I play both flute and recorder – that includes antique wooden flutes and modern electric recorders.
They are similar, yet different.
So if you want to take lessons, which instrument shall you choose?
Listen to lots of recordings. They will often play the same music, especially music from the Baroque period, but the timbre of the two instruments is different. Here are some examples to get you started:
guest post from my student Andrea MacDonald
True musical joy could never have been possible for me without the Suzuki method. After over 15 years of playing recorder in duets and large and small ensembles, I started over agin at the beginning. But maybe I should back up a bit.
I have always been musical. Growing up I sang in choirs, in musical theatre, and in pop bands. I joined a Balinese gamelan where we learned entire concerts by heart. I memorized very quickly and retained very well. My ear was my superpower. I was the first person “off book” in choir and my friends delighted in my ability to name any popular song in the first note or two. But I could not read music.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried. I’d taken piano and sight-singing lessons but these ended in frustration. When my husband, a professional musician, suggested I try a “one line” instrument I took up the recorder and fell in love with it. I was already a huge fan of Baroque music and it seemed like a natural fit.
With only one stave to deal with, things improved somewhat. I joined a quartet and a large ensemble. My good ear served me well but I quickly hit a sight-reading wall. Despite having help “on tap” with my husband and years of faithful practice, things never got easier. I was frustrated and ashamed. It was emotionally difficult to practice and I felt stuck, always learning the notes and never getting a chance to work on the actual music.
Finally, at 52, I got some psycho-educational testing done and was diagnosed with ADHD and something called a “severe visual processing disorder”. My fears were confirmed; sight reading would never get easier for me. I needed a different approach.
I didn’t think anyone would be willing to teach the Suzuki method to an adult but I found a wonderful teacher, Kathleen Schoen, in Alberta. We started lessons at the beginning of June and I burned through Level One on alto in about two weeks, easily learning two to three songs per day. We added the soprano book to my to-do list and I began working in both voices on Level Two.
Here I received my first shock: one of the pieces (Handel Water Music Bourée) was something I had just played with my large consort. How on earth could this be only Level Two? Of course the music got harder in Level Two but unlike before, I was not frustrated. I did not feel defeated.
I’m a teacher myself. I teach seniors how to use technology like iPads and iPhones and I spend quite a bit of time building good foundations before moving on to higher concepts. I was extremely impressed with the layout and progression of the Suzuki method, which had clearly been very carefully designed for a logical and gentle progression through the music.
Kathleen then suggested I purchase the music for the remaining levels as inspiration and in Level Six I found a movement of Vivaldi’s Oboe Concerto, a particular favourite, that I had long dreamed of playing (in fact I had memorized the entire thing) but never imagined I would ever be able to play. Now it’s on my long-term to-do list!
The Suzuki method changed everything for me. I no longer had to drag myself to the practice room and endure frustration and tears while trying to stay focussed for a scant 30 minutes. I was now forcing myself to stop after an hour to save my hands and arms from strain. My self-esteem soared! I was no longer dreaming of a future where I might one day be able to work on music that I loved. I was already doing it! As I no longer had to work at interpreting musical text, I had the brain-space left to instead focus on interpreting the music.
It’s fall now and I have about four songs to go in each of the soprano and alto books. Music is no longer an impenetrable wall but rather a puzzle to be solved and I know that with time and attention I will “solve” it. I would highly recommend the Suzuki method to any adult interesting in learning music. If I had one wish it would be for a place for adult Suzuki students to chat. Just like the kids, we need peers to accompany us on the journey.
Why I believe the Suzuki method is excellent for adults:
So I made a little video to commemorate 2020. We have done so much online this year, that I chose to use the Zoom and Cyborg Llama platforms to do the videos, complete with slightly out of sync video and audio tracks (slightly out of sync, like so much else we have done this year!). It also features an old transverse flute that is new to me as of December 2020 – an antique Thibouville ainé from the second half of the 1800’s. This is a simple system flute with 6 keys – I am still getting used to the different fingering system on this recording.
Students, if you want to play along by ear, the piece is in the key of C, and begins with the same interval as the beginning of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. If you want to play along on the harmony or double parts, the score is here:
Clearly typeset modern edition:
https://fluteplayer.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Noel-Chedeville-score.pdf
Original first edition of 1737:
https://fluteplayer.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Noel-Chedeville-score-1.pdf
And if you would like to record another part along with me in the multi tracked part of the video, the project is available on Cyborg Llama. Just send me an email at flutesrus@gmail.com and let me know you would like to record, and I will give you access.
Thank you for your commitment and mutual support as we navigated our way through the strangest year ever. I hope you all have a safe and restful holiday, and stay healthy so we are ready for the creative challenges of 2021!
