I recently picked up the new book Musicality by Christopher Sutton from Musical U. I’ve been looking for more resources to help me tutor Musicianship classes at CSUN (and hopefully to teach them myself down the road 🙂). Facebook showed me numerous ads for this book, and so I finally picked it up on Black Friday last year (2024). I should note that this is currently a preliminary review, as I haven’t finished the 800 page book. I’m about 300 pages in, having finished the first part in full and started reading part 2, specifically the chapter on Ear Training. I’ve also glanced over random pages further in the book, which I’ll mention a bit below.

I have been practicing Musicianship skills for pretty much my whole life. I started Suzuki violin as a three year old, learning by ear for the first few years until I began to read music as I was preparing for piano lessons at the age of 6. One of the challenges I knew I was going to face as a college level music teacher (or tutor at the moment) was how to work with students who are struggling with musicianship skills as college students. I don’t have specific memories of a time when I struggled particularly with any aspect of ear training, rhythm or the other skills associated with this side of music. I do have memories of times I wasn’t perfect at this, and I know that I did learn the skills over time, but even by the time I got to my undergraduate degree at Berklee, I was already reasonably good at these skills, and my training there helped me greatly refine those skills. My life in music since then has refined them quite a bit further too!

As I’ve tutored the Musicianship classes at CSUN (Levels 1-5 so far, in my first three semesters, probably level 6 next semester), I’ve found that with only a little practice, I’ve been able to handle everything that those classes have asked of the students. I’ve generally been able to learn to a reasonable standard all of the exercises within the hour that the students get with me each session. However, I’ve been struck by the fact that I don’t think this version of drilling is really how I learned to do this kind of thing, and I’ve been trying to figure out both how I did learn it myself, and some other techniques for working with older (college-age) students for whom this approach isn’t really working. Several of my students have asked me how I got to be good at this sort of material, and that is actually one of the inspirations I’ve had for writing up my Capital-M Music project, which takes us to this new book, Musicality.

I finally clicked on one of the ads that Facebook showed me, with the idea of seeing if this book might be something I could recommend to my students, or give me better ideas for ways to teach the subject. One can always improve in this area, but I’m generally pretty happy with my personal abilities here at this point. I have been having fun myself with some of the exercises - I do like this side of music!

They talk in the beginning of the book about what Musicality means and why they chose that title instead of Musicianship. One aspect of this book that appeals to me particularly is the emphasis on how these skills apply to all types of music. Musicianship as a term has generally classical connotations, and they want to point out that the skills are applicable across the board, to all genres, and with or without a degree in music. If you’ve read my original “Capital-M Music” paper, that part might sound familiar, and in general one of my favorite parts of this book is that it is basically a (much) more developed version of what I’ve been building towards with this whole project. They use the term “The Complete Musician” rather than “Capital-M Music”, but in broad strokes the idea is the same.

As I’ve tried to answer my students’ questions about how I learned this material, one answer is simply that I’ve been doing it my whole life, and (therefore) that I started really young. That certainly helps, but obviously isn’t a satisfying or useful answer for college students who didn’t start doing ear training at 3, so a more useful answer I’ve found (somewhat to my surprise) is that a lot of it was kinesthetic. The skills I’m specifically thinking of in this context are largely ear-based (aural) skills, but one of the things that has allowed me to get good at the hearing part of it is the kinesthetic part of playing my instruments. I didn’t start taking dedicated composition or music theory classes until I got to high school and college. Everything I did up until that point was either directly on one of my instruments (mostly violin and piano in my case, but also eventually several others), or at least was aimed at playing violin and piano. We had a musicianship class at the music school I attended as a kid, the Music Institute of Chicago, but that was in the context of violin classes and working on developing towards playing in the beginners orchestra, not at musicianship or theory in the abstract. We also worked on musicianship aspects directly in my violin classes pretty much all along.

Once I got to high school, the music theory classes I took there were integrated theory/musicianship classes, separate from my playing, but of course I also kept playing in orchestra and on my other instruments at home.

