The Music Education Podcast
Listen for authentic and challenging conversation on all things music ed. Brought to you by Charanga. Hosted and produced by Chris Woods of The Chris Woods Groove Orchestra.
The Music Education Podcast
Episode 50 - ‘Different Schools of Thought, Moving Classical Forward’ Leo Mackenzie
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In this episode Chris chats with Cellist Leo Mackenzie about how to blend traditional western classical routes in music education with other genres and ideas. Thank you to our Sponsor Faber Music and our Charity Sponsor British Youth Music Theatre.
Visit https://www.fabermusic.com/education and use Podcast1 at the check for money off and visit www.britishyouthmusictheatre.org/teachers for more info on the British Youth Music Theatre.
Welcome to the Music Education Podcast. I'm Chris of the Chris Woods Ruth Orchestra, and this podcast is brought to you by the Soundstore Music Education Hub. Our sponsor Faber Music and our charity sponsor British Youth Music Theatre. In this episode, I chat with Leo Mackenzie, musician and music educator. Now, Leo is one of those fantastic people who somehow seamlessly bridges classical roots in learning with folk, jazz, or any other genre or approach to music. And in this conversation, we focus on how we can all do that by looking at some of the lessons learned from things like Kedai or Suzuki or even lessons in improvisation that maybe have been lost from the Baroque period. Leo also suggests that we review the language that we use when we're teaching in music education so that we can bridge that gap even more. In some ways, I think this conversation is just a fantastic look at how to progress the Western classical route of learning. And in fact, all routes of learning in music education. I hope you enjoy listening. Leo, thank you so much for joining me today. Can we start off with a bit of uh who you are and what you do?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you for having me. Um I'm a cellist first and foremost and a singer. And during my time where I started off self-taught, I've since had the opportunity to have access to so many amazing teachers and get some kind of definitely classical training under my belt. Um and then later on, my world was just blown apart by historically informed performance and early music training. And I've funnelled that into live performance and teaching. And so I've kind of dipped into every ensemble. I've done the string quartet work, the orchestra work at lots of different levels. And at the moment, definitely portfolio career musician, like a lot of other people. I teach mostly, uh, especially after COVID and lockdown stuff. And I tour with a couple of, I suppose you'd say contemporary folk bands. That's kind of my thing.
SPEAKER_02Okay. Who are these contemporary folk bands? Because yeah, it's an ideal opportunity for a plug, isn't it? Do you want to miss that?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely, absolutely.
SPEAKER_02Uh so I'm three minutes into the podcast.
SPEAKER_01Boom! By my things. Validate my existence as a musician. No, um, Nine Barrow is a group that I tour with, uh, on and certainly their walking tours, which have become a really successful way to digest their music. And The Last Inklings, that's a duo project. I work with a mandolin player, who's a phenomenal uh player, kind of in the style of Chris Theley, that kind of like musical genius level playing. Um and we we play a lot of contemporary folk material where we used to work together in a very traditional folk band, uh a trio. Um, and yeah, I kind of dip in and out of a lot of other ensembles.
SPEAKER_02Fantastic. Well, I can, you know, I can vouch for how people should go and listen to both um projects, definitely. So to get stuck straight into the the inspiration behind asking you to to do this episode, um well, you're my cello teacher. Um and the reason you're my cello teacher is partly because you're because I'm not a cellist, I'm a guitarist, and I wanted to learn an instrument in a way that might access some maybe classical techniques to be able to play some classical music, but also in a way that would be super creative and mean that I would still work with you know uh ear playing and using it compositionally and even to approach it in a the instrument in a different way, maybe even a unique way. And you were the man for the job because my understanding was your ability to sit in both camps basically, and then also playing not just cello as well. So maybe could you give us a little bit of that background of your your journey? You know, it doesn't have to be from age five till now, but just how how you fit into both camps. If you do, maybe I've just got the completely wrong end of the stick and you're absolutely the wrong person for the job.
SPEAKER_01A great friend of mine from school uh was a huge fan of Damien Rice, and in Damien Rice's band, he used to work with Lisa Hannigan, an amazing singer and instrumentalist herself, and Vivian Long, who was a cellist. And we kind of had this discussion one day, and it was like, you could do that, surely. So off I went, got hold of a cello and started teaching myself. And within two short weeks they put me on a stage, which was absolutely terrifying at the time. But I was learning from early YouTube videos, because this didn't really exist at that point, um, and teaching myself as much as possible, a lot of it based on the fact that he was a guitarist, and I was able to mimic a lot of the things that he could do on the cello, and it it was giving me this understanding that like looking at the division of frets, and I could think actually it's not a random placement of notes on the neck of an instrument without frets, they are all lined up, we just don't actually have the fret marker there, and it was little things like that started to click into place, and yeah, a fascinating instrument, and because I'd found it through a kind of pop side of things, um you know, then eventually I was listening to some of the most just stunning classical performances, and I wanted to be able to access that kind of tone quality, those colours as well to pull into the stuff I was doing with the bands, and so I sought out some training as well. And I kind of I had the grounding, I knew where all the notes were, I knew all the finger positions, I knew how to use a bow, and it was learning about the whole ethos of classical music before eventually discovering that classical music in its own way had forgotten all of the important things that the Baroque period taught us. So the improvisation, being able to run through lots of arpeggios and find your way through chords in a in a slightly new new way each time. It was sort of dare I say, kind of more aligned with jazz, and I've tried to pull that sensibility back into my playing. But yeah, learning to play by ear, learning by watching other musicians, other instruments, so guitar was a big one, tenor guitar, definitely a big influence, and fiddle players, and then then looking at that in a classical space and kind of going, right, how does this all sit together?
