Experiencing Musicality (Meet the Team, with Camilo Suárez)

Christopher: Welcome back to the show! Today, I’m joined for another Meet The Team interview by Camilo Suárez, a member of our Education Team who’s also a Next Level coach. And we’re going to dive into a bit of his musical backstory and his role at Musical U. Welcome to the show, Camilo!

Camilo: Hi, Christopher. Thank you for having me, I’m happy to be here.

Christopher: I was thinking before we started today, I was remembering, I think it was when we celebrated your one year Musical U-iversary, Hannah was sharing this anecdote that came to mind today.

She was saying how when we hired our next batch of Next Level coaches, we had this big stack of applications, all these people applying to be a Next Level coach. And we were going through them, and she had done her pass, and I had done my pass, and then we got together to try and kind of narrow it down from this big batch to a shortlist, and she was like “okay, so, Christopher, how do you want to do this?” And I was like “I want Camilo Suárez.”

And she was bringing this up on your one year Musical U-iversary to make the point that it proved to be a very smart decision! I think something in your application just made me know you were the man for the job, and you’ve proven to be such a great part of the Musical U team.

So I’m super excited to dive in today and share with people a bit of your own backstory and what you’re up to on the Musical U team and all the contributions you make. Before we do that though, you know I like to open with my favourite question, which is: what does “musicality” mean to you?

Camilo: Well, I love that question because it makes me come up with different answers. But in general, I think that musicality is an experience.

It’s the experience of creating meaning through sound and the experience of interacting with others through sound. I like to think about it as an experience, because it’s something that is available for anyone, anyone that decides to unleash their musicality. And my job is to help people do that, to touch their inner musicality and to help them have that type of communication.

Christopher: Awesome. Well, I’m going to take a tangent here, in fact, and put you on the spot and ask the question that may be on some listeners’ or watchers’ minds, which is “what if I don’t feel like I have that musicality experience like that? That sounds great, but I don’t feel very musical”.

Camilo: Yeah, well, that really resonates with me because that was a situation that I experienced myself in terms of doubting my abilities, doubting that, well, do I have the talent? Because that was the word that was always around. Are you talented or not?

Tapping into your musicality is something available that happens as you take some decisions and come into an environment where you can do things like start to use your voice, start to relate to your favorite music, the music that you feel passionate about in a different way.

So a lot of mindset work sometimes is necessary to realize that, and sometimes by doing a little bit of just creative projects, small projects. I love this idea of working on “musical gestures”, unfinished pieces, things that somehow give you the realization that you are able to create that sound, to have an authentic musical experience, something that sounds meaningful, that feels meaningful to you.

Christopher: I love it. Awesome. And you kind of teed up the next question, which is to dive into your musical backstory a bit.

You mentioned there that you could relate to someone who didn’t feel talented. Tell us about your early years in music. How did you come to be the musician and music educator you are today?

Camilo: Yeah, well, like many people, I started to take lessons when I was a kid.

I come from a family that loved music. None of them were musicians in the sense of being able to play an instrument or being professional musicians, but they all loved music. My parents, my father had a great album collection that I was listening to all the time, my grandfather as well. So I started with that. Then I got violin lessons, and that didn’t go too well. Let’s just leave it like that!

I didn’t feel that it was something in which my imagination was engaged in that. So after the violin lessons, I quit for a little bit and I took guitar and I started to fall in love with it. Jazz, with blues, with ragtime.

Later I moved to the States. In the States, I started to work with salsa bands, with Latin jazz bands while I was going to college. And that just taught me a lot, working with people that were very passionate about it, very willing to show you, to help you learn in a different way.

Because my experience with school, with lessons had not been that great in terms of finding the type of relationship with music that I have now. Later, I just start wondering how come. How come this is not happening to me? How come I feel sometimes that I’m tone deaf, that I can’t understand music in the way that I understand language, in the way that I express through language? So later I decided to go back to school, to graduate school, and actually sit down and read about this and read about how the brain works. It was also inspired by this podcast, the Musicality Podcast. When I started to hear about people thinking about it, I went, I read all of that. Well, not all of that, but many of those books and articles.

And that gave me a sense of, well, maybe this is changing. Our idea of how musical learning happens is changing, and I’m gonna take some decisions, change some things in the way that I practice, the way I relate to music, and the way that I teach music to others as well.

