Keyboard Technique: Deep Dive with Scarlette Kerr and Celeste Watson Part 3

In the third and final deep dive into keyboard technique, Scarlette Kerr and Celeste Watson share heartwarming stories about their experiences with Marilyn Lowe, the creator of Music Moves for Piano. They also emphasize the benefits of incorporating group musicianship and choir into piano lessons, helping students progress faster and more holistically. By combining private lessons with group sessions, they foster technical development, aural skills, and social bonds, creating a dynamic, supportive learning environment for young musicians.

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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

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 podcast. 

Krista Jadro: [00:01:00] 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 our third and final part of our discussion with Scarlettete Kerr and Celeste Watson. We really enjoyed this part of our chat and we hope you do too.

So let's talk a little bit about Marilyn Lowe. Marilyn Lowe, the author of Music Moves for Piano. Do you guys have any stories that you'd like to share about your experiences with her? 

Celeste Watson: The first time that I remember having a conversation with Marilyn about technique was when she took the Summer Intensive and she took it on Zoom.

And the way the [00:02:00] Summer Intensive is set up is you have group classes with Dr. Lister-Sink-Sink. and sometimes some of her assistants. And then in the afternoon, you have a rotating schedule. So you work with an Alexander Technique instructor, you work in a group with Dr. Lister-Sink-Sink, and then you work privately with one of her assistants.

And so I was working with Marilyn. And I think, ended up as a conversation about teaching. It was just a, I don't think we even worked much technique, I think we just sat there and talked about teaching for like 40 minutes. And it was the best. And I just remember her talking about the importance of developing technique beginning with the middle finger.

And she said, I see you guys doing that. And we were talking about how we did it in lessons with young children. And she said, there's so much congruence between what I see you doing and what is going on in Music Moves. And I just remember that was the first thing. And then my favorite story from Marilyn is she came to Greensboro [00:03:00] and Scarlettete and I would drive her whenever she came to Greensboro.

And I was driving her to visit Dr. Lister-Sink-Sink out at Dr. Lister-Sink-Sink's house. And I was probably 10 months or a year into teaching Music Moves, and I asked her in the car, I said, Dr. Lister-Sink, there are so many moving parts in the curriculum. Every day I have to reevaluate my students. Where are they in the learning sequence?

What are they ready for? What is too much for them? And it just seems like the students are constantly in flux, like their abilities are just changing, and the curriculum is here, and it's highly sequenced, and there's just so many moving parts. I just feel I cannot put all of them together and coordinate all of them on live little human beings.

There's just too much going on at one time. How in the world do you keep track of all of this? And she said, you just have to know the [00:04:00] curriculum and know your students and you will be fine. Just learn the methodology and learn your students and everything will be okay. And I was so thankful for that.

And I just keep telling myself that. And it is true. You just know your students and you know what you want to teach. And then it all just works out. I just love that from her. 

Scarlette Kerr: I remember a conversation with Marilyn when she first came to Salem. So she came to Salem to give her workshop of Music Moves and this was her first interaction, or her first meeting with Dr. Lister-Sink as well, or was going to be. And she was observing an Alexander Technique session, and then she was observing classes, and she was also observing lessons. And I think she was observing a lesson that I was in, and I was talking to her about like my struggles with this particular repertoire, and she's like, well, have you tried audiating it?

And I was like, I mean..., and of course, that says Baby Audiation Scarlette. So it's not like I, like, you keep using that word, but I don't necessarily know what that [00:05:00] word means. Right. And so I'm like, well, I mean, I guess I hear it in my head, but I, it didn't really, you know, strike me I had something like that that I could process in the moment.

