Performance Diary

This past Thursday my great nieces and Crawford and Judy and I played down at the Orange nursing home to a mostly wheel chair bound audience. We did the same program we did at Oak Chapel, adding Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho, Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior, Sweet Hour of Prayer and Down By the Riverside.

I have never received more effusive, heartfelt and sincere thanks from an audience after a performance - ever. While I was packing up and schlepping equipment back to the car they kept rolling up to have a private moment to say just how much the performance had meant to them.

A small part of it has to do with my being down there once a week for years, so there's a nodding acquaintance with most of the residents. What just melted me was that two residents who've suffered strokes and have speech problems, and who normally don't really try to say too much because it's so difficult and frustrating, rolled up and really worked to say thank you.

The main reason for this was that the girls totally peg the cuteness meter. Once the audience realized we were really going to pull this off and successfully play the old hymns that mean so much to them, they slipped into a relaxed state of pleasure. The room just got sweeter and sweeter the more the girls played and sang, and when I got the audience to sing along with us (and most of them knew ALL the verses without hymnals).

Having done music in institutions a lot over the years, I couldn't help notice we pulled a lot of staff into the doorway of the room. The staff at places like that have heard it all, and they're very busy people, but when something special is happening, they notice. When I was leaving, several came out from back offices to say just how much they appreciated our playing.

My main contribution to the event was figuring out what the girls are capable of doing at this point and arranging music to suit. Skylar on trumpet is just starting her second year in band, and just got braces, so her range is Bb below middle C to the Bb an octave above, so mostly everything was either in Bb or Eb to accommodate that, and when it wasn't, she played the drum.

We just worked our way through the books I'd done up for them and did as many iterations of the hymns as we could get away with, with me calling out who took the next time through each time. That gives everything an improvisatory feel as opposed to plodding through a preset program, and it keeps the audience on their toes, so to speak.

Towards the end we had Crawford sing "Good Night, Irene", as the hurricane had just recently passed, and that went down very well as well. 

Judy P is the proud owner of a new ukulele with an onboard pickup I can plug straight into an amp. The amplitude of a uke strum is about half that of a guitar, so she can go much faster and throw in delightfully quick syncopations. Makes me realize one reason I so love Judy's drumming is that her background as a strummer so informs it, so it's great to play guitar and banjo with.

Back in this post I talk about what one blogger calls "transmission". And in this post there's talk of transcendence. What keeps coming back to me is that it's the sort of thing that can happen in all sorts of places outside concert halls, but in the era of recorded music and with fewer people playing in small catch as catch can ensembles (which was the norm for human society until the past couple of generations), people seem to have lost touch with that. If I can create some materials that will help facilitate more of this kind of small scale playing, I'll count that as a success.

My Core Constituency

Here are some photos of the rehearsal/warm up for the performance I wrote about in a previous post. These first two show the twelve year olds who started band last September, Skylar on trumpet and Amber on flute, along with the Reverend Crawford Harmon on E flat tuba, who's been playing his instrument a bit longer. 

Here's one with me on flute. . . 

. . . and on horn, with the six year old Carly in the first pew waiting her turn.

And here's the four year old Calli.

Providing the music for these people to play in this kind of situation is exactly what I'm trying to do when I talk about creating learning materials. What the girls are leaning in band and what's in the hymnals wouldn't work for this, but it's very easy to create arrangements that suit the players and the situation.

Working with the girls once a week this past year has been a wonderful opportunity to figure out what does and doesn't work with beginners, and working with Crawford and the other members of the Friday group, helping them get better use of the skills developed over a lifetime, is just as rewarding.

Many thanks to Crawford's wife Liz who took these pictures, and for using only available light, so there were no irritating flashes. I wasn't even aware she was taking the pictures.

Performance Diary

This past Sunday I helped my great nieces perform in their little country church (celebrating its 120th year). One 12 yr old started trumpet last September and the other started flute. The 6 yr old and the 4 yr old sang. The Reverend Crawford H from my regular group joined us with his E flat tuba to supply bass line (and because I so enjoyed playing with a group with a 75 yr difference between the oldest and youngest player).

