward certain songs or felt like they were just, like, stepping stones into a different direction but, yeah, that’s really what it was, is just trying to figure it out. I mean, I guess there’s like that Miles Davis quote about how the hardest thing to do in music is to sound like yourself and I wasn’t sure of what that was yet but I liked a lot of different things so I’m actually currently in the process of making demos for a new record and that was one of the strategies was to define a sonic palette and figure out how to make a collection of songs produced through that palette so it does sound like a cohesive album experience rather than it just being a buffet of different genres.

Christopher: I see. Well, I definitely want to dig into that some more and hear about those demos you’ve been putting together but first I’d like to take a step back. I think we kind of skipped a little bit of a story there between college and recording “Treat.”

Kendra: Sure.

Christopher: How did that come to be that you were ready to go into the studio and put together your first full album?

Kendra: Sure. So after college I spent some time in Europe traveling and playing music and collecting experiences that would turn into songs that were featured on “Treat” so between that trip to Europe and recording “Treat” I moved to San Francisco for a two-month sublet in my older brother AJ’s house in the Mission district and I just wanted to try on being a musician in San Francisco for size, ended up getting to keep the room that I was subletting and almost immediately upon my arrival to San Francisco I discovered and was welcomed into the music scene and started attending these, like, networking groups and attending lots of shows, playing more radio performances, just kind of fully immersed myself and said yes to any and all opportunities that were represented and through that networking I was connected to a man named Andy Freeman who was a local audio engineer and he was a big fan of my music and he and I decided to work together on “Treat” so suddenly I had access to an audio engineer who worked at a studio called Coast Recorders which, unfortunately, no longer exists but so I suddenly had this opportunity and he was asking me, “What do you want to record? How are we gonna do this? ” and I didn’t have a full album in mind. I didn’t have a sonic palette in mind. I just said, “Okay. Well, let’s start with these two songs.”

We started with the songs, “Fine as a Vine” and “Do What You Want,” which are both from “Treat” and those songs were definitely reflective of kind of, Beatles-esque, like, Revolver era, sunshine, major chord, swirly psychedelia that was definitely influential in my life at the time so we just started from there. I was being asked questions like, “What do you want the snare to sound like?” Like, “What is the drum pattern? What’s the bass tone? How do you want the vocals to be processed? Do you want the background vocals to be recorded all at once to one microphone or will we track them individually?”

All of these things were questions that I had never considered and had never been asked of. I only ever thought about the actual composition, the arrangements and then the performance so this was all very new to me. I didn’t know how to steer the ship but through the process and being asked these questions I learned a tremendous load. I was, I suddenly was able to think differently about this music that I was making and I feel like that sort of personal evolution is also made apparent on “Treat” because the songs are so varied and, yeah, I mean, you know, after that first day of recording those two songs the next were “Honey” and Canyon Canon. One is, like, a soul revival song and the other one we refer to as the heavy metal witch séance so even at that point all of these songs had such drastically different sonic palettes, such different production choices and kind of didn’t quite seem like they fit on the same record so, yeah, just, “Treat” as a whole is kind of an example of how I learnt to be in a studio, how I learned how to create an album which is also an interesting place to be because I feel like so few artists are making full records at this point just because of the way that most music is consumed is in, like, a single format. People want to hear an individual track or they want to experience music through a music video so it’s kind of a retired art form and I think that putting together a body of work and thinking about the sequencing and the more macro-narrative arc that can be communicated through song selection and sequencing is an art form in and of itself and I was fortunate to be working with my older brother AJ, who plays in my band and also functioned as a producer because not only did we come from the same musical background and have the sort of advantage of family communication where you don’t have to use as much language but he was able to not only help me in answering these questions but sort of use his own experience to steer me and help me better articulate ideas that I was having.

Christopher: Amazing. It certainly would not be apparent to the listener that this was a debut album or a learning experience, you know, the final product sounds extremely polished and very…

Kendra: Thank you.

Christopher: …I was about to say, cohesive. I’m not sure that’s the right word but very well put together, because, as we’ve said, you know, there’s a lot of variety packed in there. I think that gives a terrific glimpse into how you were developing as a songwriter and a recording artist and I’d love to talk about a couple of your more recent projects. You mentioned one which is your upcoming record and you’ve recently completed a residency at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur and that just sounds fantastic. So I’d like to hear about that in isolation…

Kendra: Sure.

Christopher: …but I wonder if we could maybe use those two projects as a way to talk a bit more about your songwriting process and how you approach creating something new and developing it and getting to a point of recording it because I’m sure a lot of people listening are curious to know.

Kendra: Sure. Well, to speak about songwriting specifically I would say that 90% of what I write is autobiographical so I have to have life experiences in order for there to be fodder for the songs and I’m a very romantic person, so, you know, all it takes is traveling to a new place, meeting a new person, experiencing a new, intense emotion and then I usually want to or just, like, feel propelled towards translating that into music.
I generally say that when I’m writing a song it’s like a musical kernel will pop into my head, usually first as a melodic fragment and I will record an improvisation around that melody, you know, I’ll just, like, turn on Garage Band or record a voice memo on my iPhone of just improvising around that melody and listen back to it until a sort of character around that musical kernel informs itself. I kind of think of songwriting very much like getting to know a person where you learn so much more about them if you listen and if you kind of give them space to present themselves because any time that I’ve sat down and said, like, “I want to write a song. I want it to be like this,” I’m not actually giving the music room to have its inherent character. So how a song is seen to fruition is relative to the song. Sometimes it’s miraculous and I can write and complete a song in an afternoon. Other times, again, it’s like getting to know a person where you kind of have to be patient. You need to allow it to reveal itself when it’s comfortable, if that makes sense.

Generally what happens is a song will start with a melody and I will start to hear the background vocal arrangement. A lot of my musical instincts come from this, like, 1960’s chamber pop influence, so the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Joni Mitchell, it’s all very vocally rich or at least, like, that’s what I’ve always responded to most in music so before I have lyrics or even a completed song form I hear how I want the voices to exist around that and that’s always kind of in the nucleus or the most important part of my songwriting process.

Christopher: That can be quite a hard thing to capture. I’m imagining, you know, if you have a melodic fragment, you kind of just turn on your mike and you record it. If you’re imagining those kind of lush Beach Boys harmonies, do you have a way to quickly kind of capture that and lay it down in the way that it can kind of breathe and you can return to it in the future?

Kendra: Sure. Well, I mean, usually what happens is as soon as I hear a melody in my head I can hear it, how it would be realized with a three-part harmony or I just always thought contrapuntally and I think about melodic shapes and how a backing vocal part would exist within that. That just kind of all happens in my head. I would say that, you know, the majority of the composition process just happens in my mind and then I use garage band to hear it back and then make the minute edits but one of my favorite ways of writing music is with my looping station. I use a Line 6 DL4 delay pedal and that allows me to record and realize these harmonic ideas, these vocal parts in real time so I can just hear how it all sounds.

So a combination of that and then just making really rough demos with Garage Band with headphones and singing through with a built-in microphone has generally been the process and I’m starting to dip my toes into more elaborate recording processes but that’s a universe in and of itself.

Christopher: Very cool, and we had an episode of the podcast recently all about audiation and imagining music in your mind and the various benefits of that. It sounds like you have a particularly vivid musical imagination, the ability to conjure up those three-part harmonies as you’ve had to create the music. Is that something you’ve always had you’ve always found easy or something you’ve worked on over the years?

Kendra: Well, that was, it wasn’t until I actually went to music school that I realized that that was maybe something that not everyone experiences. Like, I can recall being a young child and listening to the Beatles and being able to isolate all of the different harmony parts or how I would think of additional harmonies and when I sang along would, kind of, you know, add my own personal dimension to it and I thought that everyone had that same sort of intimacy or interest with harmony so that was an interesting realization to understand that that maybe was little unusual but, yeah, I mean, it can sometimes be distracting. Like, if I go and see live music either, like, I get inspired by what I’m hearing and kind of start writing during the concert which always feels kind of rude but I can’t turn it off or just when I hear someone performing I can also hear the harmonies with it so that’s just I guess how my brain works.

Christopher: Fantastic. That’s fascinating to hear.

Kendra: Yeah.

Christopher: So you were talking a bit there about looper pedals and Garage Band and that kind of tech-supported way of capturing song ideas. On the other end of the spectrum, you were recently doing this residency at the Library which was kind of a, as I understand it, solo, off-in-the-wilderness, just you and a pen experience. Tell us about that.

Kendra: Yeah. Oh, God. It was dreamy, to say the least. So Big Sur, California is, like, everything that is magical about the California coastline concentrated into one, like, 20-40 kilometer landscape, depending if you’re, like, in the concentrated Big Sur town part or just driving across the dramatic coastline but there’s this place called the Henry Miller Memorial Library which is a bookstore/music venue/creative destination point that was created in memoriam of the author Henry Miller who wrote the Tropic of Cancer among other titles and who lived there for many years of his life and actually passed there, but so I had played a handful of shows there over the years and had an intimate relationship with the people that worked there and had always just said, like, “My dream would be to be able to hang out here and focus on songwriting, to be able to really take that work seriously,” and it just so happened that over the course of two years Big Sur endured an onslaught of natural disasters. There were fires, there were floods. The flooding caused a crack in one of the main bridges, the Pfeiffer Bridge and so the bridge had to be torn down and that and shortly after there was a mudslide just south of the Big Sur town portion of the coastline so this stretch of coastline was basically left inaccessible.
There were 200 locals that were living down there and if they had to access the outside world for grocery shopping or to do laundry they would have to drive to the south end of the bridge closure, hike a bypass trail, get into a separate car on the north side of the bridge closure and then drive into town, so it was very challenging living but it was also kind of magical in that for an eight-month period of time Big Sur, which was this major tourist destination as eventually returned to its desolate, dreamy character that it was in the 1970’s where it was this sort of undiscovered gem and attracted a lot of quirky, alternative thinkers like Jack Kerouac who spent a lot of time there. I think he was actually trying to overcome an alcohol addiction by living in a cabin in Big Sur, but he’s one example.