And she would sit in and she was like, wow, like the, the amount of work that you guys are doing is really, really impressive. Like when, what, how Dr. Lister-Sink kind of talks you through technical components of it. And so years later, I mean, I pulled out that same piece. Just for like, fun. Fun, in quotation marks. Just to see like, where I would be at with it now. And her statement, three years, four years later, hits so differently, like, have you tried audiating it? I was like, I feel it differently. I hear it differently. Like, I hear like what Celeste refers to, like the harmonic progression. I would learn it completely differently now than I did four years ago.

And so, like, for Marilyn, again, like, I think the audiation was so tied to the technical aspect of it. Like, she understood the biomechanics, because she was trained in Taubman. [00:06:00] She took the Lister-Sink course and started using Lister-Sink terminology a lot in her casual conversations while she was in her, in that program, because I would still see her and keep in touch with her.

But she was always marrying that idea to what she already knew was audiation. And it wasn't as obvious at the time, because I was swimming in the sea of MLT, like, figuring out how to navigate it. But coming out of that, looking at the whole, it makes sense, like, what she was trying to conceptualize in her brain when it came to technique, because she was always using it to inform what she was already doing, which is already amazing.

Another favorite story was that I remember I was on a Zoom call with her and a bunch of other people for a, sing through, I think of Music Play. And she is a lifelong learner. She had what one computer screen dedicated to Lister-Sink, one screen dedicated to the sing through. At the same time, I feel like she had a screen dedicated to that jazz course she was taking.

I have no idea how she's able [00:07:00] to, like, process all that information all at once, but I hope I can get to a point where I can, like, look at one thing and, like, get some information from there, look at another thing. But I remember she called me out and she was like, Scarlettete, you told me that this course was not going to be a lot of work at all, but there's just so much work involved. And I was like, well, Marilyn, I'm a liar because there's actually so much work involved. But I mean, and she was just playing with me. But I know that she, she was so dedicated to making sure that she could observe as much as possible. Like Celeste saying that she was observing Bethany's lessons.

She would observe my lessons. And how I taught technique and also would give me pointers on how I was teaching keyboard games or music moves. She would constantly just be also like interjecting pedagogical wisdom in her own classes from conversations I've had with other students. Like she would just kind of also add on to what Lister-Sink's already saying, because she also had so much to offer, but she's also so humble as being willing to learn more in her age and just be open to anything.

I just constantly admire her [00:08:00] lifelong learning model. But she was very respectful. Like she was very complimentary of Dr. Lister-Sink and her playing, especially when she came the first time, Lister-Sink was actually giving a concert that weekend as well. And so she got to come to the concert and she was like, wow, that was so musical.

That was so impressive. So incredible. I think one of the pieces was the Chopin Cello Sonata. And she was like, I sat through that concert and I understood what was happening the whole time. I think I could hear what he was doing. All the compositional things that he was doing, I could hear all of that.

And Dr. Lister-Sink was absolutely beautiful and bringing out all the phrases. She had nothing but compliments about that performance. And this was like the day before she was giving a workshop for two days. So she was constantly on the move, but was very like grateful for that interaction, I think, with Salem students and with Dr. Lister-Sink. She learned a lot. Not that we were, Celeste and I were in the room to see what happened, it'd be great to see recordings of her and her lessons, but I know on the outside [00:09:00] she was really appreciative of having the opportunity to learn more about the body and biomechanics and the brain, because she knew all about the brain.

She has tons of articles, she said, sitting on her desk about neuroscience and whatnot, but it was great to, I guess, to see it again in this context of

body and motor skills. 

Hannah Mayo: I think that's a testament to how exciting all of this is. You know, when Marilyn discovered Edwin Gordon and Music Learning Theory, she got so excited.

And then, whoop, here comes Music Moves. And the excitement and the passion for learning why, why we can, why we cannot. All the passion and excitement for sort of opening these doors that were once closed and then being able to share that with other teachers and growing a community. I think that is what gave her all that mental energy. I think she was naturally just a very energetic person and a [00:10:00] brilliant mind, but it's sort of a testament to what we're all working with here, with audiation and with good physical movements and healthy technique from a very young age. Like that, that gets us so excited that we just want to keep working.

