About Negative Musical Experiences

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

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Transcript

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

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Have just 5 minutes to spare? What if you could learn everything you need to know about intervals in a couple of minutes? 🎉

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The Creepy Minor Key

I believe that Ira Gershwin said it best:  “How strange the change/from major to minor.”  It’s strange, indeed. Whether you realize it or not, I know you’ve heard it before: the creepy minor key.

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

To eerie creepy music boxes:

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

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

Simply put, the minor key is often synonymous with:

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

But why?

The Science Behind the Creep Factor

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

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

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

Take A Listen

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

1.  Hey Jude

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

2.  Blackbird

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

3.  Wrecking Ball

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

4. YMCA

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

5. Imagine

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

Fathoming Minor

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

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

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

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

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

Spookifying A Major Key

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

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

Instead of this:

C – F – G  
(I – IV – V)

Use this:

Am – Dm – Em
(i – iv – v)

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

Example:  Am – Bdim – E – Am

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

Build-Your-Own Creepy Tune

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

  1. Use a minor key (see above and be sure to reference the related links for more in-depth info and cheat sheets).
  2. Consider your tempo. What kind of effect will increasing or decreasing the tempo have on your song? Play around with it and see what gives you the effect you’re after.
  3. Determine your instrumentation. A song can sound totally different when you play it in a minor key on a xylophone or harpsichord. If you have access to a keyboard (or hey, said harpsichord), you can use different sounds to heighten the dreadful vibe. Try:Scary piano with jack-o-lantern

Embracing the Macabre

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

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

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

The relationship between major and minor is an inverse, complementary one – switching between the two in the course of a single song is an excellent way to keep your listener engaged – so experiment with incorporating minor into your cheery tunes, and take your audience on an emotional rollercoaster!

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

A good improv can yield hours of good spooky material! …

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/improvisation-how-to-score-halloween-horror/
A good improv can yield hours of good spooky material!

We’re going to use a particular short film clip as an example of how to improvise and then develop your score for a horror movie.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/improvisation-how-to-score-halloween-horror/

Halloween is upon us, and with Halloween comes a creepy p…

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/7-strange-musical-secrets-for-making-your-own-scary-soundtrack/
Halloween is upon us, and with Halloween comes a creepy plethora of freaky cult films, scary soundtracks, and a fascination with the horrific and the macabre that overtakes culture by a storm.

Learn how to write your own disturbing retro Halloween soundtrack with these seven secrets inspired by the theme from Stranger Things.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/7-strange-musical-secrets-for-making-your-own-scary-soundtrack/

Audiation and Thinking Music, with Cynthia Crump Taggart

Today we’re joined by Professor Cynthia Crump Taggart, the President-Elect of the Gordon Institute for Music Learning. You might have heard that name “Gordon” in the world of music education as associated particularly with audiation, and in fact Edwin Gordon developed a whole approach to music learning which is called, simply enough, Music Learning Theory.

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

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

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

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

Listen to the episode:

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Transcript

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

Cynthia: Thank you very much for inviting me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher: I see, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher: I see. And-

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher: Fantastic. Why is this important?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cynthia: Thank you very much for inviting me.

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

What’s the secret to making that scary movie even more te…

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/halloween-ear-training-insider-horror-film-music-secrets-uncovered/
What’s the secret to making that scary movie even more terrifying? Why, the music of course!

Learn more about secrets from the horror movie industry about creating that perfect frightening movie soundtrack.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/halloween-ear-training-insider-horror-film-music-secrets-uncovered/

Halloween is just around the corner! So how do you go abo…

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/spookify-songs-halloween/
Halloween is just around the corner! So how do you go about creating some spine-tingling sounds?

We’ve rounded up some of the best ideas from around the interwebs for some ways to spookify your songs.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/spookify-songs-halloween/

Wish you had some fun new Halloween music and an easy way…

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/a-halloween-treat-classic-song-writing-tricks/
Wish you had some fun new Halloween music and an easy way to train your musical ear in suitably spooky style this October?

Look no further than John Anealio’s Halloween E.P. Let’s listen together and see what musical mischief might be lurking in its four tracks…

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/a-halloween-treat-classic-song-writing-tricks/