So, all this to be said, I was offered by the people at the library to come and do an artist residency during the final weeks of this bridge closure which meant that I would live in a tent on the Henry Miller Memorial Library property, I would work in the book shop three days a week selling books to the very few travelers that managed to make it across the bypass trail and then every moment in between I was able to use the space for writing and that is precisely what I did.

So for five weeks I got to finally let songwriting be my main job and it was wild because not only had I always dreamed of being able to have such a focused, devoted relationship to this craft but I had no Wi-Fi, no cell phone reception. My lifestyle was rugged, to say the least, I mean, living in a tent, washing my clothes by hand, preparing all of my meals in an outdoor kitchen with a two-burner gas stove and just the majesty of Big Sur combined with the quietude allowed for a type of introspection that I’ve never quite been able to achieve living in a city and enduring the hustle of, you know, trying to be an artist in the United States so I was able to achieve an intimacy with my music that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

So I wrote a lot of music over that time. I developed arrangements for other songs that had already existed and a dear friend of mine, an engineer named Scott McDowell who is a friend from San Francisco drove down across the newly opened bridge and over the course of two and a half days we recorded a collection of songs, two of which I wrote at the Henry Miller Library. One of them was the second song that I ever wrong as an angsty high school kid and another one kind of fit thematically with the other songs but I performed all of the instruments on the EP.

It was acoustic guitar, electric guitar, electric bass, upright piano, so many vocal tracks and a shaker and other minimalistic percussion, but, yeah, it was just an interesting experience to have this acoustic, introspective, sort of, thesis statement as a culmination of this time in the woods and also just by contrast the production value is so much gentler and simpler than “Treat”. Like, that was a very extroverted, theatrical, bold production so it almost felt like a palate cleanser to have something that was quieter. That’s a lot of words that I just shared.

Christopher: No, that sounds inspirational and, I mean that in the sense of inspiring you but I’m sure that story alone will be inspiring others, you know, of the idea of really just giving yourself the space and the disconnect and the change of environment to inspire a new kind of creativity in music. It sounds like a wonderful experience. I’m sure our listeners are as envious as I am right now. That sounds wonderful. It’s terrific —

Kendra: I was just going to say, I wish for all creative that they will have an experience to just give in completely to their craft. I mean, I feel tremendously privileged to have had that experience and also just recognizing what it does for your creative output to be able to have that focus and isolation is something that so few creatives get to experience and, yeah, I just, I sincerely hope that others will be able to pursue and find those opportunities because you learn so much more about yourself when you’re not just trying to be creative in, like, the wee small hours of the night in between other daily responsibilities.

Christopher: So it’s terrific that you had the opportunity, too, to capture some of that in an EP at the end of the experience and it sounds like it let you, kind of, move on your craft or approach it in a different way. You said earlier something really interesting which is, in approaching your new record you’ve been trying to kind of focus in on a particular sonic palette and put together something that’s a bit more on the same page. Can you tell us what that means to you and how you’ve been going about that?

Kendra: Sure. Absolutely. Well, I started to think about making a record like hosting a party, and if you want to be a gracious host it really helps if you prepare the space, if you think about the type of experience that you’re offering your guests. I mean, like, if you’re going to throw a dinner party you want to clean your house, you want it to be warm and open. You want to consider the lighting. How are you going to feed them? Like, where will you host them? Will there be activities? Like, what is the tone that you’re trying to set, because to perform music I think is like a generous endeavor, like, you want to provide an experience. You want to provide a space. So by defining a sonic palette I feel like I’m, just, maybe being a little bit more considerate about what I want to provide for the audience and bringing it back to what I was saying about making “Treat” is that I had no idea of what I was doing. I had musical instincts but I was green in this medium and being asked to make decisions that I wasn’t sure of and it wasn’t until the culmination of that project that I was able to have, like, a more macro understanding of what that larger process was.

So with this new record, and, also, you know, as an extension of this experience in Big Sur and getting to reflect and think more about what I want to say as an artist, I wanted to have that deeper understanding of what it was that I was trying to say and how I wanted to say it before getting into the studio. So the way that I did that was, again, I was working with my older brother as the producer because he’s, you know, he’s my best friend and musical confidante, is we had a conversation of what is this record? What are the influences? We put together a sonic mood board of sorts. Influences included D’Angelo’s Black Messiah record, Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark, Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain, so there was a lot more R&B and soul influence but we were thinking about it like the Joni Mitchell influence is, like, jazz-infused, feminine, has that element of introspection but the imagery is very colorful. It is narrative lyrics or storytelling but then, like, the Funkadelic and D’Angelo influence is, like, it also invokes that stank face, like, it’s something that you might feel more a more physical response in your hips rather than, you know, jumping up and down music.

We talked about color. Like, the color lavender came up a lot for, you know, whatever people maybe have like a more kinesthetic response to music or there’s myriad ways of interpreting that but lavender for me kind of embodied a sort of coolness that I wanted to achieve.

And so with all of that in mind we then took all of the songs that I had written but were unrecorded and I laid down extremely simple demos of them, simple to the extent where I was just recording one vocal and one guitar. I would strum the chords on the downbeat and sing the melody, leaving all of this space and then through which we started to add all of these different elements and thinking about rhythmic information and as an extension of the sonic palette what would the instrumentation be, and we found out what those things were and how they would be related between the songs so if things came up like the clavinette, the wah guitar, certain synthesizers, 808 drums and by applying this sonic information on all these different songs we were able to suddenly hear which songs fit together and which songs were the outliers and so that was something that I never did with “Treat”. It was just, like, “We’re gonna record these songs; a couple of months later, let’s try these.” So to have this opportunity to think more critically about how the pieces fit together before entering into the studio in a serious way has offered clarity, or, you know, now it’s like I have a seven-song demo of all these songs that fit together so now as I complete the album and write songs I can have a more informed sense of how to fill in those blanks. It’s like these songs that exist already occupy a certain function in the record but it’s missing this sort of thing, so writing a song to fill that void.

Christopher: Awesome. You come across as someone who finds it all very easy and natural, you know, and you clearly, you’re very self-aware and very thoughtful about how you go about this whole process. You’re almost the opposite of the scatterbrained creative who just kind of fumbles their way through a music career.

Kendra: I think I just cover it up well.

Christopher: Maybe so. Given that, I would love to get your insight for anyone who is maybe at the start of that journey of creating their own music or maybe they’re partway through it and it feels like it’s just not coalescing in the way they had hoped. I’d love to hear any advice or insights you have for your own journey so far that might help them kind of more quickly get to a satisfying existence as a musician.

Kendra: Sure. Absolutely. Well, two things come to mind in response to that question. For one, I think that there is a very distorted sense of what it means to be a musician or to be musical in the west. I mean, I suppose I can only speak about my experience of living in California but I believe this is probably true for a lot of other places in the U.S. is that there’s this notion that if you don’t show an immediate musical talent that it’s not something that you can develop or something that you can enjoy.

So countless people have like, a traumatic experience where they’re in elementary school band and they pick up a clarinet and it doesn’t sound very good or they try singing and their classmates laugh at them so then they decide, “I’m not musical. I can’t enjoy this.” So then you find that the only people that are pursuing it are, like, self-proclaimed musicians or people that are pursuing it professionally. I think that that is a travesty and I’m baffled that music, unlike other subjects, is something that people don’t understand that it does take work and it is a process and it takes practice and self-discovery. I mean, I think about being in high school and I took chemistry which is something that I believed myself that I couldn’t do but when I did poorly on an exam I would, you know, stay after school and do tutoring and I would work towards it because it was something that in order to participate and in order to, like, you know, pass the grade I had to work extra hard on it.

Music is the same way and I also think that it really depends on how people are instructed, too. When small children are forced to play this very rigid, regimented classical music from a young age they’re not being ushered into, like, this vast universe of self-expression and color that is achievable or available, like, for all these musical genres so I think that people should feel encouraged to stick with it and to work hard but to also maybe explore different approaches to being musical and, like, maybe I’ll put a pin in that because I am also a music teacher and I can talk about my personal approach to teaching music as a way to counter that very rigid classical instruction but secondly, like, when it comes to songwriting, specifically I think that the hardest thing to do is to finish a song and that is true of absolute beginners and professionals because I think that it’s really easy to dwell on a result, to think to yourself, like, “I want to write something good. I want it to be this way,” and if you’re so focused on that final result you are not achieving the necessary intimacy with the process and it’s through that process that you have these self discoveries that you learn more about what it is that you want to create. So I always tell my students and my peers that they need to write and finish more songs. They need to be willing to write something that sucks because it is a more fulfilling and more educational process than having, you know, many files of incomplete songs.

