Alan Coady’s Musical Blog

There should always be room for a bit of fun in the school day, especially if it involves exposure to amazing musical skill. My PT today showed me this video of Harry The Piano playing the main theme from Harry Potter in a huge variety of styles - shouted out at random from (I presume) the person doing the filming. This is a great inspiration for pupils, many of whom (along with some teachers) have a dread of melodic improvisation, far less harmonic.

I’ve said it before, but feel it’s worth repeating, that the parallels between Music and Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) are not, in my opinion, as straightforward as one would imagine. One might imagine reading, writing, listening, speaking in MFL to equate with reading, composing, listening, playing in Music. I’d contend that a more realistic parallel would be playing, composing, listening, improvising.

Compared to many generations gone by, we have made great strides in regarding musical improvisation as something ordinary mortals should be able to attempt, but there’s a long way to go

Always a source of fascination, Radio 4 is launching Vox Project – researching the oldest instrument on Earth - the human voice. Listeners/readers are invited to send recordings of their voice, engaged in one of various comparative tasks, to the researchers at UCL. The one which particularly interested me (and possibly many of you) is the difference in one’s voice when teaching as opposed, say, to chatting to friends. Schools are full of digital recorders now so why not get involved.

You can send recordings via Audioboo (if you have a iPhone or Android Phone) – otherwise you can upload to Youtube and email a link to info@whistledown.net

The site also features:

• an interesting article entitled Why do human voices sound the way they do?

• an audio slideshow featuring Clare Balding in an MRI scanner employing various registers and accents

I’ve said it before but I’m often struck by how important our voices are in teaching and how little we really know about them. Or is it just me?

As Ronnie Summers (Head Teacher of Musselburgh Grammar School) said in his vote of thanks at the end of this year’s Christmas Concert, there is something admirable about the pupil soloist, willing to get up there and face the crowds alone (albeit often with an accompanist). People unfamiliar with school concerts might not appreciate that the same person may have taken part in several ensemble pieces the same evening – confident individual and effective contributor in one high-pressure evening Here is a clip of Callum in S6 performing the 2nd movement of Vivaldi’s Lute Concerto in D: vivaldi-lute-concerto-2nd-movement-callum

One of the other pieces in which Callum was involved was this a guitar ensemble item entitled I’m Dreaming of a Pink Christmas: im-dreaming-of-a-pink-christmas-2009-12-17

My colleague and friend, Mike McGeary, got in touch today to alert me to an opportunity for pupils to attend a workshop with legendary bluesman, Joe Bonamassa.

Date: Saturday 5th Dec

Venue: HMV Picture House, 31 Lothian Road (next to Usher Hall).

Time: doors open 2:45 - kick off at 3:00

Cost: FREE

Here’s a sample of the man in action:

I first came across the idea of mirror neurons in February 2001. How do I know this with such certainty? Because I wrote to New Scientist about the article concerned. The notion has featured recently as several pupils are playing pieces with a moto perpetuo right hand pattern. Here are three examples of such pieces currently being studied by pupils:

Ana Vidovic playing Etude No. 1 by Heitor Villa Lobos:

Ben Kearsely playing West Coast* by Helen Sanderson:

Peo Kindgren playing Estudio No. 6 by Leo Brouwer:

The essential thing in learning such pieces is to master the right hand pattern, by playing it without any distractions from the left hand. The hope in so doing is that the pattern will soon run on auto-pilot. That way, pupils will not be distracted when the left hand re-enters**. As such patterns are soon memorised, pupils are free to look away from the music and I ask them to look at my right hand while they continue to play the pattern. It may be my imagination but, almost without exception, pupils seem to relax the hand and play in a more economical way than might normally be the case. Could mirror neurons be at work here?

* I would describe this piece as the single most successful teaching piece I know

** An interesting half-way stage between playing without left hand and including the left hand is to introduce an unchanging chord shape which descends one fret-at-a-time. This way the hands can begin to come together in a way which falls somewhere between having no left hand involvement and having very varied (and therefore distracting) left hand content. A diminished 7th chord shape serves this purpose very well and, in fact features in the Villa Lobos Etude(from 0:41 to 1:17 on the Ana Vidovic video above)

I should also point out that some doubt has been cast on the theory of mirror neurons.

Further links on the topic of mirror neurons:

Wikipedia article

V. S Ramachandran 

 And here are two short videos on the topic:
 

And more generally - Sergio della Sala on neuroscience and learning about learning.

I was very flattered to be asked to contribute to the guest blog by the  Centre for Confidence and Well-being.

You can see the post here.

