How I got started with MLT, and a little about my background

TL;DR - The short version is that I am a classically trained pianist and teacher, who, dissatisfied with her teaching and some aspects of her own musicianship, decided to invest in some continuing professional development, and eventually came across MLT. 

Several years ago, I remember driving through central London and I was listening to Tim Topham’s podcast for piano teachers. He was interviewing Andy Mullen about something called MLT - Music Learning Theory. Andy was talking about tonal patterns in major tonality, and everything he said I thought - yes - that makes sense - this fits into how I perceive music in a way that I cannot seem to work out how to teach. I listened several times to this episode and also to Marilyn White Lowe’s interview (creator of the genius Music Moves for Piano method). I knew that what they were saying spoke to the very heart of how I perceived music, but had not been able to express. I could also tell straight away that in order to teach in a way that aligned with this theory of how we learn when we learn music, I would have to completely upend all the ideas I previously held about how students learn, and how to teach. So, I listened. At some point I bought the first few Music Moves books, and Andy Mullen’s book which is published on Amazon, thereby making it easily available in the UK (unlike so much of GIA's output). I looked through these books briefly when they arrived, but I wasn’t able or ready to absorb it at that time. Music Moves in particular was baffling to me at first. I went straight to the pieces in book 1 and played them through (as I would any new method book) and thought - ok, so what? I don’t understand how using these is going to help me or my students understand music and I left the books alone for some time.  I assumed that whatever there was to be learned could be done through reading about it, and actually, for me with MLT, experiencing it has turned out to be most vital for me to learn. 

I enjoy sight reading and playing lots of different pieces of music, which led to me work as an accompanist from an early age, so when I started teaching the piano I was determined I would teach all my students to read. However, a few years into teaching I was disillusioned, and although I generally kept my students for a long time and had good relationships with them and their parents, I was aware and concerned when skills like reading were not developing as I hoped, although I was really trying my best. One day, probably about a decade ago, I was playing for a day of ABRSM exams at one of my schools and met Sally Cathcart, who was the examiner for that day. I had spotted her before at an ABRSM teachers' conference at a stand advertising something called ‘The Curious Piano Teachers’, talking to various people.  Over lunch that day I asked her about it, and about things like EPTA and the value of being part of professional organisations. As a professional performer with two postgraduate degrees in Piano Accompaniment from the University of York and the Royal Academy of Music (RAM), having diligently completed my LRAM in piano teaching, I assumed that I must have studied enough to know what I'm doing, having studied at this level (not to say that I thought I was the world’s best pianist, but I believed I must surely be highly qualified to teach the piano having spent 6 years playing really hard things in higher education institutions). What would be the point of joining something like an organisation of piano teachers? What would I gain? However, I knew that I was unsatisfied with the work I was doing and rather than blame my students lack of practice or decide that teaching piano effectively to anyone is generally an impossible task (which is still a position I trust more than anyone who says it is easy!) I should consider working on how I was teaching. I remember Sally saying something to the effect of ‘people have spent a lot of time researching how to teach music, it’s all out there, but you have to go and find it.’ 

I cannot remember whether I joined The Curious Piano Teachers first, or whether I did the UK Piano teachers’ course (on which Sally is a teacher) but both of these put me on a path to learning more about music teaching in general, and being a much more reflective piano teacher, observing others, being observed, learning about different approaches. It also helped hugely to open up a world of piano teaching colleagues, and helped me to realise I wasn’t alone in some of the issues I was having with my work. It helped me start to love teaching because I felt that I was doing my best to learn to be effective. I worked on my musicianship, working through Lucinda Mackworth-Young’s (also of the PTC) excellent book ‘Piano by ear’ which introduced common harmonic progressions and different tonalities, and I also did a City Lit course aimed at classically trained piano teachers who might be interested in teaching the ABRSM jazz piano syllabus. All this taught me some useful theory about substituting chords, voicings, different tonalities etc, but not especially from an audiation perspective, and I was still aware that I could not really 'play by ear'. I took my ABRSM grade 8 theory and grade 8 practical musicianship exams - achieving distinctions in both, thank you very much - yet I knew there was something still missing. I was able to work music out in my head and write it down as I had always done a lot of composing and arranging since childhood. What I couldn’t do on the piano was confidently make things up on the spot or play a tune without accidentally playing wrong notes. I thought more theory must be the answer, and that if I could only train my theoretical processing to be faster, I would be able to play by ear. Generally, I would panic when attempting to use this theory brain under pressure, so I would never relax or enjoy it, the way I did with sheet music in front of me. Even ‘Happy birthday’ as many times as I have played it, would be stressful. I would rely on saying to myself as I played ‘one five five one’ etc, never quite trusting that I would be able to remember it without a huge effort of concentration, even though I have played that one a lot, for years and years!