You know, I say this and it’s something that I still struggle with and have to remind myself but, you know, sometimes as an exercise I will say, “You know what? I’m going to write something that I feel totally embarrassed by. I’m going to write that sappy love song with the most cliché lyrics. I’m going to write a predictable chord progression but I’m going to finish it.”

Like, you know, set a timer and do the thing because then when you listen back to it you have a more concrete sense of what it is that you want to change about it and it’s easier to develop it if you’re listening to the final product. Otherwise it just remains incomplete because you’re stunted by your own visions of grandeur so I think that finishing more songs and just accepting that music is a really hard, abstract thing that is kind of indefinable or could be defined by many things, that’s one of my favorite aspects about it is that even as someone that is a self-proclaimed professional musician that makes it every day there is still so much that I have to learn and so much to gain and so much that I’m humbled by and curious about and that’s never going to stop but you kind of have to get out of your own way and just enjoy the process.

Christopher: Wonderful. I think those are two really phenomenal points for people to keep in mind and, you know, I 100% agree with your attitude towards that question of talent or, you know, inclusivity in music. I would love to hear your teaching work. How do you go about this with, maybe younger students or maybe beginner-stage students that helps?

Kendra: Sure. So I’ve been working with people of all ages. I’ve, you know, led song circles for infants and parents. My youngest private student is six years old but, and then, you know, I’ll teach everyone from high school kids to adults and everything from singing to instrument playing but I find that I have more, excuse me, more songwriting students now, at this point, and I encourage all of the same things where they just have to finish songs.

They have to be willing to write something dorky and to be willing to write something that they might not ever show anyone but I also feel like people actually end up writing with so much more conviction and so much more authenticity if they write under a deadline and they’re forced to say that thing that maybe they’re embarrassed of and I think that it is so transformative to be in that position where you’re writing in an autobiographic sense and you’re being vulnerable because not only do you learn more about your musical process but you learn a lot more about yourself. So I, you know, with my students I just try and offer them a safe space to play that song that maybe they feel self-conscious of but it is also such an abstraction. It’s not like there is a correct way to write a song. If anything, it is through this experience of self-discovery that you find what process works for you so I want to try and nurture that. I also tell people that they should be learning songs that they like. I didn’t grow up studying classical music but I do remember having friends that would say, like, “Yeah, I have a weekly piano lesson and my parents say that I can stop when I’m 18,” like, they were, it was something that they were enduring but then suddenly to have that sort of relationship to music robs them of, like, the vast and wonderful world that it is and I do believe that there is a genre or style or an artist for everyone so, like, with a lot of my students I tell them, like, I would so much rather teach you how to play a song that you love instead of dwelling on technical exercises because it’s also a lot easier to practice if it’s a song that you like.

So that and just telling them, like, learn as many songs as you can. Find an artist that you really love, like, I’ll help you figure out the chord progression and I’ll coach you through, like, you know, this vocal styling but just, remembering that music is really enjoyable and celebrating that aspect of the making and accepting that even if it’s challenging that if you are disciplined that you can transcend those challenges and continue to make these valuable self-discoveries throughout the process.

Christopher: Fantastic. Well, it sounds like you’re imparting your own broad and richly varied musical tastes and musical creativity and that joy of music making to your students and that’s a wonderful thing. Kendra, it’s been such a pleasure to talk with you today. Thank you for joining us on the show.

Kendra: Thank you so much for having me. It was a delight to chat with you.

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The post Art and Opportunity, with Kendra McKinley appeared first on Musical U.

Major and Minor are two basic qualities that pervade our musical system. We talk about major and minor keys, major and minor scales, major and minor chords, major and minor intervals… Hearing the difference between them is a crucial step in growing your musicality.

Many times we simply resort to the old idea that major is “happy” and minor is “sad”. That might work with chords in isolation. But it’s usually not quite that simple when we encounter major and minor “in the wild.” What happens when playing minor chords in a major key? Major chords in a minor key? And how can a simple interval sound major or minor?

The unique way in which notes are laid out on your instrument, and the resulting patterns required to play major and minor scales, chords, and intervals, can actually help to untangle it all.

In this month’s Instrument Packs Musical U’s Resident Pros take on the topic of major and minor – how to find them, play them, and hear them on your instrument.

Guitar

According to Resident Pro Dylan Welsh, 99% of Western Music falls into either a major or minor key. Thus, it’s really important to be able to tell the difference between the two, and be able to control and change back and forth on the guitar. Fortunately, the guitar fretboard layout offers many handy ways to visualize and transpose these patterns:

Including:

• How to hear the difference between major and minor scales/chords.
• How major chords are built, and how to change them into minor chords on the fretboard.
• How to convert a major scale into a minor scale.
• A major/minor scale exercise, based on one that was originally introduced in Major Pentatonic Resource Pack.
• Six MP3 tracks that demonstrate the exercises on each string.

After Dylan’s thorough run-down of major and minor chords and scales, you’ll have a thorough fretboard mastery of the subject, take a huge leap forward in your understanding of theory, and take your ear to the next level.

Piano

Once you have major and minor chords under your piano fingers in so many ways, you have made a huge step towards playing by ear, reading lead sheets, and improvising. Resident Pro for piano, Sara Campbell, zeros in on major and minor chords – how to find them on the keyboard and have them thoroughly ingrained through different inversions, patterns, and even some improv:

Including:

• Explanation of major and minor triads.
• A series of chromatic crawl exercises that work through all 12 major and minor triads.
• An exercise that applies these concepts to major and minor chords in the diatonic scale.
• Playing the chords in blocks, arpeggios, and a variety of different right- and left-hand patterns.
• A fun call-and-response improvisation exercise
• MP3 tracks to demonstrate the exercises, and backup tracks for the improv exercises.

After working through this Piano Resource Pack, you will thoroughly own your major and minor chords in a big way. And Sara knows how to combine a thorough, systematic training with enjoyable music-making experiences that will have you running to the piano every chance you get.

Bass

In this resource pack, Resident Bass Pro Steve Lawson begins by looking at the three primary major/minor distinctions – interval, chord and tonality/key

Then the focus turns to chords: recognising them, playing the arpeggios, hearing the difference, and then looking at how both major and minor chords appear in a major key:

Including:

• Three positions for a C major Triad and three positions for a D minor triad (and how to transpose these patterns to other chords).
• Building a lexicon of ways to play each pattern on the neck, depending on the context and the sound that you are looking for.
• Looking at – and practicing – what happens to the major and minor qualities when you change the bass-note.
• Where the major and minor chords appear in the key of C Major, and any major key.
• Practice MP3s with backing tracks to explore these concepts through patterns and improvisation.

Bassists have the power to decide minor or major with just one note. Hearing these qualities and knowing where they are on the fretboard will help you create the sound that you’re looking for

Coming up next month…

Timbre (pronounced “tam’ ber”) is also called “tone color”, or many times simply “tone”. Timbre refers to the qualities and techniques that make one instrument sound different than another, and can often vary widely from instrument to instrument and player to player. Next month our Resident Pros will address how to work with the timbral possibilities of your instrument and the influence of timbre on your musicality.

Interested in getting access to these resources and much more, with an Instrument Pack membership? Just choose that option during checkout when you join Musical U, or upgrade your existing membership to get instant access!

The post Major and Minor: Resource Pack Preview appeared first on Musical U.

This week, we explore the chord progressions that countless popular songs share and look at why these songs are absolute earworms, interview a music educator who emphasizes the importance of hearing music in your head, and dedicate an entire podcast episode to the topic of audiation – also known as deliberately imagining the music you’re about to play before your fingers hit a single note. Lastly, we take a closer look at CNVS’s stellar debut full-length album Gran Copiloto, and why this collection of songs won’t leave your subconscious for a long time to come.

But first, something to improve the voice you hear inside your own head…

June’s Masterclass

We’re delighted to announce that this month’s Masterclass will be led by Davin Youngs of the Chicago Singing Circle. He will be joining us on June 30th for an hour-long live lesson on the topic of sounding good as a singer.

If you’ve ever been afraid to sing in front of people, or think singing is irrelevant to your instrument playing, or are reluctant to record your singing voice – you won’t want to miss this!

Register here, and we’ll see you at the end of the month!

Popular Progressions

If you think all songs on the radio seem to sound the same, we’re happy to reassure you that you haven’t lost your mind.

Though there is a near-infinite amount of possible chord progressions, there is a surprising degree of overlap in the progressions that those radio-friendly earworms are built on. And for good reason – some sequences of chords simply stick, by virtue of having a pleasant and satisfying overall sound. 

Learn about this phenomenon in Exploring Common Chord Progressions, where we introduce you to the popular kids in (chordal) school, why they’re so well-liked, and how to use them to write your own hit.

It can be easy to think of chords as just a component of musicality, but many of the tools that we stress here at Musical U (scales, intervals, and the circle of fifths) are all part of the broader picture of what makes chords and chord progressions work. To dive deeper into this concept, Sound Bridge explores the relationship between the elements of music and diatonic chords.

Guitar players have all the tricks! For guitar players, changing keys can be quite simple, especially if the guitarist uses a capo. To learn more about this wonderful musical tool, chec out Tomas Michaud’s lesson on incorporating a capo into your music.

We learned quite a few chord progressions in this packed article, and we hope that you are busy exploring them! It’s interesting to note that many of the popular songs that define our interest in music have very similar chord progressions. So much, in fact, that the Chord Genome Project asserts that by learning just 23 chords, you will be able to play the majority of popular songs. Find out more and take the challenge!