All went well, particularly on our instrumental version of The Church in the Wildwood. The first run through was me playing alto line on flute with the flute playing soprano and Crawford on bass. The second time through I switched to horn on alto line of the chorus while the trumpet played the lead. The third time through was trumpet and flute on lead, horn on alto and tuba on bass. 

Perhaps the best thing was that things having gone well, the girls are eager to perform again, so we'll probably take the show on the road to the nursing home before school starts up again.

Two weeks ago I made a CD with them of a complete run through of our performance for them to practice with. They used that CD and were completely comfortable with the sequence of singing and instrumental solos, and the little ones used it to get the words of the songs down. 

The practice CD was so successful it makes me think something like that would be really helpful in the materials for learning I'm developing. Unlike a music minus one CD, I talked through who was doing what while playing and singing so that there were plenty of cues to follow. The idea would be to create CDs to jam with more than to play one particular part. That also allows for more than one to play along at the same time.

Talent

As a music therapist, I often hear the word "talent" in a phrase such as "I don't have any musical talent". That can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but my position is that it needn't be. For one thing, my view is that there is no unitary "musical talent". Some people have a great feel for rhythm, others for intonation, others for harmony and feeling chord changes, others for performing for audiences, and on and on. Truly gifted people have an abundance of a lot of those talents, but regular folks often have some measure of some of them as well.

Also, a crucial component of success at music making is the motivation to work at it enough to fully engage in the process and to experience the positive benefits it can bring, creating a virtuous circle of progress. I have from time to time encountered people with wonderful technique, but who have given up music because it no longer interests them because they feel no reward in pursuing music. They have various musical talents, but not the talent of connecting music making to their personal enjoyment and sense of fulfillment.

This article from the BBC seems to lend some support to this view. It's a discussion of how the new research into genetics indicates nurture has a lot to do with nature, i.e. just because you have a particular genes doesn't automatically mean you have that trait.

. . . genes interact with their surroundings, getting turned on and off all the time. In effect, the same genes have different effects depending on who they are talking to. . . 

. . .[A trait] emerges only from the interaction of gene and environment." This means that everything about us - our personalities, our intelligence, our abilities - are actually determined by the lives we lead. The very notion of "innate" no longer holds together. . . 

. . ."Like a jukebox, the individual has the potential to play a number of different developmental tunes. The particular developmental tune it does play is selected by [the environment] in which the individual is growing up.". . . 

. . ."High academic achievers are not necessarily born 'smarter' than others," they write in their book Talented Teenagers, "but work harder and develop more self-discipline.". . . 

. . .Most profoundly, Carol Dweck from Stanford University in the US, has demonstrated that students who understand intelligence is malleable rather than fixed are much more intellectually ambitious and successful. . . 

. . . Bit by bit, they're gathering a better and better understanding of how different attitudes, teaching styles and precise types of practice and exercise push people along very different pathways. . . .

All of this has great bearing on the discussion of "natural" in this post and those posts on other blogs that are linked. It also bears on the feelings discussed in this post on educators' often brusque elimination from their programs of people wishing to make music. 

I've seen in other discussions of the new genetics, though, that environment (nurture) can only affect genetic predisposition (nature) at the margins. It will take a while for all this to get sorted out, but in the meantime I hope to give regular folks some good tools for developing their music making abilities so as to enjoy all the benefits that can flow from successfully making music.

Composing Music

Over the years I've often had people tell me they can't imagine how it is someone can go about composing music. It happened again here a few days ago when I was on a quick visit to my flute playing friend Susan up in Vermont and I got to socialize with some artists. In a wonderful conversation with a very accomplished and well established engraver, he said something along the lines of he could see how visual artists got going on a piece and worked it to completion, but where a composer even started was a mystery to him. His being an amateur player in a community symphony orchestra made the comment more striking.

I think part of what creates this wonderment is that very few people know the basic ingredients of music. In English classes you learn spelling and grammar and then build on that knowledge to understand literature. If English classes were like music classes, you'd be taught all the fine points of recitation of great literature without ever getting that grounding in the basics of how it's put together. 