Then at Berklee, we had a “musicianship suite” which included standalone ear training classes that featured dictation exercises and sight-singing drills, but also included several transcription projects involving real pieces of music (another aspect I like about this book, their emphasis on applying the skills to actual music and not just by themselves). We also had a sight-reading class and an improvisation class, both on our instruments (violin in my case), and the way my private violin teacher worked the technical drills into my lessons (scales, arpeggios, chord progressions, etc), was to have me play around the circle of fifths in all 12 major and minor keys, and turn it into a backdoor way to learn to solo on a chord progression (start with the notes in order like “usual”, then try mixing up the order of the notes, and later add non-chord tones to move between the chord tones in the arpeggio, and suddenly you are improvising a solo and not just playing arpeggios). It got me quite comfortable with knowing my way around my instrument in a way that other methods had not really done, and connected both theory and musicianship to my instrument and to music more broadly, one reason why instrumental lessons (and ensemble) are called “Applied Music” in a formal educational context.

I play quite a few instruments, but really keyboard alone will do wonders for the more theory-driven side of things (scales, arpeggios, chord progressions, etc.) - what they sound like and what they feel like to play (and even what they look like both in sheet music and physically on the keyboard with the pattern of black and white keys). There’s a reason why every college-level music program I’m aware of requires some sort of keyboard class (at Berklee it was called Basic Keyboard Techniques, at CSUN it’s called Keyboard Musicianship). 

Keyboard itself isn’t necessarily enough though, as you lose the pitch refinement you get from a continuous pitch instrument like fretless strings, singing, or even woodwind and brass (as I go over in the Musicianship section of Capital-M Music Part 1). In the required set of core music classes all music students take in college, they have a keyboard class, and then they have a class that involves “sight-singing”, where you have to sing the exercises to work on that aspect of it, and there is a full chapter in the first part of the Musicality book on why we should all sing, and how to go about starting that if you haven’t tried musicianship-type singing before. One point they make is that you don’t have to think of yourself as a singer to get immense benefit from this level of singing. They point out that we don’t expect everyone to go on to be an olympic-level athlete when we teach kids how to ride a bike, because there are practical, everyday use cases for bike riding outside of the super-athletes. They apply this to singing - there are practical benefits to being able to sing for yourself even if you never sing in front of others, and you certainly don’t have to be trying for American Idol level singing, or superstar opera status to enjoy singing (either for yourself or for others), or to musically benefit from it. In piano, this relates to a distinction I make between “theory piano” and “performance piano” - everyone should learn basic keyboard technique (“theory piano”) because of the benefits it brings to learning theory and composition techniques, and the common use of keyboards in music studios, but you can decide for yourself if you want to go on to “performance piano”, where you will learn to play specific pieces of music for yourself and/or for an audience. I think everyone should do some sort of performance, but it doesn’t have to be on piano (or any other keyboard instrument).

Other aspects of Musicality discussed in the first part of the book are Audiation and Active Listening. Audiation is being able to intentionally hear music in your head that is not otherwise present where you are - reading some kind of sheet music and “hearing” it without an instrument (or singing), or imagining music that you might then write (composition or improvisation) or even just imagining a recording or performance you heard but isn’t playing right now. I’ve been having fun lately taking some of my duet parts I’ve created for songs I sing in the car on my own, and instead of singing them, trying to hear them only in my head with the actual track playing in audio, and see how well I can convince myself that I’m actually hearing my harmony part for real. It doesn’t sound quite integrated but I can hear it as part of the overall listening experience (I do this version when I’m listening at home, not while I’m actually driving!). Every year when I go visit my parents over the holidays (having just come back from that this year as I write this), we have a family tradition of singing Christmas songs in the car together which we’ve been doing since I was a kid. Several of the songs we sing have karaoke tracks that I’ve heard many times, and I’ve noticed before that when I sing those songs without the track playing, I still hear a version of the track playing in my head helping me keep the proper beat and stay on pitch and fill in some of the rhythm section elements. This year I made a conscious effort to focus on that and hear how much of the track I could recreate while I sang the songs. Both of these are versions of Audiation, and this book talks about both why it’s important and useful to develop this skill, and some ideas for how to begin working on that if you’ve never tried it before intentionally.

