Creating, Listening, Understanding (with Tony Parlapiano of popMATICS)

Christopher: One of our favorite things to see at Musical U is a comment along the lines of “why did nobody ever tell me this?!”

Because filling in those missing pieces is really what we exist to do here at Musical U. And today, I want to introduce you to someone else who thrives on simplifying powerful musical ideas to deliver those kinds of “aha!” moments for all kinds of passionate music learners: Tony Parlapiano of popMATICS.

We are always on the lookout here at Musical U for passionate music educators who share the same kind of vision we do, of empowering the average music learner to achieve phenomenal things through unlocking greater musicality. And over the past year or so, we’ve been hearing more and more about popMATICS.

You can go to popmatics.com now to check it out, but it’s a new site started by Tony, and it has a really interesting approach and a way of helping students that’s all very much aligned with what we do at Musical U.

And so we kept hearing from our members, some of our keenest members were also tuned into what Tony was doing, and they were raving about it.

So we were super excited to have the chance to bring Tony in as a Guest Expert a little while back. Today, I want to share his mini-interview that we did before his Musical U masterclass, where we talk about his views on musicality, where popMATICS came from, and how they approach teaching the way they do.

It is a piano/keyboard-focused approach, but as you’ll discover, it really unlocks deeper musical understanding that I think is relevant for any instrument.

And you’ll also be hearing briefly from Angela on the popMATICS team, too.

So I’ll be back tomorrow with a clip from the masterclass you’ll hear him talk about in just a moment. But for now, please enjoy this mini-interview with Tony Parlapiano of popMATICS!

———

Christopher: Today, I’m joined by Tony Parlapiano of popMATICS, where they help music lovers develop their keyboard and piano skills and really have a kindred philosophy to our own at Musical U, helping enable that musician or music learner to tap into their true potential and gain more freedom.

So I’m super excited to have Tony with us. He’s here as our Guest Expert at Musical U this month, so he’ll be in coaching our Next Level members, as well as presenting our masterclass for all of our members this afternoon.

Tony, welcome to the show!

Tony: Yeah, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Christopher: So, I always like to begin with my favorite question to ask musicians and music educators, which is: what does musicality mean to you?

Tony: I think musicality, to me, I would think about it like, my connection to music, how close I feel to music.

And I know that I can connect to music through listening. I can connect to music through creating. I can connect to music through understanding.

And the more that I practice those three areas of my music learning, the closer I feel to music, the more I feel I understand music. And not only does it give me the ability to express myself through music, but it also heightens my ability to understand what others are trying to communicate as well.

So that’s how I would define it, is your connection with music and the desire to continue to get closer to it.

Christopher: I love that. That’s a wonderful definition. And we are more and more talking about that connection piece here at Musical U, because it’s one of those things where, once you think about it, it’s bizarre that we don’t teach that in a very active way in music education as a whole.

You know, I went through probably 20 years of instrument lessons without anyone talking about connection, anyone helping me connect more with the music or with my instrument or with my instinct for music. It just wasn’t covered.

Tell me a little bit about what you do at popMATICS, and how that connection piece fits in.

Tony: Well, at popMATICS, to me the seed always comes from creating. And I believe that students should be in an environment where there’s not such a strong emphasis on what notes you’re playing or playing things correctly.

That students should have, I like to say, like, at least five minutes. If someone were to tell me I have, like, an hour to practice each day, I would tell them the first five minutes I would devote to just creating.

And you can use some type of constraint for your creativity. You can say, I’m going to work within a particular key, or I’m going to try to use a particular chord progression. But the idea is that you’re not trying to recreate something that somebody else made. It’s a generative force.

And I always believe that that is the connection to everything, because many people who want to learn to play by ear or learn through listening, just be able to play what they hear. A lot of that can come through the creative process.

And especially we at popMATICS, part of what we try to encourage students to do is not only create every day, but actually record yourself every day. And we give them a locker where they can submit those recordings. And we take them through a sequenced approach so that they can continue to build on these, on their improvisation and their creativity.

But the idea is that you go back, you listen to these recordings. If you can recognise the sounds, what you were working with in your own recordings, you’re so much more likely to recognise it when you hear it from others.

