Keyboard Technique: Deep Dive with Scarlette Kerr and Celeste Watson Part 2

Hannah and Krista continue their discussion with Celeste Watson and Scarlette Kerr, highlighting the significance of blending audiation, biomechanics, and research-based methods in piano teaching, emphasizing a growth mindset and the patience needed to see long-term benefits.

Scarlette's Webinars
The Embodiment of Rhythmic Audiation at the Piano
Technique and Young Beginners : Development of motor skills and application to Keyboard Games
The Technique Checklist: Sequencing Tips to Monitor and Guide Student Technical Development

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Introduction to Audiation-based Piano Instruction and Music Moves for Piano

Ready to learn more about audiation-based piano instruction and Music Moves for Piano? Visit Music Learning Academy for online courses, webinars, and resources.

Want to dive into audiation-based piano instruction? Check out Music Moves for Piano by Marilyn Lowe.

Transcript

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Hannah Mayo: [00:00:00] Hello, everyone. Krista and Hannah here with a brief message before we start the episode. 

Krista Jadro: We are on the third season of Keys to Music Learning, and we have loved every second. Talking about audition based piano instruction is a passion of ours, if you couldn't tell, and we thank you for listening and keeping us going.

Hannah Mayo: We recently launched the Keys to Music Learning Community. Similar to Patreon, this is a way to support the podcast and access bonuses, such as opportunities to attend podcast recordings and monthly meetings so you can pick our brains with your questions, share your successes, and connect with other teachers.

Krista Jadro: Become a silent partner for only $3 a month or, to access the bonuses, a friend of the podcast for $5 a month. Join today at musiclearningacademy.com/keystomusiclearningcommunity. The link will be in our show notes. 

Hannah Mayo: Thank you all for listening and enjoy the [00:01:00] podcast. 

Krista Jadro: Welcome to Keys to Music Learning. I'm Krista Jadro of Music Learning Academy. 

Hannah Mayo: And I'm Hannah Mayo of Mayo Piano. 

Krista Jadro: Join us as we discuss common goals and challenges in the piano studio, and offer research based ideas and solutions to guide every one of your students to reach their full musical potential with audiation.

We are back for part two with Celeste Watson and Scarlette Kerr. Enjoy! 

And the student's ability to How do you think that lends to developing technique? I mean, it has to be hugely beneficial for a student not to be trying to read something, right, and trying to focus on technique, and doing all of this, but instead, when they're learning to audiate, they're learning music, they're learning to [00:02:00] understand what they're hearing, what they're playing, what they're creating.

And do you, what do you see with their technique as they develop audiation? 

Celeste Watson: I think it comes down to a definition of what is audiation, and there are lots of different definitions that are proposed to it, but the one that I love is listening with understanding. I probably heard it from one of you guys.

And whenever you learn the skill of listening with understanding, you're ultimately practicing an act of focus. And so, listening with understanding requires that they put their attention to something for a defined amount of time and make a judgment call. And when they learn that skill, listening to an aural sound, they're immediately, over time, able to transfer that to other areas of their life.

So, if I give them a direction about how their elbow joint should feel, because they have this ability to listen, with understanding and make a judgment call, they're able to put their attention to their elbow and say, what do I feel? Did [00:03:00] I feel it? And if they have never been asked to have specific focus, feel something, hear something and make a decision, teaching technique is very, very, very complicated because it requires listening to the physical sensations of your body. And then there's many other areas that that can also be applied to. When they come to read notation, that ability to focus, to look, and to read. When they come to hearing their sound in a space that's not your studio, focus on the sound, hear it, you know, in another space and just like making a decision based on what they're truly hearing.

I think it makes a huge difference because it's teaching a student to listen. 

Scarlette Kerr: And that's not to say that technical development is moving at the same rate as their audition. I feel like with students, their audition moves a lot faster than their technical development, which is great and also frustrating at [00:04:00] the same time for the student because they want to play harder stuff because they're hearing it and I'm seeing them do all this wonky stuff to be able to play what they're hearing.

So, it's not like it looks great, it looks perfect all the time. It's like we go week by week, just a reminder of how they should move. What it should sound like and tying how the movement informs the sound. If it's a physical habit that they're working on, we just talk about that physical habit over and over and over again because they're just not noticing it or they're not feeling it.

