Getting to Know James Kessler: Part 1

In this episode of Keys to Music Learning, Krista Jadro and Hannah Mayo welcome music educator James Kessler for a wide-ranging conversation about his musical journey and the experiences that shaped his audiation-centered teaching philosophy.

James shares his early immersion in classical music, his love of jazz and improvisation, and his winding path through performance, composition, and music education. Along the way, he reflects on sound-before-sight learning, solfege, human development, and how working with neurodiverse students deeply influenced his teaching.

Part 1 focuses on James’s background and the intuitive practices he used long before discovering Music Learning Theory—setting the stage for his eventual connection to audiation-based approaches such as Developing Musicianship through Improvisation, Jump Right In: The Instrumental Series, and Music Moves for Piano.

Developing Musicianship through Improvisation, by Christopher Azzara and Richard Grunow
Jump Right In: The Instrumental Series, by Richard Grunow, Edwin Gordon, and Christopher Azzara
Music Moves for Piano, by Marilyn Lowe

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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: 0:12

Welcome to Keys to Music Learning. I'm Hannah Mayo of Mayo Piano.

Krista: 0:17

And Krista Jadro of Music Learning Academy.

Hannah: 0:20

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.

Krista: 0:34

Today we are thrilled to welcome James Kessler, a dedicated music educator with a rich background in both piano and instrumental teaching. James has a deep connection to music learning theory and brings a unique perspective, having worked extensively with both Jump Right In, the instrumental curriculum, and Music Moves for Piano, the Audiation-based piano curriculum by Marilyn Lowe. James, welcome.

James: 1:00

Thank you. Good to be here.

Krista: 1:03

So let's start by learning a little bit more about you. So where you're from and what led you to music and to teaching.

James: 1:15

I was born in in New Jersey and lived my early life there. And then when I was a child, I moved to Connecticut. So in New Jersey, early on, my parents, both my parents have been devoted lovers of classical music. And music is a big part of my extended family. So I grew up with a lot of classical records playing in the home. My mother practicing classical guitar and my dad practicing cello. It was just classical music everywhere. My dad's sister, my Aunt Sue, she was a concert pianist, trained at Manhattan School of Music. So I had a lot of that growing up. And there was some singing in my home also.

James: 2:06

I know this because I found an old cassette tape, a home recorded cassette tape of me and my mom singing together. I was kind of a little blown away that we were also singing in solfege, which I had this was age two, according to the date on the tape. I was two years old. Yeah, so it, you know, music was everywhere growing up.

James: 2:33

And Hannah and I talked about this once before a long time ago, that I think my early listening experiences were very harmonically rich. Because you get a lot of that with orchestral classical music and everything, so and guitar music. At age four, I started lessons at the Yamaha School of Music, which was in Burden County. I think it's still there actually. And I remember a little bit of what that was like, and I still have my books and materials. There's a magnet board, and it was a group lesson experience, kind of a large group, I'd say probably maybe around ten kids, could be more, I'm not sure. And everybody gets their own electric keyboard individually, and then there would be some circle time as well, where we would kind of go to the front and all sit around with the teacher, and it's lots of solfege, everything's taught in solfege, but it's Fixed Do solfege.

James: 3:49

And I have no idea how I did that because I have never been comfortable with Fixed Do solfege, but apparently I did well with it when I was four. So eventually we moved to Connecticut and we lived in Fairfield County, Connecticut in Weston. And first I enrolled in a pretty traditional school of music, sort of standard mainstream American reading-based piano method, John Thompson books, and I did not like it at all. I was having a lot of trouble reading, even though again, apparently I did really well with the Yamaha school, and there was reading there. That there was a quite a lot of notation in the Yamaha school. But you know, it's sound before sight. The Yamaha method is sound before sight, and I probably needed to stick with it longer for it to get to true fluency with reading, because I was not at all fluent. So what I would do is I would kind of trick my teacher into playing the pieces, and then I could pick it up by ear immediately, and I got by with that for for a while, until it became obvious to everybody around me that I wasn't really progressing that way.

James: 5:29

So then we changed to a different school, and I had a more demanding piano teacher, still traditional and reading-based, but the challenge level was a bit higher and the expectations were higher. Even though he was a very kind man and very patient, it was still kind of miserable because the I was expected to sight read perfectly, I had to play scales with you know absolute precision and Hanon exercises and Czerny, lots and lots of repertoire, you know, all the great repertoire. So the expectations were high, and I was doing well enough with it, but definitely not enjoying it at all. Still I would say struggling with reading, even at that point, even though I was kind of being forced to read better, but it it wasn't really sticking.

