Creative Music Literacy with Carrie Salisbury and Michael McLean, at ASTA/SAA 2024

By Laurie Niles: How I wish that Suzuki teachers Carrie Salisbury and Michael McLean had been there to teach me theory, back when I was a young violin student! I was one of those violin-centric students who had no background in piano, nor did I have any theory classes or lessons before college. So once I became a music major - wow, did I have a lot of catching up to do! I had to take a class called, "Bonehead Theory" - kidding, but I had to remediate. I never felt proficient or confident in theory, despite actually being interested in it. Michael is a violinist/violist/composer who, as a child, was diabolically compelled to figure out how the music of Mozart worked - so he got a paper route to pay for his own violin lessons. (You might also know Michael for his many compositions and arrangements, such as tango duets and more...) Carrie is a violist and Suzuki teacher who is married to pianist Ben Salisbury, who helped her understand that music theory is not just for the keyboard crowd. Both of them live and teach in Los Angeles. Together Carrie and Michael have been coming up with some innovative and effective ways of teaching theory to string students - and from a string perspective. They work with a student's natural impulse to compose and arrange - something they feel is a inevitable byproduct of a student's urge to play. After all, the reason we all learn to speak is so that we can say something, right? I first experienced Carrie's sneaky-fun theory teaching several years ago, when a number of my teenage students took her StringsPop! course in arranging. More recently, I was a student in Carrie and Michael's course for teachers on "Creative Literacy." Then even more recently, when I attended their "Creative Musical Literacy" lecture last month at the Suzuki Association of the Americas/American String Teachers Association Conference in Louisville. "Music theory is usually taught away from the instrument," Michael said at the SAA/ASTA lecture, "or it is taught through piano." Oftentimes in classical music, we are teaching students to play pieces, but not necessarily teaching them to understand what they are playing. It's a little like reciting something, without understanding it. Michael offered an example: Reciting a passage from Shakespeare. It's complex language, and sometimes people recite the words without understanding them. Language without understanding is just "vocables" - meaningless sounds. "We want our musical language to be more than 'vocables'!" Michael said. That understanding comes from knowing the meaning of the words, the sentence construction - in music, it comes from knowing the music theory. "You don't have to be a pianist do know theory, or to compose," Carrie said. Carrie's StringsPop! program helps string players get their heads around theory, and the starting point is arranging music - pop, folk, and ultimately, original ideas. When a student comes up with a musical idea - a little composition - the first step is to make it easy for them to preserve that idea. Yes, eventually they should be able to notate it, but there are many other ways you can first preserve a musical idea: record them playing it, record them singing it, learn it by rote and then help them write it down. And "writing it down" can involve a pencil and paper, or you can learn a computer program. If you wish to arrange music that you know - such as a pop song, folk song or even one of the Suzuki songs - lead sheets are very helpful. (A tip from Carrie: you can get a "lead sheet" of sorts for Suzuki violin songs by getting the Guitar Accompaniment parts for the Suzuki violin books - click here to check those out.) A lead sheet provides the melody of a song - but importantly, it also provides the key signature and the harmony, in the form of the chords. Looking at the key signature of the song with a student, you can write out the notes of the scale and number the degrees. (And it doesn't take all that long for students to understand Roman numerals, Carrie recommends starting right there.) Then you can use those chord symbols and degrees to figure out a bassline and play it - just play the root of each chord. Working this out with a student provides a simple and (and immediately applicable) way to talk about structure - scale degrees, chord sequences, etc. And then there are the triads - the building blocks of chords and harmony. In the Suzuki sequence, the first triad occurs in "Lightly Row" - A major. Then Song of the Wind has a D major tried. Etude has a G major triad, and "Happy Farmer" has C major. "Witches Dance" has all kinds of triads, and by the time you reach the Bach Double, you can find them everywhere," Michael said. Chords, harmony - this is where composing becomes really interesting. "When you feel moved by Bach's music," Michael said, "you are being moved by Bach's harmony." One important thing Carrie does is to have students memorize their triads: that is, how to spell the seven basic triads. Yes, the accidentals will change, depending on the key, but those fundamental "spellings" remain the same: "ACE, BDF, CEG..." So that you can see this, I offer an excerpt from a wonderful handout from the class (click here for if you'd like Carrie to send you the whole 10-page packet...):

Reciting the triad spellings is an exercise that Carrie learned in a college theory class - at this point Carrie can chant the entire sequence by memory in less than four seconds (her record is 1.8 seconds)! And to what end is this, knowing the triads? Well, if a student becomes familiar with triads, it becomes a lot easier to build chords. Once they can tease out a bassline, the triads are the next step - they can fill in the arpeggios (triads). Of course, that is a much-simplified version of what Carrie and Michael have been teaching, they fill it in with a lot more detail. But this is definitely a fun way to explore music theory for kids, and frankly, it was for me, too. As Michael said, "Arranging is the easiest way to get into music theory." If you find this interesting and want to explore, both Carrie and Michael will be teaching several classes this summer. For teachers, Carrie will be offering an online Creative Music Literacy teacher workshop through American Suzuki Institute - Stevens Point (click here for more info on that). She will also be teaching StringsPop! student groups at Intermountain Suzuki String Institute (ISSI) in Utah and Japan-Seattle Suzuki Institute. Michael will be teaching composing workshops at ISSI and at Ogontz White Mountain Suzuki Institute in New Hampshire.You might also like:

• Michael McLean Finds His Element
• From Suzuki Roots to the Concert Stage: Violinist Sirena Huang at the 2024 SAA Conference
• Past and Present ASTA Conference Coverage

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