You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Is Music Notation Still Relevant?

Episode Date: December 3, 2020

It's another live edition of You'll Hear It where Peter and Adam take your questions. It's time for a hot topic on today's episode as Peter and Adam tackle the use of notation in modern music education.Interested in more music advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase. And be sure to check out our All Access Pass - every course from Open Studio on every instrument.Thursday's Open Studio Live Events (All Times EST):1:00 PM - Adam's Daily Guided Practice Session (for Members Only)For the rest of this week's calendar, follow this linkLet us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Picketstone says, I got a heck of a question. All right. If you were to change anything in music education, what would you change and why? Everything. I'm doing a project on the subject, so I'm curious. There's a lot there, Picketstone. You know, Adam Neely actually had a great video on sort of the systemic racism in music theory. I shared that on my social media and got so much, like, so much pushback for it.

I actually don't understand the problem of having the conversation. of analyzing where what we're learning is coming from, especially because for so many of us, especially if you play any kind of modern American music, so much of classical music theory is just not relevant or important. Not only that, but it actually can be detrimental to how you learn the music. You know, we have to retrain people who learned via classical music all the time

how to use their ears. I think you're a rare case where you're lucky enough to come up with really hip classical musician parents. and we're in that world from an early age, but learned very early on to use your ear to learn things. Yeah. To me, that is the biggest disconnect, is that if you look at the culture of the music

that you're trying to learn, and they don't have anything like that was written down for a very long time, it was just all passed down, musician and musician, should you be learning then from a notation that was handed down from, you know,

hiding to so on and such forth you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Like to me it just there's so much that is missing from Western notation

Yeah. With what we make today it's almost irrelevant to I mean Oh, I like getting political Well dude Getting dogmatic.

I like it. Listen. If Paul McCartney can write Eleanor Rigby without knowing how to read music I'm all on board.

Like I'm all for that and if if you know what I mean like I understand that it can be very I mean you know me I'm a notation nerd. I love writing music and I love using notation, but I just think trying to teach a style of music or a whole school of music that just did not come up really with notation as in its important

part of its transfer is folly. And I think that's where we are. Yeah. No, I totally agree. And I think even just from a practical standpoint, as much as a political side of it is, is a whole other thing that's very real. But sometimes it's just by some people, it's probably done by accident. But the idea that if we think about music at its root level, let's get to the root, you know, of it being a language, you know. And I know that that's like people hear that. And then they're like, yeah, yeah, but come on, tell me the court changes. Come on.

Give me the real stuff, you know. But these fundamental things about music are so important because you can use them to frame your development forever. And so in terms of education, what more is more important than, yes, teaching correct fingering and all these things that we got from wonderful teachers that we had yes but i think a fundamental understanding and framework and really just mindset of this being a language and that we can immerse ourselves get excited about get passionate about learning a language i mean it's the same ways that a lot of times foreign language uh in the u.s especially which is perhaps not taught i mean sometimes it's taught wonderfully big shout out to all the great teachers but sometimes the joy is sucked out of it

when it's you have to read and you have to conjugate and you have to learn the grammar as opposed to like you learn in France let's get some croissants out and let's just put the barret on and start speaking the language hopefully I'm not offending anybody but you know I'm saying like let's immerse ourselves and jump

right in to the sound of it and that's what's so great about music so yes we want to learn all these different elements but let's not codify it too early in the development so I think you know which is exactly what we do by the way in most cases of music education. Sorry. Yeah.

Well, no, you mean too, too early. Too early, it's all written. Like, imagine learning French and never hearing French. I know. Or not having someone speak it to you. Right. You're just reading it out of a book and whatever you produce is, you know, or your teacher produces. You know what I mean? Yeah. As opposed to moving to Paris for six months, you would be much more fluent moving to Paris. It's Paris. Pahri. You know what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah. Well, and so along those lines, you know, one of my teachers, I mean, my mom was my first violin teacher. And then,

when we moved to St. Louis, I got a chance to study with a wonderful teacher named Eiko Kataoka, Japanese woman who played in the St. Louis Symphony, that actually I think my mom wanted to kind of study with it, because she was one of the first children that studied with Suzuki in his experiment, like in the 50s or 60s in Japan. He was in that first class and was from Matsumoto, Japan. And so she happened to be here. But her story was very interesting. She was an amazing violinist. Her husband was a great cellist.

but she was so immersed in the learning by ear she didn't learn how to read music at all and so then she auditioned I guess she sent a tape to I think it was Indiana or Oberlin one of the really top conservatories in the States because it was like that was the dream to come to the U.S. And she sent this audition and she was accepted at like age 16

just by basically by hearing her by hearing her by her playing. Then they found out she couldn't read music and she almost didn't get in but she was so good they let her in but they were like, you have to learn to read music. In like two months before she was going to come over, she learned to read music.

