FLA 14: Lynne Phillips

LAST: VARIOUS ARTISTS: Parade of Disney Hits (MFP, 1972)

Extract: ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’

(NB: Again, this album could not be found uploaded anywhere online, so for now, here’s a link to the original Cliff Edwards and Disney Studio Chorus version of ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ from Pinocchio.)

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I spent a long, long, long time when I was younger, especially at university and just afterwards, feeling I would be judged not just for my playing ability and my teaching ability, but also what I enjoy listening to. So it was interesting when you sent the email about this, and asked what the last thing I bought was, and it was that Disney album… Because at one time I’d have not admitted to that, and said something else.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Were you always a Disney fan, or is it that these are nostalgic pieces?

LYNNE PHILLIPS

When we were young, if you didn’t see Disney films in the cinema, you had very, very little chance of actually seeing it elsewhere anyway.

JUSTIN LEWIS

They weren’t shown on television. I still don’t think Snow White has ever been shown on British television. It’s probably on Disney+, no doubt.

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Snow White’s got some of my favourite music. But Jungle Book is my absolute favourite.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Fantasia?

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I like Fantasia, but it’s not new music.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Doh, course it isn’t! It isn’t original music.

LYNNE PHILLIPS

So I don’t tend to think of that as Disney music as such, as the kind of the animation that fits in with the music.

I've got a score that I bought on eBay years ago that I found recently when I was tidying up. It’s like a mishmash of songs from Snow White, a medley for piano and it’s just brilliant fun. I was playing it for weeks. It starts with ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’ and then it goes into ‘Heigh Ho, It’s Off to Work We Go’, and there’s a great finale where all these different bits come in at the end. It’s just wickedly good fun to play music that’s so camp. But this particular record is a Parade of Disney Hits, it’s not actually officially from the films.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I just noted the MFP label, Music for Pleasure. We had an MFP album when I was growing up called The Geoff Love Orchestra Play the James Bond Themes, all instrumentals.

LYNNE PHILLIPS

So ‘The Bare Necessities’, ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’, ‘Whistle While You Work’, ‘Winnie the Pooh’, ‘Heigh Ho’, ‘The Siamese Cat Song’. It’s got all those. But they’re not the original Disney versions.

JUSTIN LEWIS

And you recently also got a forties compilation, Favourites of the Forties (MFP, 1982). I notice Carmen Miranda’s on it, Ella Fitzgerald too.

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Doing ‘My Happiness’. And [pianist] Eddie Heywood, and I don’t know who that is, but he’s doing ‘Begin the Beguine’ which I love. Nat King Cole. So I picked it up because there were a couple on there I liked. I like 40s/50s music anyway. It was 50p! You can’t go wrong.

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JUSTIN LEWIS

Did you have a vision early on of being a pianist?

LYNNE PHILLIPS

It was just something I enjoyed. Up until 18 or whatever, I don’t remember thinking, I want to do that as a career. I liked the piano, I liked drawing, I liked horse-riding…

JUSTIN LEWIS

I never quite understood why you had to make these big decisions at such a young age.

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Sometimes I have conversations with parents who don’t say, ‘My child will only have lessons if they want to be a concert pianist’, but they do say things like ‘We’re thinking about her starting piano because she's been plonking around on the neighbours’ piano, so can we bring her along and then let us know if she’s any good?’ And I think, ‘Who cares if she’s any good?’

JUSTIN LEWIS

So it’s more, ‘Does she enjoy it?’

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Yeah. When you take a kid along to football classes, you’re not thinking of playing in the Premier League. Or with swimming lessons… although, actually, that’s more something people do so their kids don’t drown.

Going back a few years, I joined a choir, which was more like a chamber [ensemble] really because there were only about eight of us. A couple of us were professional musicians, but none of us were professional singers or had any intention of ever being so. We just wanted to get together.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Does that make things less ‘competitive’ then?