Kathleen Schoen
Most years, I will just have all my students continue in their same lesson time as the previous year unless they require a change.
This year, I have a change that will require a revision of my teaching schedule.
The Augustana campus of U of A, where I teach sessionally, has revised its B.Mus degree to focus on applied pedagogy and studio teaching. As part of this, they have asked me to start a program that can provide Suzuki method teacher training and demonstration classes. This is very good news for the future of Suzuki music education in Alberta, but it does mean that I will have to change my university teaching day to Wednesday instead of Tuesday the way it has been previously.
Rather than just asking all my Wednesday people to switch to Tuesdays, I would like revise my entire teaching schedule, and give everyone a change to change their lesson time to one that might be more convenient, while things are up in the air. To this end, I will be asking everyone to give me three different times when they could come for a lesson, in order of preference. I will collect these times and try to create a schedule that is the most convenient for everyone. In order to see all the times in one place and make sure I haven’t missed anyone, I will be asking you to fill out a Google form with this information. Here is the link: https://forms.gle/QBj9xKFeNf2pUY9q9
In our last lessons in June, I was telling all of you that I wanted to try and set up some opportunities to meet outside and play duets, since we had not really seen each other in person since we all went to on line lessons mid March. Since I am now writing this at the beginning of August, it is pretty obvious that I haven’t done this yet. Unfortunately, life caught up to me – my husband, who had been on the waiting list for open heart surgery when the pandemic closed everything except emergency services at the hospitals, received a call at the end of June when things opened up, telling him to be ready for surgery mid-July. So everything came to a halt while we dealt with this. I am grateful that if it had to be done so suddenly, it did happen in the summer when our schedules were less busy. I would have had to take several weeks off had it happened during the lesson term.
I still want to do a duet project as part of our lesson start-up at the end of August, and get together outdoors before the weather gets too cold. Here’s the plan:
I have always considered one of my most important goals as a teacher is to help my students learn to work independently. In order for this to happen, a student needs these skills:
One of the best tools for developing the objective listening and self assessment is making recordings of your playing and listening to them. This is why we do this as a very important part of the graduation program. Back in January, I was drawing up a plan for having my students do more of this kind of work. And then COVID-19 came along, and we were all on line. To make up for the shortcomings of sound quality with lessons over the internet, I had many of you experiment with sending me recordings, and put a large amount of material up as on line resources, but it was all done in a hurry and not as well organized as I would have liked. Now I would like to take a deep breath and approach this in a more organized way.
So here’s the plan:
Unlike an in-person lesson, where all playing and feedback is immediate, this asynchronous lesson will allow you to listen to yourself after you record, think about whether you are really accomplishing your goals in playing the piece, and make another attempt (or two or three, over several days) until you are satisfied enough to send it to me.
Scheduling asynchronous lessons for the weeks when there are statutory holidays will also help us to keep our momentum going over breaks without needing to reschedule lessons. I will still have extra lesson days as usual! Asynchronous lessons will be in addition to, not instead of, extra lesson days.
If I was talking to you, and I suddenly paused in mid sentence, you would probably be able to anticipate the next ________ I was going to say.
This is because you know the language well, and you recognize common phrases and patterns instantly.
If I sang, “Happy birthday, to you, Happy birthday to you …..” you would probably be able to finish the song for me.
You learned this song the same way you learned your language. By hearing it often in the same context, you began to expect to hear it again in similar situations, and could predict when people would probably sing it. When it was sung, you always heard the entire melody, so you knew when it would begin, when it would end, and the special place in the middle that was always different depending on whose birthday it was. And it felt good to sing it, because it was in an environment of happy celebration (which often included cake!)
But why stop with just “Happy Birthday to You”?
You can learn any music the same way that you learned “Happy Birthday.”
You can understand where it begins, where it ends, and the special places in the middle where something different happens. You can start without being prompted, and pick it up at any point to finish it. You can do this with a simple folk song or with a piece of complex classical music.
All you need to do is listen to it.
In the same way that as a baby you listened to your parents talking and absorbed your native language easily and accurately, you can listen to music and absorb the vocabulary and grammar of the language of music.
Every person can.
All you need to do is listen.
But you have to listen more than just once. Just like babies hear words many, many times before they begin to imitate the sounds, you need to listen to music repeatedly, until you can anticipate the next sound as easily as you can anticipate my next _______.
Then you will recognize the same patterns in other pieces of music, and anticipate when they will happen.
And you will be pleasantly surprised if a composer does something slightly different from what you are expecting, and show you something new! In this way you will learn more patterns, the same way that we learn the meaning of a new word from its context in a sentence.