Music and Curiosity

Curiosity may routinely kill cats, but it does absolute wonders for music teachers and learners alike.

Sharon Mark-Teggart is one of the brilliant minds behind The Curious Piano Teachers, an organization aiming to shift the mindset of music educators towards open-mindedness, curiosity, and centering the student by making the lessons about their learning, and not the educator’s teaching.

Read our interview with her over at Becoming Curious, with Sharon Mark-Teggart to gain some amazing insights on teaching, learning, and the power of an inquisitive approach to music.

Sharon spoke about her music toolbox, and how she brought this with her each time she performed or had a new student. But what exactly should be in your music toolbox as a learner? Kathleen Ballantyne outlines the seven elements of musicality that a musician needs to be successful on the Alfred Music website.

We all know that every musician learns differently, and it’s important that we consider these differences when learning music. One factor is whether a musician is left-brained or right-brained. Sublimelody approaches learning the piano through both of these paradigms, and gives solutions that will be valuable to any music learner.

Sharon talked about the significance of learning how to sing the part that she was getting ready to play, and how much it improved her overall musical understanding of the piece. It’s true that most instrumentalists will never become “singers”, but applying the art of singing can be very important to your musical growth. Robert from Living Pianos dives deeper into the subject of the importance of singing for instrumentalists.

A Great Sidekick

From one of the most musically diverse countries in the world comes CNVS, a rock band with an emotionally charged and beautifully textured sound that immediately jumps out at you in their stellar debut full-length album Gran Copiloto (translation: Great Copilot).

In Open Your Ears to Gran Copiloto with CNVS, we give you an introduction to these Mexico-based rockers and dig into the instrumentation, song structure, and lyricism that lend Gran Copiloto’s tracks their incredible, genre-transcending sound.

Ready to feast your ears on the whole album, start to finish? Just in time – Gran Copiloto is out today, June 15th, on Spotify.

A great band has a specific dynamic that they are able to achieve during the songwriting process. However, it can be difficult to develop the ability to write songs together. If you need something to jumpstart your creative process, consider songwriting sprints – Todd from Heat on the Street explains how to get started.

We love the music of CNVS for many reasons. Not the least of these is how they are able to integrate so many different styles and sounds into a truly unique form. For other ways to develop a one-of-a-kind songwriting style, look no further than Guitar and Lace’s tips for crafting unique musical creations.

In addition to the fantastic music, the lyrical content in this album is spellbinding, effortlessly going back and forth between English and Spanish. Writing great lyrics doesn’t have to be an exercise in frustration – check out Musician Port’s 10 tips to get you started.

CNVS have certainly found their niche, and we are happy to be able to share their music with you. There are so many ways for musicians to bring their music to the public in new and interesting ways. Robin from Urban Masterclass is another artist that has found his speciality, and shares with us how to make a living selling beats online. This isn’t only for the producers – no matter what your genre is, Robin has some great tips for navigating the online music marketplace.

The Music In Your Head

In the same way that an artist can visualize a work before it’s even made, a musician can hear music in their head before a single note is played.

This is a skill known as audiation, and in fact, it’s a skill you already have.

In About Audiation, we share how you can use your skill to improve your musical memory, play more naturally and musically, and do the (seemingly) impossible: practice your repertoire without even having your instrument in your hands!

Though we are all born with the ability to audiate, it’s a skill you can grow and develop, to become a “superlistener” – with the ability to discern not only the basic melody, but also complex rhythms, harmony, and tonal centers. Color In My Piano explains how to get started developing your audiation skills, and the benefits it brings.

As we learned, developing audiation skills is powerful way to visualize and hear the music without ever having to play it on your instrument. Though it can be challenging to develop this skill to a highly proficient level, it proves incredibly rewarding. Learn how one music teacher uses this skill in her classroom with Mallets and Music.

After developing your audiation skills, you will find that you can not only be more musical on your instrument, but you can practice and think about music without an instrument. Catherine from The Piano Practice Eastbourne discusses the many ways that you can enhance your musicality without ever picking up your instrument.

From Your Head to Your Fingers

You may not love how songs get stuck in your head, but in truth, this may be your brain telling you that it’s itching to audiate!

How great would it be to practice your musical repertoire without even touching your instrument? How much would your playing improve if you could imagine the music you’re about to play in your head?

Head over to our podcast episode on audiation to learn how you can harness this innate skill to understand and play your music like you’ve never played it before.

The post Popular Progressions, Music and Curiosity, A Great Sidekick, and The Music In Your Head appeared first on Musical U.

Listen to the episode:

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Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

Links and Resources

• Interview with Sharon Mark-Teggart
• Interview with Gerald Klickstein
• Interview with Donna Schwartz
• Gordon Institute of Music Learning
• About Active Listening

Transcript

Today I wanted to talk about something mentioned by Sharon Mark-Teggart of The Curious Piano Teachers in our recent episode, and which also came up when talking with Gerald Klickstein, author of The Musician’s Way, and that’s the importance of forming a vivid “mental model” of music *before* you play it.

This is something we teach a lot at Musical U, though it’s actually only recently that we’ve been turning it into a full-on training module.

The word we use for it is “audiation”, which simply means to imagine hearing music in your mind. That word was coined by Edwin Gordon, known for his “Music learning theory”, which was mentioned and recommended by past guest Donna Schwartz. I’m hoping we’ll have someone from the Gordon Institute of Music Learning on the show in future, but for now I wanted to just tackling this one part of his approach.

You might also hear it called “auralising”, and although those two words, audiation and auralising may sound technical, it truly is no more complicated than imagining music in your mind.

It’s the musical equivalent of visualisation, you’re just trying to vividly imagine the thing in your mind.

We all do it, every day, any time a song pops into your head on purpose or by accident. If I ask you now to take a moment and think of your favourite song, or the theme music from your favourite TV show – I’ll stop talking, see if you can hear that music in your head.

Were you able to hear it? You just audiated!

When you first start, it will probably be a bit fuzzy and you may not remember the music very well. But with practice you’ll be able to conjure up really realistic musical renditions in your mind’s ear.

So you see, you don’t need to learn to audiate. But it does take practice to get good at it.

Why would you want to do that?

Well, audiation is a seriously powerful tool to have in your toolkit as a musician and music learner.

It’s sometimes called the “Secret Music Practice Skill” because just like visualisation can help an athlete or performer prepare for the big event, audiation can be used to practice your musical repertoire, even when you’re not at your instrument. Simply imagining the music, in as much detail as possible, helps your brain to create and reinforce the connections that later will let you perform it well.

In fact there’s a great way to make this even more effective, called “Mental Play” – we’ll talk about that on a future episode.

So audiation can help you practice, even when not at your instrument. How does that work?

Well there are a few big benefits of audiation, each of which has a positive knock-on effect to how well you’ll play when you return to your instrument.

The first is that audiation is clearly very closely related to musical memory. The more vividly you can conjure up a rendition in your mind, the better you are remembering that music. When you gave it a try a moment ago you might have found that it started off easy but then you realised you couldn’t remember the words, or you weren’t quite sure about the notes or rhythm, or you found you had no idea what instruments were there apart from the prominent melody part. So practicing audiation helps you develop your musical memory and that benefits you throughout your musical life, beyond just the obvious use case of performing without needing written music.

The second reason audiation helps you practice is that it forces the brain to really understand what’s going on in the music. It’s easy when performing from written music to think you know what’s going on, but sometimes we gloss over a lot of details, or for example there’s the singer in a choir who does a great job of singing their own part – but ask them to audiate the music and they’ll find they have literally no idea what the other singers are singing. Practicing audiating a piece of music makes you really dig into what’s going on and whether you are truly aware and understand each aspect of the music.

And the third reason is the impact it has on the musicality of your performance. This was what Gerald Klickstein and Sharon Mark-Teggart were referring to, that to play music in an expressive way, in a musical way rather than a robotic way, you must have the music inside you first. And that means being able to imagine what you want your performance to sound like *before* you play it.

Apart from that new training module I mentioned, the main place audiation has featured inside Musical U up until now is in our improvisation modules. Because it’s the interaction between playing, listening and audiating that allows you to be truly free and creative in your improvisation. You need to be able to imagine your musical creation before trying to bring it out into the world – otherwise you’re just at the mercy of whatever your fingers happen to do based on the rote learning or robotic patterns you’ve taught them.

So to a large extent audiation is the core of musicality. Yes there are lots of external skills we want to learn and develop to let us express musical ideas in the world. But before that we need our ears and our brain to have understood the music we’ve heard or the music we want to hear, and that lies in your musical imagination and the ability to audiate.

As I said earlier, one of the wonderful things about audiation is that you don’t need to be taught it. Yes, there are pointers and resources that can help accelerate your learning, hence our new training module, but fundamentally it’s something you simply learn by doing. So challenge yourself this week to try audiating something every day. Pick a song and see how thoroughly you can conjure it up in your head and how much of it you can play back in your mind. I’d suggest checking our previous episode on Active Listening to help you with that, that’s a musical awareness skill that is very closely related to audiation. At first you’ll probably just have a fuzzy idea of the main melody and maybe not the whole song, but day by day you can add instruments, add sound quality, add detail and precision, until you have a really realistic playback in your mind’s ear. Take this skill to the music you’re working on too, and I promise you’ll see a big impact. Especially if you couple it with Mental Play – but that’s a topic for another day.