So, like, there's that kinesthetic awareness that's like a separate skill than the audiation. Also, they're like separate. So I, when I try and teach them like the rote repertoire or anything, it's like trying to constantly marry the two as soon as possible so they don't have to worry about it later.

And we just keep tweaking it and keep tweaking it, even if it doesn't look perfect in performance, because they're still young, their hands are still small. They're still trying to deal with an instrument that's not maybe necessarily quite the size. And sometimes their hands are so small that I allow them to, like, I change [00:05:00] fingering, I take out notes to make it accessible for them. And it's still musical. They're still happy with it. And so I think it's just always trying to make sure that they feel comfortable at the instrument at all times and going to their level. Because everyone's musical aptitudes different. And I also say that everyone's technical aptitudes different because there are some kids that just know how to move or they just, that comes to them easily.

And then there are some kids that I'm still talking about, like playing on the middle finger without isolating it after like a year and a half, and we're probably gonna talk about that for a long time, and that's okay. That doesn't mean that they're not gonna be successful musicians. It's just meeting them where they're at.

Hannah Mayo: You've touched in different ways on what makes Music Moves compatible with the Lister-Sink approach and the injury preventative technique and using proper biomechanics. Could you say more about that? Are there other ways that you've noticed where the curriculum and what you have studied [00:06:00] are in alignment and support one another.

We might need to review what's already been said about it. 

Scarlette Kerr: Well, one thing I noticed that immediately upon discovering Music Moves is that it's also from a research standpoint. There's years and years of research, both by Gordon and by Marilyn. That creates curriculum that's designed to help children learn, and not designed to help teachers teach, if that makes sense.

Like this is much more work intensive for a teacher to teach Music Moves than it would be for them to teach another popular mainstream piano method. Because there's science that goes into it and you have to know the science. It's like the cognition behind it, it's kind of meta. You have to know what you're doing before you can do it.

It's the same thing with the Lister-Sink method, like you have to understand how the brain functions and how the brain works. Our whole first semester is focused on like understanding how we learn or relearn and rewire the neural pathways in our brain to retrain something from the bottom up. And of course retraining looks a little different than building something from the [00:07:00] very beginning like Celeste mentioned earlier, but we're still talking about brain functions and we're still talking about like habits and we're still talking about how to practice.

In order for us to rewire or lay down new foundations for us to remember forever. And both Music Moves and Lister-Sink Method does that as like a core component of those methods. And so that's just like one thing. They're both based on research and both based on neuroscience and psychology and cognition and I think that's super valuable for teachers to know as people that are, we're creatives, but we also can be scientific and I think a lot of us are very analytical and we can take that analytical skill and take it from science to inform how we teach, to create better musicians, to become better creatives.

Celeste Watson: And I think also a commitment to further research like the Lister Sink method and MLT both have, like, they started both of them as research [00:08:00] based methods, and they both continue to pursue more research and more study, and more, both quantitative and qualitative research about how this actually works in children and adults, how this works in people who have experienced a playing related injury, and also for people who haven't experienced a playing related injury, and just a commitment to actually researching and studying what works from a scientific perspective. Maybe I should say from a research, from a research based perspective. 

Scarlette Kerr: Right. And we come out of there wanting to learn more. So it's not like you graduate from Salem or from the certificate program thinking that you know all about the body because there's so much more to learn.

And so we're just continual students in that regard. Just because we have terminal degrees doesn't mean that we are going to stop learning. 

Celeste Watson: I think that's one of the things that I have loved about the community of teaching colleagues that I've become connected with through the Lister-Sink Institute, [00:09:00] is because so many of us have gone through the very challenging experience of having a playing related or a non playing related injury that requires you to re examine almost everything about your approach to playing the keyboard.

And that creates, I think, in many of us, a curiosity and an openness to try things. And just a great desire to be inquisitive. And I have so appreciated that within the community of teachers with the Lister-Sink Institute. And I see that also within the Teaching community of MLT. A great desire to be inquisitive about what works, what doesn't work, why doesn't it work, and how can we fix whatever might be in the way of getting it working.

And I think they just really share that desire to understand why things work. 

Hannah Mayo: [00:10:00] Nailed it. You nailed it. I see that more in this community of teachers than anywhere else. I think in a lot of communities of teachers, and not always, I'm not trying to throw a blanket statement on all music teachers of the world, but there is an ego.

