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Keys to Music Learning
Keys to Music Learning
Getting to know Eric Bluestine, author of The Ways Children Learn Music: Part 2
Eric Bluestine returns to discuss the concept of partial synthesis and its crucial role in Music Learning Theory. He breaks down common misconceptions, explains how patterns connect to real music, and offers insights into fostering creativity and generalization in students. This conversation dives deep into the philosophy behind MLT and provides practical applications for piano teachers.
• Understanding partial synthesis and why it matters
• Addressing misconceptions about Music Learning Theory
• The significance of whole-part-whole learning in music education
• How generalization and creativity work together in musical development
• Practical strategies for integrating MLT in piano lessons
• Encouraging improvisation as a tool for deeper musical understanding
• The role of movement-based activities in reinforcing rhythm and tonality
• Exploring Eric’s blog and its impact on MLT discussions
LINKS
The Ways Children Learn Music, by Eric Bluestine
Blog: The Ways Children Learn Music, by Eric Bluestine
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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.
00:00:12 Krista Jadro
Welcome to Keys to Music Learning. I'm Krista Jadro of Music Learning Academy.
00:00:16 Hannah Mayo
And I'm Hannah Mayo of Mayo Piano.
00:00:19 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 of our chat with Eric Bluestein. Enjoy.
So I would actually, and I think our listeners would as well, if you would like to take a couple minutes and just talk about partial synthesis.
00:00:48 Eric Bluestine
Only my favorite thing in the world. And you know, I've written a lot about it lately, because it's one of the things where I still think that chapter, that 10 pages that I wrote, back in the day, is pretty good. Basically what I have in mind, it's my answer to all the naysayers and all the critics of MLT who say patterns are not music.
00:01:19 Eric Bluestine
They're just not music. And we're music teachers, we're not pattern teachers. Our thing is music. It's Duke Ellington and it's Sweet Honey in the Rock and it's Beethoven and it's know Guillaume Dufay and it's all these people who made music. And yeah, okay, you can distill music into its patterns, but ultimately that's not what music is.
00:01:43 Eric Bluestine
And isn't Gordon the guy who just goes from part to part to part to part to whole. And then eventually when you collect Social Security, you'll get to the final whole and you'll see what all those parts are all about? You know, he's not a whole-part-whole guy. Come on.
00:01:58 Eric Bluestine
Before I talk about partial synthesis, I need to talk about whole-part-whole because that's one of the biggest misunderstandings. And it's so heartbreaking because Gordon was talking about whole-part-whole back in the 1980s, before it was cool? Okay. I wrote a whole blog post about whole-part-whole. And it's a long one, going into the history of it.
00:02:20 Eric Bluestine
And the real hero of whole-part-whole and MLT is, I have to give credit to Darrell Walters. He's the hero because he's the who saw that it really is about starting with a piece of music and getting a vague understanding of it, then digging into the parts. And those parts are functional patterns.
00:02:38 Eric Bluestine
They're not just intervals. They're not just random beats or a steady beat or quarter notes and eighth notes. They're functional patterns in an explicit and unambiguous tonality or meter. And then, then you go back to the final hole. And suddenly you apply what those patterns taught you to that final hole and the final hole starts to take on more and more sense and becomes intelligible.
00:03:05 Eric Bluestine
Well, he deserves credit for that, Dr. Gordon, for whatever reason, and I think I have to say it was a mistake in communication on his part because even though he was an advocate for whole part whole, he didn't play it up like he should have. And I think Darrell Walters realized that and wrote a wonderful pamphlet, 20 page pamphlet on how to apply pattern instruction to a whole piece of music. I have it somewhere, somewhere in my thing here. Coordinating learning sequence activities with classroom activities. I think that's what it's called and it's wonderful. It's still to this day it holds up because he goes through every level of learning. Aural/oral, verbal association, partial synthesis, every level.
00:03:52 Eric Bluestine
And he says, here's what you can do with patterns connecting them to the song. And they don't have to be patterns taken from the song. They can be tonic and dominant patterns that are not found in the song, but are similar. Okay, but here's how you would apply it. And he was the first person to do that.
00:04:10 Eric Bluestine
And Dr. Gordon took his pamphlet and, you know, ran with it and basically put a lot of those ideas into the 1988 edition of his book. But Walters. My understanding is that Walters was the brainchild of doing that. And even though Gordon had talked about whole-part-whole in 1984, he talked about it in a very cursory manner and got away from that conversation as quickly as possible.
00:04:39 Eric Bluestine
There's a wonderful lecture where he talks about whole-part-whole because someone asked him specifically about parts and wholes and he had to answer it. But you could feel that he was itching to move on. But that minute and a half where he does talk about whole-part-whole is fantastic. And if you read his books, his early books, there's no mention of whole-part-whole.
00:05:02 Eric Bluestine
In the first edition of Learning Sequences and Patterns, it was called Learning Sequences and Patterns. There was no mention of it. And in the 1980 edition, he mentioned it, I think, in one sentence, in one sentence buried on page 130 something or other that probably students, if they read it, they just brushed right past it.