Yeah, because she already knew how to play music. Exactly. Then it's just figuring out what all these symbols mean. Right. But if you're just trying to, listen, reading music if you're an orchestral musician, is the main part of your job. Getting a great sound and being able to read music

and being able to do it fast is so crucial for those people. And for people who do shows and, you know, show bands and things. I mean, there are gigs where reading is important. It's such a minuscule part. of I think the musical landscape these days. Word. That why don't we have a better way of teaching music so that it's more relevant to what people are,

what most people are listening to? And I don't mean that in just like pop music or hip hop or whatever, you know, this old guy wants to put on it. I'm talking about literally just everything we listen to. I mean, if you like Al Green, there's no scores lying around that Memphis recording studio. You know what I mean?

Like, let's learn how to get those sounds. There's some blunts laying around from that session. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, so that would be one thing. Anything else we were changed about? Well, the only other thing I would say about music education, and I think this has done very well, we have so many great music teachers,

and especially here in the Midwest, this is kind of a bastion. I mean, all over the country, all over the world. Big shout out to all the teachers. We love you and we need you. Continued at all levels. But we have a plethora of still great band directors and orchestra directors

and private instructors. here around the Midwest, which is great in some communities. But to me, it's like music education, don't suck the joy out of it. And I think some of this, like we're talking about having to read music or whatever, but also like if music isn't fun on some level, now it can be a challenge, especially it is a challenge as you get better. But if you're not having fun at it, I think, you know, it becomes our responsibility at a certain point. But when you're younger and when you have a teacher, I think it's the responsibility to

to expose it, to present it in a way that's fun. And it is done that way. I mean, it's such a fun thing. There's many things that are a lot harder to pull the fun out of for most people. But music is such a universal language, you know, be it classical music, be it jazz, be it reggae, be it, I mean, you know, many different things. But, I mean, if we look at typically the way, just learning to play simple, you know, you know, I mean, if you're coming and beating them with a ruler on their hands,

it's not going to be fun, right? But if you're, but if you're singing along and, you know, I love music. I don't know. If I have any faults, it's that I love music too much. So Buzz makes a point here, and this is, I think, something we can push back against. Aren't we glad that there was a written language to convey much of value of many cultures around and forward in time? Isn't it simply a technology of efficiency? Art is long, life is short, which is true.

And now the technology buzz is that we can record what sounds we make. So we actually don't need the written language of it to convey to future generations what we do. they're going to be able to hear, and we can already listen to Louis Armstrong, who's passed away long ago. Right. And how he sounded. And wouldn't it be better, instead of having all of Bach's written music, if we could actually hear him play some of those organ pieces? You know, I would love to hear him play his own preludes. That would be amazing to hear Chopin play his etudes instead of just reading the book. That would be, I think, a much better experience. So for me, I think, like, you know, we spend a little too much energy on that. but I get a little worked up.

Well, but I think, no, no, I think, too, though, that this is a good point in terms of calling it technology of efficiency is simply, and that's actually what can shape the chronology and how quickly an art form or a musical form moves along and develops. So you look at, yeah, at the time written music was how it got spread around the world eventually, but like this kind of European classical music, and then there was music in Asia, there was music in Africa, there was different areas, and some of them started to write it down,

Some of them, you know, distributed other ways. But once you get into recordings and like because that sort of coincided the beginning of recorded, you know, common, not common, but available recording technology, kind of with the birth of jazz, that move things along very quickly because, you know, that sound, everybody liked that sound, but it had it been only written, it would have taken a lot longer to get, like, you would have had to physically hear somebody playing that in order to be able to connect with it and then be like, wait, I want to do that. I mean, it's kind of like all these, you know, once basketball, Michael George

in the 80s and early 90s, they're broadcasting his stuff all over the world. Little kids are seeing, wow, I want to do that. Had they not seen that, they had to wait for somebody to come be a basketball superstar in that neighborhood,

they might not have ever gotten that bug to want to, you know, play. Suppose follows up. You would learn a Beethoven sonata by rote. I think that would be very good to do. Good for your ears if you could do that. That would be. That would be.

