Category: Pedagogy

Middle School Level Big Band Charts Now Available

~ wilktone ~ Leave a comment

Three big band charts I wrote for middle school jazz bands are now available on PDF Jazz Music. All three of these charts include chord voicings for guitar and piano and sample bass line. There are also some sample solos included, although each of these charts would be useful for introducing different improvisation topics to young jazz students.

I wrote Nogueira Amarga for the Northview Middle School Jazz Ensemble, under the direction of David Wortman. It’s a bossa nova that is based around a two-chord vamp, making it an easy introduction to improvisation since the students can choose notes from just a major pentatonic scale or major scale.

Blackhawk Blues was composed for Mary Jo Sparrow’s North Buncombe Middle School Jazz Ensemble. It also includes sample voicings, bass line, and solos. As you would guess from the title, Blackhawk Blues makes for a good introduction to blues scale, minor pentatonic scale, and blues form.

Like the other two, Tyson Tunes Up includes voicings, bass line, and solos. I wrote this chart for Tyson Hamrick’s jazz band at Owen Middle School. This chart is a touch more challenging than the other two. Each of the horn sections gets the chance to play some melodies. This chart is based on rhythm changes and includes hints at other famous tunes that use the same chord progressions.

You can view scores and hear recordings of these charts on my page over at PDF Jazz Music. One interesting things about the recordings of those three charts is that they were made with just 4 musicians. I had three friends play the drums, bass, and saxophone parts. I recorded all the brass parts and the piano on those recordings.

Jazz Education – The Kenton Clinic Model

~ wilktone ~ 1 Comment

Beginning in the 1950s big band leader Stan Kenton developed an approach to jazz education that today is sometimes referred to as the “Kenton Clinic” model. The concept of it is simple – put students and professionals in the same band and have them play together.

At one time this was really the only way available for young musicians to learn to play jazz. Prior to the 1950s you really couldn’t get instruction in jazz in school, you had to learn it by sitting in with professional bands and hopefully eventually getting good enough to be hired. Kenton realized by the 1950s that this model of music education was changing. There was less interest in jazz as pop music and fewer opportunities for young musicians to pay their dues by sitting in with local and regional bands. At the same time, many high schools and colleges had begun to put “stage bands” into their curriculum. Kenton recognized the opportunity and in 1959 he presented his first clinic at Indiana University. It was considered successful and led to Kenton expanding on his program. He would end up presenting over 100 clinics a year at camps and residency programs through the mid 1970s and developed educational materials and arrangements for student groups.

Since then the Kenton Clinic model has been duplicated many times. As a music student I was able to attend the Birch Creek Jazz Camp first as a student and then later as a teaching assistant. The highlight of those camps for me was rehearsing and performing several times with the faculty big band. The experience of playing with musicians at a professional standard forced me to step up my playing to a higher level. Additionally, I was able to make connections with fellow students and faculty that led to other opportunities years later, yet another valuable feature of the Kenton model.

I’ve always enjoyed the Kenton model and as the music director for the Asheville Jazz Orchestra I’ve wanted to do more of it. Last Saturday we were able to present a one-night Kenton Clinic to jazz students from Owen High School. The OHS band opened the evening with five charts, with a handful of AJO players sitting in (mainly to fill in for students missing for other school sponsored events that Saturday). I had been helping the students rehearse their music prior and they even performed one of my compositions, Truck Stop Coffee.

But I hope the highlight for the students was getting to sit in with the AJO. I made sure that throughout the night we had good swinging charts for the students to play on. I also made sure that our encore was a chart the students all knew and we closed the night with a combined band.

It’s my plan to repeat this clinic with other student bands and hopefully someday expand on it and present clinics that go over multiple days. The AJO has performed or given clinics at several educational conferences before, but we rarely have the opportunity to use the Kenton model at these. If you’re a band director around western North Carolina and interested in trying to help organize a Kenton Clinic with the Asheville Jazz Orchestra, please drop me a line at the contact link here.

If you’re curious to learn more about the history of jazz education in the U.S., check out this presentation by the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz.

On Metronome Practice and Logic Based Teaching Methods

~ wilktone ~ 26 Comments

Back in September I wrote a post here on Practicing with a Metronome in response to a blog post by Mike Longo entitled Should You Practice Jazz With A Metronome? While I agree with many of Mike’s points about the cons of metronome practice, my main criticism is his emphatic dismissal of any metronome use at all limits teachers and students by  completely removing a potentially useful tool from their bag of tricks.

Since then, Mike and a couple of others (including at least one student of Mike’s) have stopped by with comments to try to further debate the idea that metronome practice will always produce a soulless and stiff feeling pulse. Since many of their comments really don’t address the points I was trying to make and also rely on some fallacious logic, I wanted to write a new post to try to discuss this further. So while this post is superficially about metronome practice, it’s really more about the inconsistent logic we often use to determine what the best teaching methods are for a particular situation.

Mike commented:

Here is the main point I would like to make. Dizzy Gillespie once made a point about the role of body rhythm being an important factor overlooked by many jazz educators. He would say that he can tell if a player can really play by observing the way that they pat their foot.

Addressing the above point, I would agree that coordinating our bodies to play is essential. Tapping the foot is an excellent way to get the feeling of the tempo internalized, for example. Even though some classical music teachers discourage this practice, I’m fine with it. Sure, looking up at a stage of a concert band or orchestra where everyone is tapping their foot can be visually distracting, but there are ways to tap your foot that are less obtrusive and if it helps the music sound better I’m willing to let it go. That said, tapping the foot to play isn’t a panacea for tempo or groove problems. Watch enough students tap their foot while practicing a passage and you’ll note that sometimes when they get to a difficult passage they still change tempos – they just change their foot along with their playing.

Furthermore, from a logical standpoint, just because an innovative musician told you that tapping the foot was better than using a metronome to practice doesn’t mean we can believe that it must be correct (see argument from authority). Ideas need to stand on their own merit, not be based on who said them. If a general consensus is found among experts it’s fair to assume that an idea is correct, but in this case the general consensus among musicians and music teachers is that a metronome can be useful at times. Many great jazz musicians advocated practicing with a metronome, including Lennie Tristano, Pat Metheny, Kurt Rosenwinkle, John Patitucci, Dennis DiBlasio, and Hal Crook. Going back and forth about whose expert has the right approach is pointless if you don’t directly address the logic behind these recommendations.

