TTTV051: Audiation in Action with Andy Mullen

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This month has been Music Learning Theory month on topmusic.co and with that has come a lot of talk about audiation. But what is audiation really? What does it mean and how does it look in a teaching context?

If we want students to take full ownership or musical concepts and patterns, they should be able to audiate them. We don't want them just imitating what they've heard, parroting back the melody or harmony or definition. We want them to fully grasp it right through to their core.

Andrew Mullen discovered Music Learning Theory through the choral training of James Jordan. It made a lot of sense to him, and so he started exploring further. He now teaches middle schoolers using this approach, and his students have reaped the benefits of a true understanding of music.

In fact, he's about to transition over his whole school district to MLT teaching!

In today's podcast, Andrew is giving us a great insight into what MLT looks (and sounds!) like in a practical context. Andrew's enthusiasm for MLT is contagious, and I can tell his classes must be great fun as well as educational. I hope you'll take a listen to hear some of his fantastic teaching in action!

Transcript

Please find a full transcript of this episode at the bottom of this page. Alternatively, click below to download a PDF. If you are an TopMusicPro Member, you can find the full video and transcript in the Member Resources Area. Not a member? See below for how you can get $50 off your membership today. 

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In this episode, you’ll learn

• How a class based on Dr. Gordon's ideas might look
• Why audiation is important
• The difference between imitation and audiation
• What Andrew's audiation station videos are designed to do
• The importance of always being able to find the resting tone
• The basics of theMLT syllable system
• Why rhythm patterns are organised into a syllable system in MLT
• The benefits Andrew has seen for his students since utilising MLT

Links Mentioned

• The Improving Musician
• Little Kids Rock
• Music Learning Theory books on GIA publications
• James Jordan

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Thank you for Tuning In!

There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, and I’m grateful that you’ve chosen mine.

Being a full-time teacher myself, I know how busy teachers are and how much time, effort and passion we put into our students. Sometimes, the last thing we want to do in our time off is listen to more piano teaching stuff! So, well done for using this time for self-improvement.

Whether you’re at the gym, on the bike or in the car, I know that you and your students will get lots out of what you learn in the long run. Just make sure you try out some of the ideas before they get lost in the business of your next lessons.

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Can your students audiate?

Would they be able to identify the home note or whether a chord was tonic or dominant?

Which of Andrew's activities are you excited to try with your students? Do you like the way rhythm is simplified in MLT? Or perhaps how solfa is incorporated?

Full Transcript

Tim: All right. Andy, welcome to the call finally. Great to have you on the show.

Andrew: Thanks, Tim. It's a pleasure to be here, pleasure to talk with you. I love all the stuff that you've done for the piano world and the music education world at large. So it's just a real pleasure to talk with you.

Tim: Brilliant. Well, look and for those of you who are listening and not watching, you'll notice that Andy sounds incredibly professional. I think this is one of the professional interviewees I've had on here. But you'll find out why a bit later on when we discuss some of the videos that he's put together for you guys. So let's first talk about how you personally got into Music Learning Theory, because you're not only teaching it to your students, you're actually...I think you're a presenter, is that right? Or you've certainly had to study from the Gordon Institute

Andrew: A lot of that is right. About five years ago, I took an online course with the noted choral pedagogue, James Jordan, and I don't know if you've heard of him, but he's a pretty crackerjack teacher, and he uses Music Learning Theory as probably one of the main foundations of his whole practice. And so, after reading a lot of his materials, he kept making reference to this Edwin Gordon guy and to this monster book "Learning Sequences in Music" by Dr. Gordon. It's a big one.

Tim: Oh my goodness, that is thick. I didn't realize that. I can tell that it's pretty heavy reading.

Andrew: It's a heavy reading literally and figuratively. So I thought I would go right to the source, and I bought the book and I made it about two chapters in and just didn't understand any of it. So I bought these lecture CDs, which I would highly recommend to anybody. They're sold by GIA, which is the publishing company that publishes all of Dr. Gordon's work. And there's a half hour lecture that's associated with each chapter, and it just, everything really, really hit home. Listening to Dr. Gordon speak is a lot easier than actually reading him. So I would recommend that to anybody who's interested in Music Learning Theory.

There are some lectures that are available actually for free on the Gordon Institute of Music Learning Theory University of South Carolina website. We can link to that later on. But that's really how I got started. I have about a half hour, 45 minute commute. So I spent a lot of time in the car just listening to the old guy talk, and it just really, really hit home. And he just said all the problems that I was having in music education, and he has answers. He has answers to many of those questions, and many of those problems that we have.