Christopher: Awesome. Yeah. And I was definitely, you know, kind of touched and honored, I think, when I interviewed you for the team to hear that Musical U had played a part in your musical development like that, that you had been listening to the podcast and felt a bit inspired, and you took that to not only your own music making, but also your work at the university, right?

Camilo: Yeah, yeah, completely.

Because, I mean, some of those ideas are ideas that I had an intuition that, you know, maybe musical learning would work in a different way, but I didn’t have evidence of that. So listening to these scholars and guests and musicians talking about this allowed me also to take that experience and bring it to my classroom. I work with first year students, with pre college students, and also with music teachers now.

And just reflecting about this, how has been your experience learning? What can we change about that and how we can make those experiences in the classroom much more meaningful?

Christopher: And your degree was, you mentioned moving to the states. That was the University of Washington, was it? Right. And then your masters, just to confuse me, your master’s was at the University of Columbia (with a U) in the states? Got it. Yeah. So you were pivoting to music and music education at the University of Columbia, and then you moved back to Colombia, Colombia, to teach there at the university in Bogotá, is that right?

Camilo: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. And now I’m mainly focusing on teacher training programs of kind of taking this idea and working with amazing teachers around the country, people that teach in completely different contexts, from university professors to community schools to native american communities where they have music education as well.

And so that dialogue and bringing all of this knowledge has been just a transforming and deeply, deeply meaningful experience for me.

Christopher: Yeah, I think it’s so exciting, the work you’re doing there to really impact music education at that level and bring this spirit of musicality being the focus to that. Talk a little bit more about your own music making these days or over the last few years, what you play, what you enjoy. Give us a little glimpse into that part of your life.

Camilo: Yes, so I’m a bass player. I fell in love with the bass.

That was not my first choice, and I think not very often the bass is the first choice for someone. I was a guitar player before I decided to start a salsa band when I was in college, and the bass player didn’t show the first day. So I said, well, you know, I can take the bass, and fell in love with it.

And I’m still playing that. Play the upright most of the time. I played baby bass, the Ampeg bass, which is quite common in Latin music.

So I’ve been the leader of my own band, and when I came back to Colombia as well, I like to do a lot of arranging, transcription, playing the music that I love. We have a little bit of, we have a recording project on the works, which is going to be in my first full recording project. So I’m excited about that, collaborating with colleagues from people that I’ve known throughout the years.

So, excited about that.

Christopher: That’s awesome. I can’t wait to hear some of that.

And you applied to be a Next Level coach, but we don’t just take anyone off the street and let them coach our Next Level clients, of course! We really are looking for people who have the kind of deep educational background and passion that you do, and then we need to get you up to speed with how we do Next Level coaching and make sure that you’re really kind of ready to hit the ground running. So talk a little bit about your early work at Musical U and how your role has developed.

Camilo: Well, I started on Musical U doing support, helping people going through Living Music, knowing the program, encouraging them to keep going, to discover, to tap into their musicality. So that’s what I did in the first months, and it was just a fantastic experience to see and to identify myself also with people, discovering, feeling excited, saying, I can sing in a different way. I can create my own lines.

And later that started to transform in other challenges, like writing some modules for our site and working with our Head Educator, Andrew Bishko, who became a mentor in terms of explaining how to put things together, how to help people in a way that was effective, that was engaging, that was encouraging.

And later I moved on to become Next Level coach, which has been probably the greatest and the most challenging professional experience that I have had so far.

Christopher: Well, I definitely want to ask a bit more about that!

It’s interesting you mentioned about the module writing, because I think Andrew made reference to this in his Meet The Team interview a couple of weeks back. In that I don’t know that people realize how much more there is to creating effective online education, to just having good information. Like any, any teacher in the real world might be good at teaching, but to translate that into a format that anyone can show up, click on the module and actually have the material land with them and work for them and have it be a smooth journey, it is kind of this whole other skill set, right?

And it’s definitely taken us somewhere between five and 15 years, I would say, to figure out how to do it well. So it’s interesting to hear that was a learning curve for you, too.