Mike continues:

 In terms of my opinions concerning practice with the metronome on 2 and 4, one must consider where the 2 and 4 thing originated in jazz. The answer is hand clapping in the black church. If one observes a gospel choir clapping on 2 and 4 and notes the way they are moving their bodies, I defy anyone to prove that a metronome on 2 and 4 can produce that feel or teach a musician how to get that feeling of swing in their playing. In fact I would go so far IMHO to say that musicians who engage in this practice are training themselves to play wrong.

The gospel music sung by African Americans in around the turn of the last century is quite a bit different from the syncopated music we hear today. The texture was largely heterophonic and the music didn’t have the characteristic 2 and 4 accent we associate with jazz.

The historical evolution of the groove that evolved into the swing feeling with 2 and 4 accents is too complex to get into for this essay, but if anyone is interested I suggest that you compare the New Orleans early jazz styles of the 1920s to how it evolved when the music and people migrated up to Chicago. Then compare it to the swing bands from Kansas City and New York. You will be able to hear an evolution of how the groove shifted from a more or less even stress on all four beats to become the standard swing feeling we have today (and of course, you can continue to trace how this groove shifts throughout different style periods).

Regardless, the origins of how a particular musical style evolved doesn’t really say anything about the results that a student might get from a particular practice method. I would agree with Mike that if you don’t spend time performing with great musicians who have a steady pulse and soulful groove you’re not going to be able to pick this up by playing along with a metronome. That doesn’t mean that at times in individual practice that a metronome is going to harm your ability to swing. Certainly if you never practice without a metronome you’re missing the point. And it’s certainly possible for some musicians to achieve a solid swing feel without ever needing to turn on a metronome. None of that really addresses whether or not a metronome may be useful for certain issues in a student’s personal practice.

As far as teaching how to keep good time, it is my contention that a metronome is not the kind of time music is played to. Is there an alternative?

There is no question that there are alternative methods to teaching a student to keep good time without using a metronome and that these approaches have value. What I’m arguing against is limiting our teaching to only one approach.

The other issue I have with Mike’s point here is that practicing with a metronome isn’t so much about teaching good time, but for providing feedback to a student who isn’t keeping good time.

I’ve found that most students, even the beginners I work with, are quite capable of keeping a steady pulse just by clapping or tapping their foot. But music students will often find their time to suffer when they have too much to think about at the same time. We really can’t keep our attention on more than one or two things at a time and if one thing isn’t completely internalized it can suffer when our focus is pulled away from it. As an example, students who don’t have the tempo internalized will often rush when the music gets louder or more rhythmically active. It’s also quite common for musicians to drag when playing softer and when the texture gets less active. I’ve found it quite helpful to use a metronome in these cases to help students become more aware of the tempo in these situations because the click provides them with instant feedback when they start changing their tempo. Likewise, when a passage becomes a challenge for the musician’s technique it’s very common for the tempo to slow down. Using a metronome that will accent certain beats in a metric pattern or a basic click on 2 and 4 can be used for feedback on whether or not they are dropping beats, which can be common when students are reading very challenging lines. Learning to play very challenging passages at a fast tempo can be learned very efficiently by using a metronome to start very slowly and gradually speeding up the tempo until the passage can be played correctly as fast as desired.

Is it musical to play with a metronome this way? Not really. That’s not the point of the exercise. Music students practice all sorts of things that have little musical value (Hanon finger exercises, long tones, scales, chord arpeggios, technical etudes, etc.). The purpose is to get whatever you’re working on so comfortable that you no longer have to think about it and can concentrate on playing musically when it counts.

Or another approach you can think of is if you can groove with a metronome click, think of how hard you’ll swing when you turn it off and jam with live musicians.

This was instigated by a prominent psychotherapist in that area by the name of Andrew Schoenfeld along with saxophonist Benny Wallace, both of whom were private students of mine at one point. As a matter of fact, Mr. Schoenfeld has been using the drum technique with his patients with a great amount of success and even has reported curing some of bipolar disease with it.

I tend to avoid discussing medical issues here and when I do I always want to lead with the statement that I am not a medical professional and in no way should anything I say be taken for medical advice. Nor should you assume that anything I write about health is correct. Check with your family doctor or another medical professional. Never get your medical advice from the internet.

Now that that’s out of the way, let me first state that Mike’s portrayal of Mr. Schoenfeld’s social work as “curing” bipolar disorder is most likely a great exaggeration. The National Institute of Medical Health statement on bipolar disorder says:

Bipolar disorder cannot be cured, but it can be treated effectively over the long-term.

However, I’m a big advocate of research-based music therapy and I think that it’s certainly plausible that musical activities can be used to help individuals with bipolar disorder treat the symptoms they live with.

All that aside now, what does music therapy have to do with practicing with a metronome? If medical treatments constituted as evidence for what is best for musical practice then there is likely more evidence for using a metronome than not. A cursory search through medical literature available online shows that a metronome has been found to be helpful for treating symptoms of stuttering, Parkinson’s disease, ADHD, hypertension, walking issues due to a stroke, and much more. None of this really says anything about whether or not we might find a metronome to be helpful in certain musical teaching situations.

Since the field of jazz academia, to my knowledge, is presently unaware of these principles I feel it necessary to call attention to this statement. “in determining best practice for teaching it’s been shown that a more scientific outlook will produce better, more consistent results with our students” This leads me to ask the question, “Science based on what?” I would consider what Diz made reference to be in fact Science. Maybe not as defined in the world of academia but surely in the world of professional jazz by the people who play it and teach it from that perspective.

We can’t redefine words like “science” to mean whatever we want it to in order to support an agenda. If it helps, reword my statement to say that “research based methods will produce more consistent teaching.” Research done correctly applies certain controls to a particular hypothesis (i.e., metronome practice will automatically produce a stiff feeling groove) and attempt to falsify your idea. You don’t do science by looking for evidence that supports what you believe, you attempt to shoot it down. If it withstands the scrutiny, then you’re perhaps on to something.

The reason we go through this effort in teaching is because of the cognitive bias that we all have.

“Cognitive Bias????” For one thing the music played by Dizzy Gillespie and his followers does not involve the mind. It comes from a place behind the mind… A “magical” place, if you will, and a place, IMHO, that practicing jazz with a metronome will render a student unable to ever achieve.

I’m a fan of using poetic language to help convey musical concepts to my students too, but ultimately I try to recognize when I’m speaking metaphorically and when I’m being precise. If you want to teach that music is outside of the mind and from a magical place, that’s fine, but you can’t invoke this as evidence because it is patently not true.