LYNNE PHILLIPS

It’s not so much about ‘less competitive’. Really, there’s less perfectionism. As professionals we kind of know what we're aiming towards and there’s a difference in performance quality, perhaps, between a professional group of eight singers and an amateur group of eight singers, right? And there’s also a difference in what’s expected. So as amateurs, we were in it for the enjoyment of it – which professionals are also in it for. But there was never any point where we’d get ‘Well, you haven’t done your practice’ or ‘You can’t reach that note’. We all did what we needed to do, but there wasn't this kind of high pressure to perform something really brilliantly. There was a pressure to perform something well.

JUSTIN LEWIS

So you were doing concerts?

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Yeah, it was connected to a church, and me and this other guy were the only heathens there, so we would joke about that! [Laughs] So a lot of the concerts weren’t concerts as such. We would always sing sacred music in things like Christmas services, Easter services and we’d prepare for these kind of other things, which I never knew what they were, because I don’t really do ‘religion’.

JUSTIN LEWIS

But you like a lot of religious music, right?

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I really do.

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JUSTIN LEWIS

So piano teaching. How did you start doing that?

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I started teaching when I was about 14 which, in hindsight, was a terrible thing to do, and I don’t think I did my students any favours. My piano teacher at the time had some work she couldn’t take on, and she asked me if I would. I charged two quid a lesson or something ridiculous.

JUSTIN LEWIS

And this was… younger kids?

LYNNE PHILLIPS

One was six, one was seven, and it turned out the elder one was dyslexic, which is why she was really, really struggling to read music. I was having trouble with getting her to read anything at all, and then about six months later, I bumped into her mum who told me she’d been diagnosed with dyslexia. Which was quite a rare diagnosis back then. I think I was nice to the pupils, but I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Your teaching methods really do seem to prioritise inclusivity. Looking at your website, you teach anyone who is interested in learning. So that's you know, kids of four and upwards, as you mentioned. Adults who can be beginners or restarters. And crucially, not just neurotypical pupils – or who are defined as neurotypical anyway. So you make a point of saying that you teach pupils with dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD etc. How quickly did it become apparent to you that neurodivergence could be better recognised and nurtured in music teaching?

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Quite early on, actually. I would often get students who’d come from other teachers. And those teachers had said they were slow or couldn’t play well, and the kids had been getting frustrated, and the parents had wanted a change of teacher. And I was teaching them, thinking, I wonder if they might be dyslexic. This was, god, nearly 25 years ago, when my daughter was 11 months old. There was a nursery down the road, and so I put her there for one afternoon a week, and I’d have two students. That's how it started – and then when I got another load of students, I'd [teach for] another half a day.

I don't think it took very long for me to have this reputation where I could have a way with students who other teachers had either upset or dismissed. That gradually developed into my being regarded as someone who could teach the ones who didn’t get on with other teachers because they were autistic or dyslexic or the rest of it…

JUSTIN LEWIS

Do you think everyone has the potential to be musical? Or can innately appreciate music, at least?

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I think everybody does. The question is whether the instrument they’re learning is the right instrument for them. Which it isn’t always. And also, how far they can go; how far they want to go. You especially find adults saying, ‘I’m tone deaf, I can never play anything.’ And I’m like, That’s bullshit. Let’s start with Middle C and we’ll go from there.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Do you think when people say that, that it’s borne out of a lack of confidence?

LYNNE PHILLIPS

A lot of it is that. And with much older people, they’ve come from schools where they were just told they were no good at music. I mean, our generation were as well, probably. I don’t remember, although I was told I was no good at sport.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Oh yeah, I had that! But my dad went to piano lessons as a boy, and his teacher, and I’m sure this was not uncommon then, would rap your fingers with a ruler if you played the wrong notes.

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I’ve still got students now who remember that happening when they were little.

