Mindful Music Pedagogy Podcast

This is the final installment in a 3-part interview I did with pianist Emily Trapp Jenkins. If you haven’t listened to Part 2, you may do so here.

Ms. Jenkins is a collaborative pianist at Arkansas State University, the worship leader at First United Methodist Church in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and is the host of the Gaining Proficiency podcast where she interviews other musicians about their personal stories.

In Part 3, we pick up with Emily describing an injury that occurred just days before her doctoral school audition. She shares her struggle to mentally and physically overcome her obstacles and talks about her successful career today. As Emily and I talked, the word that kept coming to my mind was “redemption.” You will love hearing the ending of Emily’s story. Enjoy.

This is the 2nd in a 3-part interview I did with pianist Emily Trapp Jenkins. If you haven’t listened to Part 1, you may do so here.

Ms. Jenkins is a collaborative pianist at Arkansas State University, the worship leader at First United Methodist Church in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and is the host of the Gaining Proficiency podcast where she interviews other musicians about their personal stories.

In Part 2 Emily Trapp Jenkins discusses her experiences during her masters degree and shares her honest feelings about failure. We talk about the stigma that often comes with admitting to experiencing Musical Performance Anxiety, especially to our fellow peers. We discuss the pervasive use of coping tools—good and bad—that musicians use to help them deal with this anxiety. Emily vulnerably shares her lowest point in her musical career: her injury. Warning: this episode includes a discussion of suicide.

This is the 1st in a 3-part interview I did with pianist Emily Trapp Jenkins. Ms. Jenkins is a collaborative pianist at Arkansas State University, is the worship leader at First United Methodist Church in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and is the host of the Gaining Proficiency podcast where she interviews other musicians about their personal stories.

In this segment, we learn about Emily’s early musical experiences, her transition in high school to a high-demand teacher, her undergraduate experience, and we conclude this segment with the end of her first year of her masters program. As her story unfolds, we discuss Musical Performance Anxiety and spend some time considering the idea of timing: How do we as performers navigate performing on someone else’s timetable (school, juries, competitions, recitals)? Do we write ourselves off as performers if we don’t meet these goals? Do we as teachers sometimes write students off if they don’t meet certain goals?

In this episode, I discuss the tension musicians face with practice/life balance and offer my own strategy for learning music quickly and effectively.

The MMP Podcast is back! In this episode I talk about my time in Taiwan and spend some time discussing assumptions.

A brief update regarding the podcast. Things have been very busy these days, but much of my time has been devoted to speaking, interviewing, and preparing for various aspects of MMP, so that makes me happy! Stay tuned this fall for more episodes and a regular podcast schedule.

Welcome to Mindful Music Pedagogy’s Musician Interview Series. This episode is the third in a three-part interview series with singer and educator Sarah Tannehill Anderson. Sarah is a Kansas City-based musician, and the founder of raiseyourvoicekc.com. In this final episode, we discuss auditions and rejection, the importance of knowing yourself as well as your students, the pros and cons of being an intuitive musician/person, how mindfulness is a part of Sarah’s studio in a physical way, Byron Katie and her work, being judged as a musician, and best of all, funny audition stories!

If you haven’t listened to Parts 1 and 2 yet, please take a few minutes to get caught up. Here in Part 3 we pick up at the tail end of Sarah’s experiences as an opera singer. So when I pose the initial question “So when you were going through all of that, did you think about mindfulness?” the “that” we were referencing was her professional opera career.

Happy listening!

Welcome to Mindful Music Pedagogy's Musician Interview Series. This episode is the second in a three-part interview series with singer and educator Sarah Tannehill Anderson. Sarah is a Kansas City-based musician, and the founder of raiseyourvoicekc.com. In this episode, we discuss the beginning of Sarah’s vocal education and career, unique challenges singers face, the importance of being vulnerable and cultivating vulnerability in our students, channeling emotions and dealing with difficult life circumstances with and through music, and the drama of being a professional musician and opera singer. One of Sarah’s and my favorite podcasts, Food Heals Podcast, gets a mention, as does the incomparable Christine Goerke. If you haven’t listened to Part One, you can do that now to get caught up.

Welcome to Mindful Music Pedagogy’s Musician Interview Series. This episode is the first in a three-part interview with singer and educator Sarah Tannehill Anderson. Sarah is a Kansas City-based musician, and the founder of raiseyourvoicekc.com. In this first episode, we talk about Sarah’s musical beginnings, her recent venture (Raise Your Voice KC), developing a healthy mindset while practicing, learning to cultivate that same mindset in our students, perfectionism, listening to our own inner voice as musicians, and the importance of surrounding ourselves with mindful people. We recorded this as one cohesive conversation which has been divided up into three parts, so stayed tuned for Parts 2 and 3!

How exactly can you implement breathing, progressive relaxation, meditation, and mindfulness into your teaching routine? It actually doesn't take that long! Get a jump start on these techniques now.