Active Listening is where you listen to a recording or performance and “listen with a question in mind” (as they say). Something I find I share with many other composers I’ve talked to is the difficulty of listening to music without analysing it mentally. At least subconsciously, I’m always aware of some of the technical aspects of any musical sound (and some non-musical sounds) in my environment. That can be harmony (what chord progression they are using), timbre (which instruments are playing at any given time and how they are being used), rhythm (what meter are we in, and is there a groove or not? If so, is it straight, swung, or does it involve cross-rhythm?), form (what are the sections of the piece, does it fit any “standard” form (either classical or “pop” song form), how do they transition between sections, can you guess what comes next?). They mention many of these elements, and a few others, in that chapter. I find I don’t necessarily actually “ask” these questions. At this point, I’m just aware of what is happening in the music in those terms. Sometimes I’m consciously aware of these elements, other times it’s in the background of my mind to be summoned if something particularly interesting starts happening, but it’s always happening somewhere. My mother did not want me to listen to music for the first several years I was driving a car because she was afraid it would distract me from driving! Back then it probably would have, but at least since I’ve been in LA I’ve been able to listen and drive at the same time just fine. The Active Listening chapter has probably been my favorite so far in this book, or at least those are the exercises I’ve enjoyed the most in the first few weeks I’ve been reading this book.

Given the emphasis in the book, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the second chapter on Mindset, which they say several times might be the most important chapter in the book. They help you gain a probably healthier mindset than the mindset that too many musicians have, and work through goals that you might have (they don’t suggest what those goals should be, and in fact throughout the book, they dislike the term “should”, but they do have some exercises to help you develop your own goals, in particular their “Big Picture Vision” exercise).

In general, I’ve loved the book so far, and found that this is a book I was looking for to help me put into words some of the ideas I’ve had but haven’t quite figured out how to define or teach yet. I can definitely recommend it to my Musicianship students and to anyone else who is interested in the subject, and in particular to anyone else who has struggled with that side of their musical development (hearing what is happening in music as sound, and not just seeing notes on a page and playing them - they particularly dislike the idea of playing music as a “note-reproducing robot”, which I whole-heartedly agree with!).

However, like any book, it isn’t perfect and there are a couple of issues I have with it so far. One is that it took a bit to get into the book. A lot of the first few chapters felt like a marketing blog post for someone’s “Brilliant New Course” that will teach you “everything your teachers never did but should have”, and they were a little too gleeful in attacking the “traditional” ways of teaching. I have my own issues with some of those methods, and I think there are better approaches, or at least approaches that might work better for certain people. But several times I wanted to tell the book “you can stop trying to sell this to me, I already bought the book!” 😃 I think you should read the first few chapters as well - there is a lot of good information sandwiched between sentences about how shocking it is that your teachers never told you this before (I will note that I picked up much of this from somewhere, so either my teachers did discuss it or I figured it out on my own. Berklee was big on some of these ideas, and they have some less-than-traditional methods there, but we used plenty of traditional methods as well).