SPEAKER_02Wonderful. I I mean it's so cool to jump on that Baroque um I can't remember the musical term, but like the space for improvisation in a piece, for example. But but that that's that's sort of a forgotten thing, and I don't I can't get my head round why, if such a key era of classical music had that at its foundation, why is that so often completely absent from I don't know, I obviously not all classical players, but just when we think of classical music and traditionally how we learn in a classical route, yeah. Why is that?
SPEAKER_01We used to get counterpoint as the primary way of delivering music. So a single melodic line that would have complementary melodies weave around it. So not thinking in harmony, but thinking in independent tunes that all sat together and to our modern ear created a beautiful harmony. Think of Takata and Fugue, like pieces by Bach and Vivaldi. And that was fine, and the performance directions would include figures under the bass, letters and numbers to suggest to you what chord that root note was showing you. So you might only have a bass line written in your music, and the uh the song.
SPEAKER_02So we're talking about cello here, sorry.
SPEAKER_01All instruments, really. Okay, so keyboard instruments, cello, um, lutes, anything that you could use to play at the time. And suddenly uh you'd create a huge musical texture just from this one bass note and something like the number five written above it, which was really shorthand to say that's the root note of a normal root third, fifth chord. So you can play any of those notes, mix them up into the melody, and at your discretion accompany the main part.
SPEAKER_02Wow. So it's basically like a chord chat for a jazz piece or whatever.
SPEAKER_01Exactly that. And and the figured bass still exists in a lot of jazz pieces as well. But then there comes a point where we're playing together in large ensembles. In the Barack period, that's kind of fine. You can mess around with pieces, you you're listening to each other, so it's like a folk band almost. You've got a guide piece of music and you're working together to express it the best way. Ensembles get bigger, modern instruments come in. It's gonna be messy if we all start improvising. And we get classical composers, like this is at the point of people like Stravinsky and just before saying, You must follow what I put on the score. At this point, you do not need your skills of improvisation. I have thought of this already, and I have put it on the paper. Follow that. And so we we don't need that skill anymore. And definitely I think that's that's part of the reason why a lot of string players, uh, and a lot of the way we teach classical music is not interested in improvisation uh or learning by ear. So yeah, it seems to have just evaporated a little bit over the last century.
SPEAKER_02Because I I totally get and respect that idea of following the score. As a as a composer myself, I know that feeling of having an idea and communicating it, and then the last thing on earth you want then is someone to well not always, but quite often you want people to stick with that, and of course, in the epic proportions of an orchestra, if someone's if everyone is straying away from the line, then it can become a mess, can't it? So it it makes perfect sense. But why is that element that sorry, the element that's opposite to that that has all the freedom and the creativity, why is that no longer there? Do you see what I mean? Like where is why why has it been left behind? Because it seems almost like then education and classical music education roots are creating essentially creating players, not composers.
SPEAKER_01Or I absolutely agree with that. Um some of it I think is just the way that general teaching has evolved and changed. Um time is tight, curriculums are crammed full of a great many things, and music curriculums, you have to strip off anything that might be surplus to requirement and focus on the key elements, which is making sure normally that your student has a great mastery of a particular instrument in a physical sense. And hopefully, the byproduct is as a music teacher, you are taking them through the ethos of that music. Um, you're playing early European court dances, so what was the context in which those existed? And you know, perhaps you're discussing that it's written through a chord sequence, and the composers may have considered this when they originally wrote it, but there isn't much space to allow the student to do that for themselves. So you're almost hoping that they're absorbing it by playing it regularly. But uh how often does that happen? I think without proper instruction, not enough. And yeah, it does leave people for example, a lot of classical musicians that I know do not want to work in a studio situation with a singer-songwriter because they're not convinced that singer-songwriter will put a sheet of dots in front of them, sheet music, that will give them all the instructions they require. And having to think on the spot is not a skill that you are trained in. Um to to be able to just be expressive. Like I'm sure all of those musicians could play in the key of G major, which is like the last studio piece I was doing was a lovely guitar piece in G, uh, with some string accompaniment. But I've spent more time experimenting, finding sounds that I like, but I've had to do that in my own time. I was not taught that by a teacher until I was looking at early music specialist stuff. But that's not in the mainstream curriculum because there's just not time. There just isn't time.
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SPEAKER_02I'm gonna put my neck out here a little bit, but I do feel that there seems to be missing a missing fundamental part of music itself there. And I feel comfortable saying that because I feel that any classical musician or any musician who says they can't improvise can. They just they can do it. It's just that route of learning.