James: 6:44

At a pretty early age, I began to compose a lot. You know, we had a piano at home and I would improvise a lot on it, and my dad has always been a big computer buff, so we had computer notation software at home, you know, from as long back as I can remember. And I also wrote music by hand on pencil and paper, and I know that because I still have the pieces they're dated, so I know that I was composing from an early age. Apparently I really liked Dorian because a lot of the songs were in Dorian, even though I didn't know what that was. I had a lot of music theory from this stricter.

James: 7:33

I had to play cadences in every key, and at that point the the theory was very separate from the repertoire. It wasn't like today, where most teachers have gotten innovative about blending theory with repertoire. It wasn't like that. Theory was separate. It was up to me to figure out how it applied. But I do remember when I was studying repertoire, you know, Bach and Chopin, and noticing those harmonic relationships even at an early age, even though my teacher wasn't talking about it. I also had a wonderful school general music teacher, really inspirational, and I so enjoyed that class, and I must have been really engaged because in elementary school she let me accompany the elementary school chorus for recitals, and I did that on more than one occasion, and that made me feel really important and everything. And her name was Mrs. Jessup, Jane Jessop, and later on she'll come back into this story a little bit later.

James: 8:53

I was improvising a ton at this point and really not practicing a lot, even though I had this strict teacher who expected tons of practice. The older I got, the less I practiced. And the more I improvised. And I was a latchkey kid, you know, a late 1980s latchkey kid. So I would come home from school and improvise for over an hour. Then I knew what time my mom was coming home. So about five minutes before she came home, I would practice some repertoire just so that she could hear that's what I was doing when she came in. I was sneaky.

James: 9:33

So I noticed pretty early on as a preteen and into my teenage years that I was always comparing myself to peers and noticing that I was very good and, you know, I could play at a high level respectably, but I was not the best ever. I was always second best or third, you know, looking around me. I was always comparable to the better kids, but never the best technician. I I could never play virtuosically like some of my friends. So I got into jazz a lot around age 12 or 13, and I went through a period where I kind of rejected classical music. Around age 10 or 11, I asked my mom if I could just quit piano lessons altogether. I was already taking cello lessons, you see the cello behind me, and I was also taking clarinet lessons as well, and I was in the school orchestra and the school band and piano lessons, classical piano lessons.

James: 10:45

At that point, my classical piano teacher was giving me the jazziest classical repertoire he could find because that was the only thing I was willing to play. He tried giving me Bartok and I absolutely rejected that. So from my early teen years, I really rejected classical music for a couple of years and went heavy into jazz and rock too. I got really into classic rock. Loved improvising and it would improvise every chance I got. At some point, one year from my birthday, I got a gift in the mail from my Aunt Sue, the classical pianist. She gifted me a big stack of classical CDs. I think that combined with my jazz piano teacher. I forgot, also changed, I eventually quit that piano teacher and changed to a different piano teacher named Alan Simon, and he still teaches around m, I've talked to him on occasion. He actually got me back interested in classical music again because he he had a thing where he would do mashups of jazz standards and classical music, and I just thought that was so fascinating.

James: 12:03

So in my older high school years, I did all kinds of classical and jazz enrichment. I was in all kinds of select ensembles and you know, you name it, very very active musically. I was also playing as many instruments as I could get my hands on. Added saxophone and flute just whatever I could do. I was playing other instruments a lot, and I think that had me a little bit scattered and unfocused as far as technique and virtuosity. Which when I auditioned to go to music conservatory, the first thing I did is I agonized if I should go to music school at all, because everybody knows that's not a great idea.

James: 13:01

So I went back to Jane Jessup, my elementary school music teacher, and talked to her about it. She told me some. I don't remember her exact words, but it's something along the lines of that saying, Music chooses you. And she asked me to think about what I would do with myself if it wasn't music, and if I could think of something compelling that would really interest me, she said, go ahead and do that. And you know, really genuinely encouraging me not to do music. But I thought about it and thought about it, and there was nothing else I could see myself doing. So I did decide to go to music conservatory and I auditioned at a bunch of prominent places, some of which I got into, others waitlisted, and I went to University of Connecticut as a music ed major.