So you know, just listening and listening, and listening, and then more books and listening again and MLT, Music Learning Theory, is like you know, peeling back an onion. There's just the layers just never ever, ever, ever stop. So it's been a really exciting journey for me, and I'm happy to be now presenting all that stuff that I've learned to the world at large.

Tim: Fantastic. And so, what kind of teaching do you do today, these days?

Andrew: Currently, I teach middle school general music. I have sixth and seventh graders. Is that what you call it there? Year six and...

Tim: Yeah so about 12, 13-year-olds?

Andrew: Yeah, early teenagers. And I teach keyboard to sixth graders and guitar to seventh graders, you know, as well as just general musicianship. And I have two choruses, a big chorus and a more select chorus. And I do a little fiddle, a little banjo, and I have a rock band at the school. And yes, it's a great opportunity to implement MLT in a number of different areas.

Tim: And the great thing is that the concepts work for small groups, for individual, for classroom, so even though we're talking to you, you're a classroom specialist effectively, I guess, in the Middle East. All of the stuff that we're talking about can apply to any instrumental lesson, right?

Andrew: Yeah there's Gordon certifications, and there's one for early childhood. There's a whole mess of early childhood materials, and resources, and certifications. There's elementary general, which is the level that I just took last week. There's instrumental one, as you know, you talked with Marilyn Lowe. There's a piano one. So it's, yeah, as you say, it applies to individual students and groups as well.

Tim: Right. Well, look we've had a lot of posts this week and some podcasts as well about Music Learning Theory. And a lot of the talk is regarding this concept of audiation, which is a term that Dr. Gordon actually coined, I believe. And it's really, really crucial. But I think without seeing it in action, it's quite hard to understand. So I'm really excited to have you on the talk specifically about audiation but to also share with my viewers some of your videos, which are just brilliant in actually getting a feel for these. So what I'm gonna do now is just jump in. We're gonna listen to part of one of Andy's audiation station videos. And you can talk a little bit more about it afterwards. But would you recommend the teachers who are listening to this for the first time or watching it what should they do as they're listing or watching?

Andrew: I think they should start at the beginning.

Tim: Yep.

Andrew: That's what I think that they should do. They should start at the beginning. Gordon is fond of saying things like there's no correct chronological age, there is a musical age. So you never really know what your musical age is until you start back at the beginning.

Tim: Cool, all right. Well, let's have a quick listen to one of Andy's first videos.

All right, so Andy, tell us a little bit about what we've just heard and how we can actually use this in my audiences, as piano teachers, how we can apply it to the teaching that we're doing without having to go through all the process of having all the training. Are there things that we can do tomorrow with our students?

Andrew: Absolutely. Music Learning Theory teaches with what is called a whole part whole philosophy, W-H-O-L-E part, traditional spelling, and then whole, W-H-O-L-E. The whole, the first whole, is the context that we're in. So the context being a tonality or a meter. The parts of it are what we refer to in MLT is tonal patterns and rhythm patterns. And then once we've listened to the whole dissected it for parts, tonal patterns and rhythm patterns, which are the words of music, then the whole begins to make a lot more sense. We understand the context of the content. For example, if we just have bum, bum, that's just a total pattern that's out there in the world, bum bum. But there's no context to it. We can take bum bum, and we can give it this context. Now, that has more context. But say, we give it a different context. Well, now, that has a different context. Now, we're in minor tonality. We could be in Phrygian tonality, you never know. We could be in Dorian tonality, but we're getting a lot close.

Tim: Let's stick with [inaudible 00:08:00]

Andrew: Yeah, all right fine. We'll stick with mine [SP]. But I think too often as teachers, we give our students a lot of context without context, and they just become imitators.

Tim: You mean content without context, or did you mean to say context without context?

Andrew: I meant to say the right one, which is the way I think you said that.

Tim: We give content without context.

Andrew: Without context, yes. And they become imitators, and they don't become audiators. And you need audiation in order to say something musically.

Tim: And so, part of this is about the fact that if they are given that context, of let's say the major tonality, we want students to be able to go bum, bum, bum. Sorry, it's like 6:00 a.m. here, bum, bum, bum. We want them to be able to hear that resting tone. The tonality of the key, right?

Andrew: Absolutely. In Music Learning Theory, in the practical application of Music Learning Theory, we're constantly asking students to provide that resting tone. We always want our students to be able to provide the resting tone because without the resting tone, we don't have good intonation. We're constantly comparing whatever it is what we're doing to the resting tone, and that doesn't really make too much of a difference in piano because you know, everything is tune. But for most other instruments violin, and horns, you know, you really, really need to have a good sense of intonation. And so, what the audiation station videos do is and what we just heard, is it's the parts.