And so those three areas of learning for us, which is creating, listening, and understanding, I find that whenever somebody is neglecting one of those areas, they won’t reach their full potential unless they’re doing all three.

So I see a lot of people who, they love to analyze music. They’ve got a lot of head knowledge, but they don’t really make a lot of music.

Or maybe they make a lot of music, but they don’t try to learn anything from someone else.

And I find that these three areas really complement each other and continue to help develop students musical freedom so that they can just have the confidence to… I will find the sounds that I’m looking for. I will find the sounds that I hear and imagine.

Christopher: Yeah. And, you know, popMATICS came on our radar just because we were hearing so many of our own members raving about it.

They were really getting involved in your stuff and loving it. And then I know you met with our Head Educator, Andrew, who came away being like “there is so much in common here!” And a lot of what you just talked about is really near and dear to our hearts, in terms of enabling that creativity and helping fill in the missing pieces or rebalance things.

So I’d love to hear a little bit more about how your approach works in terms of the methodology, or the format, or how do you help musicians with this stuff?

Tony: Well, I think the foundation comes from, I’m always trying to simplify the vocabulary, simplify the presentation.

I’m not trying to be reductive about the content and the complexity of music, but to try to simplify things to their most basic component and we’ll be talking about some of this in the, in the class, but the idea of even a scale, you know, I’ll have students who have taken lessons for six years, and then they’ll come and they’ll talk to me, they’ll say “I know this sounds like a silly question, but what is a scale? Like, what is a scale?” And I didn’t get that question very often. And the first time I explained it to them, it was kind of a poor explanation because I’m, like, it kind of threw me for a loop. I was like, well, that’s just what we know. That’s the scale. That’s the start.

But it’s not the start. There’s things that go in to build those.

So at popMATICS, we try to. We try to build in the foundation. And from there, through exploring primarily popular styles of music, which has a little bit of a different framework from classical or jazz, it’s got a lot in common, but where they’re different is really fascinating.

And so we find that a lot of people who take music lessons, they’re usually from someone who’s trained in classical or jazz theory. And these little fundamental building blocks that I’ve discovered over the years through my teaching, really, just through my students asking questions and me finding creative ways to answer them, I’ve revealed a lot of things, really, within just the last five years that I’m just, why hasn’t anybody shown me this before? And we get those same comments from our students. They’re like, why didn’t anybody ever show this to me before?

And I find the same thing happens even, I still meet twice a month with my former college professor, and as far as I’m concerned, he’s a musical genius. And he looks at me and he says, where’d you come up with this stuff? And I said, it really just comes from me spending my life teaching. And when I was working one-on-one, any time a student didn’t understand something, I always took that as my responsibility. It was never “Well, everybody else gets it, why don’t you?”

I was always looking for a new way to craft a presentation that might connect with them in a different way. And through doing that and entertaining some ideas that sounded kind of crazy at the beginning, you explore and you find patterns not only on the instrument, but just that are present in music in general that don’t get talked about that often.

So that’s, sorry, that’s a little bit of a long explanation! But I’m kind of thinking through it as you’re asking.

Christopher: No, that was wonderful. You answered about three other questions I had, so that was perfect!

Tony: Oh, great.

Christopher: It’s funny, I don’t want to take us on too much of a tangent, but it reminds me of something we keep talking about in the context of our Next Level coaching program where we’re having people come in, some are at the very beginning, but others have been learning for decades. And it’s just made us even more conscious of the missing pieces in most instrument lessons.

And I never want to throw shade at music teachers or instrument teachers, there are phenomenal people out there, and I admire anyone who devotes their life to music education.

But at the same time, we’ve definitely ended up in this system of inheriting a methodology or an approach to music learning that is missing some fundamental things.

And so then when the teacher gets that question of “what is a scale?” for example, unfortunately, I think a lot of them shrink back and they’re nervous and they don’t even try and teach it or they discourage the student. It comes up a lot with improvisation where if the teacher isn’t a competent improviser, they tell the student “oh, improv isn’t a thing for you. Don’t worry. You’ve got to have a gift to do that kind of stuff”.

