Shiny Penny Learns · Online
A course in musicianship and expression, for players and composers who already have technique and want to find out what they actually sound like.
Rhythm and pitch are the two axes every musician is taught. Expression is treated as a finish applied to them. It isn't. It's a third axis, free to move on its own.
What follows is a plan, not a schedule. No student receives these hours in the printed proportion.
Every course is built for the individual student. Before the first lesson we correspond, and a curriculum is drafted for you specifically — drawing on this template, reordered and reweighted around what you already have and what you're after. In the first hour we go through that curriculum together, openly. You question it. Every question gets an answer. When it's agreed, two copies are signed and each of us keeps one.
Lesson numbers below are positions in a sequence, not dates on a calendar. Where a student isn't ready to move on, the arc is extended rather than the next one begun.
Groups and cohorts are taught too, and the adaptation is written deliberately rather than improvised — a cohort of six trombonists, a cohort of six unrelated instruments, and a standing quartet are three different rooms.
To find out what a musician actually sounds like — not what they might sound like after enough practice, but what is already there underneath the technique they kept and the technique they let go.
Your inner ear already hears the music you're capable of, with complete clarity. The trouble is never that the vision is absent. It's the distance between a brain that already knows and a body that hasn't caught up — and that distance has a feeling attached to it, usually misdiagnosed as nerves or as inadequacy. It's neither. It's information about where the work remains.
Perfection as an aim fails, and not because it's out of reach — because it's a dead end, with nowhere to go from it. The third coordinate is what makes Saturday a different night. The rhythm and the pitches can be identical to Friday's and the music can still be new.
Both are taught online, one hour at a time, by video link. Both carry the same architecture and teach all three coordinates. The short course loses dwell time, not content.
Three arcs of eight lessons, each closing with an evaluation. Cumulative: the second arc assumes the first, and the third isn't attempted before the second is in place.
Two arcs of eight. Four lessons are never compressed, because the course doesn't function without them at full length. Everything else gives ground first.
Arc I — Ground
Center of gravity, and the horizontal coordinate
Arc II — Listen
The twenty-two areas, aesthetic cognition, and the vertical coordinate
Arc III — Speak
The third coordinate, the voice, and presence
Advancing players and composers, on any instrument or none. Wind players, string players, singers, pianists, and writers all take the same course — the breathing work isn't a wind player's specialty, and composers are held to the movement work as strictly as performers, and usually need it more.
Keep a practice log. Record yourself, mostly for your own use. Move a passage before you play it. Sit three evaluations, each preceded by a questionnaire. Some of what you record is private by definition and is never submitted — the courage work in particular is yours alone unless you choose otherwise.
A written statement of what you sound like, a Continuation Plan drafted in the final hour, and the evaluation record kept in your own copy. The last half hour is given entirely to what continues after the course ends: which practices persist, which were scaffolding, and what you now do alone.
Read the outline with one question in hand — where does your sound start — and then write. Say what you play, what you're working on, and what you'd want twenty-four hours to do. The curriculum gets drafted from there.
Write to Scott