Since you accused me of “creating another false dichotomy” at the beginning of your article and since you are unaware of these principles your statement appears to me to be the result of projection. Who then is “fooling themselves?” Further I don’t see where this dichotomy you perceive is false but very real IMO.

I think perhaps I’m not being very clear on explaining my thoughts on metronome practice, but I also think that possibly Mike does not understand what a “false dichotomy” is. This logical fallacy is created when a situation is manufactured where only two extreme positions are listed as the only viable options, leaving out the possibility for a combination of both or other additional options.

I have never stated here or on my other post that I think metronome practice is the be all and end of learning to play with good swing. In fact, I have acknowledged many times that Mike’s points about the detriments of relying on a metronome should be kept in mind. The false dichotomy Mike has created is that because of the drawbacks to metronome practice exist there are no situations where a metronome might be helpful. The fact that one can get by without a metronome doesn’t mean that careful and correct use of a metronome at times might not be helpful. Nor does my recommending that a metronome can be helpful mean that I don’t think other approaches have validity and aren’t worth exploring.

Students are infinitely variable. Some students will need different approaches or explanations to grasp the same concepts. Anyone who has taught for long enough will also be familiar with how the exact same student can sometimes respond great to one method only to require changing our instruction up at another time. As I’m fond of saying here, if the only tool in our toolbox is a hammer every problem begins to look like a nail.

This leads me to another of your statements: “we musicians are trained to trust our feelings, experiences, and intuitions. This is a good thing because it helps us become better musicians.” To me, feelings, experiences and intuitions without reality can be very misleading and furthermore if exposed to one of Dizzy’s revelations can change in an instance.

Again, this misses my point about cognitive bias and research based methods. Mike is taking his personal experiences and making the leap to assume that his own background must be true for everyone. I can also list some personal experiences that contrast his. Which of us should one believe? Neither, without making an effort to remove our personal agendas from the equation.

One of Mike’s students, Angelo, made the same logical error:

I would like to offer my background and personal experience with Mike for you consideration.

. . .

I started studying music theory with a teacher, and for the first time in my life, used a metronome.

. . .

Years later I was living in New York City and looking to study composition and arrangement. After meeting with numerous teachers that were presenting me with the same common material over and over, I was given Mike’s name and number. When I met with him for my first lesson I immediately knew I had found what I was looking for. His approach to music was a revelation to me and at the end of my first lesson I asked if I should use a metronome when practicing. His response was “Why would you do that?” As he explained the difference between a click and a pulse feel I immediately recognized what had happened to me years earlier with the drummer and bass player.

I was only studying with Mike for a short while when I got together with a friend that I’ve been playing with for over 30 years. . . He immediately recognized a difference and improvement in my playing.

Now in no way do I want anyone to think that I’m disparaging what Mike taught you. There is definitely a benefit to this approach and in fact I would also agree that it’s essential for developing a good time feel and groove. That said, this is a common fallacy that I hear many folks make all the time. Here it is again, this time made by Mike.

A guitar student who came to me three months ago a nervous wreck because he claimed he had a “time problem.” It turned out his former teacher had him practicing with the metronome on 2 and 4 and he was getting put down by all of the musicians with whom he was playing, particularly a Brazilian drummer, and losing gigs. He came to his lesson yesterday and related to me that the drummer shook his hand after the gig the night before and called him Maestro.

It’s very common for musicians to say variations on the above. You will frequently here someone say something like “I practiced X over and over and didn’t get better. It wasn’t until I forgot about X and went to Y that I suddenly found my way.” What this completely forgets is that X might just have been a necessary step along the progression. Going back to what I wrote far above in this post, using a metronome might not have developed good time, but could just have helped the student internalize certain issues to the point of where forgetting all about the metronome click and going on to something else would be that much more beneficial. This may not always be the case for all situations, but it’s an important area to consider when we’re trying to determine the best way to help a student.

Testimonials, like those above, may be very good for selling books and DVDs, but their anecdotal nature make them extremely unreliable as real evidence. No matter how many positive testimonials you have, they still can’t be used in research-based approaches because of the inherent bias they carry.

I might also mention that the metronome wasn’t invented until Beethoven’s time so I feel sorry for all those sad musicians before him who must have had time problems including Bach, Mozart, Handel, and on and on.

In any honest discussion I think it’s important to only address points actually made by those we’re debating. Creating a “straw man argument” against which you can easily refute doesn’t benefit anyone. I never said that a metronome is the only way to develop good time feel. Again, this is a false dichotomy by reducing my argument to using a metronome is the only way and Mike’s way must therefor be ineffective. I actually advocate a combination of both metronome use for certain situations and then always moving on to internalizing the time feeling and concentrating on musical expression.

There is a story about Beethoven smashing the metronome against the wall and proclaiming, “This is not music!” This was related to me by a musician so I am not sure is it is a true story but if it is Beethoven was surly an extremist.

This story is almost certainly apocryphal. Beethoven was known for writing metronome markings in his music, so he was certainly not opposed to using one for the purpose of finding tempos. Additionally, while the metronome was invented around from the early 1700s, by the time that Johann Maezel patented it in 1815 Beethoven was almost completely deaf and wouldn’t have been capable of hearing a metronome click. Furthermore, Mike is again creating a straw man by implying I feel a metronome click to be musically expressive. It’s not. Or at least not unless you count pieces like György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique for 100 Metronomes.

Since you have not bothered to check out where I am coming from you undoubtedly will continue to consider me to have an extreme perspective.

I want to reiterate that I don’t find Mike’s alternative to metronome practice extreme or something to avoid altogether. What I find extreme is his dismissal of any other approach as having some validity. Again, there are many different approaches that music teachers can take according to the situation and needs of the individual student and it’s my contention that the best teachers are able to draw from a variety of approaches.

As far as pros and cons of metronome use I will say that there is an alternative approach with evidence to back it up that has led me and students to conclude that there are no pros.

Simply because alternative approaches exists and that these methods are helpful doesn’t mean that we should automatically dismiss the metronome. There are definitely good reasons for avoiding a metronome at times, but there is a vast majority opinion among musicians and music teachers that a metronome, when correctly used for specific issues, can be quite effective for helping a student work out problems that cause time issues.

For anyone who is curious exploring ideas on how to best use a metronome, a good general discussion can be found on the Wikipedia entry on metronome practice. I’ll close this post by quoting a passage from this entry, with my bold emphasis to illustrate my basic point.