The other thing that seems to daunt people about composing is seeing it all as one fell swoop, when it's actually a series of steps where various decisions about how to go forward are made. So I've got this idea of blogging the composition of a piece of music to see if that will help illuminate the process, at least as far as how I go about it. May well jinx the piece, but seems worth trying. It's working title will be Vermont Song and posts talking about it will begin with the abbreviation V.S.

This may help as well trying to figure out how to present some aspects of theory in a non-threatening way. I'm more and more convinced some familiarity with theory needs to be part of the learning materials from the get go. Having that knowledge baked in from the beginning seems to be a better route than trying to add it on after drilling technique and nothing else for years on end.

Macedonia

This past Sunday the Kenwood Players joined the service down at Macedonia Christian Church once again. We were five, two Eb tubas, soprano sax, trombone and me on horn and guitar. Crawford preached as well as playing the tuba. The Friday before we rehearsed with the church organist so she could get a feel for playing with us and for seeing the hymns in different keys and arrangements from what's in the hymnal.

Besides preludes and a postlude, we accompanied the organ and congregation in all the hymn singing, which went very, very well. There was no line between audience and performer, just a group of people making music together. The singing was particularly good on the hymns I'd dropped down a step or three, but was good on all them. I have to think the pleasure of singing with the Players blending in encouraged more involvement by the congregation.

The one thing I wish I could do over would be taking the small amp for the guitar. I was furthest from the organist and facing away from her, so she didn't really hear the guitar. Between that and not having percussion, my strumming had no effect on the rhythms or tempos. Until I figured out what was going on, it was a very weird sensation. 

One great benefit of this has been the need for me to finally face trying to format keyboard music for what we're doing. As a music therapist, I've always used a guitar to lead groups because you can move around to connect closely with individual players. Playing a keyboard puts a physical barrier between you and the rest of the group. So I've never really worked out playing the keyboard as a chording instrument, much less figuring out how best to notate that way of playing.

Theory Mind

Back in this post I talked about Martin Gardiner's idea of multiple intelligences and mentioned my idea that "theory mind" is one type of musical intelligence. It can manifest in a left brain way as a natural understanding of the inherent structure of music along with the ability to use the sometimes very complex language that has arisen over the centuries to describe that structure. The right brain manifestation is naturally feeling the chord changes and the way all the pitches fit together vertically and horizontally, along with the ability to "get" complex rhythms right away.

The problem is how to present this information to those players for whom talk of music theory comes across as somewhere on a spectrum from scary to obtuse. I think one problem has been that most explanations of theory are written by people with theory mind, and they see the whole of it all at once, and for those of us who don't, the result can be nearly impenetrable. 

The challenge in creating appropriate learning materials is to choose the best few things to get across first so as to form one or two beachheads of understanding and then build out from there, always connecting the information to music the player is playing. Every piece of music in the player's book should have the basic structure of the piece laid out in as close as possible to everyday language, either nearby or in an accompanying book. 

The Kenwood Players

Down in the comments to this (terrific) post Jeffrey asks who "the group of eight" are I'd referred to and here's my response:

Hi, Jeffrey - My "group of eight" players meets once a week to help me proof arrangements printed out as part books for each individual instrument and player. Everybody has the melody and at least one (and usually two or three) other parts to choose from. The idea is to help people enjoy whatever technique they have - the target audience being folks denied entry into the necessarily elite world of school music, home schoolers, and folks who were/are in school music and want to use their skills in a more personally expressive way than playing in a large ensemble.

Two of the players are a retired minister and a retired public educator who played Eb tuba "back in the day", and they've both told me a number of times that this group is the most enjoyable and rewarding playing experience they've ever had in their 70 plus years. Our percussionist is a retired elementary music teacher. Our sax man played trumpet years ago and has taken up the tenor, alto and soprano in retirement. Trumpet and clarinet are a retired couple and the trombone is a cousin. The trumpet and trombone are pro level and can soar on improvisations. I play guitar and sing (with occasional horn and flute).

Part of all this also to inject more live music into the community (music therapy on a broad scale). We play at country churches, benefits for non-profits, a local assisted care facility, and community events. It's very frustrating to me that there are so many people with band instruments in their closets and a community concert band being the only real playing option, so they end up not playing at all.