00:05:24 Eric Bluestine
And when it came time for me to write my book, I said, no, I can't just brush past. This is a major. This is maybe even as big as audiation. And I knew when I was writing my book, I had to write an introductory chapter to set the stage and to also tell people what the rest of the book was going to be about.
00:05:43 Eric Bluestine
And I knew the first chapter had to be an audiation chapter, and I wanted to come up with something arresting and eye catching, so I brought in Star Trek. I had to do that because I wanted the listener… I wanted to put people at ease, and I wanted to sort of jolt them out of this fear of, okay, I'm reading an academic textbook now.
00:06:03 Eric Bluestine
No, this is going to be fun. And you're not going to be able to predict where my mind is going, because I don't even know where my mind is going. And if, you know, in the light of day, if I look at my digression and I say, well, that digression worked, I'm keeping it.
00:06:17 Eric Bluestine
I'm keeping it in the book, and if it holds up a month later, I'm keeping it in the book. And it sounds spontaneous because it was at the time. But my afterthought told me that spontaneous digression works. Now, there were a lot of other digressions that didn't work and that fell by the wayside, but the ones that I liked most, I kept in.
00:06:39 Eric Bluestine
Anyway, the audiation chapter had to come early on, but I knew I had to write a whole chapter about whole-part-whole following Darrell Walters’ lead. And I cite him in the chapter, I talk about him. I said, you know, read his stuff, because he writes about whole-part-whole a lot more intelligently and more eloquently than I do.
00:06:58 Eric Bluestine
But I wanted the chapter up front for people to know. This is a big deal. This is a very big deal. So it's related to patterns, instruction and partial synthesis in this way that when you string patterns together, those patterns, at least the tonal patterns, yes, they're not music, but they can explode into a composition, and they came from somewhere.
00:07:23 Eric Bluestine
Just like in music, there's no such thing as an isolated moment in time in music. Nothing is isolated. Music is this constantly moving ocean, and there's constantly moving tides, and there's a before time and there's an after time. And during. Well, that's an illusion. There's no such thing as the present. Gordon said that, you know, he kept saying that to us.
00:07:45 Eric Bluestine
He said, at one time, I don't mean to shock any of you, but there's no such thing as the present, because the minute you call a moment the present, it becomes the past. This moment in time that I call now is over. There's no now. There's what's going to be and there's what was, and that's it.
00:08:03 Eric Bluestine
So we have to grapple with the sense of form and fluidity. You know, this paradox where we try to put music together into this formal structure that we can lock down and lock into something that we can grab hold of that's fixed. And music is never fixed. Music is never fixed. It's this constantly moving river and ocean.
00:08:28 Eric Bluestine
And we have to grapple with the paradox of form and fluidity. Anyway, getting back to partial synthesis. So, okay, let me stick with that. If I take a melody, like (Eric sings a melody), I can distill it into (Eric sings tonal patterns form the melody). Now, I can take that, whatever I did, I forget what I did, and then expand it into (Eric sings another melody). Or something like that.
00:09:08 Eric Bluestine
And those two melodies, one set up the series of patterns, and then one grew out of the series of patterns. So that those two songs, if you wanted to generalize, you could say those two songs, under the skin, they're really the same. Superficially, they're different. They're in a different meter. They have different melodic rhythm, different rhythmic patterns, maybe a different dynamic level.
00:09:33 Eric Bluestine
Who knows what's different on the surface? But underneath the surface, those two melodies that I just did are siblings. And what gives them the same commonality under the skin? Well, that series of patterns. Because one gave rise to that series of patterns. One grew out of the series of patterns.
00:09:52 Eric Bluestine
So they are siblings under the skin. And why do we have to teach that? That's a skill of compressing the first melody into a series of patterns and then expanding through creativity, the series into something that's really music. So when teachers, naysayers, say, oh, those patterns aren't music, I said, but they don't have to be real music because they come from music and they go to music.
00:10:18 Eric Bluestine
They're the waystation, okay? That's what they are, okay? They're a compressed form of real music that you can use to blow up and expand into something that's real again. Okay? And you do that through creativity. And how do I know that those two melodies that are so different, one in duple, one in triple, how do I know that they're common in terms of tonality and they share the same tonal context and harmonic functions?
Through generalization, I can generalize that despite the superficial differences between them, in a deeper sense, those two melodies that I performed, (I'm hoping I did them spontaneously), but those two melodies that I performed really are the same underneath. In a deeper sense, they're the same. And that's what generalization is. It's accepting the superficial differences but saying the commonalities are deeper…
00:11:18 Eric Bluestine
…are more hard to discern, but they also are deeper, and they mark a true understanding of the music, looking past the shallow surface differences. And creativity is really just expansion. And I was cornered on that one time when someone said, well, when I write and I create, I edit, I take out a lot of words.