And it's what powers us through. And it's what powered her through Music Moves. Creating it, and then editing it, and then sharing it, and explaining it, and it's what powers us. So I love that story. Thanks for sharing that story. We've talked about so much, so much, and it's all wonderful.

I have one more thing I would like for you to share with us and with our listeners. Can we go all the way back to something you mentioned at the beginning of our time together? And that is your group musicianship class, right? And I think maybe there's like a choir involved. Can we hear all about [00:11:00] those exciting things that you're doing with your students?

Celeste Watson: Yeah. I guess go back three years to when we started thinking about we have to teach them to understand the content of music. We have to teach them to read. We have to teach them to be artistic and expressive. All of these take an incredible amount of time. And how in the world are we going to do this in 30 minutes a week?

And even with a Music Moves lesson plan, which could be 40 or 50 or an hour, how in the world are we going to teach them all of this stuff in an hour a week. I mean, Mozart was a genius, but I'm pretty sure Mozart had more instruction than an hour a week. How in the world are we going to produce competent, well rounded musicians who are ready, if they choose to be, to become professionals, to enter into a collegiate program or to enter a conservatory program?

How are we going to train this next [00:12:00] generation of musicians on just an hour of lessons a week? We cannot get through all the material that has to be covered. And so one of the solutions that we've come up, it's not a perfect solution, but we've asked our students to come twice a week, which is a big commitment.

The families are willing to do that. And they come once a week for their private lesson. And then they come a second time on Friday afternoon. And they have sort of a combination of classes on Friday afternoon. They have a musicianship class. We call it aural skills because many of the families are from a musical background, and so they understand the musical concept of aural skills.

That's sort of the closest thing they can relate it to. So we have musicianship class, and then we have choir. Our choir director is a wonderful instructor named Kristen Barnhart, and we are just so pleased and thrilled to be working with her. She's from a Kodaly background. She has such fantastic experience working with young [00:13:00] children, and we have seen such leaps and bounds of progress in our students. Double the instruction produces more than double the amount of progress. It's like compounding interest. It's not additive, it's 100%. It's multiplication. There's so many benefits we've seen from this.

One, it tends to attract a student who is not overscheduled, right? They're not juggling 17 million extracurriculars because you can't make a commitment to twice a week lessons with 17 million extracurriculars going on. Not that there's anything wrong with extracurriculars. I'm not dissing them. But it does require certain prioritization of time.

And there is actually, I used to be afraid that there would be a shortage of students who were willing to make that commitment. And there's actually not. Like, the farther we get down the road in this, the more we have students just like coming out of the woodwork to us, wanting to be involved in this.

And everybody is willing to make the time commitment to come twice a week. [00:14:00] And they are forming wonderful social bonds with the other kids who are in their choir and musicianship. They're making music as a group. They are exposed to other teachers with other teaching styles and other teaching philosophies.

So they're getting used to sort of living in this sort of like duality of. Like all of us as professional musicians, we live in multiple different musical worlds, and we have to transition between contexts, and it just gives them this wonderful opportunity to be musicians with others, to practicing transitioning in between musical contexts.

And it has just been so wonderful to teach with Scarlette as a colleague and with Kristen as a colleague. I just cannot say enough about it and about how actually achievable it is. If there's other people who are like this, I've talked to so many teachers, both within the MLT community and outside of the MLT community who have said what you're describing sounds [00:15:00] amazing. I don't think my students would ever go for it. I would just say don't worry about that. Like, they actually will go for it. And if some of them don't, that's okay. There will be students who will come to you who will go for it. And it has not been, I mean, it's work, right? It is work and it's coordination and it's effort, but it is a very doable amount of coordination and the benefits have been out of this world.

I will never, I mean never say never, but I never ever want to go back to just seeing my students privately one time a week. Because they're making such fantastic progress being in group aural skills, musicianship, and choir. I can't say enough good things about it. I'm so excited. I'm so excited.