SPEAKER_01I think uh now, for example, the academy that I'm based in, uh, we've recently had the absolutely incredible opportunity to roll out the Music in Secondary Schools Trust uh methodology for teaching. The biggest part of that is they were able to fund us to supply an instrument for two years to every single year seven student in the building. And we had a pilot scheme last year with a group of year eight. And so we've got uh half of our year sevens on violins, half on flutes, and what we're we're doing as part of that is trying to embed um the Kedai technique into how we're teaching them. And I think this is a big thing. I wish I had had more training in Kedai method when I was a student because it's trying to teach you to internalize music in a way whereby it's not scary. Improvising is not shocking. Um, things like pitch recognition, the solfar method, if you're using it correctly, then uh it it makes choosing pitches less scary. Um rhythms don't have to be terrifying. Like most of the students in year seven, after just six weeks using the Kadai method, would have been able to clap, play you any rhythm that they'd seen on the page and read the notes as well. And suddenly it's not a hard, scary thing. It's it's just it's just music notes written down in some timings and they they get it. But I don't think this way of thinking is embedded enough, and there's so many reasons for that. In some places, maybe you've only got peripatetic teachers who are specialists coming in to work with your students on a particular instrument. That's absolutely fine, that's wonderful. But they're so often left to their own devices, there's no continual professional development, they live in the music cupboard somewhere, and the students go to them and leave, and we all assume everything's fine. Um I don't think that's necessarily ideal. In other places, music is being delivered by non-specialists because there are not enough experienced musicians out there who also have experience in that skill of teaching. Being a great musician and being a good teacher, both of those things hand in hand, that's a rare skill set. Um, and then secondary to that is those really good teachers, good musicians, who are aware of ways to embed these kind of like fundamental techniques so that they don't seem scary later on. So even if you do end up in a lovely orchestra, if you've had something like Kedai training or Suzuki method stuff in your early kind of music experience, you should feel a bit more free to just go off piste, as it were, and have a go at some other things.
SPEAKER_02British Youth Music Theatre is a national performing arts education charity that specialises in creating and producing brand new music theatre with young people. They visit schools up and down the UK with Discover Music Theatre, which is their in-school auditions and careers day. It includes sessions in dance, singing, acting as well as industry careers advice, and they're also recruiting students for their forthcoming season of original music theatre and so much more. Discover Music Theatre caters for 50 to 100 pupils. The cost to the school is £27.50 per pupil, though this can sometimes be subsidised. Visit British Youth Music Theatre.org forward slash teachers or email mail at bymt.org to find out more or to book. Now when booking, don't forget to mention the word podcast for five pounds off. So you've got those more sort of, I don't know, musically holistic ideas, but still it links back to crotchets and quavers. Is that kind of correct? Is that a safe assumption?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of accepting that most of the musical canon that we've got here for the last 300, 400 years is going to be written that way, so interpreting that is important, but then it starts to take you away from the page as well and think more how can I be aware of harmony and kind of theory with an instrument in my hand without having to learn it on paper. And I think this is a big part of what kind of Baroque instrumentalists were better at. You didn't just have to be a keyboard player to understand harmony, because the same way that you can divide a guitar neck up and you can see chord shapes and you can see arpeggio shapes and scales with patterns, I think there was a certain period of music where those patterns were more uh just commonplace to be taught on a lot of instruments, and the Kadai method is kind of bridging that gap in some ways, uh, because so much of the skill is embedded with physical activities, games, um, and visualizations rather than just reading off score.
SPEAKER_02Actually, physically engaging, like dance, move, connect. Yeah, yeah. Um I mean, you're talking about the keyboard element um as we sort of dabbled in in our previous conversation. One of the reasons, again, in my experience, that I've always come up against this there's two camps of classical and non-classical, be it as musicians or in learning, has been when I work with students of any age in that understanding of harmony, uh, or but as still theory, or even just the word theory, actually. So being some students thinking music theory is obviously related directly to key signatures, but again, the two camps understand key signatures differently, because the non-classical person or student would think about key signatures as in what key are we in, what scale, what is that based around? Whereas the classical root student would be talking about it's how many sharps and flats do we do we see and think, which is just I don't know, and I this is a personal sort of this is a personal opinion, which uh I I did promise not to not to express but I'm gonna it's it seems confused to me. It seems to lead to that confusion because the you know the white and the black notes is is misleading and this idea that yeah, even going back to you know the symphony in D minor, or okay, well that had relevance because of how temperament was at that time, right? That key had a quality, exactly whereas now it doesn't have that relevance, but then it's left people talking about D minor as this this recognizable key, and it's like, well, it doesn't unless you've got perfect pitch, really, does it? I've just said far too much. I'll be quiet now. You go ahead here, you talk.