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More specifically, that place is Querétaro, in the El Bajío region of the country, which (in a land of mariachi, banda, jaropo, huapango, norteño, marimba, ranchero, grupero, and literally dozens of other genres and cross-genres) has become a haven for rock, pop, punk, and jazz.

The well-trained – both through experience and schooling – musicians of CNVS have each been active in numerous other professional projects, regarding each other with mutual respect until the time came for them to join together as musical brothers-in-arms.

Ready for Take Off

Beloved in their hometown, CNVS (pronounced “Canvas”) has also played the biggest rock and pop festivals in Mexico, as well as opening for Spoon in Mexico City. After their highly successful EP CNVS, they are gearing up to release their first full-length album Gran Copiloto.

We first discovered CNVS through their cover of Juan Gabriel’s 1980 hit “Yo No Nací Para Amar” (translation: I Was Not Born To Love). Later, in an extensive interview with the band, we learned that what they learned as they jammed on that tune inspired their upcoming release, Gran Copiloto.

Scheduled for release on Friday, June 15th 2018, CNVS has given Musical U a special sneak preview of the Gran Copiloto album tracks – some of which we’ll share with you here – and we were blown away.

This is a record of what has been called “rock bailable – danceable rock” that you’re going to want to listen to over and over.

Let’s first learn more about the band, the general musical characteristics of Gran Copiloto, and then dig into some deep listening.

Your Best Sidekick

As Isaac, the band’s lead guitarist and purveyor of “atmospheric sounds”, said in our interview, “[The phrase] “Gran Copiloto” (“Great Copilot”) refers to the best sidekick you can possibly have in an adventure – this could be the guy that plays the best music on road trips, or the love of your life who took you on a trip to Iceland.”

You gave me strength
but didn’t lose your head
and you gave me love
when there was only pain

and you helped me
as a good friend
a great co-pilot who carried me
a great co-pilot when I take off

(translated from Spanish)

That feeling of friendship and camaraderie pervades the album, which is sung in both Spanish and English. In this era of reclusive “music producers” cranking out dance hits on their laptops, Gran Copiloto truly a band effort. And these guys can play.

As we learned from the interview, the band members each lead their own separate lives. But their website title, SomosCanvas.com, means “We are Canvas”: when they come together as “we”, magic happens. CNVS does much of their writing in improvised jam sessions, which then coalesce into songs, and their music is full of the kinds of surprises that only happen in those unpremeditated moments.

Colors on the Canvas

Listen to this clip from the track “Blues”. The instrumental section cruises on slowly, building over ringing tick-tock guitars. Listen to the background to all the subtle shifts and variations in the atmospheric effects and intricate guitar parts that lend a bubbling energy to this quiet section. Then the small surprise comes in the middle [0:24] where a deep bass synth doubles the kick just once before disappearing (you might need your headphones to hear it):

Organically Electric

But this is not your traditional jam band. Two band members are highly-trained, active producers and studio owners – and they bring their studio chops into the live mix.

Along with bass, drums, and guitar, each member is armed with some sort of synth, and CNVS delivers powerful EDM-inspired drops and a variety of atmospheric sounds that somehow manage to sound as nuanced, spontaneous, and organic as their “live” instruments.

Timbre Party

Traditionally, Mexican music seems to revel in an abundance of contrasting and suddenly shifting tone colors – trumpets dance with violins in mariachi, accordions battle bajo sextos in norteño, and pop songs will often jump from acoustic guitars to electronic percussion to full orchestras at a moment’s notice.

CNVS shares this love affair with contrasting tone colors. But in an album with so many timbral surprises, there are certain unifying factors.

While we may “live in cities which are built up over water”, Gran Copiloto is built up on the firm foundation of a twangy bass, a powerful, beefy drum sound, and a trademark piercingly-beautiful-with-an-edge guitar tone that remains consistent throughout the album.

Atmospheric Effects

For lead guitarist Isaac, this is an instrument in and of itself. Almost every song opens or closes with a uniquely crafted ambient sound, that becomes a sort of signature for that song.

Listen to the sustained tone in the opening of “Blues”:

Similarly, “Montaña” begins with an atmospheric drone before the vocals kick in:

And ends on a pulsing note that echoes the opening:

Lyrics

The lyrics – whether in Spanish or English – tend to be short, punchy, and enigmatic.

As we learned in the interview, these words often emerge in improvised sessions, coming from a deep subconscious place that at times defies the logic of the “real world”. CNVS collaborates with some amazing video artists to translate this lyrical dreamscape into images:

“Memoria” and Musical Form

Let’s have a closer look at this single from the album, available through a special release from Rolling Stone Magazine. The video vividly portrays a man paralyzed by too many memories, who isn’t able to move until he (literally) loses his head.

In most of the tracks on Gran Copiloto, CNVS takes a flexible approach to classic song form, interspersing short verses, choruses, and or bridges with instrumental sections that are sometimes unique and sometimes repeat. They seem to be driven by a strong internal logic of their own, beginning to end.

“Memoria” opens with its own signature atmospheric vibe, this time with a bit more harmonic structure [0:00-0:25]. Rather than a verse, the vocals burst in with a hard-rocking chorus [0:25 – 0:56] – in fact, there really is no verse in this song.

This first chorus is followed by a repeated bass note – a drone – on the characteristically twangy bass, with Isaac demonstrating his mastery of creating atmospheric effects. The instrumental texture opens up, leaving sonic space for a vocal bridge melody at [1:10]. Another instrumental section begins at [1:26] with atmospheric guitar and a prominent kick, softly accompanied by EDM-style bass bleeps (once again illustrating CNVS’ timbral playfulness).

The rock chorus returns at [1:39], followed by a short instrumental break – most definitely “rock bailable” (danceable rock) at [1:55], leading into another bridge section. Note the dull electric piano chords that appear briefly here. Gran Piloto is full of little details like this: brief timbral interjections that appear and disappear in a flash, but make perfect sense in the whole scheme of the song.

The chorus returns over brief atmospheric tone poem before rocking out. Then, the instrumental groove changes up [2:42] and drives toward the end, growing thicker [3:10] under a three-note motif of “A-F-E”, and finally taking its leave in a momentary atmospheric aftertaste.

“Campirana”

CNVS maintains a joyful demeanor even in the midst of angst-rock lyrics, but they are also ready to rise to the occasion of romance. From “Campirana” (“Country Woman”):

Listen to how a sweet perfume of respect, admiration, and appreciation rises from the bouquet of major seventh chords in the instrumental break:

Echoes of the Past

The members of CNVS also give their love to the span of rock history. For example, “Black Magic” brings back 1950s “shoobie-doo-bop” syllables in the midst of a T-Rex inspired romp – with more than a little “Let’s Dance”-era Bowie thrown in:

A Future Classic?

The amazing attention to detail coupled with highly developed musicianship and wrapped up in an undeniable musical chemistry between the five members of CNVS make this one of those albums you’re going to want to listen to again and again and again. With a musical richness reminiscent of a condensed Pink Floyd, there are new discoveries to be made every time we let CNVS take us on a sonic journey.

The post Open Your Ears to Gran Copiloto with CNVS appeared first on Musical U.

On the face of it you might think this interview is one for aspiring piano teachers only, or perhaps just music teachers. But we would strongly encourage you to take the kind of attitude Sharon talks about in this conversation: one of curiosity. She talks about how she would sometimes go along to training courses that didn’t seem directly applicable to her, for example ones designed for classroom music teachers – but by being open-minded and curious she found she would always come away with a ton of new tools and inspiration to apply in her own teaching.

In the same way we would encourage you to listen to this conversation and not just take it at face value. When we talk about teachers and students, try to consider how it all could apply not just to your own role in a student-teacher relationship, but also when studying resources online by yourself, or even when you sit and practice and you act as your own teacher. We think you’ll find that all the insights Sharon shares in this conversation can be very relevant to you in one context or another in your own musical life.

In this conversation we talk about:

• The transformation Sharon went through in her own teaching, and why she is now so passionate about changing the status quo in piano teaching.
• What it means to bring curiosity to your teaching and learning, and why that can be so powerful.
• The teaching toolbox she has built up and now shares, including the surprising variety and power in the questions you can ask to accelerate learning.

We also talk a bit about the online course and teaching diploma training they have developed, and so if you’re a teacher yourself or know somebody who is, you won’t want to miss the details of that.

Listen to the episode:

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Links and Resources

• The Curious Piano Teachers
• Online Teaching Diploma course
• “Let’s Play” course
• Dr. Sally Cathcart’s website

Transcript

Sharon: Hey there. This is Sharon Mark-Teggart from The Curious Piano Teachers, and you’re listening to the Musicality Podcast.

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

Sharon: Oh, it’s such a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for having me, Christopher.

Christopher: You are well-known online for being an expert in teaching teachers. You specialize in training piano teachers. I think anyone would assume that you must have been one of these virtuoso kids who sat down at a keyboard and could instantly play anything at the age of three. Having talked you a little bit, I think maybe that’s not exactly the case. Can you tell us a bit about what it was like for you when you were first learning piano?

Sharon: Yes, sure. Okay. I was initially taught by my great aunt. I can remember it well. She used to call round on Saturday afternoon. I started by learning to play hymns from music notation, so it was as deeply thrown in at the deep end as you could possibly imagine.