Congratulations! You can now speak the language of music.
Effortlessly, the same way that you understand what you are now reading.
OK, I get it. Now how do I do it?
Your teacher will have many resources for helping you organize your listening. Approaches will vary depending on the needs of individual students. Here are some strategies to make learning easy by setting yourself up with a comprehensive listening program.
Get your playback devices organized
Download your assigned playlist on to the device you will actually use to listen to it. Yes, download. Do not rely on streaming services. If your computer is in an office where you never listen to music, put it on your phone or tablet. Parents, make sure you both have all the music on both your phones. so it is instantly available at all times. If your child has their own device, make sure they have access to the music on it, but do not expect them to be responsible for doing all their listening unsupervised. Use decent external speakers or headphones – do not rely on the tinny internal speaker on most mobile devices. If you use CDs, burn several copies – one for the car, one for the stereo, one for backup when one gets lost or damaged.
Listen repeatedly
Set your device to play the same track or playlist on repeat. You need to hear the same tune many times before you can confidently anticipate what comes next. Set a goal – listening to a piece 100 times before trying to play it yourself is not unreasonable.
Listen ahead
Don’t just listen to the piece you are working on right now. Alternate between listening to your current working piece and listening to the entire playlist. This allows you to look forward to the pieces you will be learning soon, reviews your memory of past pieces, and avoids listening fatigue from too much constant repetition of just one thing. Listen to other pieces for your instrument as well, not just the assigned repertoire.
Consider your listening environment
Listening in the car is super convenient. It is a wonderful way to seize an opportunity, so do take advantage of it. But remember that inside a vehicle is a noisy environment – engine noise, traffic noise, etc. will mask many of of the expressive elements of the music. This is fine if all you want to do is get to know the pitches and rhythm. But if you also want to anticipate dynamic variations, articulations, vibrato, and other nuances of phrasing that are not always written in the score, you need to listen in an environment where it is quiet enough to hear them. I recommend having a quiet time at home when you make a habit of listening to music.
Use both passive and active listening
Let the music play in the background during quiet activities and meals, and when you are sitting in the car. This is passive listening. Active listening is when you engage with the music as it is playing. For a beginner, this can be as simple as beating time with feet or hands while listening, or moving freely to the music. More advanced students can alternate playing a section of the piece with listening to a section of the piece, or play along with the whole thing to feel how the melody fits with the accompaniment.
Listen to a variety of versions of the same piece
Listening to different recordings of the same piece will draw your attention to the variety of nuances used by individual performers. Imitating these different ways of playing the same passage help you make your own artistic decisions about how to play it yourself.
Did you find this article helpful? You can download it here as a printable .pdf
Reviewing previously learned material in practice:
When you are a beginner, you don’t know many things yet, and all of them are new.
So when you practice, you practice everything. It doesn’t take very much time.
Then you get to a point where you know more than you have time to play in one practice session. This is when you need to organize your material on a rotation, for constant review.
There are two categories of review: patterns & pieces
Patterns:
These are the building blocks of music. Scales, triads, and other patterns recur in different contexts in every piece of music.
We extract these patterns from the pieces and isolate them for individual practice. This is a very methodical and efficient way of practice to develop facility on the instrument and to train the ear and fingers to expect typical pitch and fingering combinations.
Pieces:
Patterns, however, are meaningless unless placed in the context of an expressive melody. So we also need to review our pieces.
You know how sometimes you meet someone in the grocery store, and you feel you ought to know them, but can’t remember who they are? It may be someone you know from work, but in a different location you can’t recall their name. (And feel slightly embarrassed.)
In the same way, you may meet a pattern that you already know in a new piece, but you don’t recognize it and need to learn it all over again because the new context makes it feel very unfamiliar.
This is why we need to review all our known pieces, so that we can become familiar with all the different contexts where we have to be able to recognize a pattern.
And we need to review them in different settings and venues: practice, lesson, concert, group, festival, exam … so that we can recognize these things in any setting, and not draw a blank like you did with your acquaintance in the grocery store.
Result:
If we review both patterns and pieces, we become very good at recognizing known patterns in a variety of contexts. This makes it easier to learn new pieces quickly.
If we don’t review, learning new pieces takes a very long time, as you have to do everything as if it was for the very first time.
OK, I get it. Now how do I do it?
Your teacher will have many resources for helping you organize your practice time. Approaches will vary depending on the needs of individual students.
Here’s the basic idea:
Some pieces may exercise more than one technical point. These ones can get swapped around between groups or become a group on their own.
Newer pieces can be in a group that gets played very day, until they are as familiar as the older ones. Then you can put them in a group where they get played after a longer interval.