SPEAKER_01I I completely understand what you mean. Like, I think uh there are a lot of methods, Kadai would just be one example of them, where uh you're teaching singing pitches or interval recognition with a movable dough. So we absolutely Absolutely have embedded in us in Western culture and a lot of other like Indian ragas still have a major and minor mode that we would recognise that they associate with similar flavours to us. Um but we perceive major and minor, knowing a major scale and a minor scale, independent of any instrument, and that general feeling, and then applying it later to being able to play in that scale and understand where we're drawing on the feeling of that scale to create this piece of music. I think we've almost lost touch with modes. We lost so many of the church modes where being in a particular key did have a real meaning, like the the Dorian mode feeling like a slightly curdled, joyful thing. Um, because of the way the intervals play around with each other or mixolydian, maybe having more of it. Curdled. Like there's there's a quality, it's minor, but it's not properly minor, it refuses to give in properly. But yeah, these we've scrapped almost the emotional stuff in favour of well, that's what it is on the page in equal temperament. And I completely get what you mean. We've it's become a sea of sharps and flats and technicality. But the reason that we mix all those things together is to create a certain feeling, and once you know the rules, we tend to ignore them anyway. Like look at a lot of jazz that will move through amazing circle of fifths progressions, and it's in a different key every couple of bars because that's where the feeling of that music is taking us.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, but it it seems that that sort of classical way of learning then is detached from say you talking about we've detached from the emotion and but actually classical music is the pinnacle of well, I don't want to say the pinnacle because we get into um questions of elitism and stuff that always come up here. But well for me, uh okay, in personal listening, it is the pinnacle of of emotion put into sound. I you know, I remember the first time hearing orchestral music as like a young teenager and genuinely feeling my heart skip a beat and it changing my breathing, and then being, my words, what is this? You know, so so then it seems disparate or dissonant for then the teaching to be detached from that, doesn't it? I suppose.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I think when we look at a lot of these amazing classical pieces that have that kind of quality, they were written by people that were trained in an entirely different way over a hundred years ago, and they had a knowledge that we lack now because we're not teaching composition in the same way. They would have been doing rigorous exercises in realizing chorale tunes and writing counterpoint and exploring what it meant to have different intervals work against each other because uh dissonances created a particular feeling, syncopations created a sense of something is going to happen. It hasn't quite blossomed into a major or minor yet, where are we going with this? And they were conscious of resolutions and the feeling behind those resolutions. They even had these whole tables, um, books and books, figure and lera, of um different ways of expressing an emotion based on a musical figure. So perhaps something with a pause and three hurried notes falling after each other, um like that da da da da da da da da da kind of quality, a suspirance as they call it, because it has that breath, that has a completely different feeling of kind of urgency to just a nice bouncy kind of um hornpipe style rhythm. And they recognize this absolute um link of feeling and writing. But now we're not teaching that. Is that perhaps why we see a different kind of composition come out of uh modern day writing that's much more chordal accompaniment?
SPEAKER_02Uh, but when you say they melody, sorry to barge in, when you say they, do you mean uh students of composition? Do you mean music students as a whole? Obviously, in Baroque times, you know, classroom ukulele wasn't a big thing. Um, but you know, who who who are we talking about learning in that way, do you think? Do you know?
SPEAKER_01Or I think it would have been there would have been a class thing, it would have been a time thing. So definitely we're looking at Victorian or well back beyond that before, and access to that kind of tuition would have been quite important, um, which did come at a cost, but obviously their schooling system was very different. People were expected to be instructed in these things because it was proper to be able to play and to have a lot of discourse about what you were playing and the quality of the music that you were listening to. Perhaps just because of the way life was back then, people have more time to digest those things. It would have been an experience because you couldn't have just put it on your Spotify playlist or listen to it on the internet somewhere else. You had to be invested in that moment to make it worthwhile, and so you're considering all the effects that it has, and internally you're doing that analysis, but we digest music differently now. Our music students are taught in a very different way. We're we're scrabbling for time, we're trying to get them to a point where they can play the instrument. And I I yeah, I really do feel unless you go on to specialise later, uh, that the composing element is secondary, and improvisation is just spontaneous composition, and it's it's still something that takes a back seat.
SPEAKER_02Hmm. Okay, so we talked about notes and theory and what have you a lot, but I guess the technique element of this is something to delve into. I mean, I as a contemporary non-classical guitarist take a lot from classical guitarists in the picking hand, anyway, because it's ergonomic and it's just makes so much sense. Uh in the fretting hand as well, um, I take I completely mirror because it's just again, it's the the most economical. Interestingly, position and posture, absolutely not, because it's just wrong. Um it's literally gonna hurt you. Although people are coming around to that now with so not using footstools and using something to raise up the guitar so that your spine isn't put at a twilt and stuff. But and then in the cello that you're you're teaching me, you know, you talk a lot about bow techniques and bow holds from from different musical backgrounds and stuff. So that there's there's so much magic um and value in classical technique, isn't there? But then there are some little fluffy bits, aren't there, that maybe shouldn't be taken too seriously. What do you reckon?