I started out as a psychiatric attendant and group therapist and am a huge believer in the beneficial nature of small groups, and see combining that with music making as a near perfect pairing. We get compliments on our music, but also a lot on how obviously were all enjoying each other and making music together. I think the camaraderie we display has as much effect on the audience as the music we make.

Modular Music

One of the many things I've learned working with the Friday Group/Kenwood Players is that any positive effects of short pieces (say 2 or 3 minutes) in performance are erased by the shuffling around before and after. So I'm trying to string together tunes that have similar tempi by putting them in the same, or closely related keys, and just conjoining them as Handel did some of his short pieces, just going from one to the other with no transition. 

The individual tunes are clearly marked with double bar lines at beginning and ending, with the title given over the first measure, so beginners can work on individual pieces before stringing them together.

What looks to be a fun aspect of all of this is that once the basic work of transposition and juxtaposition is done, then the players can jump from piece to piece in whatever order suits, not necessarily the way it's laid out on the page. As far as I'm concerned, anything that helps players see the written music a just a simple aid to playing, as opposed to a holy writ, will help them become better players in the long run. 

The other thing I'm aiming for in these little arrangements is that they will sound fine played as is, but they can also be used as stepping stones to improvisation. Lavishly detailed scores can be fun to dig into, but they can also feel way over-determined if they head into directions that don't appeal to the player(s). 

Seeing the player(s) as more important than the music means the scores are going to have a different purpose and are going to have a different look and feel.

photo - garden greens.

Timbre

Timbre and tone are closely related, but not usually thought of as the same thing. When using the word "tone", we're usually referring to a specific instrument and/or player. "Timbre" (which is italicized because it's taken from the French) usually refers to the characteristic sound of a family of instruments, and then further to individual members of a particular family. 

There are the strings, which can be bowed orchestral instruments or guitar, banjos, and mandolins and such which are plucked or strummed. There are the brass instruments, some of which have conical tubing and others with cylindrical tubing. There are the single reeds - the clarinets and the saxophones - and the double reeds - the oboe and bassoon. The percussion family has a wide range of individual members with unique sounds.

One way we identify an instrument's timbre is by what audio people call the envelope of the sound (how the sound starts, sustains and then ends). Strings, brass, reeds and percussion have characteristic ways of creating their sounds that our brains process quickly and easily.

Another way we identify an instrument's timbre is by the nature of the vibration creating the sound. In this animation I linked down in the post on tone, you can add or subtract individual parts of the vibration and thereby change the overall vibration.

We use this way of changing the components of a vibration to alter its sound all the time when we speak. If you sing a long held note on a particular pitch and go through all the vowel sounds while doing so, it's your making subtle changes to the various components of the overall vibration creating the sound that makes "a's" sound like "a's" and "u's" sound like "u's". 

The specifics of what's going on with the components of the overall vibration are explained by something called the harmonic series, which gets pretty mathematical pretty quickly. At some point in the materials, the harmonic series needs to be explained for those interested. My hope is, though, to help people understand the broad outlines of all this well enough to inform their music making, without inducing math phobia.

Music Makers & Brain Function

In just about all of the articles about music and the brain, one of the points being made is that music engages and coordinates activities in multiple areas of the brain. If there is a human activity that uses as many, or more, areas of the brain, it hasn't been mentioned in any of the articles.

One of the underlying principles of music therapy is working to find the best way for each individual to go about learning how to make music and then how to improve their music making. Individuals are going to have variations of strengths and weaknesses (and individual characteristics) in the various areas of the brain involved.

 

The more we learn about these different areas and their involvement in making music, I think it will help us better tailor learning strategies for individuals. The better, and more complete, the evaluation of the client, the more effective the therapist can be. We need to improve our working understanding of what the different parts of the brain are up to and how that plays out in individuals.

A Year of The Balanced Embouchure

It's been just over a year now that I got in touch with Jeff Smiley, the trumpet playing originator of The Balanced Embouchure, and he put me in touch with Valerie Wells, who handles the horn side of things. I bought the book and have blogged about it over time (with the tag BE). 