I remember that when I was a child, occasionally I would hear about or meet people who ‘played by ear’. Such people were described with great reverence, as though they were magic. Because for me I could only ‘play by ear’ through a bit of trial and error and memorisation, I assumed it was either something you could or couldn’t do, and that I couldn’t do it, because I wasn’t a magic person, unlike those other people. I needed to read music - which I enjoyed and did easily as I generally found the correct notes and it sounded like it made sense to me. I liked the degree of accuracy it afforded me - much more reliable than if I were to ‘guess’ at something by ear. Those ‘play by ear’ people could never properly explain to my satisfaction what they were doing anyway - a notion which turned out to be key in my exploration of this, more recently. 

My mother, who forever involved me in a lot of singing, most often in the car where she taught me rounds and to improvise descants, and then lower harmony parts to whatever she was singing, could play the piano a bit by ear. She could do chords I, IV and V in at least three different keys I reckon, and she could play some nursery rhymes and Welsh tunes. She never could really explain to me was she was doing though (and she had not really had much formal instruction and didn’t read music). There was a man at the church I went to and played at in my mid-late teens, who jazzed up every hymn he played, it was glorious. I'd ask him, how do you do that? Oh, well I just add what sounds nice, a bit here a bit there - he’d say while demonstrating, as though he was adding seasoning to food. I was none the wiser as to how I could do it myself - how to know which notes were the right ones to add. I could improvise rhythmically, and could find my way around inversions of chords etc, but I couldn’t just automatically feel my way to the chord that worked unless I had either notation or lead sheets, or guessed (often incorrectly). At university in York I was friends with someone who was comfortable with improvising. He had a freedom and a confidence to finish his musical thoughts in front of other people, which I simply couldn’t imagine myself having the nerve to do. I thought I would just freeze and stop if the sound came out differently to how it was intended, and I couldn't cope with the thought of allowing anyone to hear me working something out at the piano, the way we allow babies and toddlers to babble nonsense as they get to grips with language. I still struggle with the idea of anyone hearing me as I try to learn to play by ear, which I am trying to change.  It's not just my lack of skill, there is something of a psychological block too. I just find it embarrassing to 'get it wrong' - because if I am guessing, rather than audiating, of course it could go either way. 

While I do remember a time round the age of 10 when I still read rhythm in a very approximate way without a sense of the underlying beat, I think I had cracked the basics of rhythm/beat notational audiation pretty well by my early-mid teens, thanks to playing (always with notation) with others in church, at school and for the children’s choirs that I regularly accompanied. I was well trained by the conductor of the children's choirs I accompanied - much of the music had highly patterned piano parts - I would decode a chunk of pitches and rhythms, working it out if I encountered something unfamiliar, and then I would look at her, and she would sing and move to demonstrate how it felt - and I found that if I moved the same way, I would feel it too, and I could somehow find what was needed to play it in time and with the appropriate style. I developed my skills in decoding pitches quickly and jumping around the piano with increasing accuracy, and as I got better at anticipating what others were going to do rhythmically, I got a lot of accompanying tasks given to me. However, despite being an OK sight singer in choirs (with lots of effort and singing the notes in between bigger jumps, in my head), I know I didn’t audiate fully when reading pitches - by which I mean I wasn't always perceiving the pitches within their context of chord functions and tonality. I was never too fazed by my wrong notes when reading at the piano, preferring to prioritise the pulse as sacrosanct. I enjoyed sight reading because the pitches were mostly a delightful surprise to me, so I was really motivated to hear lovely music by reading it (and I still don't really understand why most of my students are not hugely motivated to learn to decode music, just for this reason). And I liked learning to read people’s signals, and to anticipate their movements and feel like I could be good at predicting people. Also, I liked to feel useful, and accompanists are useful. I would have loved to have been a solo singer if I had had the voice for it, as I would love to be able to express myself that way, but even with that I know the competitiveness of it would not be for me . Many people want to sing, but not many have the skill or desire to be accompanists (it's a lot less glamorous), so I was in demand. Plus you get to play EVERYTHING. All styles and genres. I have had access to SO much wonderful music because of accompanying people, far more than if I had focused on solo singing or solo piano, it really is the best job of all musicians, in my opinion. I was (am) an accompanist through and through!