SPEAKER_01I think quite a lot of the time, it's a little bit like when people say classical music, they don't mean the classical period, they mean all art music. And I think in the same way, when we say classical technique, quite a lot of the time we just mean good technique, ergonomic technique. And we've we've had the good benefit now of decades of things like the Alexander technique weighing in on ways to make sure your body is being used within its own parameters and not being forced to work around some inhuman thing. But these instruments aren't developed, they didn't come around ergonomically. Uh and it's a frustration of mine that the pegs that we have on our cello are just friction pegs. They are wooden dowels shoved into a hole and we pray that they hold at the right pitch, and they never quite stay where we want them to, and they're really fussy. But they've developed geared pegs, much like a guitar peg, it's hidden within the the look of the cello peg, so it doesn't spoil any of the visual aspect. It still feels the right way to use if we're used to using a cello and violin has the same thing anyway. Why isn't this more commonplace? It's ergonomic. Why have we not adapted the instrument to us at this point? Uh, because it's almost like we've decided none of these instruments should evolve anymore uh to suit us, and we've just said, well, tradition dictates I must force my body around this thing. Guitars. Yeah. Like there was a point in time where a cutaway on a guitar would have made people vomit in the streets, which is ridiculous. And and really, when you look at is it the Vijuela, the the old Spanish guitar, and um someone recommended perhaps we just make the neck much much longer so we can reach further down it later, and then you get the orbos and it's all ungainly and you can't use them. Because the sound quality, this beautiful uh thing that you can't define might be spoiled if you change this mathematically lovely design. But as humans, we don't really work well with things that are beautifully mathematic, we need things that are a bit chaotic and work around us. But there are certain things you you need to listen to how your own body works, but at the same time, as Alexander technique teaches us, if you stand, close your eyes, and try and line your feet up parallel, when you look down, it's very unlikely you will have achieved it. We don't have that level of control over what we're doing. And sometimes classical technique feels fussy, it feels uncomfortable to start with, but hundreds of years of development and kind of just refining it, it has actually led it to a point where that's the ideal way to do it. That is the way you should do it. And unfortunately, you have to learn that. The same way that it's hard to hold a pencil when you're three years old, but now we can pick up a pen without thinking, and it's ergonomic. When you approach an instrument, you have that kind of issue. So, yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for doing it the way you like it, that absolutely, um, and a way that's comfortable for you, but you might recognise that you reach limitations because someone else has already troubleshooted that for you at some point in history. They already know that yeah, you'll get to a certain barrier and you'll be really comfortable and you'll love it and it'll make a lovely tone, but you have now stopped yourself from achieving the next step because you've ingrained this habit that's only going to take you so far up the mountain.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, I mean hey, actually, can we try the the Alexander technique? Because you're you're a man who knows about Alexander technique, aren't you? So what's the I I wanna I wanna I wanna try that thing. So I stand up.
SPEAKER_01Right, stand up, like have a little bit of a bounce around. So you've uh you've relaxed everything a bit. Now the key thing, look up at the ceiling, close your eyes whilst you're looking up at the ceiling, keep them closed, and I want you to try and step out about shoulder width apart and make sure that your feet, now without looking down, are parallel with each other. So your in step being parallel with the other in step. Once you think you've done that, glance down and let me know if you've actually managed it.
SPEAKER_02Oh my god, that's embarrassing.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_02Just for the listeners at home, my my left foot was pointing in one direction and my right ankle was, you know, basically a mile away. Wow, that's interesting, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01Um We've had hundreds of years of people ironing that out for us. So when they say it's gonna feel weird to start with, but you know, put your hand on a bow in a particular way, that's because they've already done the thing where they've looked down and gone, ah, that's not where my feet should be.
SPEAKER_02But then how how do the the the more rubbish bits, sort of the most the more illogical things that have stuck in? How how how do we get rid of those then?
SPEAKER_01I'm not entirely sure on the answer because in Western classical music especially, I think people are very unwilling to embrace change. Uh sometimes it feels quite stagnant. Um instruments, for example, made out of different kinds of woods, because we found that there are other kinds of wood from just maple and spruce that have lovely tone qualities, they they have the resistance necessary, they sound beautiful, and they're not endangered species of woods that we're stealing for fingerboards, things like that, like for bows, for example, but they don't look right, and you'll stand out, and you won't now be the most perfect version of a homogenous player possible. Because in classical music, unless you are the soloist, I do not want a soloist. I want you to replicate exactly what's on the page. You need to look right, you need to sound right, and there's a real resistance to changing certain things because it it's an eyesore to to have an ergonomic instrument, for example.
SPEAKER_02It just seems to so much resonate with more of a philosophical um look at this that I often feel I mean, you just use the word homogenous, and that the the term that gets chucked around of are you are you classically trained? Um, which has always left a slight chip on my shoulder in some ways from what I would be doing as a guitar virtuoso for want of a better word, but there's no other way to explain that to demonstrate that you know it's extreme technique, if you like. And then to be immediately confronted with, well, were you sort of were you classically trained? And that and the answer to that from my perspective was, well, no. I've certainly looked at lots of classical music and lots of classical techniques and taken things from that, but I'm not classically trained. But it seems that we we obviously put it on a pedestal, but also we I've I feel like it's uh a term for things being, as you say, maybe homogeneous, maybe ordered, maybe, maybe kept at a certain place. And I feel that resonates with this idea of not understanding theory in an applicable way as well, because you're now you've learnt that you can be rank and file.
