Community Chat with Felicity Breen (Part 1)

In this episode, Hannah and Krista welcome Felicity Breen from Perth, Australia. Felicity shares her music background, including why, despite having a wonderful piano teacher in her younger years, she stopped playing and how she came back to it. She also discusses the questions that led her to music learning theory and how her teaching goals changed after learning about audiation.

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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

Krista: 1:14

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

Hannah: 1:19

And I'm Hannah Mayo of Mayo Piano.

Krista: 1:22

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.

Hannah: 1:34

We'd like to welcome our next community guest Felicity Breen, who we've known through the Music Moves for Piano Facebook groups for some years now. And we recently had the pleasure of finally meeting in person at the summer PDLC back in August, Felicity is from Perth all the way in Western Australia. So welcome, Felicity, we're so glad you're here.

Felicity: 2:01

Thanks so much. It's a real honor to be here.

Hannah: 2:04

Could you start by telling the listeners a little bit about yourself, who you are, what you do, and all about your background?

Felicity: 2:12

Sure. So I'm Felicity Breen. And I'm a piano teacher. I live in Sorrento, which is a little seaside suburb in Perth, Western Australia, as you said. I started teaching in 2011, which is about 12 years ago now. Prior to that, I was a busy mom of four gorgeous little children, who are now an all grown up. Yeah, so a little bit about my music background. I'm gonna go pre birth. So my mother grew up in India, and she was accustomed to having live music as a part of her daily life. And so I guess coming to Australia, she continued that sort of acculturation for us. And yes, she took violin lessons when she was pregnant with me. So there's a bit of shades of Gordon there. And in the background, as I was growing up, she was always playing something. I remember, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, but we were also listening to Chuck Mangione, Roberta Flack, John McClane, Billy Joel, Elton John, so I was very lucky. So my mother took me and my sisters to many concerts. I loved the variety of sounds of the orchestra. And around age four or five, I remember running outside finding a stick, and picking it up and trying to get the sound of a violin out of the ukulele. So I was, I was keen and ready to learn. I asked for violin lessons shortly after that. I sounded pretty horrible. So yeah, I had violin lessons. And about a year later, I started piano lessons and just really, really gelled with my piano teacher. Her name was Jane McKinley. Everything switched in my mind from that point onwards, and I just grew to love the piano and came to consider it my first instrument. So my lessons with Jane McKinley were not traditional to start with. She herself was a composer, accompanist, and an early childhood music educator. She worked with School of the Air, which is a program that delivers music education to children across Australia in the remote regions. She was Dalcroze and Orff trained, and recognized that I needed to start music away from the piano. She had me work on coordinating my whole body, embodying the anacrusis, the crusis, the metacrucis. We worked on the xylophone first before she moved me to the piano. So yeah, very sort of non traditional, I guess. Mrs. McKinley noticed me creating at the piano when I was quite young and encouraged me by notating my compositions. But from about the age of 11, sorry, that's the age of eight to 11, my sister and I played in the eisteddfod and sort of went down that competition pathway. And we did pretty well for ourselves. We were doing solos and duet categories. And through that process, we also did the exam path and lessons became a lot more traditional and notation-oriented. I guess at some point, I probably stopped creating and improvising. We also played in community orchestras and ensembles. I played the violin and my sister played the trumpet. And my other sister had a beautiful singing voice and sang operatic style music. So there was a lot of music going on, in our homes growing up. During my mid teen years, the piano was still important to me, but for various reasons, I felt increasingly like an outsider to the music world. I was placed in a music specialty school. And I was told that violin should be my first instrument. And I was given a violin teacher who berated me each week for not being good enough. As you can imagine, that had quite a big effect on my feeling of myself as a musician. Piano lessons stopped at 16. And I interpreted all of these sorts of events as pressure to stop playing, which I did. Yeah, sadly, I'll come back to that later. So music to me it was not about performing on stage, it was about musicking. And it was a connection between mind and body, being present, and creating. My high school music experiences almost undid the wonderfully rich and meaningful work that Mrs. McKinley has set up for me in the early years. Instead of music, I threw myself into the visual arts, and went on to major at university in that along with postgraduate studies in education, which came to be handy later on. So fast forwarding to 2011, I met an amazing piano teacher called Cheryl Penson, who encouraged me to complete my music qualifications. So at the age of 40, I threw myself into an intense practice routine and achieved two piano performance diplomas. My Associate of Music, Australia called the MSA and my license diploma with Trinity College of London. Cheryl understood the challenges of juggling family life and studies. And I was really, really supported by her. Very lucky to find her. At this time, I'd also started to teach a handful of students just seven or so to begin with. So she also started thinking about audiation. I watched her as she looked at a score, and she would just hear the music, she was notationally audiating, I guess. And that was something I've not seen anyone do before. And she did it with such confidence. And I remember thinking, that's amazing. I sort of filed that away in my mind. Yeah, she was able to understand music in a way that I really struggled with, melodically and harmonically, and taught me that there was so much more to music than dots on a page. I'm also a Yogini. And I've practiced, I've been practicing yoga since the mid 1990s, a type of flow style yoga, called Ashtanga. And I mentioned this because my interest in the mind-body connection, along with my renewed Kenai studies led me to Dalcroze. And so once I'd finished my performance diplomas, I completed the Dalcroze Foundation Certificate here in Perth. And the teachers are amazing. A couple of the older teachers were actually taught by students of Jacques-Dalcroze himself. And we had one amazing Laban teacher. I learned, through direct experience with Dalcroze, two main things. Firstly, there are these musical interrelated concepts that pertain to music performance, that are rarely talked about in mainstream music, education, space, weight, time, and flow. And secondly, these musical concepts are written into music notation, and not the other way around. Dots on a page are representations of these choreographed ideas. Traditional ways of teaching, don't allow students to experience music, only to try and perceive it intellectually and through the mind. So from piano, to visual art, to yoga, back to piano and through Dalcroze, up to Gordon is quite a windy path, but here I am.