I continued having lessons with her until I started secondary school, so I guess I started around the age of eight. Thereafter, I then had lessons from a teacher who was really quite well-considered in the area, I think possibly because she was one of the only full-time piano teachers. Again, it’s interesting, full-time, because they do it all the time it’s considered that amazing teacher.

I guess my big issue was I did nothing but prepare for exams. For the first right through until I was age 17, when I did my graduate, everything was exam-focused. I did go off. I did have the motivation to go off and learn things by myself, but I did not enjoy learning the piano at all, and only I had my mom there behind me pushing me on, I would definitely have quit.

In fact, I remember two weeks before I took my graduate exam, bringing my mom into the room and saying, “Okay, sit down. I want you to listen to this,” hoping that she would say, “It’s awful. I’m not going to make you go in there and take that.” Instead, she said, “You’ve got two weeks. Just get on with it.”

I did quite literally take it at that. I remember spending those final two weeks in the run up to my graduate practicing madly, listening to loads of recordings because I remember I was not skilled in technique and just looking back, goodness me, there were so many weak areas.

I went in. I did the exam. I got a distinction, and that was the one thing that actually spurred me to continue with learning piano. My playing and my skills as a musician were let’s say very shabby, to say the least.

Christopher: Interesting. I talk to a lot of people who have had that kind of intense exam-focused childhood experience of learning an instrument. Number one, I’m sad to say, it’s all too common, isn’t it, to feel like you haven’t actually learned to really play the instrument, you’ve just learned to tick the boxes and do your performance.

Sharon: I remember feeling so embarrassed actually when I was at somebody’s house. There was a piano, and they discovered that you had graduate with distinction, and the first thing was like, “You must be brilliant. You must be amazing.”

It was always this excuse, because at that stage, I couldn’t play from memory. I couldn’t play by ear. I couldn’t improvise, and it was always this excuse, “Well, I didn’t have the music that I knew.” Of course, to give me something to sight read would have been the other terrifying factor.

Christopher: Got you. I think when I talk to people like yourself who’ve had that experience, it’s actually really unusual to find they’ve continued with the instrument. Normally that story goes, “And so I passed my exam and I never touched it again.”

Sharon: Yes.

Christopher: For you, clearly that wasn’t the case, and you think getting a distinction encouraged you on. Was there anything else that made you think, “Okay, maybe there’s something to this”?

Sharon: The distinction was, I remember actually where I was, sitting on the stairs in my aunt’s house getting the news that I had got a distinction graduate. I didn’t think it mattered that much to me, but it did. Still to this day, I don’t feel worthy of that. I don’t think I was worthy of that distinction.

Providence, call it whatever you like, it was there, because if I hadn’t, if I’d just got a merit or if I just passed, and certainly if I failed, that would’ve been it. That would’ve been it, but I think the fact that I got that encouragement and I then explored that, and it was the people that I met subsequently that I then realized, “Okay, yes, I need to teach the piano and I need to teach it in a way that suddenly being in those years after revealed to me.”

Again, like you said, I came into it not having a great experience at all. In fact, probably what you would term as a pretty terrible experience, but I came into it so impassioned that no one was going to learn the piano like the way I had. I think that is what drove my passion to be an effective teacher myself, and then obviously leader. As I really got into it, my passion then lay in training piano teachers.

Christopher: That’s such a positive, creative outcome. Some people would have that resentment of the way they were taught and just bury their head in the sand. What was it that opened your eyes to the possibility of it being done in a better way?

Sharon: I move teachers. I’ve had a new teacher for my diploma. It was definitely the starting point, because a lot of things in those lessons changed. It was that glimpse into, “This is really quite different.” I got very involved. I started teaching. Just about the same time that I started preparing for performance diploma with that new teacher, I got involved in an actor, actor UK. I actually won my own region for 10 years in northern Ireland.

When I say I was immersed in professional development, I was for 10 plus years of my life, I was completely immersed in it. In my professional development, I’ve spent over 100000 pounds. Obviously being based in northern Ireland, I was having all the traveling expenses, as well. I have lived in London. Didn’t ever live in London, but it felt like that because I was always there for courses.

I think it was getting right there. It was meeting the right people at the right time. It was the people I met who did have the spark and the enthusiasm and where I was just like, “Wow.” I was literally blown away because I was in contact with the people who were, again, what they were doing was bringing transformation to my life as a pianist, as a musician, as a piano teacher. It was just seeing the relentless possibilities, which I hadn’t seen before.

Christopher: Take us back to that time then, because you mentioned passion there, but I’m sure it wasn’t just these people were passionate about teaching the grade four ABRSM exam syllabus to their students. What was it that they were passionate about that had been missing for you up until that point?

Sharon: What I will say at this point is that until I did the MTPP course, which is the Music Teaching and Professional Practice Course based at Reading University, post-graduate course followed by a master’s in music education research, I was teaching piano for about five years before I did that course. I remember distinctly trying so hard to teach in a way that didn’t reflect how I’d been taught, if that makes sense. I went all out. It was like, “I’m not going to teach as I’ve been taught.”

Until I went in that course, did I actually discover, “Oh, Sharon, actually you’ve been teaching exactly as you were taught.” The difference with that course was reflective practice and really digging in and understanding. Before, it was like I didn’t know what to be curious about. I didn’t have enough knowledge to be able to explore. I think it was that particular course that really exploded everything.

Up until then, I guess I was inspired by little bits and pieces, but actually just before I started the MTPP course, I was considering quitting piano teaching. Initially, going through school, I wanted to be a dietician. Can’t get any more different than that to piano teaching. If someone had said, “You’re going to teach. You’re going to be piano teaching,” it would have been, “No, absolutely not. Piano teaching is just not on my radar.” At that point, five years into teaching, I was actually considering going back into dietetics or something different because I was getting frustrated.

Christopher: Where was that frustration coming from?

Sharon: The frustration was, again, I was doing lots of courses, but there wasn’t any follow through with them. If you like, it was a one day conference here, another seminar here, the sort of thing that just fires you up for the day, for two weeks later, and then you’re back at home, you’re back in your studio and things just fall back into the routine because there isn’t that ongoing catalyst to keep you moving forward.

That was where the MTPP course at Reading University changed all of that. Again, my route is so unconventional. I didn’t have a degree at that point. I didn’t have a basic music degree. I didn’t have a basic degree of any sort of description, and I remember talking years later to the course director, and he said he really did wonder whether or not you would be a good fit on this course, because the course, it’s a master’s degree. I think I was one of the very few people to get onto it without a basic music degree.

It was because of all the other stuff they could see I was doing. They could see it was thirsty and hungry to develop my skills as a piano teacher. At that point, I was severely frustrated, and I think it was because there just wasn’t this ongoing thing to give me the solutions that I needed.

That was where then the MTPP really came into its own because there was the ongoing. You had a tutor. You could go back. The stuff that was frustrating you, you then had someone to talk to. You had a network of fellow students, and that actually made all the difference.

Christopher: Interesting. I think we’ll cycle back and talk about this a little bit later on when talking about your own community now for piano teachers, but I’m reminded so much of an episode we did recently here on the show about online courses and when you’re choosing and following through with an online course.

I was talking particularly about trying to find a course that has really great support, because it’s one thing to be able to submit an email question, but it’s completely different if you have some kind of community or some kind of an environment where a tutor, for example, is keeping an eye on you. If you start to wander off course, they can help you get back on. They can help with motivation and enthusiasm, and there’s little sticking points that can otherwise frustrate you.

I’m sure a lot of people listening can relate to where you were up until that point, taking little bits and pieces of learning from here and there and getting bursts of enthusiasm, enough to carry you through, but not really solving the overall problem.

Sharon: Yes.

Christopher: You mentioned something there that I’d love to pick up on, which was reflective practice. What does that mean?

Sharon: Okay. Reflective practice is where, I’m going to describe it as, okay, before in my teaching, stuff was going wrong. I knew stuff was going wrong. I didn’t know how to fix it because I basically didn’t have the tools in my teaching toolkit to fix the problems. The tools just weren’t there. What I was doing was I was just sweeping, brushing all of this stuff under the carpet and just going on. It felt very much to me like muddling on in the best way I knew how.

The MTPP course was the first course that really helped me understand reflective practices. It’s basically where, if I can just take it as an example, you teach a lesson, and one of the best ways to reflect on a lesson is where you video record it, obviously with the people and the parents’ written permission. Obviously, that’s very important. Whenever I’m talking about that, I always say it. You watch that lesson back and you see the things that you never realized.

Without the course, I still would’ve struggled, but of course with the support of the course, I understood how to dig into that. I knew the sorts of things to look for, and I think it was again being given that license to go, “Yes, that’s going all wrong, but it’s okay,” and being given that license to say, “It’s far from perfect, but that’s okay,” is actually the first thing that actually lets your brain just open up and go, “So let’s take a look and see what’s going on in here,” rather than all those thoughts of, “I’m a rubbish teacher, so I’m just going to close it all down,” because I’m just so scared of where this is going to go, feeling like an imposter, so you just close it down. Instead, being reflective is where you’re just going, “It’s fine. It’s fine to be wrong, not to get it right,” because that’s the first step in actually moving it all forward and improving it.

For me, reflective practice is where you’re looking at what you’re doing in practice. You are using the tools and the resources that you have, and obviously the sorts of resources that we are providing as piano teachers, to be able to go, “Okay, so what is it that I need to do to move that to the next level and to improve that?”