It is my happiest teaching day of the week. 

Scarlette Kerr: And again, I'll just say that that's just the privilege and blessing it is to have someone else of your philosophical view in the same town as you that we can come together and collaborate and [00:16:00] help each other do this. So as a bit of a background, Celeste was the one who started doing this I think two years ago, a year and a half ago, and she was talking about having her students come a second day of the week for like essentially activity time, doing all the LSAs at a separate day of the week.

And the following year I was like, you know what, I have time in my schedule, I can do that. And so I was teaching I think two or three classes, like a book one, a late book one, a book two class on Fridays, and I would go from like, 3: 30 to like, 5: 30. But then of course, like, and our studio requirements are different.

Like for me, because it was an experiment, it was optional. Whereas Celeste, she's way more confident and way more assertive in what she wants. And she's like, this is a requirement. Mine was optional. Just because I was like, time schedules. Again, like I'm one of those teachers that's like, I'm not sure they're going to go for it.

So I'm just going to offer it and whoever offers it, good for them. And if not, okay. But I saw great progress in those students. And then when Celeste approached me about the idea of doing a choir, I was like, absolutely. [00:17:00] I love choir. I was a choir kid growing up and in college and choir added so much to my musical education as a pianist. Immensely. And so we came together and approached Kristen about the choir. And so then we kind of just melded together on Friday afternoon. So I'm currently teaching book two kids. She's currently teaching like Keyboard Games, Book One kids at the same time, so that way we're able to kind of like divide our studios up and have someone be able to teach at the same time as us so we can save time, which is a huge load off my shoulders at least.

And I hope for Celeste as well. And then next semester, I hope that it'll also be divided Book Two Kids. More equally, as we divide and conquer roles and responsibilities in that aspect of teaching. And then they would go off to choir right after their activity time, and then they're in there for 30 minutes.

And at the end of the whole of the semester, they do a little informance. So this is our first semester doing it, so it's kind of all of one large [00:18:00] experiment. But yesterday we actually had a meeting, all three of us, about our takeaways from there. And essentially, like, all of us had really positive things to say.

Like, I noticed that because my students are in choir, they have a better singing tone. They're more in tune. I have a student that just started taking lessons, but he's older and he was also in choir. He was like plunking out choir warmups, the piano, like out of nowhere, you know?

So there's more motivation to them to make music at home because they're getting it somewhere else too. Like they want to tie the two together. And Kristen on her part was saying, it's really great to work with kids who already have that foundation of music making. Like I can just ask him to do it and they will do it.

I don't have to walk them through it. Like I don't have to motivate them. Like they want to be there. And so in the students that we see come together often, we're starting to create a studio culture where they know each other. They know each other's names. They're working together more, they're forming friendships, and so it also contributes to studio culture in a big way.

And so I'm hoping to encourage more families to participate. For me, right now, it's [00:19:00] about a third of my studio that participates. I understand that some other students just can't because of schedules and whatnot, and that's totally okay. But I always, every recital, like, if you can do it, I highly recommend it. You're not gonna be negatively impacted by this. You can only get so much more out of it. 

Celeste Watson: I think another benefit of that is it frees up so much time in the private lesson to deal with concepts that can only be taught one on one. You know, in Keyboard Games, one of the purposes of activity time is to break up off the bench learning so that the child with a short attention span can be grown into a longer focus time.

But once they sort of outgrow the need to switch activities, every seven minutes, you really need so much individual time at the keyboard in the intermediate rep and going into advanced rep. So much has to be covered technically. So many things have to be talked about keyboard skills wise and so much, it's so time consuming to teach that [00:20:00] repertoire and to say nothing of like the whole process of teaching reading, which is also very time consuming and has to be done.

