34: Homeschool Music Mastery: Kathryn Brunner’s Innovative Approach From Early Childhood Audiation To Jazz Piano Education

Welcome to another enriching episode of the Music in Our Homeschool podcast! Today, we are honored to have Kathryn Brunner as our guest. Kathryn is an esteemed music educator and a dedicated homeschool mom with certifications in early childhood music and movement education through Musikgarten. She's also a seasoned piano instructor with a passion for integrating music into homeschool environments. She runs the website Musik at Home.

Join host Gena Mayo as she delves deep into Kathryn's unique philosophy on piano education, where audiation—the ability to think and understand in music—takes center stage. Kathryn explains how her methods make learning music intuitive and enjoyable for children. She also provides insights into her online music studio, MusiK at Home, which offers comprehensive classes for babies, toddlers, and elementary-aged children, designed to simulate a live class atmosphere.

The episode highlights Kathryn's innovative Creative Keys: Nordic Adventures curriculum, a piano program that merges music learning with storytelling and movement. This program is perfect for children aged 5 to 10, designed to enrich their musical journey and enhance their creativity. Kathryn also shares the success of her Creative Keys: Jazz Chords course, aimed at teens and adults. Developed in collaboration with jazz expert Asa Nero, this course offers a non-threatening, engaging way for learners of all ages to dive into the world of jazz.

Listeners will gain valuable tips on integrating music into their homeschool curriculum, the importance of early musical education, and how to make music learning a joyful experience for the entire family.

Find links to all resources mentioned in this episode here: https://musicinourhomeschool.com/homeschool-music-early-childhood/

Please follow/subscribe to the podcast and leave a 5-star review and comment if you liked this episode! Find all courses at https://Learn.MusicinOurHomeschool.com ,free music lessons here: https://MusicinOurHomeschool.com/FreeMusicLessons , and lots more links here: https://linktr.ee/genamayo !

Transcript

Kathryn Brunner podcast interview episode

Homeschool Music Mastery: Kathryn Brunner’s Innovative Approach From Early Childhood Audiation To Jazz Piano Education

Gena

[00:00:00] Welcome back to the Music in Our Homeschool podcast. I'm so excited to have my good friend, Kathryn Brunner with me today. She is a fellow music educator and homeschool mom, and I'm your host, Gena Mayo.

One thing that Kathryn and I have in common is that we are both early childhood music and movement education certified with Musikgarten. And I've taught Musikgarten almost every single year since 1998. And I know that Kathryn does a lot with that program too. 

But one thing I don't do is piano. I do not teach piano lessons. I never have. And so I would love for Kathryn to talk to us about her philosophy of piano education and anything else you'd like to share with us today. 

Kathryn

Absolutely. Well, thank you, Gena, for having me. It's such a pleasure. I know we've known each other for a number of years now and gotten to just see how our joy and love of music is able to help so many families, so [00:01:00] many homeschool families in particular, because it's a really unique experience. part of educating our children is the, the music education side. And I know sometimes parents can feel not equipped, ill equipped to really bring music education into their home. And so any kinds of resources that we can provide, I feel like that's my mission. I know that's your mission as well, is to make it easier for parents to say, Hey, you know what, I've got this, I can do this.

And I'm just going to follow these steps, and I know that this is going to be a great program for my kids. And so that's, that's the joy of being a part of what you're doing with Music in Our Homeschool and what I'm doing at Musik at Home is to bring the joy of music education into homes and make it accessible.

So I love that. But yes, I have taught Musikgarten for many, many years. I think I got my license and certification in Musikgarten in 2005. [00:02:00] And also started teaching their piano program in my local piano studio along with their early childhood music and also along the way really got involved with Dr. Edwin Gordon's Music Learning Theory because Musikgarten actually uses a lot of Gordon's learning theory. 

And so as I got into teaching piano and I finished, you know, kids that finish the three-year Musikgarten program in my studio, they need to go on to something else. And so what is that something else?

And well, if you've started learning music through what we call audiation, the ability to think in music and understand in music, which is how everything in Musikgarten trains kids from the ground up. Then you need somewhere to go after you finished just a beginning piano program with that same track that [00:03:00] helps you to learn music sound before sight, and then get into true music literacy. 

So the way I teach piano is through audiation. So if you, if we're like, we're having a conversation now right now, right? So you're not sitting there dissecting, well, what letters am I using to create these words? Right? Because as we're communicating, we're using words and sentences and phrases. And as we help our children think musically, we can't be focused in on single notes and single rhythmic values all the time. Otherwise kids get stuck figuring out, well, how do I put all these pieces together similar to, you know, trying to decode what we're saying in individual letters.