00:11:38 Eric Bluestine
I said, yeah, but that's rewriting. That's what you do after the fact. And there's a creative element there as well. Don't get me wrong. I know that a lot of creativity is taking that explosion of ideas that you may have improvised or may have come up with spontaneously, and then in the light of the morning after saying, okay, this didn't quite work, and then excising this and chopping that and getting rid of this and tightening it up a little bit.
00:12:03 Eric Bluestine
And that's part of your craft. But really what's exciting about creativity is, yes, the editing and the chopping down to size, but it's the explosion from that series of patterns into something that really is musical and meaningful. I always have the sense when I think of partial synthesis as the accordion that shrinks and expands and shrinks and expands and shrinks and expands.
00:12:31 Eric Bluestine
If you go into my book, I quoted Carl Sandberg, who's a wonderful poet. No one reads him anymore, but he was a wonderful poet who talked about shrinking titans into dwarves, shrinking midgets into giants. And that's what it is. When you audiate, you take this unwieldy piece of music and you compress it into something that's mentally manageable.
00:12:53 Eric Bluestine
And then from that, you can say, well, now let me exercise my creative impulse and expand that shrunk, compressed thing into something that is your own and that bears a striking family resemblance to the original piece that you're basing it on. That's where variation form comes from. That was what excited Gordon so much about that extra stage of audiation that he came up with in the late 80s.
00:13:22 Eric Bluestine
And he later on did himself a disservice because he said, well, it's mostly about retaining patterns that you hear after you've heard a piece for five minutes, six minutes, it might go on for a long time. And you're retaining patterns that went back into, you know, 30 seconds or 45 seconds into the piece.
00:13:37 Eric Bluestine
And I said, no, superficially, it's about retaining patterns. What it really is about is making judgments about the piece and correcting those former judgments. Maybe the piece really isn't in major tonality. Maybe that was just a temporary thing. Maybe the piece is in Lydian for the most part. And that major tonality was just a temporary thing.
And now we're hearing lots of raised fourths. So that going back into my assessment and audiation now, I think the piece is really in Lydian after all. And that major tonality was just temporary. It was just a stopgap, a tonicization, just a temporary thing. That's what stage four is all about. And why do we need partial synthesis?
00:14:18 Eric Bluestine
Because we have to teach by rote. We have to teach kids deliberately how to make their minds work like what I was describing, that accordion of shrinking, expanding, shrinking, expanding, shrinking, expanding. We have to teach them how to take a piece of music and shrink it into a series of patterns and then take that shrunk series of patterns and expand it through creativity into something that is their own, that they can be proud of, that relates to that original piece of music.
00:14:50 Eric Bluestine
Okay. And we have to do that by rote because that doesn't come naturally. We have to teach them how to do it. And that's what partial synthesis is for. So that's my thinking. That's what I'm thinking. All right. I still think the, the guy who, I mean, he'll come up to me at the next conference and I'll make sure to get his name.
00:15:13 Eric Bluestine
I won't be, it won't be like a quick drive by conversation. I'll thank him so much for the word compressing. You, you helped me think it through because that's really what I had in mind all along. Chaining. Very important thing. You know, the pattern, the series of patterns has a meaning that the patterns don't have an isolation.
00:15:30 Eric Bluestine
That's absolutely true. But the fact that the series is a compressed form of a real piece of music or several real pieces of music, that's equally important. So there, there you have it. That's my thinking.
00:15:45 Hannah Mayo
That is going to be with me all week now. And I think it's because you've come at it from a more real life sense, as in why. Why do we even need partial synthesis in the first place? And functionally, you know, surface level, going back to that. Functionally, yes, it makes sense that we would want to.
00:16:07 Hannah Mayo
We want our students to be able to hear the difference between major and minor and duple and triple. But you have really dug a whole new level about why we want them to be able to do that and then to bring this idea of compression. And that's exactly what we're aiming to do.
00:16:25 Hannah Mayo
And it also reminds me of the Marylin quote, “improvisation cements learning.” And what you described about taking these compressed ideas and then letting them burst open and making something new is just really blowing my mind right now. It's making me think of partial synthesis. You know, it was a real milestone when I finally understood partial synthesis.
00:16:52 Hannah Mayo
And then it was another milestone when I finally fully understood how to teach the learning sequence activity for partial synthesis. And now it's blowing my mind on a whole new level.
00:17:05 Eric Bluestine
Well, Yeah, I mean, what I wanted to get through in the book. And this is something that I still think about, and I still think it's true that I mean, Dr. Gordon was a very. He, as a researcher, you can't blame him for this. He wanted to isolate elements, and he wanted to isolate factors so that he could examine them and study them.
00:17:28 Eric Bluestine
So everything had to be… meter is separate from tonality, and tonality is separate from balance and style and phrasing and tempo is separate from harmony. And all these elements of music were running separately so that he could examine them. Makes perfect sense. But some things really need to be conflated at a certain point.