Krista: 9:22

That was quite a lot to process. And I feel like I learned so much about you in these last six minutes that I had no idea. That's amazing that music was just such a huge part of your life. And your first piano teacher sounds lovely. And even if you couldn't stay with her for too long, she set such a wonderful foundation for you that you can still, I'm sure you still draw upon.

Felicity: 9:47

Exactly, yeah, yeah. It's like a full circle. It's quite interesting.

Hannah: 9:53

That's fabulous that you discovered Laban. And before you ever discovered Gordon, and there is that connection between Laban and Gordon, that is, with the flow and time weight, space, all those things, you're right, that we don't talk about enough, I think in music lessons, and the idea of space has really been coming up a lot. And it's kind of this almost, this is a bit of a stretch, but it's almost like this spiritual thing. You know, like this, the spiritual aspect of music about creating space, in our bodies, in our movements in the musi,c in our mind, like giving our mind space to audiate, giving silence giving aural space to feel music in an internal way rather than the external way like you said. I just love everything you just said Felicity. It's wonderful.

Felicity: 10:54

Oh, thank you. It's very, very hard to put all of that into words and but I know exactly what you mean. I find that connection just endlessly fascinating. And I do believe Gordon did as well. I think if you read his writings, there's a lot of things that skirt around that. I mean, in his last bit, I think he was talking about audiation of space. And I just wish I could have known where he was hitting with it.

Hannah: 11:22

That's that's been coming up a lot because I think people even long time-MLT audiation approach veterans are still grappling with the idea of space audiation and what it really is. And I was having a conversation on Friday with my GIML mentee about this. We should do a podcast episode about space audiation one day.

Krista: 11:48

So you have told us about what came pre Music Learning Theory. So now, can you tell us a little bit about your personal auditaion journey? How did you discover Music Learning Theory? Just what was that process like?