I continue to think Jeff's approach to helping people find their best embouchure is the best approach to music making I've ever come across. From time to time you'll see folks on the web talking about what they think it is, but you can tell they haven't read the book, so seize on a detail without appreciating the full range and scope of the method.

It's easy to understand why this is, because even though I've read the book from cover to cover twice now, whenever I flip through I'll come across a passage that I'd forgotten about or hadn't fully appreciated at the time of reading. Often this is because the passage is so common sensical I assume I already "know" it. Music making includes all kinds of large and small scale mental and physical activities, and knowing about them all isn't enough. You need to be aware of them in real time as you play as well, until they become second nature.

Jeff's book is a terrific aid for gaining those necessary awarenesses, but his method is to help you achieve them in the best way that works for you, not to instill "the right way". As a therapist, I see the way you walk the path towards greater abilities of making music to be more important than the abilities themselves. I think it's also the case that how you go about developing your music making abilities shapes those abilities for better or worse. 

Since I've been working with Jeff's method, my horn playing has been transformed in some deep sense. I've got better range and endurance, but the main thing is I now have a much better "feel" of what's going on with my embouchure. A big part of Balanced Embouchure is how the exercises give your musculature a chance to find its best way of working, a lot of which is happening below the conscious level, which is why it's hard to describe and is so often misunderstood.

For those of us who aren't natural players, Jeff's method helps us find our way towards how we would play if we were natural players. It's that approach of helping people find their own way towards natural music making I'd like to expand into more general aspects of making music.

Ashley and Ritual

In this post over on Kyle Gann's blog, he pastes in a long passage written by Robert Ashley. Here's a section of that passage:

We have lost the idea of the rituals that remind the people who come that what is happening is only a small part, a "surfacing" of the continuing musicality of everyday life.

Actually, those rituals do not exist, except in television and probably in sports events. Everybody plays baseball or football or basketball or soccer or hockey (or wishes they did or thinks they do) so the game is only a "version" of what is part of your life. You are emotionally in it. That is what I mean by ritual. Everybody does not go around singing Mahler or Ives or Feldman or Palestrina. The music is foreign to you. Interesting, maybe, but foreign, like the gamelan. You are not in it.

The whole point of my project of creating musical materials "for the rest of us" is to enable folks to play music just like the sports Ashley mentions. Right now, most music available is for particular instruments, in particular keys, with particular technique requirements. If music making continues on its current path of more and more specialization, with more and more people having zero experience of making music for themselves, it seems to me a lot will be lost to society at large, and that professional music making might become an increasingly isolated endeavor.

Notes on Caroling

* At Gordon House we started with me on guitar, then some four part carols with me on flute or horn, then finished with guitar, closing with a sing along. That set up a really nice pace to the performance. Rhythm guitar is really my strong suit, with years of experience engaging audiences with it, and it builds momentum and excitement. Then, once we have the audience with us we can count on their attention for the instrumental pieces. In the past at Gordon House I'd tried leaving the guitar until the end, but book-ending the performance with it worked much better.

* On the four part carols from the hymnal, starting with someone on all four voices on the first iteration, then a duet on the second, then all four on the third worked much better than starting with a duet. Starting an iteration with a solo and then other voices coming in on subsequent lines also works. Stringing two or three carols together in one simple arrangement would be a nice improvement as well. If they were in the same key you could just go right from one to the other, letting someone solo on the soprano line on the follow on tune(s) to set the new tempo and feel. If you just did two tunes in an ABA arrangement, there'd be no need for page turns if they were on facing pages.

* I get tired of the sound of my voice on the guitar numbers. It's fine for leading sing alongs and egging on instrumentalists without having to be amplified. The problem is that in working to project, nuance and sustain tend to get lost, and for whatever reason, I tend to slip into the country accent I grew up with around here. Five of the Players are in choirs and/or the community chorus. I've tried to get them to sing before and met with stiff resistance. Need to try to see if rather than singing solos, or duets with me, they can be cajoled into being a mini-chorus with me of six voices. Also need to see how it would work having someone play the lead line along with me when I sing, so I wouldn't have to fill up so much melodic space with my voice alone. I always sort of expect the help, but instrumentalists seem trained to never step on anyone else's solo.