Camilo: Oh, it is. And I still learn a lot. I mean, in the past, like everyone, I bought books on music theory and then I would have a paragraph with the information, but I didn’t know how, how to apply that. I didn’t really know what that meant in terms of music, in terms of my relationship with music.

So what I find here, it’s a team that has a lot of experience in this and this back and forth. When Andrew says, let’s work on this, and then I do a draft, I send it to him, he sends me comments, let’s do this way. Why don’t you consider this other thing? And then we end up with these experiences that we see that members of the community enjoy and that they add to their own musical journey.

Christopher: Awesome. Yeah. And you said being a Next Level coach has been maybe the greatest and most challenging experience.

Talk a little bit about what it’s like to be a Next Level coach, how that’s been for you. Because you’re maybe not quite a year in? I think you’ve been with us about 18 months now.

Camilo: Yeah.

Christopher: So probably coming up towards a year of coaching. Is that true?

Camilo: Yes, almost.

Christopher: So how’s it been?

Camilo: It’s been a great experience because in coaching, we get to change our mindset from being a teacher to doing this other activity, this more integral, holistic activity, and learner-centered activity, which is coaching.

So this way, I get to work with people that have different interests, different backgrounds, that come from different experiences in music. And our challenge is to respond to the questions that they have to help them work towards the musical goals.

And that starts from helping articulate in a better way what their musical goals are.

So I have people that come from the classical world, from the jazz world. Some people want to learn the pop music. So all of these traditions help you and invite you to open your ears as a coach, to listen to different musical traditions, to understand what people really want to get out of music, which is generally to have this authentic, direct relationship with music.

So we have performers, we have arrangers, we have people that are interested in improvisation and on a weekly basis, having that conversation, hearing about that, finding new resources, also getting recommendations from them, and learning. You can’t believe how much I have learned and how much I have grown as a musician and as an educator by doing this constant learning with them every week.

Christopher: That’s terrific. Yeah. And I sometimes when we’re talking about Next Level coaching, I explain the difference between a coach and a teacher.

And obviously, you’ve been both. You’ve taught at the highest levels at university, but I think you touched on there what to me is the crux of the difference, which is a teacher, even the best teacher in the world, their responsibility is to show up and teach and be good at teaching and giving a lesson.

With coaching, the responsibility is to get results for the student and to do kind of whatever it takes to get them from here to there. And I love how you shared that there, that, you know, the beautiful burden, as it were, of taking on that responsibility and having to react and respond dynamically. You know, we use this approach, Passion-Based Learning, which really encourages the clients to show up with whatever they’re excited about.

And then it’s your responsibility as the coach to channel that in the right direction. And it does just create this kind of never-ending back and forth where you’re helping lead them forwards in a very responsive way that I think is, again, total respect to teachers and the teaching format, but it’s a very different thing to teaching.

Camilo: Right. It is. It is.

And this changing world where education is changing that much, coaching is, I think, is really responding to what is happening now, to what people are looking for and helping us use different tools to get to them. So it’s an exciting, it’s an exciting job to work, to work with people and to help them to concentrate on outcomes, not just teaching.

“This is the material that I have to tell you. And here it is. And let’s see what you can do with that”, as opposed to now saying “well, let’s see how that material, how these experiences are transforming what you are doing, and let’s make sure that you’re coming close to those outcomes that you were looking for”.

So that involves constant self-assessment as a coach and constant communication with the client to make sure we’re moving towards the place that we want to move. We’re discovering new things which can happen as well.

You jump into a program, you thought that you wanted this, but along the way you discovered that maybe you were also interested in arranging or an improvisation. Coming from a classical background, you never thought that you would be able to do that. But in the experience within coaching, you find out. So we are open to explore that along with clients.

Christopher: Yeah. And I’m really glad you touched there on the kind of trend generally in terms of teaching and education. I think you’re very on the, you’re very on the spot with it that teaching as a whole is, I think, evolving in that direction, more towards coaching.

And it’s a particular thing for us, I think, because part of that shift is away from a model that says the teacher is the grand authority. They pass down the wisdom and it’s up to the student to succeed with it. And if the student doesn’t figure it out, they have failed. They’re not good enough, they’re not smart enough, they haven’t tried hard enough.

Really flipping that on its head and be like, well, no, you know, if they’re not learning, then it’s the educational process that is failing and we need to be willing and able to adapt.