Felicity: 12:04

Right? So I've got a year 2017 is when I discovered Music LearningTheory. It was actually during my seventh year of piano teaching. It coincided with the end of my formal piano study. So I had these papers that said I'd reached a certain level of musicianship at the piano, but I knew there was so much more, I was playing someone else's music, and I was trying to understand it from the outside in. I also knew I had deficits especially in my understanding of harmony that prevented me from being able to improvise. I also wanted to expand my studio, and I knew I would need a better way to support students in their learning. So up until 2017, I've been teaching repertoire only, and thought of music skills as something that was acquired by way of osmosis. I thought about Suzuki as a way to help students develop musicianship away from notation. But I didn't want to limit myself to teaching the same pieces to each student. On the other hand, I figured students needed a book that they had something physical, to remind them what to practice between lessons. But all the other method books were about music notation. Music lessons, for me, became about notation and not the music that it represents. And I knew that was problematic, but I just didn't know how to take the first step forward to make that change. I was really set up to discover MLT. So yeah, during those years where I started teaching this, my students struggled technically, different strategies didn't help with their sense of ease. It seemed like each new student presented with a new way of not being able to do what I wanted them to do. I became a bit of a technique freak, I focused on the length of fingernails and practice regimes. And I grew more and more uncomfortable with the idea of celebrating students for whom traditional lessons seem to work while at the same time letting other students fall away.

Unknown: 13:57

My students had poor rhythm, well a lot of them had poor rhythms, skills. And mid 2010s, I latched on to a fairly new method that was kind of reading based. It was addressing more isolated technical motions, which interested me the rote pieces were absolutely fabulous. And I still use those a lot. But it just left me with more questions. And so when I started to ask myself, what do these students need to be able to do, before I asked them to do the things that I'm asking them to do? And that reminds me a little bit of Marylin's evolution of the Book One to Five series that she has, and after those, she thought childrens still need some more scaffolding underneath what we think they should need. For example, I didn't know that I could easily audiate triple meter upbeat elongation patterns. There's a little book that has a little tune at the end of it called "My Bonny."(singing) "My Bonny lies over the ocean," which I'm sure you all know. And at their age, you know, when these children were playing this, at their age, I was probably able to recognize, imitate, create and improvise rhythm patterns in those categories and in that context, but I didn't know that some students would need just a little bit more scaffolding to be able to do that. And then they would be off and running. I started to recognize that there were big chunks missing. And then I saw a couple of comments by Anne-Katherine Davis and Benjamin Steinhardt and they were dropping comments about Gordon and audiation. Sentences like solving rhythm and technical issues and Marylin's method books got mentioned numerous times. I bought Learning Sequences in Music and was hooked from the preface where Gordon says, responding to people criticizing his him calling it Gordon's learning theory and saying that actually really, we all have our own learning theories. We all have our own beliefs, and we really should allow those theories to be challenged. So my thinking turned upside down and I thought"What do I really believe?" And I thought I need to start questioning my own learning theories. So I bought Eric Bluestine's book, all of Marylin's books, I didn't worry about the costs and the wait times. And I realized later that Marilyn was actually subsidizing the cost of those books to Australia. So I was very, very grateful. I emailed Marylin as to how I could prepare for a PDLC. And , she suggested several resources. And one of them was the lecture CDs, the Learning Sequences in Music lecture CDs, which were really pivotal for me to hear Gordon's voice. On disc one, around the 19 minute mark, he says, "If you're worried about technique, forget it. Because if you can audiate, chances are you'll have a few technical problems. And you'll master many of the technical problems if you can audiate what you're trying to do. So my thinking switched from technique to audiation, and this started the process of discovering about MLT for me. From then onwards, I separate rhythm from tonal in everything I hear. And it just helps me so much. So I bought the Music Moves for Piano books, listened to the Pattern CD, the Keyboard Game songs, Beth Bolton's songs in a variety of tonalities, and meters and I was off and running. Within a few months, I was audiating all the tonalities with not much of a problem. It was consistent practice, but I knew it was backed by research. And it was actually a very calming, very enjoyable, and very productive time in terms of musicianship, which I've heard so many people say. So I learned songs, the orienting patterns, tonal sequences for the different tonalities took me a bit longer, essential tones in each tonality, and I created with the tonalities every day. I paid attention to where the semitones were, which was one of Marilyn's tips. That really helped me a lot. In daily listening, I started listening for the resting tone as I was walking down the aisles in the supermarket. Everything came to life. I was listening for context and function, for both tonality, meter, things just opened up. In the same way it must have happened for my students, having a vocabulary of tonal patterns and rhythm patterns meant that I could identify sameness and difference in music. And it was just so exciting and really fun. The quality of the songs had a direct impact on my ability to audiate the tonalities as well. So the materials were really wonderful quality. And in terms of rhythm, like Dalcroze, it was it was very similar, but it was more organized and sequenced, which suited me. I wanted to to learn more. So I booked a place in the 20019 PDLC And I was so excited to meet Marilyn.