The “intuitive” approach to metronome practise, is to simply play your music along with a metronome. With metronome technique however, musicians do separate exercises with a metronome to help strengthen and steady their sense of rhythm, and tempo; and increase their sensitivity to musical time and precision. Only occasionally do you play your music with a metronome, to deal with particular issues. It is entirely possible that you never play your music with a metronome at all.

Lindy Focus Music Track – Part 2

~ wilktone ~ Leave a comment

A couple of days ago was the first full day of the Lindy Focus jazz dance camp. I picked up a guest pass for their music track classes and have been enjoying sitting in and watching Ben Polcer and his staff from Welbourne Jazz Camp (Jason Jurzak, Benji Bohannon, Aurora Nealand, Lucian Cobb, and Russel Welch) teach and play.

Most of what they are covering deal with playing traditional jazz or swing for dancers, and many of the students here came for the dancing and are taking “add on” classes in music too. Others are here specifically for the music track, but many of those musicians are also dancers.

Even though I knew to expect there to be musicians around at this dance camp, I was surprised to see how many of the dancers are also musicians and brought instruments to jam. Sessions seem to spring up pretty regularly and walked from one room to hear a crowd of musicians around a piano jamming on New Orleans jazz into another room where some folks were playing gypsy jazz and singing. There’s an overall sense in that making music, like swing dancing, is something that is supposed to be participatory, not separated into performers and audience.

The staff really knows the music very well and are great at getting their points across, even in some of the larger classes with musicians of mixed abilities. They’ve been emphasizing learning tunes and concepts by ear yet at the same time teach the music theory. They also play for and with the students a lot.

There are a couple of more days left in this year’s Lindy Focus, but my impressions at this point are that the first music track has been quite successful and has been definitely worth my effort to sit in on. Semi-professional and amateur musicians interested in traditional jazz would definitely get a lot out of this music track, if they decide to host the music track again for 2014.

Lindy Focus Music Track – Part 1

~ wilktone ~ Leave a comment

Tomorrow, December 27, 2103, this year’s annual Lindy Focus social dance conference will be taking place here in Asheville, NC. I ended up being booked to perform with the Jonathan Stout Orchestra at their New Year’s Eve dance this year and so ended up with a pass to the whole event.

Since most of the dance classes are going to be (way) over my head as a swing dancer, I was excited to learn that this year there will be a music track as well for musicians interested in playing traditional and swing jazz for dancers. While I feel I have a good historical and stylistic understanding of these jazz styles, I know I’ve only scratched the surface. I expect there will something I can learn even while reviewing some things. I also thought it would be interesting to share some of the things I pick up over the next few days here.

Ben Polcer will be running the music track this year. Ben sent out an email to the music track participants with some information on what to expect and also a request for each of us to bring one or two audio examples of our “favorite jazz songs” to share with the group.

As a music teacher, I like this exercise because it can be a launching pad to all sorts of different discussions or exercises based on what the students bring in to play. You can get an idea of your students’ current interests and influences. My personal dilemma would be trying to narrow down my favorite jazz tunes to just a couple. Following the spirit of the conference my first thought was to grab a couple of recordings of Kid Ory and Jack Teagarden, two of my favorite trombonists from the early jazz style periods. Big band jazz, however, has always been most interesting to me, so I thought about bringing some Duke Ellington. I also even considered some Thad Jones, who as a more contemporary big band composer/arranger never forgot how to make his charts swing, even in the face of some quirky melodies and rhythms. As far as my favorite jazz trombone players I’d want to bring in J.J. Johnson, Carl Fontana, and Frank Rosolino (although it’s hard to limit to just those three).

So I figure I’ll throw a mix of all those into a playlist and then have different options based on how the workshop progresses and what specific things get focused on. My question for you is how you would respond to the same prompt. What one or two jazz favorites would you bring?

Interview on Free Music Ed Podcast

~ wilktone ~ 1 Comment

About a month ago I posted a new resource I discovered that I recommend for music educators called FreeMusicEd.org.  The podcast covers some great topics, such as iPad and iPhone apps for band directors, dealing with limited instrumentation, brass mouthpieces, marching band arrangements, and much more.

Stephan Cox, the brain behind FreeMusicEd.org invited me to come onto the podcast and interviewed me about a number of my favorite blogging topics, including teaching jazz improvisation, brass embouchures, teaching composition, and other odds and ends. It was a great time talking with Stephan and he was an excellent host who asked great questions. The podcast is now live and you can download it here or by searching for FreeMusicEd on iTunes (best to type it in as one word to find it easily). Be sure to go through and listen to his other podcasts and poke around the website some too!

Introducing Improvisation in the Concert Band Setting

~ wilktone ~ Leave a comment

Ever since the National Association for Music Education adopted its National Standards for Music Education one area that band directors have begun to address in more detail than ever before is improvisation. NAfME’s standards include:

Improvising melodies, variations, and accompaniments.

In many band programs, however, this can be a real challenge for directors to implement, particularly if he or she has had little to no experience playing jazz. If you don’t happen to play one of the typical jazz instruments the chances that you feel uncomfortable are high. This essay is designed for  band directors who want to introduce improvisation with their students in the concert band specifically, although music teachers should be able to find ways to adapt these ideas for almost any situation with a little thought and creativity.

The first thing to understand is that everyone improvises all the time, but we often don’t think about it when it happens because we’re so used to it. When rehearsing our concert band we improvise a great deal by responding to what we’re hearing and addressing them in patterns that we know (or hope) will be successful. As we get more experience teachings we pick up on new ideas and try them out, eventually coming up with our own teaching style that fits our own personality and style. This process isn’t really all that different from how we can develop an improvisational style, it’s just a different context.

The way we teach is highly influenced by those who taught us. Improvisation should be equally influenced by an informed opinion of what we think works and fits how we want to play. In order to improvise convincingly we should be familiar with lots of different players. Probably the most important thing that we as band directors can do is listen to lots of great improvisers and encourage our students to listen to great improvisers as well. It’s sort of like learning to speak a language from reading a book. You can learn the “grammar” and “spelling” of musical improvisation from a book, but if you don’t listen to it performed by the masters you’re going to end up with a funny “accent.”

Improvising for the first time can be a daunting task. There are lots of different things to keep track of all at once and the amount of multitasking is intimidating for many students. That said, when you consider improvisation at its basic level there are really three main areas of concern – when to play, what to play, and how to play it.