James: 14:08

My principal instrument was clarinet and saxophone. I had a double principal instrument. Before I arrived at UConn, they had a jazz department that was just starting. So I was very excited to be able to study jazz. But when I arrived on campus, that professor had left and there was no jazz department. So it was gonna be classical saxophone and classical clarinet. I'm really, in a way, glad that it worked out that way because in my career it has set me apart in the jazz world being a Woodwind player with a a lot of heavy classical experience. So no classical Woodwind repertoire has ever bothered me. Eventually they did hire another jazz professor who was very influential, John Mosca from the Village Vanguard Jazz Orchestra. And I studied a lot under him. He really taught me so much about jazz. And he also had a classical background at Juilliard.

James: 15:28

So I got more and more interested in jazz and decided to transfer to SUNY Purchase to pursue more jazz studies. And something else I'll mention about University of Connecticut is one of my theory professors. Oh, I'll I'll add this too, that in high school I was very good at music theory and I took AP music theory, and that allowed me to be in an honors music theory classroom at UConn. There we did Movable Do solfege with a Do-based minor, and I loved it. I noticed my classmates struggled with it, most of them anyway, but I was a natural with that. And some of us would go around campus just solfeging tunes for fun. Our theory professor used the word audiation, so I don't know where he picked up that word from, Professor Kaminsky.

James: 16:40

I'm not sure if he heard about it from Feierabend circles or Gordon. University of Hartford is 20 or 30 minutes away, Christopher Azara was there. So even though I didn't know who any of these people were. In Connecticut at the time, I think some people were starting to get into audiation, and so I did hear that word at that time. Anyway, I transferred to SUNY Purchase to pursue more intense jazz studies as a jazz saxophone performance major. Set myself apart among my peers by being the the classical background helped a lot because I was the only jazz musician who could really play classical like that.

James: 17:31

So I did pretty well at SUNY Purchase. Again, not the very best. There was always one or two people better than me, but I was always holding my own, just you know, just below. The atmosphere at SUNY Purchase was very intense. And I had some experiences there that didn't sit well with me. It's not like I couldn't handle it. I like I said, I was a good player compared to the others, but it was more just the tone and the atmosphere that I didn't really enjoy. Another thing I started doing while at SUNY Purchase was for extra money, I was driving around teaching private lessons.

James: 18:19

I had taught a little bit of private lessons in high school, just you know, neighborhood kids. I was using the Bastion books. As I taught more private lessons I realized that I was really good at it. And I had excellent retention. A lot of my peers were teaching private lessons, but they didn't seem to like it. They were all complaining to each other and um lots of students quitting. But my students were thriving and I was enjoying it, and they loved their lessons and were making excellent progress. So I taught more and more until I really it was becoming almost like I was a full-time teacher and school was hard to fit in.

James: 19:10

So I quickly transferred back to the University of Connecticut, finished up my remaining credits, and got a bachelor's degree with an emphasis in human development. I took a lot of psychology classes and just taught massive amounts of private lessons, travel teaching in people's homes. I met my wife at the time, and I also taught this one family in particular that paved the way for my career to really expand.

James: 19:45

There was a family I was teaching that lived in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and they lived across the street from a very prominent piano teacher named Joyce Harrison. Joyce had a big studio. She was Like a well-known piano teacher. But she was getting near retirement and she had a waiting list a mile long. This family was on her waiting list, and I started teaching them, and they were doing so great. So eventually they got to the end of her waiting list and she called them and said, Congratulations, you have a spot in my studio. And they declined. They said, We're happy with our current teacher. And she must have been she's a really sweet, lovely woman, but I can't imagine what she must have thought of that.

James: 20:40

So she slipped a note through the family to me saying, Would you mind if I observe your teaching? And she came over kind of near the end of a lesson and watched me teach and invited me to her house, and she ended up hiring me to teach basically all of her students. So I instantly had like 30, 40 students, a lot of students, just like that. Many of her students were very accomplished, so I was teaching now, all of a sudden I was teaching high-level pianists, some of them sometimes like the the siblings of enrolled students, so I was teaching babies too. I was young in my 20s, so m ambitious, and I threw myself into this.

James: 21:30

She she made me kind of like the manager, and she moved out of state to Georgia, and I managed the studio for several years until eventually she shut it down. But during those years, I made a big name for myself in Ridgefield, just really riding on her reputation. But people got to know who I am, and I was doing a lot of adjudicating of different festivals, and I taught a lot of composition at this time too. Joyce didn't have that much of a theory background, and she loved that I was like a theory whiz. So I would teach her students, you know, her high-level students, about the music theory that they weren't getting from her.