I think yes, we’ve got to be open, first of all. Again, the helpful way through is going, “It’s fine to be wrong. It’s fine for it to be going completely out the left,” because that gets you into a place of being really honest as a piano teacher, and then it’s having the tools where you can go and dig in and start to see improvement.

Christopher: Fascinating. It’s amazing how much of that I think applies to the individual learner, too. We’ve talked before about how you should record yourself practicing and listen back, and it’s going to be uncomfortable, but there’s so much you can draw from it. I haven’t really thought in the past about teachers doing that for the practice of their teaching, but it makes perfect sense.

Sharon: Yes. It’s exactly the same thing. It’s actually exactly the same thing for again, whether you’ve got people, again, listening to this show who are learning the piano by themselves again, go out there, record, record. Again, for teachers, students, again, what I encouraged my students to do is record themselves because you very often get them saying, “Do I really sound like that?” You can take that either as a positive or a negative.

It’s so important because it gives you the space that when you’re actually in the activity, whether you’re in the activity of playing the piano or in the activity of teaching the piano, where you just don’t get that wide open space to sit back and listen, and again, ideally video because you get to see, as well.

It’s very interesting, again, for pianists listening or watching back. You get to see, “What’s my posture like? What am I doing? Am I tensing my lips as I sit and play? Am I breathing?” You get so much feedback, and a video is an excellent place as a starting point for reflection.

Christopher: Amazing. You were someone who was at the point of considering quitting teaching piano. Fast forward, you were launching Evoco to help other people in northern Ireland become piano teachers, and you went on to co-found Curious Piano Teachers and take this mission internationally online to teach even more people.
Somewhere in there, you must have transformed from one type of piano teacher to another. Maybe you could just paint that picture for us of what the lesson looked like from the students’ perspective before and after that transformation.

Sharon: Oh, okay. That’s a great point. Okay. Yes, if I cast my mind back to my previous teaching, I think actually first of all, it was mainly about me as a teacher. Of course, as teachers, they’re learning we are never the hero of the story. It’s our students. I’m going to say that that’s the first main distinction.

Pre-reflection, I was very much, it was all about me checking is my teaching good and feeling very stuck and very stifled. Back then, it was actually, again, I was teaching very notation-based. I had students who did not enjoy practicing. I did not have a lot of practice strategies.

Oh my goodness, goodness, there were just so many things that when I fast forward to think about my teaching now, where yes, I am the teacher, but the piano lesson is not about me as the teacher. It’s not about my teaching. The focus is on the students learning, and that’s a really important distinction.

If you like, I’m not the hero. This learning journey belongs to my student. It’s their story. They are the hero. The focus is again, shifted, and again, I think this only can really come when we become more confident as a teacher, because when you lack that confidence, when you feel a bit of an imposter, you’re always trying to prove to yourself that you’re okay, my teaching’s okay, as opposed to then having the confidence in yourself as the teacher.

There are still areas. There will always, goodness me, there will always be areas as teachers where you go, “Oh yeah, I need to dig into that more.” Of course, that’s coming back to being curious. There will always be a quest of, “I need to improve on this and this and this.” The more we are curious, the more we unearth and dig up to explore and expand on. I think that is the main distinction. It’s where I’m obviously so much more confident and skilled as a teacher.

That toolbox that I referred to previously, that was really quite empty, it’s now jam-packed with things. That comes from experience, but it’s not just experience because you could be teaching for a long period of time, and if you haven’t been putting into your toolbox, the tools still aren’t going to be there. That’s an active process that teachers need to do. Yes, so looking at my teaching today, the student is the hero. It’s all about their learning. It’s where, again, I have the tools at hand to be able to develop and move them forward.

Christopher: What kind of tools are you talking about there, because I can imagine someone listening thinks, “Well, if you’re qualified as a piano teacher, you must be able to get them to doing the things that the exam requires, and if that’s what the exam requires, surely that’s what it means to be a pianist.” What extra tools would you need?

Sharon: Tons. Okay, so to give you an example, if I just dig into, for example, the art of questioning. As piano teachers, there are lots and lots of little if you imagine pockets of things that we need to have awareness and skillsets in, so questions. What sort of questions do we ask our students? You get skinny questions, fat questions, high order questions, low order questions, meta cognitive questions.

I didn’t always know about these sorts of questions. When I started to understand more about the way we enter into dialogue with our students, and the fact as well that music making is actually what should make up most of the lesson, not the teacher talking, which again very often hinder the students’ learning.

Again, just to dig into one of those examples, I remember once watching back a lesson, looking specifically and knowing to look for these things, like again, how am I interacting with the student? In this particular case study, there was something like I spent about four and a half minutes talking her through what she needed to do, trying lots of different ways. Wasn’t working, and in the end, I just demonstrate it, and that was it. 10 seconds later, she got it. You look back and you go, “Okay, so stop the talk. Stop talking, Sharon. Just demonstrate.”

Again, going back into questions, we know again from the research that we’ve done, we know from research that other people have done, not even necessarily in the music education profession, it’s about asking good questions. What is a good question? I was talking earlier on about skinny questions and fat questions. If we’re asking questions like, “Do you,” you’re going to instantly get an answer, a yes, no.

Basically, what you have done is you have shut down the opportunity to really figure out if the student understands, but if you ask a question that begins with, “How could you practice that? What might you do?” You’re instantly going into, again, open, closed. It’s either questions shut something down or open something up, and just understanding that makes such a huge impact.

Again, just really quickly, to share an example of one of my teaching students, she taught a lesson recently. She watched it. She gave it to me to watch, and it was really interesting that she, again, asked a question, got the right answer, but decided to ask another deeper question, and then realized actually, no, the student doesn’t understand this.

Again, that’s just an example of one of the tools, so again, knowing how to ask questions in a piano teaching lesson. Is it important? Yes, it’s important, because you may have a student who doesn’t get something. If you’re asking the right questions, you’ll realize, “Okay, they haven’t got that.”

That’s I think what can happen so often in lessons is where we talk to the student and we assume, and it’s something that a guy called Lee Lefever has referred to as the curse of knowledge. We’re a 10. Our students are a one and a two. We try and communicate what we know, and we so often miss and we get a seven. There’s this gap, and it’s because we have learned the stuff so long ago, we have just forgotten the possibilities for confusion.

That’s why we need to be asking those questions. We need to be interacting with our students, because otherwise, there will be stuff that they won’t understand. It’s the same way that if we have a conversation with a lawyer or an accountant, we don’t live in their world. We don’t understand. They will say things, and we can so often nod our head as if to say, “Yeah, okay, I understand,” but I don’t. Again, it’s the same with our pupils. That’s going to be a very long-winded question, but that’s just one tiny, tiny area that it can make such a transformative difference if you understand.

Christopher: I think you’ve painted a great picture there of how thoughtful you can be as a piano teacher and how easy I’m sure it is if you’ve never encountered these kinds of tools for your teaching to be oblivious to that possibility and be a very thoughtless teacher inadvertently. You used a different word then, thoughtful though in creating your company. Tell us about Curious Piano Teachers, where that came from, and why you chose that word, curious.

Sharon: Curious, I remember using the word curious on my very first Evoco banner. On the banner was, “How do you eat an elephant? Curious?” Of course, the follow through with that was, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time,” because as with anything that can seem challenging, again, piano teachers can look and again, when they hear about questions or when they hear about any of these little pockets that I’m talking about, they go, “Where do I start?” It seems there’s so much to learn about. The whole point is that you don’t try and get your mouth around the whole elephant. You just take it one bite at a time.

Sally, again, just to put you in the picture with Sally, Sally and I met on the MTPP course one very hot sunny day in 2003, I think it was, at Reading University. Subsequently, she was my master’s supervisor, and then we worked together as the principal teachers on the PTC, the Piano Teachers Course, that runs at the Purcell School.

She then, back in 2013 I think, she came over and did some work for me at Evoco. Again, then, she started up the Curious Piano Teacher blog, and then obviously from there, when we had a good chat, joined forces, we decided, “Okay, let’s become the Curious Piano Teachers,” because essentially, you can’t be curious about something that you don’t know about.

Of course, for example, that whole concept of questions. If you’re not aware that questions are so massively powerful, knowing all the questions to ask, unless you’re aware that questions are a transformative element, you’re not going to.

Again, the idea with the Curious Piano Teachers is that we again put out little things where teachers go, “What?” That’s really where the whole word curious, and of course, piano teaching, anything in life, it’s always evolving, constantly. Like I said earlier, there’s no point. You can sit back, fold your arms, and go, “Okay, that’s it. I’m done.” The more you dig in, the more you unearth. The more you follow a trail, the more it breaks off into all these other trails.

Again, Sally and I at the Curious Piano Teachers, we’ve got research backgrounds. We understand the importance of research. We understand that all this amazing, wonderful research that has been done very rarely actually filters down to piano teachers out there. If it did, we would actually be realizing, for example, having this focus on notation was actually not the way to go in the first lessons.

Again, research fuels curiosity, so yes, curious is a very important word for us because in essence, it talks about asking that what if question. Again, we did that. What if we could help piano teachers online? We didn’t know if that was going to work, because before then, we were only doing it in a one to one setting where we had a piano in the room, where we had teachers physically in the room with us. We didn’t know if it was actually going to work. Again, that was us being curious, going, “Well, what if? Let’s push the boundary here.”