There's a security or an insecurity issue with like needing to be seen as doing it right. We're doing it well, or even being the best, you know, I've heard teachers actually say, you know, we are doing it the best and rather than like coming at it from a very sort of judging and, concrete, what we might call fixed mindset.

I feel like there's a more of a growth mindset here, especially because we don't know what we're doing at first, or we don't have the answers and we just want the answers. And once you get the answers, [00:11:00] you see that in other people, you see that they don't have the answers and they want the answers.

And then we're just sharing all the answers and everything's getting better. And it's, you know, it's not without its challenges, of course, and maybe we can talk about that next. Over time, it evolves in a way that is just really wonderful and magical. 

Krista Jadro: I love it, Hannah. We don't know what we're doing at first.

I feel like every time I hit a new Music Moves for Piano book, I'm like, Do I know what I'm doing? Because you're constantly learning, and I love that about Music Learning Theory. 

Hannah Mayo: It's an adventure. 

Krista Jadro: It is. It is an adventure and I love it. Celeste, you mentioned research and I feel like you both, and there's a few other teachers that we've met through PDLCs or Zoom or what not.

It's almost as if you guys are pioneering using this, the Barbara Lister Sink method with young beginners and young children. Are you, are either of [00:12:00] you interested in doing research in the future and really kind of documenting what you're doing with the students? 

Celeste Watson: It's something that I'm very interested in.

It requires a huge level of specificity and also one of the complications is that usually It's with minors, and so there's a lot of regulation that is around how that happens. So, it's definitely something that I am interested in for the future. It's a little bit tricky to find a program that is on board with doing that kind of research.

So yeah, like there's definitely an interest, there's definitely subjects that can be researched, and when those are on adults, that's much easier. But I think it is really important somehow to find a way to do research with minors, because the vast majority of people who start playing the piano do so as a very young minor, and so, it's, It really [00:13:00] matters because the, the size of the body and the size of the hand is so different and that's definitely going to affect what's going on with the statistical research that's been done.

There's so much research that has been done by so many people. So much of it is published in the Performing Arts Medicine Association Journal. And there's also other publications in other journals. But those are all done with adults who have roughly adult hand size, which varies greatly between adults.

But even the child's, even their cognitive self is so different than the adult self that they really are, they just learn in, the learning environment is just different. So I really am interested in researching those kinds of things, but it's, it's tricky to know what institutions to partner with to do with that.

Scarlette Kerr: Right. Right. And I would just rather just keep teaching rather than have to like be a doctorate. Celeste is the one that she'll be our in [00:14:00] home researcher and I'll be happy to contribute to that data. 

Hannah Mayo: I'm so with you. I'm so with you on that, Scarlette. 

Scarlette Kerr: Yeah. 

Hannah Mayo: I would rather just teach and see for myself what happens in my own little teaching bubble than try to do research.

Scarlette Kerr: Right. I'll do my own scientific, what is it called? The theorem or I'll get in my own studio with my hypothesis. Yeah. Yeah. My husband has a master's degree in, quantitative psychology. So he's a stats guy. Not that he does it in his career currently, but he keeps telling me that like, I should be reading all these different books and Use statistics all in a different way, do assessment in all these different, different ways, but I'd rather just teach. And just let the results speak for themselves. Hopefully in a good, positive way. And if they don't result in a positive way, that will be a message to me that I gotta change something. 

Celeste Watson: Which can I brag on you, Scarlette? It is being validated. Scarlette will not say this because she's very modest, but her students went to a competition recently.

Scarlette Kerr: A festival not a competition. 

Celeste Watson: Okay, so they went to a [00:15:00] festival, and the adjudicator came and found Scarlette afterwards and said, Scarlette, your students have incredible rhythmic and musical flow in their playing. And she said that that is so rare in the elementary pianist.

And it was just a standout of all the students in the festival that she had adjudicated. She noticed it as a hallmark of those who were Scarlet's students. 

Scarlette Kerr: Yeah, she had that really good tone, which there you go, and they're, you know, 8, 9, 8 through 11 year olds. So, it was very validating. I will say it was very validating.

 Especially because talking about challenges. Celeste and I are very, very lucky and privileged to have each other within 10 minutes of each other. I know that's not common for Music Moves teachers. They're kind of like alone in a sea of traditionalists. And it's hard, it's easy for us to get in our own little bubble of like great teaching and great pedagogy.