James: 22:24

And I took on a lot of composition students, and they entered contests and started winning. And for 15 years I had a an uninterrupted string of first place winners in composition contests, so that kind of became a specialty of mine. Also, I would say, even though I still didn't know what MLT was, I remembered that word audiation, and I remembered just my own experience of how I learned music and noticing harmonic relationships and solfege in college and and from early childhood. And so my teaching really centered around audiation from the beginning. It wasn't MLT, it wasn't, you know, Edwin Gordon's concept of audiation, but it was still there.

James: 23:24

I got hired at the Worcester School in Danbury. I became a full-time music teacher there, teaching all kinds of classes. I taught AP music theory there, and again, being really ambitious, I threw myself into that curriculum and decided to master it. I did the certification process through the College Board, and immediately my students started just crushing the AP exam. I got kind of an uninterrupted string of scores of five for as long as I was teaching that course, just everybody got fives all the time. At one point, the school admin asked me if I was teaching to the test, and I said, no, I'm teaching beyond the test. And I was teaching a lot of audiation. This was where I think my focus on audition grew even more because I realized that the secret to successfully understanding music theory is through audition.

James: 24:40

And I have a really controversial take on this. My personal opinion is that the correct approach to understanding music theory is audiation. And when we talk about in traditional Gordon MLT, we say theoretical understanding is at the end. My opinion is that all of it is music theory, that music theory and audition are inseparable from each other. And what we do with preschoolers, that's music theory. It's just being done right. So I don't really think of it as a separate thing. Audiation is just sort of another word for music theory in a way. I became kind of a theory expert. I was giving state presentations at our CMEA on how to teach AP music theory, and I was attending conferences there.

James: 25:40

I was teaching concert band at the Worcester School, directing a concert band and the jazz band. I had already been married now for a bunch of years, and my son was born in 2010, and things were changing at the Worcester School, so a lot of music teachers left, and I left and just decided to teach privately in business for myself at that point.

James: 26:11

When my son, Eli, was a baby, I would sing to him. Really, from birth, I was singing to him constantly, you know, hours every day. At that point, I still did not know what MLT was. I had not yet been shown about MLT. So I was solfege fanatic, and I would sing to him for hours solfege, like entire songs in Solfege. And that went on for years, for literally years, hours at a time.

James: 26:52

When he got about four or five years old, he started begging me to use words instead of solfege, and I was a little disappointed. Like I said, my piano teaching was going well. All my students were doing great. I had so much success. I was still focusing a lot on reading, but with the support of what my understanding of audiation was, and I was noticing a lot of problems still that were just unsolvable problems. No matter how good a teacher I was, there just did not seem to be a solution. And some of that had to do with piano technique. You know, I don't have a background in high-level piano technique, so that was a little bit of a problem. And ear training, too. I mean, I was noticing that I had no trouble with ear training. It was, you know, piece of cake for me, and some of my students had no trouble with ear training, it was a piece of cake for them. But then others couldn't get it.

Hannah: 28:13

James, you have an amazing music background. I only had like glimpses of some of those things, but the intuition that you had coming up, like as a father singing to your kid, using sound before sight with the theory teaching, and using an an audiation approach before you even knew what audiation was, maybe an informal audition, we'll call it, before it was formalized. I have a follow-up going way back to something you said about human development. Can you talk about how that maybe influenced your teaching and what that did for you as a piano teacher and a music teacher?

James: 29:03

Yeah, well, it's gonna become way more important after I meet Marilyn (Lowe) because she was very influential in how I came to understand that. But I did take these classes in college. I didn't really know how to apply them. But again, y ou mentioned intuition. Another thing that I probably should have mentioned in there somewhere was that one of the first students I got assigned to when I was working for Joyce Harrison was an autistic student, a composer. And I had no experience with autism. I didn't really know what it was, but she had this instinct that I might be good with that kind of a student, and sure enough I was, so I started teaching him piano and composition lessons, and he was the first student who I really felt like I connected with and found my first glimpse at how to teach special needs students.