Felicity: 18:45

And then the pandemic hit, and I'm trying not to tear up. I never got to meet Marilyn in real life, but I feel her presence. And I felt her presence and even being so far away and I still feel her presence. And I think anyone using her method will feel it. She knew that I was a huge fan. And we had several zoom study groups, which were spin offs of, Krista and Hannah, your Pattern, Skills, and Sequence that Drema organized and yeah, I had so grateful that I had that time with her to ask her questions, and she shared a lot of information with us. Yeah, so my teaching goals, to summarize, my teaching goals went from helping students to play with good rhythm and technical ease by focusing on technique to helping students understand music by teaching them how to audiate. The technique started to happen naturally, when the good rhythm started happening naturally and reading became more effective and efficient, if at all, because it's perfectly fine to go far down the audation path without needing notation. And in a roundabout way, my students ended up showing me that what they needed was what I needed to. I became happy in my imperfections. MLT is not about proving yourself as a musician or as a teacher, it's about the music. Returning to music as an adult and discovering MLT was like doing a full circle back to happier days for me where personal connection to music is valued, where music creativity is encouraged, and where the individual can flourish in their own time.

Hannah: 20:21

That is all just so beautiful. I don't really know where to start. Let's start first with this part about the the technique versus the audiation. I went through the same thing and I'm sure a lot of teachers that have been at this for a while discovered the same thing. The technique will come if you know what it's supposed to sound like. And if you have a really solid rhythmic foundation, and you know how to approach the instrument and all of that is so uniquely synthesized in Music Moves for Piano. And I think that that's a really great point is that many times a student's audiation is far beyond their technical ability. But if you just keep working with that audiation and keep building on it, by the time that they're fully in their bodies, and they've grown, and their hands are as big as they're going to be, and their bodies are as tall as they're going to be. I mean, all of that just comes so easily and naturally if we are patient with that process. And so, great point. I'm glad that you brought that up. Because I think that we just need to keep saying that.

Krista: 21:33

Absolutely. And it makes me think of one of my students actually. I was talking to somebody about this recently. He is working on a route solo, he's, I think it's called"Revelers." It's in Phrygian. It's a lovely, lovely solo. And I'm really taking my time with him to learn it, really making sure that he can audiate it. And it just makes such a difference with his technique. If I rush having them learn repertoire, the technique suffers. But if I really just take a step back and take it piece by piece, and really make sure that they're understanding what they're playing, and they're really comfortable with it, and they know what they're going to do, I notice a huge difference. It's really important. And I'm glad you mentioned that as well.

Hannah: 22:19

And the balancing on the third finger. You know I love to talk about the middle finger. And this is just such a great time to reiterate that Keyboard Games is all about learning how to balance the hand and use the arm and in early Book One, there's a lot of focus on body awareness and shoulder awareness and forearm awareness and all of these different technical awarenesses. And that is probably in my top three favorite things about this approach is that we are so focused on the sound and the audiation. And in order to really do that effectively, we use a lot of middle finger playing and the reason that it's the middle finger so we can balance the hand as opposed to the other fingers.

Krista: 23:05

Well, I feel like we have a lot more to talk about Felicity so if you will, we would love to have you back on for another episode.

Hannah: 23:14

Love to be back. Thank you.

Krista: 23:15

Thanks so much, everyone, and we'll see you soon.