And there’s just this terrible feedback cycle of teacher to student, teacher to student, where these whole areas get locked off. But there are, thankfully, instrument teachers, music teachers out there, like yourself, who really take that growth mindset to it. And through developing their own musicality, they figure out the answers that they can pass on to their students, and they reply with “oh, here’s how that works”. And they explore it with their students.

So I just want to give you a shout-out and commend you for taking that attitude. And I’m so excited that you’re now turning it into this online platform where you can help more people. I know popmatics.com is the main website, tell us a bit about what people can find there and how they can get involved.

Tony: Yeah, so if you visit popmatics.com there, I think we have a tab… Angela can clarify. I think it actually just says “free”. And if you go there, you’ll see what we offer for free.

We have something that we call the Campfire Challenge. That’s ten lessons on creativity at the piano, and it doesn’t matter if you have no experience at all, you will find success with the Campfire Challenge. If you do have more experience, you’ll be able to do more with the instructions that are offered.

So it’s a really fantastic ten-day experience, and each day builds on the next. And that’s where we really try to promote the idea of making trips to the piano or whatever instrument you choose to create on part of the rhythm of your life and just including that in your daily rhythm.

And so they can find that over there, but they can also just find a whole lot about, read a little bit more about what we do and how we try to help people. But if they want to get a live interaction, the Campfire Challenge is a great way to do it.

Angela, is there anything else we should add in with that?

Angela: I guess just like, you know, we do a membership, so we do live classes. Live is a big part of our program, teaching live. So we offer live classes Monday through Friday, and then we also offer a lot of recorded classes for people who can’t make it live.

Or, and some students use both. So that’s if you want to engage with our listening classes, our creating classes, and then our understanding classes, which is sort of Tony’s framework for pop theory, all of that is available for our members.

Tony: Yeah. And so if that is the general curriculum, the way that we have it is we have prerecorded curriculum, popMATICS. It’s the individual concepts one at a time. That’s kind of like your music theory class. That’s your musical understanding.

And then we support that with two live classes every day, one on listening and one on creating. And so we take a new song every day, and we reinforce what we’re teaching from the curriculum in those classes.

And then we have a class where we come and create. And I try to give some constraints so everybody can play in the sandbox, you know, give the kind of give the borders and people play, and we don’t worry about write notes or if we step outside the instructions. It’s all just part of creating.

Christopher: I love it. Well, I can see why our members have been enjoying that so much. And, yeah, I really encourage anyone if you play piano or you want to definitely check out popmatics.com and see what they have going on there.

Tony, I can see we have people lining up in the waiting room for the masterclass, so we should be wrapping things up. Before we do, give everyone a little taste of what you’ll be presenting in the masterclass today.

Tony: Yes, so in the masterclass today, we have three areas we’re going to talk about.

One is we’re going to talk a little bit about pop theory and how it’s different from what you might get with classical theory or jazz theory. Again, a lot of similarities, but we’re going to focus on where they’re different.

And then we’re going to give a little presentation on melody and harmony and treating these as separate elements and talk about how we introduce this to our students and share some of the musical discoveries, the things that I wish someone had told me 20 years ago. And also just give some prompts for how we can create with these.

And then at the end we’ll attach what we’ve learned to a song just so you can hear it within the context of real music. And then we’ll have a Q and A.

Christopher: Fantastic. Well, I can’t wait. We better get the ball rolling.

Huge thank you, Tony, for being our guest expert here this month and for this interview, as well as Angela from the popMATICS team.

We’ll see you next time!

Tony: All right, thanks!

———

Christopher: So I hope you enjoyed that, and that it sparked a few ideas for you. Hearing the way Tony talks about these things and how he approaches music making and creativity in particular maybe just rejigged a few things for you.

You can probably see why we’re such fans of his here at Musical U and why we recommend popMATICS so highly.

I’m going to be back tomorrow to share a clip from his masterclass. It’s a bit where he sketches out the major difference between classical, pop and jazz. And the ideas or the information might be familiar to you, but I think you’re going to really love how simple he makes it and how the way he explains it really opens up a gateway for exploration and creativity.

That’s it for this one. Cheers! And go make some music!

Subscribe For Future Episodes!

Apple Podcasts | Android | YouTube | Google Play | Stitcher | RSS

Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!