James: 30:25

And just to fast forward quickly through it, since working with that boy, it's become another specialty area of mine, and I've had so many students with all kinds of a range of neurodiversities, everything from bipolar disorder and OCD and ADHD, and uh I even taught a deaf student at one point, so everything. And I loved it. I had very little, little to no formal training in special needs education, but just by intuition and kind of seeing it through the lens of human development, special needs education became something that I was very good at and really enjoyed.

Hannah: 31:24

I smell a follow-up interview about teaching students with particular needs. Krista, let's put it on the schedule.

Krista: 31:38

Sounds good to me. James it's so nice learning about you. I don't think I knew a lot about your musical background and your history, and it doesn't surprise me with your experiences and your love of improvising, your love of jazz, and listening, that you eventually found music learning theory and audiation. So, can you tell us a little bit about how you found MLT and Music Moves for Piano and just what that journey was like for you?

James: 32:08

Yeah. So it started with this one boy, as I was beginning to say, about his problems with ear training. I was doing a reading-based approach with him, and it just wasn't working. He was sorry t o be a little harsh about it, but he was terrible at reading, despite all my, you know, I know I was a quality teacher, but he was not getting it. And the ear training, he wasn't getting that either. And he had support and engagement and intelligence. So what was wrong? And around this time I started talking heavily to Anne Katherine Davis and Benjamin Steinhart, and they introduced me to first to Taubman Technique and Piano Safari. I became kind of obsessed with Taubman Technique, even though I never had any formal Taubman training, but I just wanted to learn more about it.

James: 33:13

And they also mentioned Music Moves for Piano. I have to admit, I'm gonna admit something, just being totally honest here. The first time I looked at the sample pages of Keyboard Games, I did not care for it at all. I thought it was kind of laughable. I mean, I was looking at these pictures of hands and dots and stuff, and I thought this is ridiculous. It's so, you know, how could this possibly be good? So I did reject it at first, but Anne and Benjamin were both very persuasive, and I really admire them, particularly Anne. Benjamin too, but but Anne was very persistent, and I decided to give it more attention. And when I started to look into it more seriously with a more open mind, I realized that there was a lot more depth to it than it appeared from looking at those sample pages. There was some more there, was a lot more behind it that you don't see on the page when you look at those student books. And Anne was informally telling me a lot about how MLT works. She was telling me about not singing entire songs in Solfege. And that was fascinating to me because it was also around the same time that my son was begging for me not to sing in Solfege to him. So I decided to go to a workshop. It was at the South Shore Conservatory. Do you remember that actually, Hannah? That's when I met you for the first time. Krista, were you at that as well?

Krista: 35:22

Oh, is this at Brookline Music School?

James: 35:25

No, it wasn't at Brookline, it was at South Shore Conservatory. It was a double header with Irina Gorin and Marilyn Lowe.

Hannah: 35:34

No, you didn't meet me there. You met me at our PDLC when you came to visit.

James: 35:38

Oh. Okay.

Hannah: 35:40

But tell us more about this workshop because those are some big names.

James: 35:44

Yeah, I guess you're right. I think you're right. I forgot that I met you at Brookline. You're right. Okay. I met Anne at this workshop. That was the one time I met Anne in person. Because she was not at Brookline. That's why I got confused. It was an all-day workshop on a Sunday, and I live at least three hours from the South Shore Conservatory. So I just got up really early at the break of dawn and drove, and I showed up a little bit late, not too late, but it had already started, and I just snuck in and sat down next to Anne. She's very tall, I could see where she was sitting, and I was so excited to meet her too. So I snuck in, sat down next to her, and just what followed, I mean Marilyn had stamina because she taught that workshop all day and it was long and gave us an in-depth overview of everything about Music Moves for Piano and it was like a whole course, you know, smashed into one day. I was enamored of it all. I mean it was of course, it was just speaking my language.

James: 37:18

Everything about it just reinforced everything I knew about music learning. So I loved it. I knew I wasn't ever going back again. Even before the day ended, I was completely sold. And near the end, something else that really sealed it for me, because something I had always struggled with was students practicing. I was a good teacher, my students made so much progress, but I knew nobody was practicing. I taught them how to practice. I even had requirements where they had to send me recordings of them practicing and just nothing was working. I was despondent that I came to believe that none of my students would ever practice properly, that I would never be able to achieve that. That it's just impossible.