It takes students through just some very basic parts. In the audiation station, I plan to take students through major and minor tonalities, duple and triple meters, and teach everybody...teach students, the one chord, and the five-chord in both tonalities. And for students to be able to understand big beats, little beats, divisions, and the space in between. So that's my goal, and so what we just heard was effectively just one little snippet of parts that students should be able to take and practice and eventually reproduce and eventually, eventually, hopefully, not too eventually, improvise with. And I think that's one of the most important things we can do for our students is to teach them how to improvise.

Tim: So if I was a seven-year-old coming into your music class, what would the first five minutes be all about?

Andrew: This means audiate. Don't do anything just audiate. Listen to my song. Move like me. Now, you can't see my feet, but I'm...Move like me. Then move like me. Little beats on the lap like this. You're doing like the quick version for you. Then put them together.

Tim: So you're tapping the feet. Is that what you're doing that we can't see?

Andrew: That's right. Yeah, shall I move my feet?

Tim: No, it's fine.

Andrew: Okay. So big beats are in the feet. Little beats are in the lap with what we call spider fingers. Then we try to put them together. Move like me. Together now. Et cetera.

Tim: And all this time they're just listening, no vocal as yet?

Andrew: Not yet, no. This is the whole part whole philosophy. They're getting the whole, the whole, the whole, the whole, the whole, lots of times. But the same sense, we're comparing the whole against the parts. What are the parts? Big beats.

Tim: Which we'd call crotchets, I guess, or whole notes? Whole notes? No.

Andrew: Whole notes is a bad, bad word in Music Learning Theory.

Tim: Is it? Why is that?

Andrew: Because that's what we would call in the business a theoretical understanding. We want to start with labels that are kind of devoid of theory. So big beats and little bits together. So we've isolated a couple of rhythmic elements. We still have the big whole. Then we talk about flow. We don't talk about flow. We do flow. Flow is very, very important because flow is the space in between the beats. So we do it again. Listen to my song, and we do little flow. As much as they will do, sometimes they're a little leery about flowing way too much. So those are some rhythmic elements then we do some tonal elements. Listen to my song and whenever I stop, I want you to sing. They'll all say bam. We haven't labeled it anything because we're still in what's called ro ro [SP] in through the ears out through the mouth and back in, which is a little bit challenging because it's a five-chord function. And they have to kind of go back to one bum. And then we do, let it linger bum, let it linger, bum.

Tim: Good, very nice.

Tim: How did it get it, did I get it well?

Andrew: It is a great bum, great bum.

Tim: Well, thanks.

Andrew: And then we say something like, "Now, you've heard that song about 1,700 times could you please audiate the song. Can you please raise your hand when you are done audiating the song?" Audiate. And then they'll raise their hand when they're done. And then now, you've heard me sing a song about 1,700 times I bet you'd like to sing this song, yay. Ready, sing. There was one kid with a changed voice and mixing and then we do something like, I had this kind of all dial up here ready to go. I would love for you to sing it and then for me to sing something else, but I don't think that it would jive in the space-time continuum.

Tim: We could try. Do you wanna try?

Andrew: All right. Let's try it. So you sing the song, and I'm gonna sing a different song. I'm gonna call it my song, ready, sing.

Tim: Well, that's gonna be fascinating to listening back to it or really awful.

Andrew: So effectively, you're singing the melody and I'm singing the baseline. I'm providing the harmony for them. And then I divide the class in half and one-half would sing the melody then the other half would sing the code roots, the harmonic functions. And then we would switch, and they would their very first really true musical experience with melody, and rhythm, and harmony all together. Now, I talked a lot. In reality that would take about, you know, depending upon the length of the song, three, four, five, minutes. And it's a really, really great introduction to Music Learning Theory. And that's really what I was trying to provide in the A tune videos, is listening opportunities for individuals to be able to listen and pick out melody, and pick out rhythm, and pick out harmony, and have those kinds of musical experiences.

Tim: It's such a great overview. I really, really love that you've got and demonstrated this for us because it really puts it into perspective. You can read only you want of that audiation but to actually hear someone who knows what they're doing actually do it, I think it's brilliant. So I actually reckon we might have a listen to one of your attunes right now. So this is this is a chance for all the teachers watching to actually participate in exactly the activity you've just described, right?

Andrew: Absolutely. And there's a video that's at the beginning of the playlist, which kind of gives you directions and challenges you and charges with what you should be doing with these attune videos.

Tim: Okay, to save us worrying about that now, can you give them a quick overview of what they should be doing when we're about to listen to this one now. We won't play the whole thing but just a...