When to play is usually the first thing I address with teaching improvisation to a new group of students in a longer-term improvisation class. Subtopics in this area of concern include using silence, playing with good phrasing, rhythmic density, etc. The main point I want to get across at first is that you don’t have to play all the time and, in fact, it’s often more interesting to leave room in your improvisations for your audience to guess what’s coming next. I like to demonstrate to new students what this can be like by improvising a solo by using much more silence than I normally would. When a soloist doesn’t play for a long time the tension can really build up and no matter what you play next the release can be quite surprising and enjoyable. Get your students to duplicate this in their own solos as much as possible.

Leaving silence in improvisations has additional benefits beyond simply making your solos more interesting. It allows the accompanists to interact more conversationally. It also gives the student a chance to evaluate what he or she just played and how effective it was and then think about what’s coming up next. This is also another one of NAfME’s standards.

Evaluating music and music performances.

Items that address what to play are actually pretty easy to find. This includes things like chord/scale relationships, playing chord tones and non-chord tones, playing outside the changes, etc. There are lots of great resources all over on this aspect of improvisation, so rather than duplicate a lot of it here I’ll instead focus on what I think the best way to teach this element of improvisation is.

Music is an aural art form. It exists in sound, not on the paper. With improvisation it is even more important to learn to listen and imitate the sounds you hear. When introducing note choices to students new to improvisation I always teach them by playing a pitch and having them find it on their instrument by ear.

A simple ear training exercise you can do with your concert band is to play random notes and have your students try to match pitch. Some students will be better than others and it’s helpful for struggling students to have a strategy to help them out. I usually advice my students to simply play a chromatic scale until they hear themselves match the pitch. Over time they will find it easier to hear when they’ve found the right pitch and may even begin finding it faster by learning how far away they are and leaping closer to the correct pitch. Once students get used to matching pitch with you playing the lead have a student volunteer play the random pitches instead.

As an aside, I find many students will use their eyes, rather than their ears, to figure out the pitch. As a trombonist I get in the habit of playing lots of pitches with alternate positions to see if the trombone section is just watching my slide rather than finding pitches by ear. Students will often look over to their section peers to look at fingerings rather than risk guessing the wrong pitch. It’s up to you to encourage them to avoid this and instead really try to find pitches by ear. The payoff will be much better in the long run if they can learn to find pitches aurally, rather than visually. Once most of the class has found the pitch I will tell the band what the pitch is to help provide feedback, but I always make them give me an honest effort first.

Once I have a band able to match pitches fairly well I will teach them by ear basic scales (pentatonic, blues scale, or scale fragments) that can be used to improvise over a simple vamp. If they want or need to write down pitch names I will usually allow it, but they again have to give me an honest effort to learn these scales by ear before I’ll help them with the pitch names. Next I’ll teach the band some simple riffs that set up a vamp (again by ear) that fits those pitches.

As a composer I try to limit the number of independent lines I’m writing to no more than three or four (with some exceptions according to the effect I’m after). For the purposes of setting up a vamp for improvisation with a concert band I feel two or three riffs works best. Again, I teach my students the riffs by ear and have the whole band learn some basic riffs. After the band has got the gist of each riff I assign parts to them and get them to set up the vamp. Once the groove is happening, I’ll demonstrate by improvising a simple solo (using only the notes I taught them just before) over their accompaniment.

Since I’m a composer and experienced improviser, coming up with chord vamps and riffs isn’t really a big deal for me, but for many band directors this is a brick wall. In order to help those folks out, I’ve put together some riffs that you can use in PDF form here. Three of the examples are simple two-chord vamps with three simple riffs notated in all standard transpositions. One example is a blues progression in Eb with parts for each standard concert band instrument. Again, I usually teach students these riffs by ear and then later hand out parts if needed (or, better still, have the students learn to notate these riffs themselves).

Once you’re able to get your band riffing on this simple chord progressions you’re ready to get them to play solos. If you want to ease them into solo improvisation one way I like to get them started is to play a very simple (one or two note) idea with a metronome click and have them play the lick back at me. Use the a scale that will work over the vamp you want them to improvise over, but don’t use more than three notes (see the handouts from above for some scale choices over the vamps I wrote out). The point here is to teach them that they don’t need to play a very complex lick to sound tasteful. I emphasize that all they can play very interesting ideas by rhythmically improvising on even just one or two notes.

Then go around your ensemble and have everyone play 2, 4, or 8 measures of improvisation. Some students will jump right in and go wild while others will freeze up. With the eager students it can be helpful to get them to scale back their improvisation and not try to squeeze in every idea they have into just 4 measures. With timid students my goal is to get them to play just one note (then just one note more, now two notes, etc.). You can also have some students practice playing longer solos.

Another exercise I like to use is to have students come up with their own background riffs using only notes in the scale I’ve given them to improvise with. Each of the PDF examples I posted has three riffs, one that functions as a bass line, one chord support, and one melodic riff. Simply remove the melodic riff from the vamp and have a student play his or her own riff in place of it, then have the other students pick up that riff by ear.

You’ll notice that in almost every step of my process I emphasize teaching students ideas by ear. Having good aural skills is a critical ability for improvisation. While it’s certainly possible to create interesting improvisations from selecting note choices by reading notation this approach is limiting. Teaching your students to match pitches by ear will train them to “hear” the ideas they have in their head and play them more spontaneously.

Conversely, only teaching improvisation through playing by ear will also hinder development. I always like to point out that music theory IS ear training and vice versa. After you teach improvisational techniques by ear go back later and teach your students the theory behind it. More advanced concepts can be first learned via a theoretical approach (e.g., read this scale and then apply those notes over this chord vamp), but emphasize while practicing this way that your students should be listening closely to the sounds and making the connection between what they are seeing with what they are hearing. When using this approach reiterate to your students that they should intentionally leave a lot of silence in their improvisations to give them a chance to evaluate what they just played and then think a bit about what they are going to do next.

I recommend that you make improvisation a regular warmup with your group. You don’t have to improvise with them every day or even every week, but go back to improvisation every so often with them to reinforce what they’ve learned and get them to practice it more. Like most musical skills, improvisation abilities are developed over the long term and we can’t simply teach it in one class and expect that our students will become successful at it. In fact, you can break down all of the above steps and exercises into their own warmup and spread them out over the course of a week or so. Easing your students into improvisation this way will help some of your students who are more nervous about improvisation get used to the idea of playing a solo over time. All your students will benefit from the repetition of ear training and music theory over time, helping them retain these skills.