James: 38:22

So near the end of this workshop, somebody raised their hand. I t might have been me or it could have been somebody else, I don't remember who, but somebody raised their hand during the question and answer period and asked Marilyn, What do you do about students who don't practice? And Marilyn's answer to that question was one of the nails that sealed it for me. She said very simply, she said, Many of my students don't practice, but they all make progress. And I had never heard any music educator talk like that about practice. It it was always the if you ask anyone else, the answer is always, oh, you have to teach them how to practice, or you know, it's always about finding ways to get them to practice. There's never an acceptance of not practicing. That just doesn't exist. That that was it for me. I was like, I want that. I want to be able to just not worry if my students practice anymore.

James: 39:39

I remember I stayed very late in Massachusetts. Anne and I hung out well into the night. When I drove home that night, I called my sister, my younger sister, and I told her about this experience I had had at this workshop. I said, you know, this is it. I'm doing this from now on. And My sister's not a music teacher, but she she's an artist and she does play music and so she was very interested. And that was it. I immediately started teaching Keyboard Games to everyone. I changed everything about how I taught. I went from Do-based minor to La-based minor. That was very difficult for me. And like many music educators, I see this all the time. It's a big controversy in music education. A lot of educators think that Do-based minor is the way, that movable Do-based minor is just the most superior. And I believed that. My students were already crossing AP tests using movable Do-based minor, so I thought, you know, that was it.

James: 41:02

And somebody had introduced me to La-based minor at some point along the way, and I just thought it was silly. I thought, oh, that that must be for babies. Maybe that works with lower elementary school or something, but you know, this is for the serious students, Do-based minor. But my personality when I'm learning something new, the way I approach learning something new is I know in my gut that I'm gonna end up doing it my own way at some point, once I get a handle on it. But I feel like the best way for me to learn how to do it is to just do it by the book at first. I'm not gonna change anything, I'm gonna do it exactly the way I'm told without questioning it. And then I know I will start questioning it at some point, but you know, I wanna experience what it's like to do it by the recipe. So I was doing precisely what I was told. I still had some trouble with it. There were some hard parts, but I trusted that there was enough there that that it would make sense.

Hannah: 42:32

Yeah, can I just reiterate the thing about practicing? I think this is not to just be glossed over, especially if you're listening to this and you are struggling with this and you think that you have to make your students practice. And I know that there's once again, it's very controversial to say, oh, I don't make my students practice. And I have been met with flabber g gasted responses to that. But here's the thing about it, everybody. The reason we want to force our students to practice is because we think that they cannot make progress. And it's gonna look, they're gonna look bad, we're gonna look bad, they're gonna feel bad, we're gonna feel bad. It's not good when you don't make progress, especially if you're devoting all this time and money to music lessons of any kind.

Hannah: 43:29

And the thing about it is that if you are using an approach where you can still make progress, it's okay. And the approach where you can still make progress is one that is audiation-based. So I just wanted to get that out before we move on to our next topic. And it's great. It's great if your students practice. The students that I have that practice are amazing, they excel at 10 times the rate. But the students who don't practice, they still come to their lessons and love it. They still are learning to sing in tune, they're learning labels like tonic and dominant and subdominant and duple and triple, they're learning music fundamentals, they're learning how to play in ensemble with other students, even if it is at a very simplified level because they don't practice. So just wanted to make the case for being okay with students not practicing if you are using an approach that can still give them progress in the lessons. That is that's my soapbox.

James: 44:39

Hannah, I agree so much. I mean, I was shaking my head yes the whole time you were talking about that. Before MLT, like I said, I believe that throughout my entire teaching career, ever since I was a teenager, of all of my students probably none of them ever really practiced well, and many of them never practiced at all. The most successful students I ever had before MLT probably practiced a bit, but not properly. They I'm sure they weren't practicing with good practice habits and you know effective strategies, despite all of the, you know, I've heard it all, I know how to teach practice strategies, I just don't think they were doing it. So think what you said about making progress, I think even before MLT, because I had some basis of audiation built into my teaching from the beginning, I think that was responsible for probably all of my success as a teacher early on and all of my students' success. Because another thing that audiation-based teaching does is it makes progress without practicing because they're learning the music itself rather than the execution of the music. The physical, technical, mechanical execution of the music and the decoding aspect of notation, those aspects, the mechanical aspects and the decoding aspects, they do require a lot of heavy practice to maintain.