I’ve just been catching up with Alistair McGowan on Radio 4’s Chain Reaction. Aside from the expected entertainment value, he struck me as being someone of great insight. This came through particularly in his descriptions of trying to get into the what makes characters tick. From a technical point of view though, what really struck me was his description of what we warm to in a voice. It could be summed up as:

•  resonant voice = voice connected to the body and therefore to feeling thereby encouraging trust
• constricted voice = the opposite

 This made me wonder about voice projection in our profession. The subject has come up in terms of voice preservation and avoidance of unnecessary injury but not, to the best of my knowledge, in terms of putting pupils at their ease. Moreover, I can’t help feeling that, perhaps, a little more knowledge of the workings of the primordial instrument might give us one more tool in our armoury in understanding physical manifestations of psychological features in pupils.

The above Chain Reaction link will take you to listen again until 18:30 tomorrow (Wednesday 7^th Oct.) when, speaking of resonance as we were, Alistair McGowan interviews the cathedralesque Simon Callow.

You can also see Alistair McGowan describe some of his working method and observations here:

If someone were to mention electric guitar with digital delay, certain musical ideas might spring to mind - but probably not what happens from 4:00 in this video as the player is from quite a different musical culture. 

On Tue 15 Sept I went to an event in Glasgow Caledonia University organised by the Centre For Confidence and Well-being. A capacity crowd turned out to listen to Dr. Norman Doidge discuss ideas from his recent book, The Brain That Changes Itself.

Formerly, I could never decide whether, before attending a talk about a book, it would be better to have read none, some or all of the book. I had read about 1/3 of the book before attending and so was familiar with a little of the territory. I must confess to being no nearer a solution to this dilemma as I felt that prior knowledge of some chapters made those parts of the talk easier to follow (and film footage of some of the characters certainly reinforced my memory of what I had read). However, nearing the end of the book, I also feel certain that having been present at the talk enabled me to get more out of the remaining chapters.

I would say that the central claim of the book is that the metaphor of hard wiring and the perception of the brain as a computer are not supported by evidence of the brain’s capacity for change – as cited in the book’s wealth of anecdotal evidence of near-miraculous recovery from strokes and neurological disorders.

In person and in his writing, Dr Doidge effortlessly guides the lay listener/reader through what might hitherto have been regarded as difficult territory. I got a great deal out of reading the book but would like to concentrate on three nuggets which I feel immediately applicable to professional and personal development.

Learning Difficulty. Dr Doidge suggested that we all tend to equate this term with the same few deficits – difficulty with reading, writing, auditory processing etc. Our society has come to prize these activities/tools. Had things turned out otherwise, many more of us might find ourselves categorised as having a learning difficulty. I for example, have no sense of direction whatever, and precious little visual acuity. I wouldn’t have survived half-an-hour in a hunter-gatherer society and it’s lucky for me that I appeared here and now.

Attention: Dr. Doidge makes it very clear that lasting cognitive change is impossible without the full attention of the learner. We all know this but it’s rewarding to hear the evidence put forward from such a physical, as opposed to pedagogical, point of view.

Habit: we are all familiar with the adage, use it or lose it. Unless I’ve missed something, there does not seem to be a similarly snappy phrase for the other side of this coin – repeat it and benefit from/live with it. As a teacher of physical techniques I feel vindicated in having been such a stickler for technical correctness. Poor habits, once instilled, are very difficult to shake off and the thousands of reminders-per-week have not been in vain. The idea of fuss being made of posture, hand positions etc. can summon up images of terrified pupils, sitting bolt-upright, their limbs and digits exhibiting the flexibility of wrought-iron. Au contraire. What I am describing is natural technique where the skeleton does its own work and the muscles do only what is required. This could be summed up as follows: the strength is in the technique – not the person. That reinforcement in this regard should come from a book about neuroplasticity is no more of a surprise to me than the fact that my approach to natural technique came, not from music college, but from here.

My lifelong friend and professional predecessor at Musselburgh Grammar School, Mike McGeary, dropped by there last week to see me – with an offer for East Lothian guitar pupils. In his capacity as City of Edinburgh Council’s Principal Officer for Instrumental Instruction, Mike is involved with the outreach side of the current International Guitar Night tour. In addition to the gig at our own Brunton Hall, the members of this outfit are putting on a concert/workshop for pupils in Portobello High School on Friday Oct 2 from 2:00 – 4:00. Entry price to pupils is a mere £5.

There is ample video footage on the tour diary site but, to give you a more immediate idea of the three players involved, have a look at the videos below.

Lulo Reinhardt (great, grandnephew of Django Reinhardt)

 Itamar Erez

Brian Gore

Search for Portobello High School on Google Maps here.