SPEAKER_01That is very much something that I feel from all of that. Uh, but this is why there's an exodus of players from classical music who are finding their voice in contemporary styles, and certainly like within the little niche that I work in regularly as a live performer on stage, the folk circuit is seeing more cellists arrive who are adapting their technique and they're borrowing fascinating sounds from squeeze box players and fiddle players and double bass players because they can achieve it all on that. They can harmonise with themselves because the cello is a second voice when they're playing. They can play rhythmically. Uh, there's some great techniques out of the 60s where fiddle players were discovering. You could be the snare drum, you could kind of bring this hi-hat feeling to things uh with different bow techniques. And the cellists are sucking all of this up and bringing it into a different sphere where their musical personality can shine through without having to go through a filter of being like everyone else first. Like they want you to be the best, most expressive, most invested player, bringing everything about yourself to the instrument as long as it looks like the person next to you in a classical center. It's like it's it's a really difficult thing. I mean, and they kind of tell you early on, oh well, you'll never be a soloist, so I wouldn't worry about pursuing that level of showy playing. You just need to be a good functional player who can work with a conductor, which is a skill in and of itself, to be one of those blended voices. And I think I don't want to put down orchestral musicians because it's insane training and it's insane dedication. And they are amazing players, and actually, most of them, because they've been around this music for so long, by the time that they're playing in those levels, these people will be able to improvise it when they pick up that instrument because they've just soaked up music through their lives. It's that middling ground, the graduates who haven't necessarily touched on that yet, who can really wield an instrument, but the the concept of the harmony behind it might still feel foreign despite being taught it through your kind of degree career, for example. Actually putting it into practice is a very different thing.
SPEAKER_02Okay. So in your experience of teaching in what we term as you know, classical music education and non-classical, which is interesting in itself, just me saying that, because it's like, well, there's western classical music teaching and roots, and then there's everything else, all the other genres from around the world. Um but what what do you think is key to bringing that Western classical route in to in line with all the other ways of teaching? Because I think I think it's fair to say that that is it it needs a little bit of updating and maybe philosophical reviewing. Um, you know, what what what do you think is gonna is gonna bring that in line? And what do you think educators can do, you know, be it classroom teachers or peri-teachers, to to just stop there being there's the classical students over there, and there's the guy who's bang into hip-hop, he's uh a whiddly-widdly guitarist into metal. And do you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I do, I really do. I think a lot of it, uh, as I do with a lot of kind of philosophical approaches to this kind of thing, I think it comes down to language. We need to stop using certain language and calling things classical technique when really it's just good technique. I think that's a big problem, like an ergonomic way of approaching an instrument that's been developed for 300 years. Like that happened before the classical period. It's not classical, it's just a solid way of doing it that someone else has really gotten to grips with for you. But I like to look at training as much as possible. There is a central spine, and that middle ground is gradually climbing up. Let's take a teaching piano, for example. A good technique, so we want to know the names of the keys on the keyboard because that's going to help us navigate. We've got a shared language now. So if I call that note a C and you call it a C, great, we're together, we can describe how to step forward onto the next step. Let's number our fingers in a way that's useful for us to internalize so that when we memorize little patterns, our brain can chunk that away and we can repeat it and we can be confident playing those patterns. And again, it's a shared language, so we can develop together as a student and a teacher. From there, we're going to gradually come up with kind of difficult ways of playing and easy ways of playing, expressive ways of playing. And at each level, we're going to branch off left and right almost a little bit. Here's a classical piece, style piece, or a you know, a piece from the Western classical canon that you can play at this level of technique. Here's some pop music, here's the history of this particular jazz piece. You know, now you can read these chords. Let's have a look at a jazz lead sheet that has these chords on it. Let's have a look at um piece of Mozart that uses the same kind of chord voicings.
SPEAKER_02It's find that familiarity between them.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. It means that the central thing is improving on the instrument and improving your musical ear, and your your goals are not just pointing you towards playing classical music constantly. Um the pieces are almost secondary to your ability because you should be able to reach out and enjoy everything. It's like learning a language once you've got the skill. We're not aiming when we learn a language to just reach the pinnacle of being able to achieve one difficult conversation. We want to be able to be expressive in lots of different settings. Are we going out for a social occasion? Am I learning that language for business use? And it's the same, your technique is doing that for you. So I think So did Sorry. Well, just more emphasis on technique and less less forcing people, you know, what you have to use that technique for.
SPEAKER_02Okay, which kind of in turn promotes then individuality and originality. To take some of that language stuff very literally, what's your feeling around, you know, in primary school teaching the word forte? We need to understand what that means, children. You know, what do you think about that classical language physically, you know, dynamic markings and musical terminology that always to me, I'm more teetering on the edge of revealing my opinion again, but but always seems to be a bit like, well, why why are we learning a word for a word for a word sort of thing? Can't we just call it a bit loud or a bit soft?
SPEAKER_01I think there's an acceptance in classical spheres that if every single country used its own language in printing music, it would be like the Tower of Babel. Uh, it would be really difficult for us to comprehend what everyone meant. And so a little bit like starting off on a keyboard, it's completely arbitrary that I've decided, or we have decided, that this middle key is called C, but at least now we've labelled it together, we can share, we can have a conversation together. And so I still think there's a merit in learning because really it's one language to learn. It's some of the Italian words and how you relate to them. If you want to play that kind of music. But when you're first starting, I don't think it's necessarily important to have that concept. I think playing around with volume and being noisy and not noisy, easy to comprehend words for kids is much more important than trying to get them to hook it on to a really abstract concept like F is for forte. What is forte? Just say loud. There's definitely a place where you should transition so that if they want to reach out into that repertoire, they're going to understand the language that comes with it.