00:17:54 Eric Bluestine
And I think that you can't entirely separate creativity from generalization. That the two of them really are. One is the other one's evil twin or whatever. I don't know how you would describe it, but they really are opposite sides of the same coin. And I mean, it's a cliche, but it's really true.
00:18:15 Eric Bluestine
You know, generalization is when you take two pieces of music and you shrink both of them down so that you find commonalities between them. I did that recently when I was starting to replay the two part inventions again. I'm starting to get my fingers back in shape and doing stuff and playing again.
00:18:33 Eric Bluestine
Because if I want to teach. I want to actually have some piano skills behind me. So I'm playing a lot. But I'm starting to look at the three part inventions. And the second one in C minor modulates from C minor to G minor to F minor to E flat major, and then from there goes back to C minor again, the relative minor, okay, from 1 to 5 to 4 to 3 to 1.
00:19:02 Eric Bluestine
A very unusual modulatory scheme. The three part invention in D minor does exactly the same thing, as different as they are on the surface. I mean, the D minor Symphonia is very chromatically rich in a way that the C minor is not. The C minor has a consistent counter subject in a way that the D minor does not.
00:19:26 Eric Bluestine
But underneath the surface, the D minor modulates to A minor, to G major, to F major, and then back to D minor again. 1, 5, 4, 3, 1. They have the same modulatory scheme. It's almost as if Bach was saying, I'm going to make these two pieces sound completely different on the surface.
00:19:46 Eric Bluestine
No one is going to know, except the most astute listener is going to be able to decide or discern that I compose these two pieces in the same afternoon and that they grew out of the same creative impulse. Okay. It's going to take one of my sons. Wilhelm Friedemann is going to figure it out, but nobody else will.
00:20:04 Eric Bluestine
Well, I figured it out. Those two pieces are siblings underneath the surface. That's generalization. Looking past the surface differences, understanding them, but looking past them and going for something that's deeper, a deeper commonality. And at the same time, creativity is the explosion outward. There's something about generalization and creativity where you cannot entirely separate them.
00:20:32 Eric Bluestine
You just can't, because they both grow out of the shrinkage and expansion and that whole process. It's one process, and they're both part of that process. That's what I think. Does that make any sense? I mean, am I making any sense?
00:20:51 Krista Jadro
I think so. I just have a lot of wheels turning now, because when you're talking.
00:20:55 Eric Bluestine
Do that with people. I'm sorry, I do. It drives people nuts. They go, okay, well, nice talking to you. And then they back away and it's.
00:21:03 Krista Jadro
You should not apologize. Actually, you know what? My wheels are turning, and it goes directly to, okay, well, how can I practice this in my lessons, right? Like, what am I missing that can help my students? Because you define partial synthesis in a way that I really haven't heard before described to me.
00:21:23 Krista Jadro
So what can I do with my piano students that can help start this?
00:21:26 Eric Bluestine
Wow. It's hard to say something that would be very advanced. And I don't know, I'm not sure off the top of my head what sequential objectives would lead to this. And it was sort of what I was getting at about how the two can never. Generalization. Creativity can never be entirely separated because when you shrink down a folk song into its patterns, or you do that mentally, you are, in a sense, creating a series of patterns. You're making that up. You know, the shrinkage itself is a creative act. You know, wouldn't it be great if kids could take two or three. But let's start with two. Two folk songs that are alike under the skin.
00:22:17 Eric Bluestine
And again, Eric Rasmussen, who's done so much stuff with harmony, he's, you know, he's found all these folk songs that are harmonically, you know, that have the same progression. Teach those two back to back and then say, now I'm going to come up with a series of patterns that these two songs have in common.
00:22:40 Eric Bluestine
Now, I want you to come up with a series of patterns that these two songs have in common. And it's going to look a lot, and it's going to sound a lot like mine, but it's not going to be exactly the same as mine. Now it's your turn to take these two songs and shrink them down into this, you know, three or four patterns in a row or something, something like that.
00:22:59 Eric Bluestine
And that would take a lot of years to get to that point. But, boy, would it be worth it, because I would love for students to be able to look at the C minor invention, the C minor Symphonia and the D minor Symphonia, and say, wait a second. They're the same, you know, different meter, different use of counter melodies, different chromatic texture, but underneath the surface, they're the same. I want them to be able to hear that and, and see it and hear it and to get to that point. That would be a wonderful thing. So that's. I don't have a quick answer for you.
00:23:40 Eric Bluestine
But that might be something. Taking those two. Two folk songs and showing the student through partial synthesis, teaching them how to shrink them down into a series of patterns that they both had the songs have in common. And now saying, now it's your turn. That would be a thrilling thing to do.
00:24:01 Hannah Mayo
Well, Eric, you have mentioned a lot of things, and we of course, love hearing about it. We also love reading about it on your blog, which some of our listeners may or may not know about. So let's get into your blog. And could you tell us what inspired you to start a blog on MLT topics and other musical topics?