Cool. Let's see what else we got here. up, Zach. Oh, this is funny. Sorry, I'm late. My office schedule a conference call during, I hate it when they do that. What's up with that? You know what I'm saying? I mean, clearly we publish our schedule in advance, so tell your office to get with it. You know what I'm saying? Joe says quit that terrible job. Cool. What else we got, Adam? I'm just looking up through here. Let's see. Another thing we were talking about earlier about ear training. What you can do is like if you learn something like the thing that you played for me at what was that

e flat major and then you were going to like a four minor yeah you know something anything that say is new and then you start to kind of hear it take the rest of the day or maybe even the week or a couple of days to like see what you can do with that same concept by placing it in different areas different keys is certainly an easy way to do but it could also be like and then maybe so you go to the four then you turn that into the major then that becomes the major to the four minor and then at a certain point just try to start going forward don't even think about where you're going

and you might mess one up but then fix it because you really want to you want your ears to start working on an unconscious level like that's the dream so sometimes just learning things practicing things working on intervals working on root movements

those are the elements that will help but you'll get to a point where it's like okay I can hear all this stuff but I'm having trouble connecting the dots and making it automatic And so that's a lot of times when people stop Because they say oh I just don't have good ears I've gotten as good as I can do

But I can't go next level And I want to encourage you to have a growth mindset with this Because ears are some of the easiest things Simplest things sorry But it's time consuming But it's a very simple thing In terms of repetition challenging Learning challenging yourself

But you've got to be willing to continually go over to the edge So like when we do this stuff You know playing around playing stuff with each other Everybody's always thinking we've prepped. We haven't prepared any of this stuff. We literally don't talk about it. We refuse to. We refuse to talk about it.

But what we get out of that is a little bit of challenge and a little bit of ear training. So you can put yourself in that position every day. And in fact, you should. All right. Me and Buzz now, we have an internet flame war going on. No, it's good stuff, man. It's great discussion. Buzz follows up with it would be interesting to see you start that Beethoven project and share your experience, Adam.

and then learn them all that way. Good luck, L.O.L. So this is my point, though. So that Beethoven, I'm not talking about Beethoven, though, Buzz. I'm talking about modern music post the invention of sound recording. And we're learning things like Miles Davis and Al Green and Taylor Swift or whatever with the way that we were taught Beethoven. And it's a completely different thing.

The people that make the music don't use the way that Beethoven used to communicate the music and yet that's still where our music education is stuck. It's stuck in the 18th century. And so that's what I'm saying is like, we need to get out of that. We're missing so much information that we can get now from recordings. Yeah. And with, that you just can't get with notation. Can you get Witten Kelly's eighth note with notation? It would be impossible. So that's all I'm saying about. I actually wouldn't learn Beethoven by ear because that that music was developed to be passed down via notation. But I'm saying the music we listen. to now was not passed down via notation

so why are we attaching this notation to it when it doesn't tell the whole story. It doesn't tell anything about the... Now that there's been advancements in the art of recording it certainly doesn't talk about that stuff in the notation. Right. About how much reverb is on the guitar. No, but things that are important to the

sound of the song about how much compression is there. There's no notation for that. That's all using your ears and understanding how modern music works. Absolutely. And I think it's important also none of this stuff is all or nothing. Like we want a combination. Like there's the exception of, well, actually, like my teacher, she actually learned

Mozart violin concertos by ear. I mean, like, that was, because she had gone through the book nine and book 10 are both two of the Mozart. So that very much well can be done. And I mean, her ear was very well developed. But the thing about it is these musics, like different musics and genres develop in the time that they exist. Right.

So they're consumed, they're learned, they're handed down in different ways. I think that your point, which is a very important one, is like let's not just thoughtlessly, for whatever reason, just take this one system that existed a couple hundred years ago and apply that that technology to today when the actual manifestation of the music and stuff comes out of another sort of technology to hand it around. That's right. Travel. You talk about recording. Word of mouth. And travel, word of mouth is able to happen where people can hear this stuff all around the world. And then, you know, it's not just learning the recordings.

It's like being able to hear it at a club and they're going home and trying to figure it out by ear. And Buzz is saying these are not mutually exclusive approaches which is what I'm saying too. I'm just saying one is super underrepresented in music education.