Frustratingly, unlike some other accompanists I encountered at RAM, I couldn’t transpose. Something in the way I had developed my reading skill meant that I was adept at reading individual notes and just finding them, fairly automatically, on the piano, apparently short circuiting any sense of the bigger picture, even intervals, despite having learned a lot of music theory. I could identify functions, etc when analysing music, but that wasn't what I was doing when I was reading it in real time - I struggled to overpower the part of my brain which would  see a G and play a G on the piano as a reflex. It meant transposing felt close to impossible for me as I would revert back to reflex as I tired, and this was something I did poorly in this part of the skills test at the end of my time at RAM. It wasn't taught to us at all,  and I held the fixed mindset that you could either do it, or you couldn't, so I didn't see too much point in working on it. I thought I should probably just try to memorise the set song accompaniment in all the keys - but I found memorisation really difficult (and really, really boring), too. 

Back in 2017 must have been when I had first heard ever MLT mentioned at the Piano Teachers’ Course UK (because I listened to Tim Topham's podcasts well after they were released). Something like ‘Edwin Gordon did some research and found that we learn music in the same way as we learn language - listening, speaking/improvising/performing, reading and writing.’ This seemed so radical  to me at the time because we were also learning about all the different types of ‘notation first’ piano methods - middle C method, multi-key method, intervallic method etc. I remember someone asking if there was a method book based on this idea. Yes, we were told, Music Moves for piano.  I remember it, but I didn't do anything then.

I was very keen on the piano method I was using in the 5 or so years preceding my switch to MLT. I liked that it moved slowly with a vast choice of pieces available at each level, meaning that neither student nor teacher would be stuck with something we were not keen on. Other methods that I have used move more quickly, but this means that you cannot miss anything out, which I find limiting. I struggle with using piano methods in general because I struggle with being told what to do (I want to do what I want to do!), and I think should you always teach music that you love or at least like,  both for your own sanity and because students can tell if you don't. I liked that it had sight-reading supplements based on patterns found in the main piece of the week that was being taught. This is not a bad idea in many ways, but being born of a sequence based on adding new notation values/pitches based on an adult logic of how we might develop our decoding, rather than on audiation, these were not successful in the way I hoped they would be at the time. With optimism, I’d set one sight reading exercise a day for my students. But even then, only a small proportion of my students really seemed to even have this decoding of written music make sense to them. Many struggled to retain, what seems to an adult, simple information. Some worked hard and I helped them use logic and work on their speed of reaction - FACE, All cows eat grass, note naming and note finding apps. But, even when my students got to be good at decoding, it didn’t often sound like music. They were so busy counting and working out intervals, they didn't have the space to listen to hear if they were making music anyway. In this method I was using, I liked the many duet accompaniments (I have always liked duetting with students as it a very direct way of modelling and involving them in a high quality musical experience - I still like doing this). I also liked that most of the tunes had words. I knew I wanted my students to play musically and think in whole phrases. Somewhere I had picked up the idea that giving every tune words would help my students ‘get the music stuck in their heads’. Well, I was almost on to something, there. They do need the music in their heads! And I found that making up words (the sillier, the better) to tunes is really quite effective to helping children learn piano music. It has been hard to give up, and some of my students would tell you I haven't completely given it up yet...  But, it is important to ask if the child processing the music or the words? Are they learning anything of actual value about the music these words are set to - about the rhythmic and tonal content and context? Jokes are great for the relationship and engagement, jokes are really important in that way, but perhaps in this case can block the actual learning of music, treating the content as less important. Sometimes it is good to put the (musical) vegetables in a blender so that children will eat them without noticing and have some benefit, but really, we need to encourage children to explore and enjoy their vegetables, as vegetables are delicious! 

Back to the start: I heard Andy Mullen on the podcast and my mind lit up. It was clear that ultimately, I would need to be teaching myself and my students audiation. I did nothing about it for quite some time, I knew it would mean changing my whole life and relationship with music (which it has - I was right about that) and at the time, I had building work going on in my home and life was busy. Eventually I got around to reading Andy’s book one half term, went down an MLT YouTube rabbit hole, I  joined GIML and did some online workshops which I loved. Then Andy sent an outreach email to his website subscribers, and that was enough of a push for me to make enquiries with him about possibly going to Massachusetts in summer 2022 for the PDLC (Professional Development Levels Course) he was teaching on and managing the site for (a big deal for me, going such a long way was really expensive and I didn’t habitually spend much money on travelling).  Going on the PDLC felt like a huge leap of faith but it was the right decision - being able to be in a room musicking with fellow MLT enthusiasts is better than I could have ever imagined - I loved it, and haven’t looked back!