00:24:28 Eric Bluestine
Well, as enthusiastic as I can be sometimes, and really high energy when I talk about this stuff, I've noticed that a lot of my colleagues don't want to hear about it. So I end up, I need some kind of outlet, and writing has always been a really good outlet for me. I write and then I play Speechify and I listen to myself usually with a British accent or with some kind of foreign accent. So I know it's not me. You know, someone will talk like this, and then, oh, goodness gracious. And it'll be my words, but I'll hear it fresh. And then I can rewrite it, but it sounds like it's coming from someone else. It's almost like, I don't know, what was that movie where Tom Hanks talked to a beach ball?
00:25:18 Eric Bluestine
You know, it's Castaway or something like that. My blog is kind of like my beach ball, okay? It's my therapist. I talk into the blog, and the blog talks back to me sometimes, and I really start thinking things through. But my colleagues in Philadelphia, bless their hearts, they had their own definitions of success and what that meant.
00:25:42 Eric Bluestine
They had absolutely no interest in MLT whatsoever. Most of them. Most of them, over the course of 35 years. And not only not an interest in it, but a genuine antipathy toward it. And especially many of the supervisors that I worked with, especially in the early years when Gordon was still at Temple, when Dr. Gordon was still there. And it was heartbreaking for me to watch as a young, naive teacher, I thought to myself, well, they've got the world's foremost thinker in music education in their backyard. They could put the Philadelphia public schools on the map in terms of music education. And they're making a deliberate choice not to.
00:26:23 Eric Bluestine
If I live to be 500 years, I will never understand their motivation. Was it fear? Was it jealousy? It was a negative emotion. It was a negative motivation that drew them away from Dr. Gordon's work. And it would take a dozen Sigmund Freuds to figure out what exactly was going on in their hearts and minds and why they rejected him so decisively and inflexibly.
00:26:49 Eric Bluestine
But my blog is basically for me to get my ideas out. I sometimes. It's interesting. I sometimes have difficulty, and this might be my fault. I don't know. I sometimes have difficulty. I don't seem to have any difficulty today talking about it. It's nice. And you two are really letting me go in a very generous way.
00:27:12 Eric Bluestine
You're letting me just go and talk, and it's very refreshing and things like that. But I think that with a lot of MLT'ers, they're used to doing things a certain way. They're used to the techniques that they use. They're used to the particular patterns found in Jump Right In. And sometimes it's possible that sometimes MLTers don't really think about why they're doing what they're doing, or they don't have a ready answer for a skeptical teacher who would ask them, why bother with this at all?
00:27:47 Eric Bluestine
Why? Why go through the whole rigmarole solfege or why not movable Do temporarily in certain cases? And, What's wrong with 1e and a 2 and again and and or Tas and Titis? They worked for me as a kid. Why not? They don't have ready answers. And I think that, and that's just human nature, when you teach a 9 to 5 job and you're working so hard with kids and writing lesson plans, you can get kind of mentally calcified.
00:28:17 Eric Bluestine
I don't mean to say that people are unintelligent, but they do things in a kind of rote way. And what I try to do with my blog is push that a little bit. I want people to start thinking and asking themselves why they do what they do. And I might be in full agreement with what people do with MLT.
00:28:35 Eric Bluestine
I might say, yeah, this makes a lot of sense. But let's look at it from the point of view of the skeptical teacher who has not embraced MLT, who might be open to it but wants to know why, why, why? Why are you doing this? Isn't there a better way? Are there a better series of patterns?
00:28:54 Eric Bluestine
Is there a better way to write Jump Right In? Is there a better way to write the learning sequence activities that might be more conducive to the students that I'm working with? I would love to see teachers write their own edition of Jump Right In. And I think what needs to happen is that the writers of Jump Right In need to exercise a creativity and write it four different ways so that we can learn what something is by learning what it's not.
00:29:22 Eric Bluestine
And one edition of Jump Right in could be very straight laced and very conservative and follow the steps with maybe an occasional bridging movement to inference learning, but not much follow it in a very sequential way. And then another version of Jump Right In could be more outlandish. We're going to bridge to theoretical understanding-Aural/Oral, and then back to Aural/Oral.
00:29:44 Eric Bluestine
And we're going to go to places that MLT's don't normally tread and we're going to flip flop from discrimination learning to inference learning, back to discrimination learning. We're going to bridge and bridge and bridge all over the place. And it's going to be a kind of free for all. And then the reader, the teacher, is going to have to decide based on these two things, can I come up with some kind of compromise posture for my students that will work based on these different ways of approaching MLT.
00:30:14 Eric Bluestine
I have learned what something is by learning what it's not. And I'm going to write a curriculum based on this that will fit my students. And that's kind of what I did. I mean, I took the original edition of Jump Right In, which was very expansive, and the current edition of Jump Right In, which is very compact.