But when you go out into the rest of the professional world, they're doing you know, traditional things. You have, I [00:16:00] feel like I have to put like, defense walls up and like, justify who I am as a teacher and justify my students to fellow colleagues that are just kind of curious and or like, wary of not teaching notation from the beginning or working on music theory like, as a huge thing in the beginning.

And that same festival, I had a conversation with a teacher who was like, so you don't teach music reading from the beginning. And I was like, no. And so, and she's like, oh, interesting. And if other parents see that, they might be like, well, well, wait, is that normal? Is that not normal? Even though I'm very upfront saying like, how I teach is not the same as other people.

And so, and of course, like that ego comes back in, right? Cause you want to be validated. You want to be seen as a good professional, but, you also don't always have all the answers because we're all learning at the same time. But I just like put a lot of faith into this teaching and I'm very enthusiastic about it and I just hope that parents see that and they do like have having taught this pretty okay for the past three [00:17:00] years. Parents are starting to see the fruits of their children's work and how I teach. But it's still hard to go out in the community and have my students be evaluated or seen by other teachers because we have a completely different mindset and a completely different goal than perhaps other teachers do. And to have them compare like apples and oranges always makes me really nervous. But having Celeste as like someone that you that can validate your actions is really helpful. But also, and also having professionals validate your students playing is also really great too.

Celeste Watson: It's such an act of playing the long game and having faith in the process, I think that's another thing that has a lot of commonality. I think that's another area where there's a lot of commonality between MLT and the Lister-Sink method is this idea of trusting the process, and if you give the process time, and you do the process in a good environment, And in an environment that truly cares, we can trust that the process will work.

And, you know, like the magical thing, like we may be [00:18:00] doing, we may be building a huge amount of foundation before teaching the student to read, but, you know, the magical thing is then they're all reading, right? Like they all do eventually. And they do so from such a rich understanding, but it requires us to trust the process, which when I retrained, that was a hard process to trust, to sit there with something that is in process and incomplete. You know, you go from one way of playing, which landed you an injury, but it was at least a complete way of playing, and you're going to something that is good and complete, but you're in this transition and this phase of flux, and it feels so incomplete, and it's very hard, at least for me, to sit there in the incomplete place on the way to something better.

And Hannah, what you talked about a little bit ago about the growth mindset is so important, and I want my students to understand that that [00:19:00] growth mindset is actually what enables them to grow and learn. Because without that, it doesn't matter how much time they spend practicing.

Without that ability to have a growth mindset, the practicing is of a very limited value. And I remember so many times in the retraining process, coming to this place where I was so frustrated, like I felt like there was this thing I wanted to do and it was just outside of my grasp, like I didn't know how to get there.

And then realizing that's the feeling you have in your mind and your body right before you're about to learn something big. And if you can just acknowledge that that's the feeling that I have in my body and say, I'm on the verge of learning something tremendous, and let the body relax into the confidence that you're about to learn something.

It was so helpful for me, and I just want my students to experience this. When you bump up against that, that means you're about to learn something, and don't be afraid of that [00:20:00] feeling of frustration. And don't fear that and don't back away from that, like move towards that and move through that because that means that there's something, fancy this, big flashing light, there are things that I don't know.

And I'm bumping up against one of those things that I don't know and I can't learn it unless I bump into the boundary of my learning. I will never be able to cross that. And I think that's why, for Music Moves teachers, and maybe also for the Lister-Sink Institute teachers, I think some of, maybe, I think maybe one of the reasons we have a great openness to that growth mindset is because having a playing related injury forces you to that boundary.

You realize that something stopped working and you have to acknowledge that to yourself. And then you have to acknowledge that to someone who can help you. And then the beauty of acknowledging that to a community of people who have experienced similar [00:21:00] things and have also been transparent about that. And so you have this wonderful community of people who have all experienced something that didn't work, and we're all working towards solutions together, and it just, it fuels a growth mindset. 

Scarlette Kerr: Yeah, that's so important. I think that was kind of the uniqueness about Salem's community, is that we were all there because something wasn't working, and we all had the humility to acknowledge that.

And also had the humility to acknowledge that, like, we needed a community to get better, like, to help ourselves learn. We were all very supportive of each other. There was no ego involved, really. And I know there's other programs that are probably more intense that you feel like you have to guard yourself against other colleagues, but here it was very collaborative and we all just learned together. I think it just kind of also helped us learn more because we learned other perspectives, we learned other stories, we're able to learn from other people's stories, and kind of foster that in our own professional lives here in our own [00:22:00] studios.