For the students who are, who don't need activity time for attention reasons, to take that and put it into a Friday musicianship time. And then at the keyboard time in their private lessons, we can spend that entire time dealing with keyboard skills, technique development, repertoire. All of those kinds of things that need to be addressed one on one in greater and greater quantities of time.

It's so valuable. I tell the parents when every once in a while a parent will sort of look at me funny, like I have to come twice a week. And I will tell them, if you don't come twice a week, your student would need to be in a private lesson with me for an hour and a half. And that's like not financially a policy that I'm willing to make for the studio because I think that takes piano lessons out of the realm of being financially affordable.

If you have to pay a premium for my time for an hour and a half. [00:21:00] And so this really is making private music instruction at a very high level available to the widest number of people possible in the most affordable way. And then they're like, Oh, I understand now. So it just really opens up time for technique development for the intermediate and advanced student.

Krista Jadro: And a couple logistical questions. So you see the student privately for how long? 

Celeste Watson: It depends on the student. My littles come for half an hour. Sometimes my littles come for longer if they're in a group class. I try to get them into a 45 minute lesson when they're in Book one. So that's 45 minutes of just keyboard time in book one.

And then my goal is by the time they're in book two, I mean 45 minutes or an hour. 

Krista Jadro: And that's in addition to when they come on Fridays. And Fridays, how long are they there for? 

Celeste Watson: The older students are there for an hour and a half. The younger ones are there for an hour. 

Krista Jadro: That sounds like a [00:22:00] dream.

Hannah Mayo: I love everything about this idea. And I think even if you are teaching five days a week, like I'm imagining how to sort of adapt that for my schedule. And I think I could even say, offer a once a month on a Saturday, like I can commit to that. Probably they can too. We're already doing other events and recitals and there's certain events that I would sort of like to weasel my way out of, so maybe I could replace it with a group class of musicianship. And so you're giving me a lot of ideas. 

Celeste Watson: I think the other lovely thing is If you need someone to teach choir, because like as a piano teacher who has quite a bit of choral experience, I don't want to teach choir because that's not my area of specialty, and I want to pass on to my students the very best in choral education.

But, because of what we're doing in MLT, The choir teacher doesn't necessarily need to be MLT trained, they [00:23:00] just need to be a fabulous choir teacher. And what we're doing with those students is preparing them to be excellent choral students. So if you have just a really great choral director in your area, but they're not MLT trained, that's totally fine.

Partner with them, bring them in. I mean, there's some backstage coordination that has to go on between you and the director, but it's been a really wonderful working relationship, even though she's not MLT trained. That's been another part of the fun environment of the Musicianship and Choir class, is because those classes are graded by musicianship level, not necessarily by age.

And it creates this really wonderful mixed age dynamic. Now, generally, the Book 3 students are older than the Book 1 students, but it has been so fun to teach mixed ages. The class that I'm teaching right now is a combo Book 1, Keyboard Games class, which is The two worst classes to combine, I feel like, because I have four [00:24:00] year olds who are in keyboard games and literal, literal 13 year olds who are in book one.

It's such a wide age gap, but, and it's quite a large class. I mean, we have almost 20 kids in that class. 

Scarlette Kerr: Yeah. Meanwhile, across the hall, I have Six or seven. I always feel so bad. Godspeed Celeste. 

Celeste Watson: But we had the best thing. We were playing the duple meter game and moving to the duple meter song and chanting duple meter rhythm patterns.

And the little kids, the really little ones, I struggle getting them to coordinate the macrobeat, microbeat movement, and I'm not sure if it's like, sometimes it's developmental, and sometimes it's just they just don't have the focus for it, right? But, we have been playing with the idea of, if you're an older kid, can you model it?

And if you're a younger kid, can you watch one of the older kids and move the way they do? And then that hooks in the older ones, who sort of feel like they're too cool for this whole activity anyway. And then the little ones that have this instant model in front of them. [00:25:00] And I have never seen older kids and younger kids so in sync as when the older ones are modeling intentionally and the little ones are intentionally copying the other kids.