And so, Music Learning Theory and an audiation-based piano method really helps students hear rhythm patterns, hear tonal patterns that identify certain pieces of music. And that's what makes [00:04:00] the music come alive to us. It's not the individual notes of the music, but it's the patterns. 

So it's pattern- based instruction. It's instruction that then guides our understanding of how to put those patterns at the piano and make sense of them both rhythmically, tonally, and harmonically. So that's just kind of a quick recap. 

Gena

I love it. So you have taught this to private students in your own studio, but you also teach it online. So can you tell us how you have taken that program and how you do it for students who live anywhere in the world? 

Kathryn

Yes, absolutely. So Musik at Home is an online music studio for babies, toddlers, all the way up through elementary kids. Now we are moving into, you know, the early, early adolescence, teenage years, and even we came out with a class for adults this week, which I know we're going to get into later.

But what we do is we [00:05:00] provide, a class video that is almost as if you're with me in a live class situation. So if you were to come to my studio and take an early childhood class with me, you would have classmates. There would probably, there'd be other parents there. And so when you take my online video course for say babies or toddlers or preschoolers or kindergartners, you'll have me as the instructor, you'll have two children on either side of me that are there learning with me, and then you'll have you, you and your child at home, and together we make one class situation as if we're all together live, which I think makes it such an authentic, real experience for kids and parents at home.

That's always been my hope and what I've found that parents who do music at home classes consistently with their children, see their children develop musically in ways that are [00:06:00] astounding to them. Even in just a few classes, when you hear my rhythm patterns that I'm saying, the children pick them up so fast and begin to incorporate those patterns into their daily life, their daily language skills.

So it's a great opportunity for parents to have an easy click-and-go music education program as if they're in a live studio. That's what Musik at Home really is. 

Gena

And then, I'm sorry, go ahead. 

Kathryn

No, I'm sorry. I'll get to the next part, which is the piano element. 

Gena

That's what I was going to ask you. 

Kathryn

Yes so along the way. I also homeschool my children, and I was reading so much beautiful literature with them. And one of the themes that just started jumping out at me all over the place through Jan Brett's gorgeous picture books, Astrid Lindgren. 

Gena

I love those too. 

Kathryn

Yes. And even the [00:07:00] D'aullaire's. Wonderful works like Lief the Lucky, and all of those great books. One is called Children of the North Lights that they have. I began to see a theme that my daughters and I gravitated toward all of this Nordic content. So I took everything that I knew from how to incorporate audition-based piano into a curriculum that also uses literature and stories and imagination, and I wrote my own curriculum for piano, beginning piano that's called Creative Keys: Nordic Adventures.

And it allows parents and children to connect around music, stories, imagination, and movement around these beautiful tonal and rhythm patterns to songs that I wrote to go with these stories. 

So the songs make the stories come to life. And if you could imagine you're, you're living and breathing these stories with your children, then you're singing about what you've just [00:08:00] read, and then you're learning how to play this music at the piano. But before you get to the piano-- actually we recorded in this room several years ago, maybe three, two, actually two years ago-- and you just, you're moving, you're swaying, you're feeling it in your body. 

That's how we learn music because it's rhythmical, it's movement based. And then we take it to the keys and we begin realizing, all right, well, what does the keyboard look like? We learn keyboard geography because if you, if you've ever seen, well, I've seen hundreds of students approach the piano as I've interviewed them for lessons and I could always tell immediately whether or not a child I've seen a piano before, because it can be very overwhelming. There's so many keys. What do I do with all this? What is this? 

But the students that have a piano in their home, they will, in my interview, be ready to go with me because they've had a chance to explore. Oh, I see. There's some different [00:09:00] things going on here. There are some black keys, some white keys, and they make different sounds. And I know that these ones over here sound a certain way. And these, they may not know to say this is low and high or middle, but then as they learn about the keyboard geography, it begins to make sense and they can play simple songs right away. And not only that, in my program, they, they can begin to compose their own music instantly because of the pattern vocabulary that we're developing.

And so what I found is children that go through Creative Keys: Nordic Adventures have a robust sense of audiation and it's a new word maybe to some people, but it's just what we do with music. It's how we think about music. So that's what I love to see is. The concepts come alive, the piano comes alive, and it's because our minds are also developed and made by God to enjoy stories.[00:10:00] 

And when you can bring stories and music together, and then you put it with something that's kind of tricky and complex to learn, then you have a beautiful combination that, even when it's hard, you want to stick with it. Because that imaginative element is there. And that's what I find undergirding my type of instruction.