00:30:33 Eric Bluestine
And for my students, I said to Roger Dean, I kind of came up with a compromise version of it for myself, and he just laughed. But I said to him, that's what I think every teacher should do. I want them to own it. Not just buy it superficially, but own it inwardly, make it their own, so that there is no such thing, not even in a joking way of the Gordon police.
00:30:58 Eric Bluestine
I don't find that joke funny in the slightest, because there are some people who really think that way, and there are some people. I don't know any. You don't know any, perhaps. But hypothetically, there might be some people so married to those learning sequence activities that they're saying to themselves, what if I change a pattern? Oh, no. And what if I leave out this generalization exercise? Is that legal? Am I allowed? Of course. If you understand MLT, you can do pretty much anything you want. You know, it's. Just make sure that when you bridge to a level of inference learning that you have taught its counterpart at discrimination learning, okay, play fair with your kids.
00:31:40 Eric Bluestine
Don't introduce a new bit of content in inference that you haven't introduced at discrimination learning. You know, play fair. Follow those basic rules. But beyond the basic rules, you can do anything you want, okay, rewrite it. You know, I don't want to bite the publishing hand that feeds me. Of course I want Jump Right In to sell a million copies, A million copies.
00:32:02 Eric Bluestine
But I want them people to buy it, not so they can use it directly. I want them to use it indirectly as source material so that they can write their own version and make it their own for their students. Because, after all, isn't that how we learn to understand Dorian and Phrygian, by composing?
00:32:21 Eric Bluestine
You don't really understand the Dorian mode. You can't say, well, just the white notes on the key starting from D. That doesn't help. You have to compose in Dorian, and then you own it. And then when you compose in Phrygian, you own that. And you can say, this is different from Dorian, because I've worked in it.
00:32:40 Eric Bluestine
I've Internalized it. I want people to internalize Jump Right in the way they internalized Dorian. And they can only do that by composing, so to speak, their own curriculum that follows certain basic rules. But they are basic rules. It's up to each individual teacher to own it in their own way for their own students.
00:33:03 Eric Bluestine
That's my thinking and my blog. To get around to that is sort of pushing the edges of that a little bit. It's challenging. Not only teachers who are dismissive of Jump Right In or dismissive of MLT, but still kind of open to it. But I also want to challenge MLTers who might be a little bit frozen over, a little bit calcified at this point, a little bit jaded.
00:33:27 Eric Bluestine
I want to spur them on to thinking in fresh ways, and even at the cost of saying no, Eric, you're completely wrong. I've thought it through. I've read over what you said, and I'm still sticking with my idea. Fine. Fine. But I got you thinking.
00:33:44 Krista Jadro
I think it can be especially hard. I don't want to generalize, but for piano teachers, coming from maybe teaching a more traditional method, because they are used to following exactly what's on the page and turning the page and finishing a book or having a series of repertoire in theory and whatever books that they're using, and then all of a sudden, Music Learning Theory, I think there is this fear of, oh, am I getting it wrong?
00:34:06 Krista Jadro
Am I going to, you know, mess with this child's development because I'm not doing something in a certain order or because I'm not doing these patterns correct or because I accidentally went to verbal association without doing aural/oral. You know, there's so many questions. You know, you don't want that fear to paralyze.
00:34:24 Krista Jadro
But you make such a good point that, that if you know the theory and you know the purpose of. Of what you are teaching, why you are. Are teaching it, then you can experiment. What is it, Hannah, that Janna called it?
00:34:39 Hannah Mayo
Benevolent experimentation.
00:34:44 Eric Bluestine
What a phrase.
00:34:45 Hannah Mayo
Yeah, right. And because of that phrase, I have made it a point in these last few years, especially once you really get comfortable with the curriculum, it sort of feels wrong not to start experimenting and not to use your own creativity and your own voice. And I add things all the time, or I, you know, rework things into games instead of just what's on the teacher's guide.
00:35:15 Hannah Mayo
And then I just don't do it when I'm in the teacher book because I know we did it in this board game that I made. So it's okay. And that's going all back to exactly what you said about why, why do we do it this way and not that way.
00:35:29 Eric Bluestine
Yeah. And just, I mean, it's kind of embarrassing for me to admit, but I am that teacher. I am the teacher who is used to piano teaching from a particular frame of mind. I mean, my memory of piano teachings, piano lessons, you know, they stopped when I was 12, but that's what I'm thinking of.
00:35:51 Eric Bluestine
You, you open the John Schaum, you know, the John W. Schaum piano method book, you know, the green book. That's all you know, it's, it's shaped this way. And then the first the A book is this way. You know, they're all like that. And you open the book and you start reading.
00:36:06 Eric Bluestine
And this is a quarter note, and this is an eighth note. And this is, this is G, because. And, you know, and this is a staff. And the sooner you memorize every Good Boy Does Fine, the better off you'll be. Just memorize that quickly and, and if you're good at that, then you, you move on.
00:36:25 Eric Bluestine
But several years go by and you'll see something's missing. So that was, that was where I was and that's still my mindset. I, I have to reconcile the fact that, you know, I've got this Gordon stuff in my head and I've got this kind of very conservative way of thinking about piano instruction also in my head, and I don't quite know where that's going to go, but it'll be interesting to see.