Christopher: You mentioned something there, which I think is characteristic of your teaching philosophy or your approach, which is not going too heavy on the notation-based learning. I really enjoyed looking at your Let’s Play course, which, I don’t know if it’s fair to say, kind of equips teachers with a lot of different interesting tools they can bring to their lessons and unpack music in a very different way for their students.

I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that course and in particular, what jumped out at me was that you are unashamedly or unabashedly putting singing front and center, which is I think quite unusual for a piano teacher.

Sharon: It is, it is. Okay, so we have an online course called Let’s Play. It’s for piano teacher who teach beginners, so obviously that’s quite a lot of piano teachers. The idea is when you get the course, you get to see Sally and I teach lessons. Now, it’s not just one to one lessons. We’re also doing small group lessons.

Again, reflection is very much the center of this because you get to watch a lesson, and then you get to hear us talk about it, so you actually get to hear our reflections of what went well, what didn’t go so well, and subsequently, what would we do instead. We follow through with that, because again, no lesson’s perfect.

Again, the underlying premise of this course is that we develop musicians first and pianists second. If you think about it, one way that I will talk to parents about this is it would be absurd to get your child to learn to read and write without having first learned how to speak. Piano lessons that start with a cheater break, so often, it’s kind of a similar thing.

What Sally and I are very passionate about is that we develop musicians first of all, and the natural way to do that is through the singing voice. Sally has done a huge amount of work for the Voices Foundation. Again, it’s something to look at and Google. They do a wonderful course, and it’s actually where I did a course. That was one of the courses that I did whilst I was in the MTPP course and where I was struggling to get the practical side of this whole idea of sign before symbol, because it was presented quite theoretically, and I thought, “But how do I apply this in a piano lesson? What do I do? How do I develop musicianship skills for my piano students?”

Basically, I went in this Voices Foundation course, and it was for classroom teachers. Again, it’s being open-minded, it’s being curious. You could think, “I’m not a classroom teacher, so this will not apply to me,” but I came home with again, a toolbox full of what I needed to do in my piano lessons, developing singing.

Again, for example, you teach your beginner student a simple song. They then will be able to let’s say understand how to tap the rhythm, understand how to play that by ear, understand how to write that down. Obviously, the scope of this podcast, I can’t go into that, but again, that course looks at that.

It’s really developing musicianship and oral skills. It can work perfectly as something alongside a piano teacher book. It’s a way of songs that you can teach and then how you can break down the elements, so how do you teach students to understand rhythm and pulse. It’s broken down step by step in that particular course, with again, lots of songs and lines and examples that you can use in lessons.

Christopher: Terrific. Just to play devil’s advocate for a second, why do it that way? What’s the advantage of developing those skills away from the piano or in conjunction with the method book?

Sharon: Again, music needs to come from within. We can’t sit down at an instrument and bring music out of that instrument without the music first being inside, so the rhythm, the intonation, all of that. Again, people, again, singing, it’s maybe less obvious for singing to be used in piano lessons. People might say, “Well, a tuner comes in and that’s their job to tune the piano. Why do piano students need to learn to sing in tune?” Do you know what?

Again, from having done that Voices course myself, I developed so much musicianship skills and I realized the importance, where before I struggled to play a phrase musically, if you start with singing, the problems just dissolve.

Again, going through and understanding the approach and all the nuances of that approach, which is what I learned in the Voices course, and again, which is what the Let’s Play course is very much infused with, it’s this where we all need to have these musicianship skills. Music insight has to develop first, then internalization, then we can go to the instrument. We have got the full sound in our head. That’s why it makes sense.

Christopher: Fantastic. Well, as you say, unfortunately there’s only so much we can pack into a podcast. I feel like we can do a whole episode on that approach and helping students be confident singing and all of that good stuff, but I think for now, we’ll put a link in the show notes to that Let’s Play course. Anyone who’s interested to see what this might look like or what that toolbox contains, definitely go take a look at that course.

You mentioned earlier the importance of community, or from a different angle, we could talk about support and ongoing training and advice and help when you’re trying to learn something. I’d love to hear about your online teaching diploma course, because that’s something that I think a lot of people would assume needs to be done in person in an old conservatory somewhere.

You guys are taking a very different approach to preparing the next generation of piano teachers, and you’re putting community front and center as part of that. Tell us why you’re taking that approach and what that overall program looks like.

Sharon: Okay. Just to backtrack a little bit, we obviously set up a community, which is our online membership site back in 2015. It’s a big part of what we do. Again, prior to that, with Evoco, my focus was on offering courses to piano teachers. Again, these were courses where they were physically, again, in a building with me with a piano.

A year down the line, having started the membership site and realizing, “Yes, we can make a difference. We can do this online. This is working,” we then went back and looked at the idea of an online piano teaching diploma course. Again, there’s that ongoing element and varies the accountability. Again, there are the assignments, which we do have challenges for our members in the community, but again, we’re not chasing everyone out to make sure they’ve done their homework, as it were.

With this course, especially for teachers who either struggle to know what to do or who get started something and it just falls by the wayside because there isn’t the ongoing impetus, then this is what this course is designed to help them keep going to where they’ve actually got an accredited teaching diploma.

At the moment, we are currently offering the ATCL and the DipABRSM, so it’s a course that helps piano teachers prepare for either one of these teaching diplomas. Again, we’ve just launched the 2018 brochure. The deadline for applications is the 30th of June, and that course then, it’s a 15 month course. It starts in September and runs right the way through.

Everything, yes, is online, so we’ve got eight modules. We’ve also got a Facebook group for curious people who are curious to know more, because again, we’re in there answering lots of questions and actually diving a lot more into the module content a lot more than what we can actually put into a brochure.

What was really important for us was that we knew that piano teachers very often want to feel that they have a recognized teaching qualification, as opposed to a performance one. Of course, you learn a whole new set of skills, because I started out teaching, fairly soon after I started teaching, I got a performance diploma. There isn’t pedagogical skills that you then will learn about when you go and you do a teaching diploma. You’ve got another whole set of skills, and that’s what we dig into in these eight modules.

Again, we didn’t want people just to go away with a piece of paper. Obviously, in the same way that as piano teachers, we don’t want to use the exam syllabus as a curriculum, that’s again what we’ve done. We have gone, we have looked at the requirements for these two accredited piano teaching diplomas, and then we have created this eight module course around that.

It’s so that piano teachers don’t just get a piano teaching qualification when they follow through and they do the work, they also get, if you like, that toolbox of skills. The idea is that it’s transforming their teaching, so we have I think some sort of a tagline somewhere where it’s a piano teaching diploma for life.

Again, from what people are saying, we had a pilot course initially. We then ran, are currently running a small course, and then this year is a proper full run of the course, which we have also added three complementary live days, so we’re really excited about that.

We had our first Curious live event, one event in Belfast and one event in Oxford, where I had speakers from the US and Australia earlier this year. The amount of sheer enthusiasm, from bringing, it was largely members who attended, the energy was just awesome, just awesome. We thought, “We’ve got to bring our teaching diploma students together, as well.”

We have a day in London at the beginning of January just as they’re starting module three, and then later on, there’s two days in the summer where we’re also going to be delivering, Sally and I will be delivering with people from the ABRSM and Trinity. I know for sure, I was in touch with Peter Wild, chief examiner for Trinity Village, so he’s going to be working alongside me and delivering the content in one of the days. Again, we just haven’t confirmed who the person is from ABRSM.

Again, the idea is to connect with our members at those points because we know that bringing people together in a live setting is just very, very powerful. Now, we know that it’s in London. We do have applicants. We have people from Australia who have done the course, so obviously if you’re based in the US or Canada or Australia, you’re very welcome to take a flight to London, but of course, we’ve decided, “Okay, we’re going to make this complementary.” We haven’t increased the cost from last year.

This is another element not because we can’t deliver it live. We have had our first batch of students who have gone through the course and who have successfully completed the course, passed the course, but the idea is we’re just from Curious live, we’ve realized bringing people together is awesome. For students that can make it to London, it will be a rocking experience is all I can say.

Christopher: Tremendous. Well, I have to say on the podcast here, occasionally the topic of instrument exams and the traditional way of teaching comes up. I have to admit that it’s often a fairly negative narrative that the old way doesn’t work and the exams do more harm than good and the dry notation-based approach isn’t much fun. It’s just really refreshing and encouraging and exciting to hear about the work you’re doing at Curious Piano Teachers.

I think that there could be a whole new generation of teachers coming up now. I’m sure you also have some people retraining or taking their diploma even though they’ve been teaching for 10 or 20 years. To think of them going out and teaching in the way you’ve been describing that actually puts the student front and center as the hero and brings in musicianship from day one rather than just robotic playing, that’s all tremendous and very exciting.
If anyone listening has thought about becoming a piano teacher, or maybe you are a teacher and you want more of these tools and ways of thinking about your teaching to improve, definitely do check out the Curious Piano Teachers. We’ll have a link in the show notes and you can get that brochure for this course. It’s TheCuriousPianoTeachers.org.

If you’re not in that category, don’t avoid checking out that website. Don’t miss the opportunity because there is a ton on there. Whether you are thinking about teaching or thinking about learning, there is a back catalog of blog posts that will expand your mind in lots of interesting ways and no doubt give you a ton of new things to be curious about.

Sharon, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the show today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Sharon: Oh, it’s my pleasure. It’s been absolutely wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for having me, Christopher.

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The post Becoming Curious, with Sharon Mark-Teggart appeared first on Musical U.