I love that imaginative element for young children. It changes everything about their desire to learn and stick with it when it's hard. So that's what Creative Keys: Nordic Adventures is. It also comes with two practice books. So you have a tangible, two tangible resources. Each one is a hundred pages, but don't be intimidated. It has daily practice steps where you follow step by step by step. What do I do? 

And if you can't get through all the daily practice steps in one day. That's totally fine. You just pick up where you left off. A lot of us in homeschooling, like the loop scheduling, it's like, okay, what's next, and you just kind of keep working through it and you don't [00:11:00] have to go at anyone else's pace, but your own pace.

And I think that's the beauty of a type of program like this. We're empowering parents to involve their children in music education on their own schedule in a way that works for them at their own pace. 

Gena

So what age is, is Creative Keys written for? The Nordic Adventures. 

Kathryn

Nordic adventures is written for ages five to 10, and it can tend in the beginning to feel a little like it's for the younger ages because I had my six and nine year old recording those with me.

My six year old is in the first class, then it's my nine year old, then my six year old, then my nine year old. And so they kind of switched off. So I would recommend and encourage parents that if you have a 10-year-old, and the first class feels young, well stick with it because there is a range of maturity in the children that you'll see in the classes. 

But it really, really, truly develops [00:12:00] children's audiation wherever they find themselves and one of the things that's so important to remember is that music aptitude is flexible from birth to around age 10, and that's when you can truly learn a language easier, you can learn music, audiation much easier. And that's why this beginning course for kids up to age 10, it's really important to have them take this course before they're 11, as their audiation and their music aptitude is still really flexible.

Of course, all of us can move into music achievement in any time of our lives. But as you have a music aptitude tank, every single musical experience we give our children when they're birth to age 10 fills that tank up, and it will stay that full the rest of their life. 

But if they've only gotten a little bit, they can still use what they've gained to achieve in music. So I don't want anyone to despair about that, but the more opportunities we give our children to learn [00:13:00] music and be educated musically, the more they will experience the joy of it in adulthood. 

Gena

Yes. So let's move into your Creative Keys: Jazz Chords course that just came out. Tell us about that. 

Kathryn

This is so exciting. So last March, I would say I had an Instagram reel go viral. It has, you know, a couple of million views. And what that really did was it showed me that there is a real hunger for parents and just adults, even without children, to learn music in a way that's non threatening.

Gena

Can you describe what happened in that reel for people who haven't seen it? 

Kathryn

Sure. In this particular reel-- I think it's pinned on my profile @musikathome on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/musikathome). Okay. So people can go see it. My daughter and I had, we're having just a regular lesson time at the piano, [00:14:00] and she's extremely creative in what she plays. And all of a sudden she plays something that was just moved me to tears. It was so moving. It moved me to tears. And I was sitting there thinking, Oh my goodness, my daughter is playing so beautifully, and it's because of all of the investments I made into her tank. 

Gena

And it was completely improvised, right? She wasn't reading music?

Kathryn

No, she's not. It's all from her heart and her mind and her audiation. And so what I, what I spoke about in that reel just with the text is that When we give our children opportunities to create music, and instead of telling them how to play and what to play every single time, they can truly blossom in their own musicianship.

And I found that there was a lot of trauma induced into people's lives by music [00:15:00] teachers who said, you have to do it this way and only this way. And an audition based approach is actually a very creative improvisatory approach, that allows people to express what's inside of them. And what, what took place in that reel was this connection I had with my daughter, the beauty of the music she was creating, and then how did she get to create it was through this method of, of audiation.

And so there's a real hunger for that, is what I found. Hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of people commented, I wish I learned music this way. I wish I learned music this way. And do you have anything for teens? Do you have anything for adults? And so, let me come back to your question about the jazz course.

Asa Nero is the instructor in the jazz course. He was my student at age four, 18 years ago, walked into my [00:16:00] studio, an incredibly gifted musician. He learned through my audiation-based method, and he has gone on to study at the University of North Texas, earned his bachelor's of music in jazz percussion.

And now he's in his master's degree for jazz composition. And so four years ago when he graduated high school, I asked him to begin writing a book on jazz chords for Musik at Home because he loved jazz and I just, I wanted to encourage him in all of his giftings. And that's what I love to do is bring people that love to make music and let's work together.