And of course, have fun with it. The more you project that you’re enjoying the music the more it will “jazz up” your concert band for learning to improvise. Even if many of these students will never join a jazz band you’ll find that the ear training and music theory practice they get will help them become better musicians and benefit your concert band in ways you didn’t expect.

Good luck! Let me know if you have any questions in the comments below.

Practicing With a Metronome

~ wilktone ~ 27 Comments

I recently came across an interesting blog post written by pianist Mike Longo asking Should You Practice Jazz With A Metronome? Longo’s reply:

In MHO, absolutely not!  Why?  Because a metronome clicking is not a pulse.  What is a pulse anyway?  The sound of your heart beating.  It produces a throbbing, pumping kind of feeling as opposed to the monotonous, soulless clicking of a metronome.  All of the great jazz musicians of the past such as Dizzy, Charlie Parker, Cannonball, John Coltrane,  Erroll Garner, etc., display this kind of sound in their time keeping.

He raises some very good points that are worth some serious consideration. That said, I feel some of his reasoning is a little off base and creates another false dichotomy of the sort that pervades so much music pedagogy. Let me take a few of his points and add my own thoughts.

There is a practice among some of the jazz educators to encourage musicians to practice with the metronome clicking on 2 and 4.  In my estimation this is probably one of the worst things a musician can do and practically destroys the ability to ever swing.  I’m sure there is no malicious attempt on the part of the educators, and they sincerely believe they are “helping” students by having them do this.  The sad thing is there is a type of playing and a kind of “music” that can result from this.  The question becomes…does it swing?   Does it produce a positive reaction in the listener?  In other words, does it make people who listen to it feel good?  In my opinion, ABSOLUTELY NOT!

As someone who has played along with a click track  for recording and for shows that include prerecorded music I agree that this often makes for a stiff feeling groove. That said, there are some folks who really enjoy music that has been recorded with metronomic time and a lot of interesting music has been created this way. I think that Longo’s opinions about music made with a metronome should be placed into the context of the jazz music that he personally enjoys and performs.

But is it really the worst thing one can do? Will it destroy a musician’s ability to play with a confident and natural swing feel? Let’s examine his arguments.

Since this is a common practice being used in many jazz education environments and since the popularity of jazz has diminished in alarming proportions, I suggest that educators might want to question if there might be a connection.

Probably not. Consider how much pop music is recorded and performed with a click track. One might argue that the decline of interest in jazz is inversely proportional to not having metronomic time. I don’t this really applies to a discussion on the pedagogical or practice value of using a metronome.

Longo’s next couple of paragraphs deal with a discussion of watching musicians dance or tap their foot while performing. He argues that one can’t dance like Dizzy Gillespie or tap a foot like Count Basie to a metronome. I’m not sure that this is necessarily true (I can’t dance to either a metronome or Basie both, to be honest), nor does it really say anything about whether practicing with a metronome is useful. There’s also some thoughts about whether white musicians can groove as hard as African American musicians by Cannonball Adderly, but I’m not certain that this is evidence against metronome practice. It’s probably more due enculturation than anything else.

I had a young guitar student who was studying privately with me while attending a university jazz department trying to get a degree in jazz performance. . . He reported that the guitar teacher showed him a clip on You Tube of a guitarist playing a solo while placing the microphone on the floor next to a metronome clicking on 2 and 4.  I observed this clip and found that the playing displayed a tremendous amount of technique with speed and velocity as well as a ton of notes.  But it was not producing anything I wanted to listen to, nor did it swing.  The student proclaimed that the teacher told him, “This is why you should practice with the metronome on 2 and 4” to which I responded by sending the teacher a clip of Wes Montgomery and his group playing “Impressions” with the drummers high hat popping on 2 and 4 in a manner that started your foot tapping involuntarily from the first bar on.  I sent a note along stating, “This is why you shouldn’t practice that way.”

I will let you judge for yourself if Metheny swings and if there’s anything worth listening to, but we need to place this video in context. Metheny isn’t really performing here, he is demonstrating something at a clinic. Again, I think that Longo’s thoughts here are more indicative of his personal preferences in music than what metronome practice can do for your playing.

Further evidence that supports that there is a ring of truth to my theory is the following.  Try taking any classic jazz recording that has withstood the test of time and has everyone agreeing on the fact that it swings and see if you can get a metronome to stay with the music on that recording.  Obviously you cannot, and obviously the musicians were keeping time differently than the way a metronome clicks.

This is indeed a difficult task to accomplish. It’s much easier to use a metronome that you click or tap that tells you what tempo it is moving at and see if the tempo remains steady throughout. Musicians often play at tempos that are between the standard metronome clicks and even if they played in perfect time it would be impossible to set your metronome to the music. That said, it is true that there are almost always minor fluctuations in the tempo with human musicians. It’s part of what makes the music breathe and flow in an expressive way. But do musicians who practice with a metronome do any better at staying with perfect time when recording without a click track?

As an aside, I recently recorded a few big band charts with just four musicians, so used a click track to keep all the parts lined up correctly. When editing the recordings I noticed that many of the players, myself included, frequently played ahead of or behind the beat at times. There were times when this happened where I was able to clean up the sound by edging the notes forward and backwards a bit, but when I perfectly quantized the music to line up exactly the resulting sound was very stiff and artificial sounding.

But I feel the real question to consider is whether or not metronome practice needs to be all or nothing. What does a metronome provide for your practice? It’s good at two things – getting your  tempo correct in the first place and then providing feedback as to whether your tempo is remaining consistent. I prefer to think of a metronome as a “spotter” for your time feel. Once you’ve reached a point where you have a good idea of your tempo and have consistent tempo on the music you’re playing you turn the metronome off. Can a musician develop a static and unmusical groove by overpracticing with a metronome? Perhaps, but I don’t think that this happens to any great degree. On the other hand, the feedback that metronome practice can provide to musicians, particularly less experienced ones or even experienced ones working on challenging material, makes for a valuable tool. In my daily teaching (and performing, to a lesser degree) I come across more cases of musicians who drag or rush than players with a stiff groove.

If you can swing with a metronome click as your “rhythm section,” just think of how hard you will swing with a real one.

What are your thoughts? Do you feel that it’s better to never practice with a metronome or use it frequently? Or do you find that the best approach is somewhere in the middle of the two extremes? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Questions – How To Find a Good Baritone Horn Teacher

~ wilktone ~ Leave a comment

I was recently emails some questions from MS who wanted to know about finding a baritone horn teacher for a friend’s son.