And there’s all kinds of interesting things going on, obviously now in the age of AI in terms of adaptive learning and flipped classrooms and how can we, you know, have it be more learner-focused? But coaching kind of shortcuts that entire thing and just says “no, look, two human beings, one of them has a lot of expertise. They’re going to act as the guide in a very hands on way and be with you side by side to get you from here to there”.

Camilo: Yeah, exactly. It helps you deal with all of that, with changing your mindset.

I have students, younger students also at some times come in saying, well, you know, I am too old for this – and they are 16 or 17! Because they come with this idea, you know, if you didn’t start music when you were four years old, you are “too old”.

But I also have students which later in life after retirement, start doing this, and they defy that. They discover that they can improvise, they can’t figure out a tune that they love by. And coaching is allowing us to realize that, to help people do that.

That’s why it’s exciting, and that’s why many music educators are turning their attention to this, because it’s tapping into some questions that we had. Who is entitled to have music education? Only the talented ones? Is this something that can be available to anyone at different stages of their life?

Christopher: Awesome. And you still play a part in the member support team, doing work in the discussion boards, in Living Music and elsewhere, and your main duties are obviously as a Next Level coach.

If you had to pinpoint one thing in your week to week work, that’s your favourite thing to do at Musical U, what would that be?

Camilo: My favorite thing to do is to get up in the morning, I open my Slack, and see the recordings that clients sent.

I get surprised and excited every time that I see someone taking their chances, improvising, sending something, being vulnerable to show something that is your own creation and putting that in your Practice Space and looking for feedback or posting that for the community to share. That just gives me so much energy and motivation as a coach. And as a musician sometimes saying, “oh, I want to collaborate with this, I should record a bass for this part”. I have to let them do their own thing! But that’s the most rewarding thing about this job.

Christopher: That’s lovely. That’s really great.

And I think it’s been exciting to see because we have, over the years, definitely encouraged and started to see more and more of that happening in the general membership community. People being willing to share their improvisation attempts or their new song they’re working on and that kind of thing. And it does happen, but that’s a big community, like tens of thousands of people in there.

I think there’s still quite a lot of intimidation to share there, and that’s one reason we kind of created this separate space for the Next Levelers. And of course, they can go direct to you as their coach and just share it privately. And so it’s been really great to see them doing that and see the flourishing of the collaborations and everything that’s going on there.

Awesome. So I like to wrap up with a strange and unusual question, which is, what’s a strange and unusual technique? Something that people might not have come across before or might be skeptical about, but something you found really works to help people develop their musicality.

Camilo: Well, your inner hearing, in my case, the ability of recalling music that you heard before in your childhood, in your teenage years, because that music, even if you didn’t feel like a musician at that point in terms of being able to figure ear by ear, that music has been ingrained in your body, your mind, in your ears.

Sometimes I go back and I start thinking about that music that I was listening to when I was in high school. Now, I’m not going to confess what music that was, but sometimes I get very surprised that suddenly I realize, oh, my God, it was only these chord changes and now I can play them. I can play them.

So sometimes I just go back to that music and that just gives me a lot of happiness and it’s really rewarding as well.

Christopher: I love that. Yeah.

I think we probably all have some part of our teenage music tastes that we’d be embarrassed to admit to, don’t we? But you’re right.

We sometimes touch on this at Musical U, how your vocabulary and your instinctive understanding of music comes so much from those memories you built up over decades, maybe even before ever touching an instrument.

And I love that recognition of the power of those memories and how much fun it can be to return to them both, to spark the enthusiasm, but also to be a gateway into playing by ear or improvising or figuring stuff out. That’s a really great tip. Thank you.

Well, Camilo, it’s been an absolute pleasure. It’s always a pleasure talking to you, but to have the chance to interview you in this format is fantastic. Thank you for joining us.

Any parting words of wisdom for our listeners and viewers today?

Camilo: Keep going. You are here, you’re listening to this. It’s because you love music and we are here to help, to help you continue with your journey to anywhere that you want to take it.

Christopher: Fantastic. Thank you. Well, you will all have the pleasure of hearing from Camilo again tomorrow in our next Coaches Corner episode.

Until then, cheers!

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