And so he did that. And when this happened with the viral reel in March, I said, you know what? I know the perfect person who can make a course for teens and adults and have it ready right away with tons of substance. 

So Asa wrote his own jazz tunes for this course. Great tunes that are [00:17:00] based off of all types of jazz from New York, from New Orleans, just from all over geographical regions. He brought in the sweet sounds of those. those jazz influences. And so you'll learn six tunes in this course and you'll learn the 

Gena

And it's all on the piano, right? 

Kathryn

All on piano. Yes. And you'll learn six types of chords that go with them all around sevenths. So major sevenths, minor sevenths, Diminished sevens, dominant sevens, all the sevenths.

And what are those? And if you know, a basic major chord, bum, bum, bum, that's, you know, one, three, five, On a jazz chord, you're just adding the seventh above that five. So one, three, five, seven would be your dominant seven. And so you're learning, okay, well then how do I manipulate that chord? You can invert it. You can do all that. 

But in Asa's jazz course, we're just [00:18:00] using root position jazz chords, and you're going to learn them in all of those different you know, types of chords, which makes jazz really come alive. If you can know what you're doing and move around and on the keyboard with those chords and have just a lot of fun doing it.

So Asa's style of teaching is just really relaxed. He's totally calm. And he has another student that's been in my studio for years named Ben. Ben is an incredible composer already. He just graduated from high school in May and he, his last year of high school, he studied with Asa. He studied jazz with Asa and came out just so excited about all of his new skills.

So Asa is an incredible teacher. If the, the neat thing about this course is it, it keeps on giving, right? So any class that you take, if you were to take a live lesson with Asa for [00:19:00] example and just to talk about the cost of it for a second. A live course, you know, you're paying depending on where you are in the country. If you were taking a, a live lesson in my studio, I didn't really quite do the math ahead of time, but it's probably about, you know, $50 for a 30 minute lesson is kind of the going rate. Around Northern Virginia where I live. But in Asa's course, if you break it all down, if, if people get it while it's on sale, it's even less, but it comes out to about $18 a class if you don't buy it on sale. If you buy it on sale, it's even less than that. So you have access to six classes at $18 a class for an entire year. And then a book that comes with the course as well to exactly show you where to put your hands on the piano. How to read lead sheets and things like that.

So it's extremely affordable, which is my heart for music education is to make it as affordable as possible, as doable as possible, and [00:20:00] also as fun as possible. 

Gena

Yes. I love that. So I can't wait to dive into it myself. I haven't had a chance yet, but I want to. I know how to play the piano, but I've never done much with improvisation or jazz.

So that sounds so exciting to me. 

So glad. 

Well, as we're wrapping up here today, is there anything else you'd like to share and then please tell everyone where they can find you online?

Kathryn

Yes, absolutely. So I would just say to parents of small children, involve them in as many musical experiences as possible.

Music education is powerful and what children can learn academically through the creative pathways that are made through music education is off the charts. So if you have a musical child put the songs they love on [00:21:00] repeat because what's happening is you're like drawing with a pencil across a brain pathway.

Every time they hear that same song again and again, that pathway gets stronger and stronger and stronger. And they're, you know, whether you, you can't see what's going on in their minds, but they're making musical connections whether consciously, unconsciously, or subconsciously. That's how powerful music is.

So I would say, keep music going in your home. Get structured music education, however possible. And stay the course, never give up because kids want to stop what's hard, but we would never let them stop learning math. We would never let them stop learning the other subjects that they need to learn in school.

And I believe so strongly that music education is more powerful of a learning tool than any of the subjects we learn in school, although it must, you know, it must come with love and care [00:22:00] alongside of it. So that's what I would leave you with today. That's beautiful. And where can my listeners find you online?

So our website is MyMusikatHome.Com and the end of music has a K, so you can find that there. And then follow me on Instagram @MusikatHome. And again, it's M U S I K A T H O M E. And there's a lot going on over there on Instagram, so I'd love to have everybody. 

Gena

Your reels are very fun. 

Kathryn

Oh, thank you.

I'm having a lot of fun making it and I've only really been on Instagram for about a year and a half, but what I found is that there's a really beautiful community of people that use Instagram regularly and are very curious about how they can grow and deepen their skills. And I love that. So that's a lot of fun.

Gena

Beautiful. Thank you so much, Kathryn. And I will definitely share all the links for everything she's mentioned today. So thank you all for being [00:23:00] here with us today. And until next time, keep the music alive. Bye.

Find links to all resources mentioned in this episode here: https://musicinourhomeschool.com/homeschool-music-early-childhood/