* For the Art Center benefit, need to arrange the Players better for balance, and get the singers in closer. Would also be good to break the sing along up into two or three sessions rather than one long one. Could do one session with just guitar and the Players who can play by ear, which would allow for pitching the tunes especially for particular singers on any particular song. This year I sort of hid the recorder, which made for poor balance on the CD. I'd worried that seeing it might put some people off singing, but with the performing type folks that showed up for the event that wouldn't be a problem.

* The organization of the music books for the Players needs to be completely redone. This year it ended up being like layers in an archaeological dig with front, middle and back sections as I added new material without wanting to reprint things already done. All the versions of each carol need to be grouped together and clearly marked as four part and/or guitar version, and each of those should have the concert key clearly marked with an ossia staff showing the highest (and maybe lowest) note in the song in that particular key. 

Gordon House

Yesterday the group played over at the Gordon House, a small assisted living facility just over in Gordonsville. All eight of us played for no more than two dozen residents in a room 40'x30' with a carpet. We used the same music books prepared for the Arts Center benefit and played for an hour. We started with Frosty, Rudolph and White Christmas with me on guitar and alternating vocals with instrumental solos, with others improvising harmonies and counter melodies. Then we did five carols from the hymn book arranged for instrumentals with me on flute for four and horn for one. Closed with some hymnal carols arranged for guitar like the first set and then Jingle Bells and We Wish You as a coda. Did a sing along version of Silent Night as encore.

It was our best performance to date. Very good intonation, great blend, wonderful freshness due to the improvised elements, and, most importantly, a terrific connection with the audience, whose median age was probably 80. They applauded enthusiastically after each number, and sang along amazingly well on Jingle Bells and Silent Night. 

The Gordon House performances are really a lab for me to test out how the materials work when performed with an audience I'm used to from private practice days in San Antonio. It's close, I can back up to the door of the room we use and off load stands and mats and instruments directly into the room, and the acoustics are good for recording.

Doing all the arrangements for horn, flute, trombone, trumpet, clarinet, alto sax and Eb tubas; getting my guitar skills and voice back to sing along level; and practicing the horn and flute - it's been a busy six weeks or so, but the Arts Center benefit and this event made it all worthwhile. I've learned a tremendous amount, and want to detail some of that in subsequent posts. 

Keys for Singing

Leading a sing along with just guitar is relatively easy if you have a capo. As you get a feel for the range of the group you can adjust the key by simply using the capo on different frets. A G chord with the capo on the first fret is Ab, and is a Bb with the capo on the third fret. 

Adding in orchestral or band instruments complicates things because as a rule, most players can't transpose in their heads, and capos don't work on clarinets. So you have to print out the music ahead of time in whatever key you think will work. For the Christmas caroling I'd assumed that there would be mostly untrained voices, so took most songs down around a third, and used flat keys to make things easier for the Bb and Eb instruments.

Then a week before the event I found out a lot of choir and chorus members were being invited, so went back and put things in their standard keys, plus or minus a step or two to keep the key signatures in flats. (With very, very few exceptions, hymns and carols will be in the same key in every hymnal you find.) So for every carol we had a choice of at least two keys, and that worked out well as some folks were more comfortable with lower keys and others with higher ones.

The format for most of the arrangements was to have the melody line, the bass line and guitar chords. To play the guitar in Eb or F I usually used the key of D capoed on the 1st or 3rd fret. For Ab and Bb I used G capoed on the 1st or 3rd fret. The exceptions were when the ii, iii, and/or vi chords required too many bar chords, which I can play but would rather pay attention to leading the singing than complicated fretting.

One of the problems with sheet music is that if the key doesn't suit your vocal range you're out of luck. For my music materials to really be helpful I think all the songs should be presented in at least three or four keys using the melody/bass line/guitar chord format in smaller print for the extra versions. That would also be a spur to improvisation.

Caroling 2.0 - Overview

Last week the Kenwood Players performed as a benefit for the local art center. The venue was a large private home and the program included us playing instrumental Christmas music first, and then having the guests sing along with the Players. I've done caroling for years with just the guitar, but this was the first time trying to incorporate other instruments. 