So, group learning, that's another thing from Music Moves. Marilyn, I know, is super into groups. And so, I had group lessons in my graduate degree at Salem. Me and two other women, we, we practiced together, we wrote lessons together, we took notes together. Celeste and I, over Christmas, I remember, winter break, we would get together and practice together.

And it was super helpful, having someone listen to you. and objectively give you criticism and not feel personally attacked by it. Because that's kind of a hard thing to overcome when you're learning your craft. You feel like everything is like a personal attack to you, but it's not. You learn to become objective in a skill.

 These are all skills. This is not who you are as a person. This is just part of you as a person. And that was something that changed my mindset at Salem as well. And I also wanted to point out with something that's, Celeste was talking about earlier about establishing that foundation.

While it takes time, I remember at Salem, you talked about the exponential growth. So that first year when you're retraining, everything's going [00:23:00] to go super, super slow, but you're establishing that foundation. But once you are able to establish that foundation, you build upon it and you're able to transfer those skills into different contexts and situations and different repertoires, then you're learning just takes off because you're able to problem your way through with a solid foundation.

 Same thing with Music Moves. It feels slow, maybe for the first couple years when you're in Keyboard Games and you're in book one, you're talking about tonic and dominant for a very long time in book one, in book two too, like you don't even get to like introduce subdominant until like late book two.

But when your students are learning other repertoire, they hear it and they can start and then they figure things out on their own and they can harmonize things on their own. And so they learn more repertoire because they hear those same patterns reoccurring over and over and over again. So, while it feels like you're spending a lot of time on content, when you put it in different contexts, it just feels like their world opens up so much more and then it's [00:24:00] easier to add on more complicated content, like subdominant or division elongation patterns, you know, and they just eat it up and they just run with it because they understand the principles behind all of it.

Hannah Mayo: Yeah. I think you touched on something that I'm starting to come to realize that. What we are doing is sort of like a way of life, you know, we, if we do tonic and dominant every single lesson, there's a reason for that. We are trying to make tonic and dominant and hearing those functions in many different keyalities.

We're trying to make that a way of life because that's what music is. It's a lot of tonic and dominant, or Western music, a lot of the piano repertoire that we deal with, and then eventually subdominant and then eventually subtonic in other modes or tonalities as we call them. And we were recently interviewing Janna Olson for a different episode and she says, and I just love it. She [00:25:00] comes back to this phrase, an ease of learning.

So in the beginning, yes, it's taxing. It takes a while. You're kind of sludging through some things. You're getting those neural pathways to connect and to kind of make this thing a way of life for the student. But then once it happens, and once that foundation is laid, it really, just like you said, Scarlette, it takes off, and then you can move at the pace of the student, but oftentimes, the pace just really picks up. 

Celeste Watson: It's so cool to see that. I had a crop of students last year cross that threshold from late intermediate into, excuse me, from late elementary into early intermediate, mid intermediate. And that is such a cool transition to watch in the student.

And I find for many of them, it's almost completely a technical transition because they can already hear all the intermediate stuff. They have it in their audaition. They can hear [00:26:00] the tonic dominant. They can hear the predominant concepts. They can hear all of that harmonic stuff. They can even hear the rhythm stuff.

Maybe it's complicated rhythm stuff, but they can hear it. And so much of that transition is just their physical bodies suddenly being able to coordinate that after years of laying that foundation. And it is so wild to watch that transition happen. It happens so fast if all of that prep work has been done, I was amazed.

There's no such thing as perfect teaching. And I definitely didn't do any version of perfect teaching with them. But even in an imperfect environment, they transitioned so quickly and so confidently to intermediate rep. I was amazed. 

Krista Jadro: That concludes part two of our discussion with Celeste Watson and Scarlette Kerr.

We will be back next week for the finale, part three. three of our discussion. But if you can't wait to learn more, check out Scarlette's webinars on the Music Learning Academy [00:27:00] webinar library. She has three, Technique in Young Beginners, the Embodiment of Rhythmic Audiation at the Piano, and the Technique Checklist.

And if you purchase one of these webinars, you will receive an offer to purchase the others at 50 percent off. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you soon.