00:36:53 Krista Jadro
You mentioned you have a young student. Do you have any other students? And if so, are you currently using MLT with them? Are you using method books? What is your path right now of teaching piano?
00:37:06 Eric Bluestine
Well, with the students that I started, and they're very recent students, I hooked up with an agency that basically the parent calls the agency and says, can you find me a piano teacher? And the agency calls me and says they're looking for a piano teacher 12 minutes away from your house and you go to their home.
00:37:25 Eric Bluestine
And that's worked out well so far. It's a lot of driving, I'm on the road a lot, but I'm being very cautious now about introducing certain things. Children who are not used to singing in solo in their school, it's very difficult for them to sing in lessons, so that's going to be a tough hurdle.
00:37:47 Eric Bluestine
If they were my student, they wouldn't have trouble singing with me. If I were teaching piano to the same students that I taught for years, they would be like, oh yeah, Dr. Bluestine, he just wants us to sing, you know, okay. It's no big deal. So what I've been trying to do is I've asked my daughters to sing and do call and response activities and kind of quasi learning sequence activities just to show that singing is possible and also to show them what head voice sounds like because they do need that vocal model. And rhythm they seem to be much more open to.
00:38:24 Eric Bluestine
They like getting away from the instrument and rocking back and forth to macro beats and padding and tapping and moving their arms and moving. Especially the, the five and six year old students that I have. Sitting still is very hard. Well, good news. You don't have to sit still. We're going to do something where you don't have to sit still.
00:38:41 Eric Bluestine
But you do have to stay and you can't run out of the room. That's the only pretty much rule. You have to stay with me because we're doing something together. Okay. And usually they agree to that. Usually. So, it's a lot of discovery at this point. My answer six months from now will be very, very different from what they are today.
00:39:02 Eric Bluestine
And I'll try to keep people up to date with what's going on in my blog and talk about this lesson failed completely. And this lesson kind of worked. And we'll see. But I do want to write about it. Yeah.
00:39:16 Hannah Mayo
And I just want to mention, since the majority of our listeners are piano teachers, I would like to let you know that some of the blog posts have to do with piano repertoire. Favorite piano repertoire. Some Burgmuller, some Clementi.
00:39:34 Eric Bluestine
Yeah, I had never heard of Burgmuller. Oh, I'd never heard of him.
00:39:39 Hannah Mayo
That's one of our most beloved pedagogical composers.
00:39:42 Eric Bluestine
I learned that through Facebook. I was asking around. . Because I knew I'd be getting some intermediate students. I said, I know Czerny and I know the Hanon. They're big names. And even when I was 12, that was what I was sort of starting to work on before I said, these lessons are getting too hard and my teacher's asking me to practice because music has always come naturally to me, but not really naturally because I do so much listening.
00:40:18 Eric Bluestine
That was why theory came easy to me, because I had had a decade of intense listening, really intense listening before that, hours and hours every day. And that's what made it easy so piano was easy until it was no longer easy. And then when it stopped being easy, I said to my parents, it's not fun anymore.
00:40:39 Eric Bluestine
My teacher's making me work. And they said, well, what's piano? You don't have to do it anymore if you don't want to. They weren't very musical, my parents. I didn't come up from a musical household. So they said, yeah, drop it. So what, you know, it's like dropping baseball, you know. You'll do something else.
00:40:56 Eric Bluestine
You'll do something else. So that was it for piano. But I had heard of Hanon and I had heard of Czerny. I had never heard of Burgmuller. So I got his music. And the pieces are the Opus 100 set. They're delightful. So I'm working my way through them. Well, I've been writing about this horrible piano that I got from the school district, this Lester piano that the strings are shot, the felts are worn through, and it sounds like a hammered dulcimer without the charm.
00:41:28 Eric Bluestine
That's how I describe it. It sounds like I'm banging on these strings with these metal hammers. And somebody said to me, Eric, why do you play these pieces so quickly? Why do you rush through them? This was a student of mine who was listening, an adult student. Why do you play through them so quickly?
00:41:44 Eric Bluestine
I said, I don't know, maybe it's just I want to get it over with because the piano sounds so ugly. Well, now I have a Yamaha hybrid keyboard and the tone is gorgeous. The Yamaha sound. I much prefer the Bosendorfer sound. It has a weightier and more elegant sounding. The Yamaha is a very bright in your face kind of sound.
00:42:07 Eric Bluestine
The Bosendorfer has a more mature sound to my ears at least. So now my tempo have slowed down a little bit. I can take much greater care and make my scales more even and all this stuff and the voicing I care about now. And so I'm kind of teaching myself piano lessons while I teach the kids.
00:42:25 Eric Bluestine
And they're one step behind me at this point. I'm one step ahead of them.