They're way better than when they copy me. They never copy me as well as they copy the older kids. And it's just so fun to watch that inter age dynamic. 

Krista Jadro: And do you both have Instagram? I do. You have Instagram. Scarlettete, do you post any clips of these on your Instagram account? 

Scarlette Kerr: Oh, Musicianship. I posted about choir at the beginning of the year. I should have posted, but then I do bursts of social media. Like, I'll be on top of it for a week and then not touch it for like three months. So I need to get better at it, especially since Krista shared our handles with a lot of people on the Music Learning Academy Facebook group. So I know people are looking for that content and there are some people that are amazing at providing that content. So maybe I'll just be more motivated to post more about it. But yeah, that would be a good idea for me [00:26:00] to like record what they're doing and share it. 

Krista Jadro: I think it's great to just show people.

Scarlette Kerr: Yeah, it's very accessible. There's a value in having kids use those mirror neurons and watching other people do what they're doing and they can make those internal comparisons about whether or not they're doing it correctly or not correctly. I don't have to correct them outright.

Sometimes they do need obvious like, oh, let's try that again. But for the most part, it's very gentle instruction because we're just kind of follow along and figure it out. And I think sometimes that's the best policy about me having to like drill into their heads. And they all do great. The ones that started and had A lower, or a seemingly lower aptitude, when it came to like, tonal aptitude or even rhythmic aptitude, once they were in a year and a half of group instruction, they have come such a long way, such a long way.

I've seen so much growth and their ability to hear and process and do. Not to say that they're all our problems are solved. Right. But it's [00:27:00] just that I've seen, I see the growth in what they're doing. I think they do too. Like it's coming easier to them. And I think that happens so much faster than when I see them one-on-one. every week. 

Celeste Watson: I think it's also helped with those students who maybe feel more shy in their singing voice or more shy chanting by themselves or students who are just having vocal difficulties. I have a little fleet of little boys who are going through voice change right now. I have a couple of students who just really are not comfortable using the voice and working one on one in the LSAs allows you to be very gentle and intentional about developing the singing voice you If you choose to go down that route, and that has been very helpful, but providing the group gives them a safe place to experiment because nobody can hear them.

And some of my most hesitant singers, I have seen them grow a lot in the privacy of the group. The group has given them anonymity and privacy to [00:28:00] experiment with things that they will never do in front of me. I'm thinking especially of one student who never sings ever, even in private instruction. And after Four months of being in choir, this student felt comfortable to use their singing voice, and I just happened to see it out of the corner of my eye, and I immediately looked away so that that the student wouldn't know that I had seen.

 But that student would never ever have that experience were it not for the anonymity and safety of the group. 

Hannah Mayo: I was also a choir kid, and I think that the reason I felt comfortable singing, and no one asked me to sing in piano lessons until I was in college. Surprisingly, or not surprisingly, depending on who you are.

But I was actually quite resistant to singing in piano lessons as a college student, even though I had grown up singing in choir. I loved [00:29:00] singing. And it was that feeling of, Oh, I'm by myself. I'm in front of this person who is still kind of new to me, I don't want to sing for you or with you. And it's, even though I love singing and had been singing and had performed solo, it's just a totally different feeling to have to sing for your piano teacher.

So I could totally sympathize with that experience. And I think it is marvelous the way you are supplementing this class and giving them that feeling of support. 

Celeste Watson: I feel like with so many of us going on this journey of like what does it look like to read in an MLT context, choir can be particularly good because in the elementary choir, everything is done by rote, but then pretty quickly in choir, it transitions to a form of reading notation, independent of other parts.

And choir reading is sort of the ultimate experience of context and [00:30:00] context based reading, because you hear all the harmonic parts around you. You're singing whole. You're also looking at notation going up and down in ways that don't intuitively make sense, and you have to follow that with your voice.