A friend asked me for a recommendation of a private baritone teacher for her 10yo son in our smallish college town.  I’m a string player, so I feel pretty in the dark here — although my own 10yo son has been playing trombone for a year, which is why she asked me.

I looked up baritone on the internet.  My impression is that baritone is mainly used for marching band.  Is that right?  I don’t think I’m going to be able to convince them to switch instruments, because for some unknown reason, they own a baritone.  But I’m curious.

My first low brass instrument was the baritone horn. It is a cousin of the euphonium, the main difference between these two instruments is the shape of the bore. The baritone is similar to the trumpet and trombone in that it is a cylindrical bore instrument. This means that from about the leadpipe to the bell flare the instrument the size of the tubing remains more or less consistent. In contrast, the euphonium is like the tuba and horn in that the bore size gradually gets larger the further away from the leadpipe. While this does make for a difference in sound, the basic technique of the two instruments is very similar.

The baritone horn is used in many marching bands and also is a typical instrument in British style brass bands. There is a marching version of the baritone that is designed so the bell points forward, like a trumpet, rather than up, like a tuba or euphonium. While most symphonic band literature typically calls for the euphonium rather than the baritone, baritones are sometimes asked for instead and many school bands use baritones instead as they tend to be a little cheaper to purchase and make for a little easier transition from trumpet to baritone. Baritone parts are very commonly notated in a Bb treble clef transposition like a tenor saxophone, again to facilitate a transition from trumpet to the baritone (although in British style brass bands almost all the parts are notated in Bb treble clef).

So to get back around to your point, baritones aren’t just a marching instrument. If the bell points forward, the particular instrument is designed for marching, but if it points upward like the photo above it is meant to be a concert baritone horn.

My main question is about finding a private teacher.  I doubt we’re going to find someone whose main instrument is baritone.  I think it’s going to be someone whose main instrument is either trombone or tuba.  Is that right?  And does it matter which?  My own son’s first private trombone teacher was a tuba player who used his tuba in lessons for demonstrating and playing duets, but who was very familiar with trombone.  That worked fine for my son, who was already advanced for his age with other instruments, and turned out to be a natural at the trombone, so I don’t know if having a teacher playing a different instrument in lessons would work so well for everyone.  I know from my son’s reports of how the group lessons at school went last year that my friend’s son tends to progress at an average pace.  In other words, my son found listening to my friend’s son frustrating, but not as frustrating as listening to a third child.  So by average, I mean in the middle of a sample of !three children.

You will probably not find a music teacher whose main instrument is the baritone horn, but you might be able to find someone who plays euphonium. This is the closest instrument and might be your best bet for private lessons. That said, an awful lot of trombonists and tubists double on euphonium or baritone and would be more than capable of starting a beginner on the baritone. Since the baritone is often used as a double for trumpet players (or, as in my case, to encourage trumpet students to try out low brass to balance school band instrumentation) a trumpet teacher should also be able to help start a beginner on baritone quite well. This isn’t so much different from a violin instructor who can also start violists, for example. While certain mechanics and literature of each instrument are unique, basic brass technique is the same for all instruments.

My advice is that if you can’t find someone who is a euphonium player for private lessons would be to look first for a trombonist or tubist who teaches privately and then perhaps investigate trumpet teachers. More importantly than what instrument the teacher plays, however, is making sure that the teacher has experience at working with beginners or at least has an interest in teaching students at that level.

You mention that you live in a college town, so I would imagine that the college’s music department, if it has one, would be a good place to start. If the college teachers there do not take on extra private students there may be a college student who is interested in teaching beginners and the professor may be able to recommend a music education major. The middle school and high school band directors would be another resource to check out. Again, they may not be taking on private students, but they often know who the music instructors in the area are and can recommend someone.

Finally, your blog is very interesting reading, but it would be great if some day you could pull out some bits and pieces from your oeuvre that would help someone like me.  What do I need, as a non-brass-playing musician parent of a brass player?  Practical advice about technical and musical development, setting up fun activities for my child at home, help finding good play-along recordings, method books, repertoire books, duet books, etc.  I found the article about buzzing helpful, but I have to read pages and pages of detailed text to find the nuggets that are helpful for our situation.  Also the advice about young players needing to sing the difficult note first, in order to get it into his/her ear first — that’s great to read, but I’d like an easier way to find those sorts of tips, since I’m unlikely to make my way through your entire archive.

Thanks!

Thanks for the kind words and excellent suggestions. My regular readers know already that I tend to focus my posts on things for either the music student or music teacher, but I do get frequently contacted by parents looking for information and advice on helping their children with music studies. I’ll give your suggestion some more thought and see about compiling something more specific for parents and posting it here soon.

Anyone else have any thoughts for MS about finding a private instructor for baritone horn? Did I leave off anything important or would you like to correct something I wrote that is misleading? Feel free to leave your comments below.

A Review of Implicit and Explicit Learning Strategies in the Development of Motor Skills and its Application To Teaching Instrumental Technique

~ wilktone ~ 1 Comment

Frequently in online conversations, and sometimes in person, a discussion about teaching instrumental technique to music students gets broken down into two extreme ends. The more popular, exemplified by Arnold Jacobs’ so-called “song and wind” approach, is that when a musical goal is kept first and foremost in mind that instrumental technique will fix itself. A second, more controversial approach is to teach the music student about the process of playing an instrument and consciously practice the motor skills needed for good instrumental technique. Scientists who study human performance call the former an “implicit” approach to learning a motor skill where as the later is known as an “explicit” approach.

There has been a fair amount of published research investigating and comparing these two teaching methods. One of the most widely published authors on this topic is R.S.W. Masters. In a number of studies Masters (1992, 2000, 2009, 2011) tested subjects who were taught various skills (golf putting, for example) through implicit instructions (goal oriented) as opposed to explicit instructions (learning the “rules” on how to putt correctly). Such research, replicated with different tasks by others, suggests that when these two approaches are used exclusively that the implicit instructions provide better results. Implicit learners were also found to perform the task better when subjected to distracting stimuli or situations designed to provide a stressful situation.

However, this research may be misleading and there may be some methodological flaws in Master’s research. For example, test subjects who were taught an explicit approach to learning a motor skill were generally presented with instructions all at once, as opposed to breaking down each step of the process into manageable chunks where each individual step is mastered before moving on to the next step. Other authors (Willingham and Dumas, 1997) found that a year after receiving implicit instruction on a task subjects performed no better than a control group that had no instruction at all, however some attempts to replicate this research has produced conflicting results.