James: 46:39

And if you're not practicing heavily at those things, you won't be able to do them well. But when you are teaching students in a way that focuses on music rather than mechanics, physical mechanics or decoding, then music learning it's just pure music learning, based in audiation, is just so natural and easy that students I think can't help but learn it. Just the way it's effortless that a baby learns their native language. They don't have to practice that. I think that's really what it is. And when I say the music, I'm talking about the sound, the pure sound. And I was always talking about tonic and dominant to my students ever since the very beginning. So a lot of it has to do with harmony. I think in MLT Gordon talked a lot about harmony, but he also used the word tonal a lot of the time. And he used the words harmony and tonal in different ways, but he's kind of working with the same thing from different angles. I think because I was always focused on that at all times, that was why my students were able to learn even from the beginning.

Hannah: 48:18

And if you think about it, like the way I came up playing cadences and chords and scales, I never sang them.

James: 48:28

Right.

Hannah: 48:28

And the learning sequences that first we listen, then we speak, then we think, and then we read and write. And so to be hearing patterns based on tonic and dominant and subdominant for long periods of time, foundational. And I was not hearing those patterns based on these harmonic functions that I was expected to not only play but be able to quickly recognize in real music and know theoretically and be able to write them out and do all these things with tonic and dominant.

James: 49:05

Right.

Hannah: 49:06

But then having switched over to an audiation-based method, we're singing these patterns from very early on, and then the teachers are singing the patterns, the students are listening, and then the student begins to engage and sing those patterns... that's speaking, and then they go to the keyboard and they play them, and then they learn all 12 major and minor keys and just the the scaffolding and the foundational things that happen before we are playing tonic and dominant, and then we write tonic and dominant, and that's just so different from how I learned about tonic and dominant because I could not improvise with tonic and dominant until I was in college, and I was forced to do it.

James: 49:54

Yeah, and also the the bit about physical technique and you know, just learn to play with healthier technique and faster and more accuracy and more That also comes a lot from audiation, I believe. I never had really good instruction in that when I was young. My teacher, even my classical teacher, didn't really teach me technique. It was focused on being as strong as possible at decoding and learning music theory, practicing scales. But I was never taught, you know, about neutral handshape and how to balance and rotate and any of that. But I was told in my young twenties when I was working at that studio, another teacher admired how lovely my technique was. And I thought how why? I don't know, how did I get such good technique? I didn't know I had good technique. And I think it's because of my attention to listening. ou if you're really truly listening to what you're playing and you're just intensely focused on sound only, sound primarily above everything else, then your technique will just improve.

Hannah: 51:33

Yeah, the technique follows the audiation.

James: 51:37

Right.

Hannah: 51:37

Your ear and your audiation is what's leading all of your movements, and the sound that you produce is what's determining those mechanical and biomechanical things that are happening with your body as you approach the keyboard. So I think you're right. I think now that's not to say that we shouldn't teach good technique as teachers, we really should. I can totally understand how someone who is really focused on the sound would sort of intuitively and naturally develop at least some level of technique, even if they didn't have formal training in that arena.

James: 52:18

I think there's an aspect of body health and learning technique that not only makes the sound that you're seeking, but also won't damage your body. And that's where the teacher comes into it, because a student will not figure that out, the healthy aspects on their own without guidance. And I m when I was younger, I listened a lot to Glenn Gould. I loved Glenn Gould's playing at the time. And everybody knows how much he suffered physically. And I think part of Glenn Gould's physical suffering had to do with his obsession with sound, even to the point m sacrificing his body for the sake of sound. And there was one point at which I was playing some Bach as a teenager and I was trying to sound like Glen Gould, and I remember it going through painful, like physically painful experiences trying to reproduce that sound. It hurt. And I spoke with a Taubman teacher as an adult, and he said, Yeah, you were injuring yourself, and so I mean I'm lucky that that didn't last long.

James: 53:50

It was just it was really for maybe a couple of months, and so I don't think I have any lasting damage, but if I had continued down that path, I would. I'm sure I'd be badly injured now. So technique instruction is important, and Music Moves for Piano does such a good job of that, better than anything else I've seen. Even the methods that focus on technique a lot, like Piano Safari and Irina Gorin's method, and even to some extent Faber does a lot of this too, they all are getting at this technique instruction, but they don't do a great job of marrying that with audiation. And that's one of the brilliant things that Music Moves for Piano does, is it teaches technique from a pure audiation, just about sound.

Krista: 54:51

This concludes part one of our chat with James Kessler. Join us for part two as we dive into MLT instrumental methods. Thanks so much, and we'll see you soon.