And I notice pretty significant interesting reading things happening with my students who are in choir. 

Scarlette Kerr: Yeah, as someone who had a wide variety of musical experiences growing up, I was in choir, I was in band, I was in piano, I was like in a string ensemble. I think all those experiences, being exposed to notation helped me be a better pianist.

With those reading skills. Like playing flute, I had to read ledger lines all the time. So I was a pro at it when I had to do it in piano and then also having to pick your line out in a choir helps you with contrapuntal repertoire. Even if you don't realize it in the moment, I think it's just kind of marinating in the back of your brain, ready to come out when it needs to be used in a piano contest. So yeah, I [00:31:00] say nothing but praises about the idea of incorporating choir in a piano curriculum. 

Hannah Mayo: And even Gordon said one of the best ways to practice music is to... it's not very accessible for most people, but to sing in four part harmony with three other people and anything, to sing piano repertoire in three, in four part harmony with other people, to sing your band literature, to sing anything, a string quartet, you shouldn't just be playing it. You should also be singing it with a group of other human voices. 

So Gordon was on board with all of this too. 

Scarlette Kerr: I actually just finished a three day reading and writing intensive in my studio yesterday. And yesterday, like my first group, which are essentially mid book one, late book one students, we were singing everything on the board first, singing all of our tunnel patterns.

I actually just posted an Instagram reel about this. Speaking of social media. And then we went to the [00:32:00] piano and we played it. There is something to be said about having that kinesthetic awareness of like what finger goes where and what key. I know it's super important and that can be taught separately.

But there's also something you see on the board, you're hearing it in your head because you're hearing it out loud. Then when you go to the piano, they self correct so quickly, they're like, that's not what it sounds like. Like, I see my students self correct, which to me tells me so much information.

It gets me so excited, so much more excited than if they were to play it correctly the first time, because it tells me that they're audiating it, and they recognize that what they were hearing from what they were reading was not what came out of the piano, and they fixed it. So yeah, singing, singing all the time, singing piano lessons.

All the time. 

Krista Jadro: I tell my students that all the time when I'm excited that they make a mistake and they fix it themselves. I'm like, that is amazing. I grew up with so many musicians because again, I was also in band. I also played the flute, Scarlettete. And I was like, we would be [00:33:00] playing something and all the other flutes would miss and they wouldn't know that they missed.

Right. And the fact that you can hear these mistakes and correct them yourself is just so huge and so important and so awesome. So, Scarlette and Celeste, we have taken up way too much of your time. We want to thank you so much for being on the podcast, for sharing your expertise. And before we go, for listeners who want to learn more about the Lister-Sink method, Scarlette, you have a few webinars on the Music Learning Academy webinar library that I'll post the link to, but what else can the listeners do to, further their knowledge of this method? 

Celeste Watson: A great place to start is the website for the Lister-Sink Institute. So that's a great place to start. Another great resource is the Association for Body Mapping Education.

That's a fantastic sort of the flagship book for pianists coming out of that is What Every Pianist [00:34:00] Needs to Know About the Body by Thomas Mark. Also the American Society for Alexander Technique Teachers, AMSAT. That's another great place to go for information. If you want to reach out to me and me in particular, my website is watson-music.Com. 

Scarlette Kerr: I'm also always happy to answer questions about the method, or technical questions in general, if they're more specific. 

Krista Jadro: So I'll make sure to put that all in the show notes. Thank you again for being with us today. 

Scarlette Kerr: Thank you so much for having us. It's been so great to come on and talk to you guys.

Celeste Watson: Yeah. Thanks for inviting us. It's been a great conversation. 

Krista Jadro: If you're not already a part of our Facebook group, Introduction to Audiation Based Piano Instruction and Music Moves for Piano, Please join us. Scarlette and Celeste are there to answer your questions, talk more about their approach, and also hopefully their musicianship class.

Thanks so much. We'll [00:35:00] see you soon.