00:42:30 Hannah Mayo
Well, on behalf of all audiation based piano teachers, welcome back to the piano and welcome to the wild and joyous ride of piano teaching, especially using Music Learning Theory in your lessons.
00:42:47 Eric Bluestine
Or at least bridging. I'm going to try as hard as I can to get over my own biases about the piano and what it means and somehow bridge, you know, because I do know. I do know enough about MLT to make it work. And I can sort of fight whatever tendency in me, you know, if I'm, if it's too mechanical and too non audiation based, I can say I need to.
00:43:12 Eric Bluestine
There's something I need to do with this lesson to make it real. I've got to bring musicianship into it, tonal and rhythm, musicianship into it somehow, because I'm not doing enough of that.
00:43:23 Hannah Mayo
Absolutely. There's a teacher in my area who just moved here from Minnesota and she's very open to Music Learning Theory and to movement and fresh ideas. And we've been talking a lot and she was relaying an instance of teaching a lesson and she said, you know, it was just feeling really exhausting. So that's when I knew I had to do something different because it's not supposed to feel that way.
00:43:54 Hannah Mayo
And I always say if I'm feeling, particularly in the early days, it's gotten over time, much better. But sometimes you start to revert back to old, less effective methods of teaching. And whenever I feel like I'm starting to do that, my go-to is stand up, walk away from the piano and move our bodies.
00:44:20 Hannah Mayo
We can continue this same piece of music. We can do something totally different. But never be afraid to abandon what you're doing if it's not working.
00:44:29 Eric Bluestine
That is an excellent rule of thumb. I'm going to stick with that one. And that's going to be my go to. My inner voice is going to tell me, stand up. Because that's similar to general music. That's similar to what I was saying to myself in general music. Get away from the piano.
00:44:48 Eric Bluestine
The piano is a tool. That's very nice. It got you into the tonality and keyality that you want. Now move away from it. You don't, you don't need it. You don't need it for this exercise. And you're better off without it. You know, if you want to play harmonies underneath, which might be a good way to teach patterns after all, playing, supporting them with, with harmonic accompaniments, that might work, but that's the extent of it.
00:45:13 Eric Bluestine
And I think, Hannah, that's an excellent way to approach it. Just telling yourself, get out of your seat, stand up. And then from there, you know, you can, you can dig into an old activity or come up with something spontaneous and new. At the moment, it's a great idea.
00:45:35 Krista Jadro
Eric, we have taken up so much of your time and we can't tell you how much we appreciate everything that you have talked about today and even just getting to know you more. We would love to have you back at some point and maybe even dive into some of the, because we didn't get to it today, but we had it on our list to dive into some of those topics that you talk about on your blog.
00:45:57 Krista Jadro
We got a little bit into partial synthesis, but we wanted to talk a little bit about more of that, the phonemes and the morphemes and all those. And now I think a recent post was about another stage of audiation, I believe too. So I feel like there's so much more that we can talk about and really kind of pick your brain.
00:46:18 Krista Jadro
But thank you for today for coming and talking with us. And would you like to share or can you share how the listeners can find your blog?
00:46:29 Eric Bluestine
I use the same title from my book, all one word, thewayschildrenlearnmusic.wordpress.com and that title is interesting. I don't know if I mentioned that in my book. I don't think I did mention in my book, but my sister Lisa came up with that idea. We were driving to some kind of family function or something and they wanted to know what I was doing.
00:46:53 Eric Bluestine
And I said, well, I'm writing a book. And they said, wow, that's really cool. What's it about? And I started going off on pedagogical stuff and they said, well, what's it really about? I mean, if you had to just sum it up, what's it really about?
00:47:07 Eric Bluestine
And I said, well, it's just about the ways children learn music. And Lisa said that's your title. That's what it's about. Just call it The Ways Children Learn Music. There's your title right there. And I said, okay, I will. It's interesting how a conversation can lead to different things.
00:47:25 Hannah Mayo
And the rest is history.
00:47:27 Eric Bluestine
And the rest is. It's just such a wonderful thing that people are reading it. I feel so good about that. I feel so flattered. And I'm warming from my toes to my head when I hear that people are reading it and it opens doors for them and maybe causes some inner arguments and things like, oh, I don't think Eric might be a little misguided about this.
00:47:54 Eric Bluestine
That or the other. That's fine too. That's fine too. It's all part of the process gets us thinking. Gets you thinking.
00:48:01 Hannah Mayo
Thank you so much for being here today, Eric.
00:48:05 Eric Bluestine
Well, thank you. It's been a pleasure.
00:48:07 Hannah Mayo
We really appreciate your time and your passion. And we want to remind our listeners that our Introduction to Audiation-based Piano Instruction and Music Moves for Piano, the longest Facebook group title that ever existed, is available. If you're not a part of that group, all piano teachers and even non piano teachers who are interested are welcome.
00:48:32 Hannah Mayo
And Eric, you recently became part of that group. So, Eric will be there and we hope to see our listeners there. Thank you very much. We'll see you soon.