A further issue in interpreting this research is that most teachers and coaches don’t separate their instructions into such an  false dichotomy between these two extreme approaches. Rather, most individuals employ a combination of implicit and explicit instruction. Researchers using transcranial magnetic stimulation to map brain regions demonstrated that implicit practice showed gradual activity in areas in the brain associated with explicit learning as well, until subjects achieved explicit knowledge of the task when brain activity returned to its base line (Pascual-Leone, et al., 1994). Similarly, Willingham and Goedert-Eschmann (1999) point out that while functional MRI studies indicate that motor skill development may be purely implicitly or explicitly developed, their experimental study showed that when presented with a random task, subjects in the explicit group demonstrated similar sequential knowledge to those in the implicit group.

Other research suggests that a combination of implicit and explicit learning may make for the most effective method for motor skill development. Lola, Tzetzis, and Zetou (2012) conducted a study comparing four groups’ abilities to make important decisions while serving a volleyball. Their analysis showed that all groups improved over time, excepting the control group who simply performed the assessments. The implicit group outperformed the explicit group, however the group that was instructed through a combination of the two was faster and more accurate than both. Mazzoni and Wexler (2009) investigated a similar research question and also found that subjects who engaged in both implicit and explicit motor control during assessments performed without degradation compared to groups that used explicit or implicit control alone.

One difficulty in interpreting this information for the music teacher is that most of the scientific literature on this topic deals with either an athletic skill or on some task designed to test the performance of motor skills (such as a random button pushing task). However, there has been some research conducted specifically looking at how music students learn instrumental technique best.

Rosenthal (1984) conducted research looking at the effects modeling and verbal instructions had on expert musician’s abilities to perform a challenging passage. She found that the group given a model only outperformed groups given only verbal instructions, both a model and verbal instructions, or practice only. Rosenthal’s research would appear to support above mentioned studies that find implicit learning to be superior to explicit learning. However, Rosenthal’s results conflict with other research showing the combination of both may provide the better results than an implicit or explicit approach alone (Mazzoni and Wexler , 2009 and Lola, Tzetzis, & Zetou, 2011). Kennell (1989) devised an experiment that used a similar approach to Rosenthal’s yet found slightly different results. Using three different experimental treatments, his results suggested that the effectiveness of a teaching strategy may be related to the context of the situation. He hypothesized that instruction marking critical features would be best for reminding students of skills they have already learned, demonstration would be more beneficial for learning new concepts, and task manipulation best for building new skills (Kennell, 2002, p. 249).

Making specific recommendations for music pedagogy based on the currently available research is challenging for a variety of reasons. The first issue that must be taken into account is that most of the available research explores either tasks associated with sports or tasks specifically designed to measure motor control. It is likely that the results of most of these studies will also apply to the motor skill development needed for musical technique, however the lack of research that specifically looks at musical skills makes it difficult to be certain that this is the case. Much of the research relied on visual stimulation, rather than aural stimulation, and it is possible that this change in feedback can alter the benefits or drawbacks to teaching strategies.

While implicit learning has the consensus supporting its benefits over explicit learning, it should be noted that a lot of the recent publications have been done by a limited number of researchers, specifically Masters (8 publications cited in this paper) and Maxwell (5 cited publications). Additionally, replication of their research produced inconsistent results, in spite of later studies by Maxwell, et al. that attempt to correct for methodological issues and replicate their original work. Before these results can be accepted with widespread authority they will need to withstand more peer review and replication by other researchers.

Other areas of caution in applying this research to music instruction involve the ability levels of test subjects, the length of retention, and the specific nature of improvement on a motor skill. The majority of research comparing implicit and explicit learning uses novices as test subjects, yet much music education deals with students who have been studying their instrument for years or even decades. Some of the literature indicates that the type of instruction most effective depends on the particular stage of development a subject is in (Pascual-Leone, et al., 1994 and Willingham & Goedert- Eschmann, 1999) or the specific task being practiced (Lagarde, et al., 2002 and Kennell, 1989). These findings imply that musical instruction related to motor skill development needs to take the student’s current stage of development into account, as well as the specific skill being learned.

Very little research has been done investigating the longevity of motor skills beyond a single year, particularly in relation to expert performance. Wilson, and Roehmann (1992) do make note of research regarding injuries and disorders with expert musicians, such as focal task dystonia. Furthermore, it has been noted that issues such as embouchure dystonia typically manifest between the ages of 35 and 45 (Frucht, 2001 and Frucht, et al., 2009) Many individuals suffering from dystonic-like symptoms tend to be players who favor an implicit learning style (Kagarice, 2005). While implicit learning may show better short term effectiveness, prevention of injury or other related issues may be best done through the inclusion of explicit instruction in correct instrumental mechanics.

In spite of the difficulties applying this research to music pedagogy, there are two statements that can be made with some confidence. First, it is clear that implicit learning strategies make for a powerful tool and music educators must be aware of how to make effective use of it. Instructing through analogies and goal-oriented processes are already widely used in music instruction and is exemplified through the “song and wind” approach advocated by Arnold Jacobs. Secondly, evidence suggests that implicit and explicit learning work in conjunction and parallel with each other, as suggested by Donald Reinhardt’s “Pivot System” approach. Music educators should become familiar with the situations where explicit instructions have the most potential benefit and learn how to use it effectively. This will not only ensure that students progress quickly and perform well under the pressure of a concert or audition situation, but can also have potential benefits for long term health and technique maintenance among professional musicians.

Lastly, it would be beneficial for the field of music education for more emphasis on research methodology and to encourage high level research specifically in the area of the development of musical technique. In part due to the over reliance on teaching implicitly through analogy and emphasizing expression over technique, many teachers have a weaker background in the explicit understanding of how they actually play their instrument. Furthermore, the very people who can most benefit from an improved understanding of the development of musical technique through the balance of implicit and explicit teaching strategies are the ones who will need to lead the way if greater understanding of these findings can be effectively applied to music pedagogy. Speaking on this very issue, Wilson and Roehmann wrote:

Most Ed.D. and D.M.A. Candidates will never engage in experimental research; they will teach and perform and teach others to teach and perform. Because they are in a unique position to observe student performers at all levels of ability and all stages of life, they can make an enormous contribution to clinical research. . . Although not every teacher-performer would be inclined to take on such are arduous task, and fewer still might commit themselves to it for the long haul, some would – and the effort would make a difference.

(Wilson & Roehmann, 1992, p. 520-521)

You can download the full paper I wrote on this topic, including complete references here.