Overall, it was a great success based on the responses of the guests, both that night and as I've met them around town since. There were lots of things I'd do differently profiting from this experience, but the enthusiasm of the guests having the opportunity to sing along with 2 Eb tubas, percussion, trombone, alto sax, clarinet, trumpet and guitar carried the day. 

One of my notions is that exposing folks to band and orchestral instruments in an informal setting like this is a positive experience. Before recorded music, gatherings like this were the norm for generations and generations. These days most people encounter such instruments only in formal concert situations, which is fine, but it's not the only way they can be utilized and enjoyed. A basic aim of the materials I'm working on is to facilitate evenings like this.

Group Music

Every so often Jeffrey Agrell writes a post that clearly states something in my mind that I've never so clearly verbalized myself, and he's done it again in this post. Following my "regular reads" has been one of the most fruitful exercises ever when it comes to trying to develop the learning materials.

In the post linked, Jeffrey makes the point that working with others can be much more beneficial than solitary practice. A basic premise of the materials I'm trying to create is that they enable players of various instruments and with different skill levels to work together. I'd much rather facilitate small ensembles working and learning together than giving lessons to individual players. Working in a group can vastly accelerate one's musical progress, and it can be a lot more fun than plugging away on your own. Being able to focus on just one element of the music rather than trying to do it all by yourself allows for a much more relaxed approach.

When I had my practice in San Antonio, one of the places I worked was in the closed classrooms for emotionally disturbed children in a public school district. Many of the students had very poor social skills. Working together mostly non-verbally playing music together was a great way for them to learn how to get along successfully with others, and over time the verbal social skills would usually follow.

In my current Friday group that performs as the Kenwood Players, one of the things I most enjoy is watching how working together musically is creating a wonderful social dynamic amongst the players.

Jeff Smiley

Jeff Smiley is the man who came up with the "Balanced Embouchure" approach I've mentioned various times in posts with the "BE" label. Basically I was ready to give up the horn about a year ago due to a recurrent lip callus. I came across his website, ordered the book, and with the info in that book, turned around my horn playing, got rid of the callus, have extended my range and endurance a bit, and feel much more confident about my playing.

I find his approach a wonderful model for presenting information on how to go about learning music and hope to emulate it as much as possible in my own materials. Learning music is a complicated endeavor calling for attention to a wide range of issues and Jeff does a great job of getting you to think them through and to figure out what works best for you as an individual.

He has revamped his web site, especially the section for horn players. Highly recommended.

Mirror Neurons

Recently when talking about things I'd been blogging about with a friend who is very knowledgeable about current brain research, she told me about mirror neurons, which set off a cascade of things falling into place for me. Here are some snips from Wikipedia on the subject:

>>  A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. . .

A large number of experiments . . .  have shown that certain brain regions . . .  are active when a person experiences an emotion (disgust, happiness, pain, etc.) and when he or she sees another person experiencing an emotion. . . 

More recently, Christian Keysers at the Social Brain Lab and colleagues have shown that people that are more empathic according to self-report questionnaires have stronger activations both in the mirror system for hand actions and the mirror system for emotions, providing more direct support to the idea that the mirror system is linked to empathy. . . 

This has led to suggestions that human language evolved from a gesture performance/understanding system implemented in mirror neurons. Mirror neurons have been said to have the potential to provide a mechanism for action understanding, imitation learning, and the simulation of other people's behaviour. . . 

In Philosophy of mind, mirror neurons have become the primary rallying call of simulation theorists concerning our 'theory of mind.' 'Theory of mind' refers to our ability to infer another person's mental state (i.e., beliefs and desires) from their experiences or their behavior. . . <<

Research on all of this is in the earliest of stages, so it may not pan out, but if it does, here are some of the things it would illuminate.

* My notion of getting "traction" with a client or audience.

* Jonathan West's point about mimicry being so important to musicality

* My long held intuition that gesture is a substrate of music making.

* How "flow" can be shared by music makers and their audience.

* Why simply demonstrating a point about music making can be so effective.

* A John Ericson post months ago about how imagining shooting free throws was as helpful as actually doing so.

* How music can communicate emotions.