I do note I work. I like orchestration and I do a lot of arranging for large ensembles. I'm a notation nerd. I think it's super valuable and is a huge part of my musical life. I also think that in education

that other part that where we say you need to transcribe this and people are like, I've never transcribed anything before and they're a professional musician. How does that work? Like, how do you get to a point where you've never picked anything off of a recording when we've had a hundred years now of recordings?

You know what I mean? It's just part of it that I think is lacking in our music education system. I do think they can occur concurrently. I just think it's way out of balance and it's kind of, it's getting to the point where it's so arcane that it's getting ridiculous. And I think, too, it's like for music education, it would behoove and you see a lot of great teachers doing this in, you know, not just in music, but it's like, how, you know, not that you have to pander to every single different kid, but everybody learns in different ways. And so,

like, the way that we learn music, you know, first of all, I think there's very, very rarely anybody that needs to learn music less by ear, you know, said nobody like, oh, I did too much year training. My ears are too good, you know. So there's always that. But I think that we want to learn things and acknowledge that people learn in different ways. We have visual learners. We have, you know, all these different things. So give people a chance. And now, I want to just jump to one question because we are running short of time here from our friend Norrico and she says any difference

because this kind of I think ties in a little bit with the newer technology too and the traveling of music any difference of American and non-American musicians in terms of improvisation I say no no not anymore maybe at one time yes but not anymore but not as like a as a stereotype

or not a stereotype but as like a whole you couldn't say that there's something inherent the way somebody plays now I think your musical context, your musical heritage, your musical frame of reference, like what you've heard, what you've learned, the way that you feel a beat and whatever, that's always going to affect you. And I think there's times when different geographical places around the world, you know,

kind of breed you to hear music in a certain way. But there's always enough exceptions to that, i.e., you've got, I mean, the thing that I know that we know the bass jazz music, you've got people from every corner of the world that I've heard that can really excel in terms of their improvisation and their ability to do that because they've steeped themselves in the skills and the sounds and the actual skills that you need to be able to improvise as opposed to getting into a thing of like this is a cultural thing

that only applies to a certain part of the world. Cool, this is a great discussion. Thanks, Buzz, for the back and forth. That's really awesome things to think about. And hey, listen, it's never. ever going to be a perfect system. There's always going to be, you know, a balance issue for anything like this. And there's always going to be ever-changing ways that we communicate this stuff to each other. Yep. So, so folks, too, are asking about, um, ear training apps. And that's something

that we always, every time we talk about this, we're like, we need to get into this. No, I'm telling you what, man, five minute ear training. December, it's happening. Oh. It's happening. Oh, is that going to be an app? I thought it was going to be a course. It's going to be a course. But Rob, you, I think Rob is a, a member here at Open Studio, he'll have access to it. I know, but somebody was asking about it, like an app. And I'm sure there's good stuff because it'd be so easy to make, no? Don't even worry about the app. Just get the five minute, you're training from Open Studio.

Five minutes? Yeah, five minutes. I like it. Cool. Can we talk about, can we go public yet on JPA? No, can we talk about it? Well, it's already happening. I know.

Jazz Piano with Adam is a thing. And it's exclusive now, but it will be open to the public in 2021. New Year's Day. Also, look out for a possible Brace, for our bass players. Chris McBride Daily Masterclass.

A little subscription. Can we guarantee that? Rich says, today is the first anniversary of my purchasing an open studio piano pass. One of my better investments. Thank you, Rich. That's what I'm saying.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I'm saying. We have smart folks coming in this time of year, which is super awesome. And we hope for everybody that's coming in today that you will be like rich a year from now and still with us and excited about that um i think we're good right oh we're going to invite you to the podcast some folks

are youtube only did you know that no because they don't know where to get the podcast they don't know the podcast that was my mom until recently no yeah yeah she thought it was like a paid thing and she didn't want to do it i told her it's right there on her iPhone even if it was a paid thing when you'd be like mom mom i can hook you up you're my mom she's not a freeloader she's not a free loader but she also doesn't think our content's worth paying for it. It's a weird combination. She wants to support her son, but not that much. Yeah, but you can check us out wherever you get your podcast, Google Play, Apple Pied.

Let's be honest. Everyone gets in an Apple, right? Stitcher, got a couple, but not many. If you do Android, just hit us up here. Yeah, hit us up at Android and Adam Manus.com and you'll be able to get that. Oh. Thanks, everybody. Thanks a lot.

We'll see you next week. Later. Peace. Later.