SPEAKER_02Um, but let's be honest, that takes ten minutes, though, doesn't it? Exactly. And you can only talk about really loud for ten years. Well, now you can just replace it with this letter.
SPEAKER_01Exactly that. Just scribble it on your score. No one from the audience can see it. Just write loud underneath. Like we all do it in the orchestra. We put big goggles on things that say reminder, stupidly loud. Right. So what does it matter? Like if it's an aid memoir, it's for your benefit, isn't it? It's like going through a score and writing in all the finger numbers. Great. If you can play it, you can play it. Doesn't matter what the instructions say. If the instructions Crotch it on line three, didn't mean anything to you. Right, finger three above it, fine. Who's to say that's any better or worse? But yeah, this is where I really appreciate things like Suzuki and Kedai, which are trying to just embed thinking musically without all of the extra stuff. So it doesn't have to jump through any hoops of language, it can just be loud, it can be quiet, it can be fast, it can be slow, it can get faster, doesn't have to speed up with an accelerando or anything like that. Particularly, I notice this with kids that have learned phonics. Uh like my students now will be years that have gone through that. Like I put a word like crescendo in front of them, and you know, a crescendo is a really bizarre concept. And an acal accelerando doesn't mean as much as if I say it's accelerating, it's speeding up. Um like native language teaching, I think, is quite a useful thing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it becomes quite a well, I I've had this argument flipped from both sides. So from my experience, the language of crescendo's and fortes was was a barrier and uh felt like then something I couldn't access, and still feels like that now. If someone uses that language in a conversation, I almost feel slightly irritated because I'm like, well, you know, just let's just speak on a level that we'll definitely understand, you know. Um I hope I haven't made you feel self-conscious in their reviewing of have I said force to him. Um but I it's totally cool. Um, but then I've heard on the flip side the idea as well, okay, of if we don't teach children to understand that language, then actually we're stopping them from being able to access that world. And you kind of come to well, what what's the right thing to do?
SPEAKER_01By supplying a good glossary and accepting that learners can be uh self-directed, I think we kind of tick that box. If in the back of your classical sheet music book you make sure that you provide them with a glossary of symbols, then a self-directed learner can go away, check that, and go, oh, right, loud, cool, yeah, I'll play that loud. I think we need to give music students a bit more credit for that. If they can be expressive, labelling the expression is should be a secondary thing, I think. Um really when we read those expressive dynamic markings, we're reflecting on the fact that the composer felt that it expressed the sentiment of this music best if we performed it in a certain way. But it's still up to us as performers to reflect on whether or not we think that it does work that way. Take something famous like the El Garcello concerto in the classical canon and uh or romantic period. A lot of people have a lot of opinions on how that piece should be played, and some of them come because a previous player used to do it that way. It's not written in the sheet music, we've just accepted that that person, the the non you know, not written in the score way that they played it, we liked, so we keep doing it. So we're ignoring the printed score already. Why can't we be more flexible in that in future? Yeah, I think there are grounds to using native language, but making it accessible. Like I said earlier, a jazz piece compared to a Mozart piece because they use a similar chord structure. When I showed my student a jazz piece, we're gonna look at a lead sheet, it's gonna have uh a chord chart on it, which might use all manner of weird symbols. So I might have triangles and circles with slashes through, and I'm talking about diminished chords and things with shorthand or dominant seventh chords, whatever. That's still notation, isn't it? It's just a different form.
SPEAKER_02And a really confusing one at that as well. It's kind of more hieroglyphic, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and in some ways uh less standardized, so more confusing because certain jazz artists would have a different approach, like um writing a minor chord with a a minus sign, a dash, instead of the the lowercase M. And if you're a student who's learned a particular way of reading that, now I've thrown something new at you, you could sort of say in Western classical music, at least the notation is standard. Um, especially although I could still pick examples, it's not foolproof. Uh, generally, yes, we use Italian words and symbols to describe dynamics, tempo, those kinds of things. Uh but more recently, people are more tempted to use beats per minute and a tempo marking properly instead of like my walking pace is faster than yours. So does Andante as an Italian word relate? Uh and then if you look at the music of Grieg, for example, Norwegian composer, strong national identity, it's a it's a small country, there's the same number of people there as around Wales. Their national identity is important to them as a way of preserving their culture. Using Norwegian words to describe the pieces, the speed, the tempo, is something that they would do. So I'd that's not wrong, certainly. But yeah, even classical music doesn't have that consistency. But it's all just a different language, jazz, classical, it's all symbols anyway, so we might as well learn a handful of them all.
SPEAKER_02Hmm. Yeah, so well, as you say, the sort of the York notes of those terms. What uh one experience that uh I had that was pretty profound was um being tasked with the job of translating a um American musical book, a guitar book, into English, English. For that I majoratively spent a lot of time turning words from you know crotchets to quarter notes or quavers to eighth notes and such like. And it really made me at the end of that process go hands down, said in the most English way possible. Hands down, those American chaps have absolutely got it right. Because, you know, again, okay, Jimmy, we're gonna do four crotchets here. It's like, well, crotch it? What what does that word even mean? Well, it doesn't mean anything. You know, it's a it's an abstract representation of time, um, but could be much more easily explained as a as a fraction, which you've spent, you know, two hours a day learning about for the past ten years.