If you find a piece that you feel that you have forgotten, you can add it to the every day group until it is back to being familiar again.
You can combine groups into bigger categories and review pieces after a longer interval. This will exercise your long term recall. If you find yourself having to re-learn pieces after a long interval, make your categories smaller so the pieces rotate more often.
I find this system to be a good indicator of when a student is ready to go on to something new. If the review of the known scale patterns and pieces is completed quickly and confidently, there will be time left in the lesson or practice to start a new project. If the review takes a long time, and spots need to be re-learned, that will use all the available time. And that is OK, because that is what that student needs to be doing before going on to new things.
Did you find this article helpful? You can download it here as a printable .pdf
I recently had the pleasure attending a workshop with the amazing recorder soloist Piers Adams, which was sponsored by the Edmonton Recorder Society while Red Priest was in town. This was my third workshop with Piers Adams over the course of several years in a variety of locations. The man is a force of nature as far as recorder playing is concerned – I have nothing but admiration for his command of the instrument and the way he fully embraces the expressive and improvisational philosophy of Baroque music. It was fascinating to hear many of the same things that he had said in previous workshops, but distilled by more years of experience. I took copious notes, and here they are:
Piers Adams Workshop – Edmonton Recorder Society March 3, 2017
Details! – this is the 10% that takes you from amateur to pro.
Breathing:
Blowing:
Now go to the music – just air, no articulation:
Contrast a straight air stream with shaping air & punchy bits
Make the air shape the phrase the way you want it – then use alternate fingerings to correct any pitch problems. Do not compromise your phrasing or play tentatively because you are afraid of going out of tune.
Now add articulation:
Vibrato
Fingers
Thinking
Slurs
Where should I spend my time?
I recently had a parent ask me if she could pay for a longer lesson time. This surprised me for two reasons:
So I began to think:
That was the best solution in this case. But when do we need to increase the length of the lesson?
So my equation for lesson length calculations might look something like this:
L(Lesson length) – P(practice assignment assessment) = T(time available for new material)
When T = 0 then we need to make the lesson longer
P is affected by two things:
Changing the value of P can allow more to be accomplished in a short lesson before it needs to become longer.
I finally acquired an inexpensive Aulos baroque flauto traverso pitched at a=415. I have been wanting to do this for some time, in order to have an instrument that I can loan out to interested students. These instruments are not readily available – I only acquired my handmade instrument after playing an order with an instrument maker and waiting for two years. Now that mass production instruments are available, I can offer the experience of playing a period instrument along with the performance practice instruction I provide when teaching the Bach, Handel, and Blavet sonatas to my older students.
My first student to try the instrument was featured on the Edmonton Suzuki Flute and Recorder Society fall chamber music concert. We are playing a duet by Hotteterre – she is playing the Aulos flute, which is a copy of a Stanesby Junior in plastic, and I am playing my boxwood Rottenburgh copy by Rod Cameron. She is also reading from a facsimile of the original publication, which is in french violin clef.
“Perhaps it is music that will save the world.”
Pablo Casals said this, after hearing the students of the Talent Education movement in Japan, April 1961.
I write this on Remembrance Day. This is a day when I reflect on the effects of war. Not just to appreciate the sacrifices and commitment of the military, but also to remember how war and other acts of violence affect civilians. In my immediate family, we count both WWII veterans and WWII refugees, people who have given me personal stories about their war experience. Some years I am thankful for movements towards peace in the world, and other years I am worried when events start to look similar to past events that foreshadowed future conflict.
This year, my student groups met to rehearse on the evening before November 11. I was thinking about Remembrance Day, and following current events, and hoping for a peaceful future for my students. This brought to mind what Pablo Casals said to Shinichi Suzuki after hearing a student performance: “Perhaps music can save the world.” So I took a moment with each class to speak to the students. This is what I said:
Tomorrow is Remembrance Day. On this day, there are certain things that we do to remind ourselves about past wars and our hope for future peace. This reminded me of what Pablo Casals said to Dr. Suzuki: “Perhaps music can save the world.”
Think about this, and think about what we are doing here tonight.
- We are listening carefully to each other.
- We are taking turns, alternating between leading and supporting each other.
- We are anticipating what our colleagues are trying to do, and helping them achieve it.
- We listen respectfully to suggestions to improve the performance of our group.
- We are flexible, and often try different solutions before we solve a problem.
- We share the same goals.
- We are cooperating to create something beautiful and expressive.
Do you think, if our world leaders all did these things too, our world would be a better place?
We are not world leaders. Some of you may grow up to become one! But what we can all do here and now, is take what we do in our group class, and use it to make our own small corner of the world a better place. Take this thought with you tomorrow, for Remembrance Day.