The other issue I have is something that is going to come up in the next chapter or two after the one I’m on now, when we get into “Solfa” (or Solfege as we call it in my schools - that might be a British vs. American thing, as Musical U is based in England). I was looking at random pages before I started reading from the beginning, and stumbled across their approach to minor-key solfege. They use a version of Movable-Do solfege, which is the version we usually use in American schools as well, but at both Berklee where I first studied solfege in detail, and at CSUN where I’m tutoring it, we use Do-based minor solfege, and in this book they are going to recommend La-based minor solfege. In movable do, “Do” is always the 1 note (the “tonic”) of the key you are in, and we alter syllables for chromatic usage. So we have the standard Major key solfege most people learn as kids, Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Ti-Do (note that Sol is spelled that way but usually pronounced “So”). Then if we alter notes from that, we tweak the syllable, mostly changing the ending to “-i” if we raise a note by a half-step (do becomes di, re becomes ri, etc), or (more commonly), changing it to “-e” if we lower it. So in Do-based minor solfege, the 3rd scale degree, 6th scale degree and 7th scale degree get lowered compared to major, and we get Do-Re-Me-Fa-Sol-Le-Te-Do. Then if you do harmonic minor, it ends Sol-Le-Ti-Do, and if you have melodic minor, it’s Sol-La-Ti-Do going up but Do-Te-Le-Sol going down, etc. You can apply this to other modes as well, so Lydian mode is Do-Re-Mi-Fi-Sol-La-Ti-Do, for example, and Mixolydian is Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Te-Do, Locrian is Do-Ra-Me-Fa-Se-Le-Te-Do, etc. See my Modes guide for more on this approach to modal theory. I don’t use solfege in that guide, but you can apply the ideas to scale degree numbers as well (also note that the odd change for solfege is to make Re into Ra when we lower it because it already had -e in its standard form).

So that’s Do-based minor, but in this book, they use La-based minor. That approach notes that natural minor is the sixth scale degree of major (often stated as “to find the relative minor, go down two steps from the major key [(8),7,6]), and then uses a scale where La (the sixth solfege syllable) is the tonic, and then you don’t need to alter syllables for natural minor. I haven’t studied this in my classes before, and I haven’t read the full section in the book yet, so I don’t know how they handle chromatic alterations like harmonic or melodic minor, and it completely ignores the existence of the other church modes (though you could take a similar approach there - Dorian would start on Re, Phrygian on Mi, etc). And through that approach you can see that they are taking what I call the “White Keys Method” in my Modes guide, and I talk there about why I don’t love that approach to modal theory. They do defend their choice to use La-based minor in the book, and we agree on the differences that are generated through both approaches, but they think that makes their approach better and I think that makes my approach better 😛

There is, by the way, a third standard approach to Solfege that my composition / theory professor Dr. Liviu Marinescu has defended passionately at CSUN, called Fixed Do. This is where the note we call “C” is always Do, (and “D” is always Re, etc). In much of the world that uses this approach (and it is the approach used in much of the world outside the US, the UK, and Germany), the notes are simply named by their solfege notes, so they think of the note “C” as “Do”. The oddest thing to me about this approach is that they abstract away the concept of sharp and flat, so Cb, C (natural), and C# are all called “Do” and you just sing or play the right one. We make a big deal out of the fact that C (natural) is not C#, and it’s not like they don’t know that, but it does seem an odd thing to abstract away from labels. The real issue I have with Fixed Do, though, is that it does nothing to help you identify patterns in music. With Movable Do, you can see how a “I chord” (one chord) is always going to be Do-Mi-Sol (or Do-Me-Sol in Do-based minor), and we spend a decent amount of time in musicianship classes (and tutoring) singing through those patterns in various keys to ingrain them. You get none of that in Fixed Do. The I chord in C major is Do-Mi-Sol, but in E major it’s Mi-Sol-Si [also note that “Si” replaces “Ti”, this is not #5! “Si” is what we’d call B (or Bb or B#)]. Also note that that Sol is what we’d call G# in E major, but Sol in C major is what we’d call G-natural. The benefits you get from Fixed Do are a system that’s easier to memorize, better ease of working with pieces that modulate (at what point does a new “Do” take over in Moveable Do?), and the ability to use solfege with atonal music that has no “1” note. That said, I don’t personally think the advantages to Fixed Do outweigh the advantages to a Movable Do system (in our system where we use letter names for note names) except in the case of atonal music, where you don’t really have a choice if you want to use solfege at all.