SPEAKER_01And then when you relate that fraction to a sign signature that's written at the beginning of a piece of music, such as three, four, and you are describing the bottom of the fraction being a crotchet, a quarter note, or an eighth note, six, eight, and now we know how many kinds of notes are in that bar. It makes a lot of sense to me. And uh, I don't know why we go with the archaic terms, I really don't. Because that's one of the things that's not inherently there. That's just a symbol on a piece of paper, it's not a letter. So why can't we name it differently? Exactly that.
SPEAKER_02Leah, I I think it's been a very enlightening and wonderful chat. I feel like we could go down another avenue of talking about the sort of jazz way of learning as well, because we just opened that out, and that seems to be an increasingly sort of almost like classical route of learning, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's almost got the same sense of I don't quite know if it's the right way to express it, but almost elitism about it. Especially had all these jazz musicians presenting this idea that it just came to them magically, ignoring the fact that they'd actually spent seven hours a day practicing the same three arpeggios, like to present like this contrast to Western classical music, like the white man and his wonderful elitism, it just like God-given gifts that Mozart has at the age of four, all this stuff. They're like, Well, I can do that too with a bit of smoke and mirrors, so uh off we go.
SPEAKER_02Wow. I mean, we've gone through this whole thing without even saying the word elitism, and then you just drop that bombshell towards the end. Uh, I mean, let's talk about that more because it I think jazz again from this episode is full of my opinion far too many times, but you know, what the hell. Um, I feel with jazz again, um scarily elitist in a this is from I'm talking from feeling rather than actually what that is, it makes me feel that I know at university, for example, I took solo jazz guitar lessons to so I wanted to sound like Joe Pass. I don't like how Joe Pass sounds, sorry, Joe Pass, but it seems like some kind of incredibly complex language that was mystical and magical, and I had to know that in order to be able to validate myself to you know family members and go, no, it's all right, I'm a jazz guitarist. And then they go, Oh, that's alright then.
SPEAKER_01Well it's really, you know. Yeah, I absolutely get that, but you get it everywhere. So um I love going to sessions because really it should be just a fun occasion where there's no dots, there's nothing to worry about. Everyone sort of knows a handful of the tunes, you leap in when you know them, you have a nice time playing. It's social, you know, pint of beer occasionally, nods to some of the other players, a little in joke because well, I know that version of the tune as well that the people on the other side don't know. But it creeps in. There's this speed in Irish sessions, the speed, the dexterity, the different improvisation aspects that they're adding in the different ornaments. Like that's there's an elitism to that, and there's a lot of people terrified to go and join a session despite loving the folk music because they don't want to be looked at. Like, what was that night you displayed? Did you just try and play a harmony in a hornpipe? Oh, what are you doing? There are barriers. There are barriers to these kinds of things, and it's it shouldn't be there, really.
SPEAKER_02I guess we're all just trying to validate again, aren't we? It's just that sort of be it folk jazz or my pretentious brand of instrumental acoustic music. It's just trying to justify why you make a living out of it or why it's such a big deal.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, if you spent a lot of time perfecting something, it does seem to be creatives generally, lots of the arts, you have to prove to someone why it was worth making that piece of art. Uh, because it's an opinion at the end of the day. Not everyone will like it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have value. And it's it's really hard because you spend all of your time trying to persuade yourself as well that what you've done is something good, and it can tempt you down the path of being, well, you know, I've got this much training behind me, and I can play my three octave scales really fast, and it's it's a ridiculous boast. Like, can you play it expressively though? Who knows? That can you play that in a musical context that you enjoy? Are you having a nice time? Was it satisfying for you to do, and did anyone else have a nice time with you?
SPEAKER_02Measurements of success, measurements of joy, almost like you know, what sort of yeah, the the idea of always bringing value into stuff, isn't it? It's just well maybe it just is. Maybe maybe that was enough.
SPEAKER_01I'd I'd like to think so, but I think we're definitely at one of those points, it's not like we've never been in a difficult time, like financially, for example, crashes have happened, all sorts of things, but it's another period where everyone's having to justify their worth. And uh it's another reason to end up in this kind of way of thinking. Well, you know, you should pay for my ticket because I've got all these accolades to my name, I've won awards doing this, I've been trained this way. And you you can kind of accidentally believe it yourself after a while. But yeah, I just thinking of random examples, I know Carnatic Indian singers that have a very similar thing. Like us Western uh classical trained musicians just have no concept of uh the dexterity that they have and the amazing depth of their music and ours could just be brushed aside. So it happens everywhere.
SPEAKER_02Mmm. Wow. Big stuff, man. Was there value in this podcast? Who knows? I enjoyed it, and I hope everyone who listens enjoys it, and I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much, man.
SPEAKER_01Well, yeah, thank you for having me. It's it's absolutely fascinating, and uh, I mean, we'll get you playing the cello at some point.
SPEAKER_02So there you go. I hope you enjoyed that episode. Thank you to Soundstorm and to our sponsor, Faber Music, and to our charity sponsor, British Youth Music Theatre. Thank you so much to you for listening.