JUSTIN LEWIS

With music lessons, it does require a lot of hard work and practice, but you still want to feel comfortable in order to be able to express yourself. I had good teachers when I was younger, but I had confidence problems. My flute teacher – who was lovely and brilliant – would sometimes say, especially in the early days, ‘Justin, you have to play louder.’ I would see ‘f’ on a score or ‘ff’ and think ‘well, how loud should that be?’ It was quite nerve-wracking for a while, and it took a bit of time to get past that.

So, in terms of accommodating difference in your teaching methods, with the kids at least, you’re probably talking to their parents. And the parents can sit in on the lesson with their children if the children wish, is that right?

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Yes, with a lot of the autistic students, some of the parents do sit in. We’ve just come out of the pandemic – supposedly – and having come out of that ‘everything is online/nothing is face to face’ world… I only started teaching face to face again a term ago. So [with online teaching], parents were there a lot of the time anyway, because they kind of had to be. A lot of kids need help with getting the right book out, finding the right page, being shown what I’m talking about. And also the size of many people’s houses being what they are…

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, there are only so many rooms.

LYNNE PHILLIPS

And you need the parent there for safety. But they don’t really have to be sitting next to the child a lot of the time.

Sometimes, though, my expectations of behaviour of specially autistic children is different from those of their parents. I will be very chilled out, generally speaking, when I'm teaching. So if I’ve got a kid who doesn’t want to do something, I’ll say, ‘OK, let’s do something else.’ But then the parent might interject: ‘You must do that because your teacher asked you to.’

JUSTIN LEWIS

I guess it’s a difficult balance to strike because obviously, the parent is probably thinking, ‘We’re paying the teacher to teach’, and so they might have good intentions of wanting their child to co-operate.

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I think they're trying to be helpful, yeah, but it’s difficult then for me to say, ‘Okay, can you not do that?’ Because I know that they’re trying to be helpful, but in the end they're not, because the kid gets stressed out. A lot of the time, if I ask a student to do something, and they do something else, I kind of like that because it shows that either they’re being creative – they’re playing a different part of the music, for instance – but also, what’s the problem anyway? There are all sorts of reasons why I’ll just sit there and listen, even if what I'm listening to is nothing like what I asked them to do.

JUSTIN LEWIS

So the unexpected can be the interesting thing. They might find something you might not have thought about?

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Exactly. I'm quite happy to listen to somebody playing not what I asked or the wrong bit. Or the communication breakdowns that can happen with autistic children, especially when you've only there for half an hour, especially when you're online. I’m fine: ‘Let’s just do that.’ But really, what we just discussed, that’s as bad as it ever really gets in terms of parental expectations.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I was thinking also about how teachers can often learn something new and valuable in a lesson, often from an unexpected source. It suggests that there’s real communication going on there. Or when a pupil asks a question and the teacher says, ‘I actually don’t know, but let’s see if we can find out the answer.’

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

JUSTIN LEWIS

And surely this is what curiosity is all about.

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I completely agree, and I see the difference between kids from either home or school environments where they're allowed to explore stuff, and kids from environments where they lack imagination and initiative and are scared to try things. It can get really frustrating because you’re asking people really simple stuff:

‘You know that says piano on the score, do you think you played quietly?’

‘I don’t know.’

It’s like I’ve got to tell them. Or:

‘Did you play a crescendo through that bit?’

‘I don’t know.’

There’s this fear that I’m trying to trap them, or that there’s a right and a wrong answer. But there isn’t. Even a question like:

‘Did you find that bit easy?’

‘I don’t know.’

JUSTIN LEWIS

Even as a child who loved listening to music, I found early instrumental lessons hard, and making a cluster of notes on a page sound like a piece of music. I wasn’t very good at things like phrasing then, so I would read something absolutely literally on the page, but it would take a while for it to become music in my playing.

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ANYTHING: STEVE REICH: Works 1965 - 1995 (Nonesuch, 2005)

Extract: ‘Piano Phase (1967)’

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Many of my favourites have been favourites for years. Although Steve Reich… I only started properly listening to about ten years ago.

JUSTIN LEWIS

‘Piano Phase’, which I think I already knew a little bit, really grabbed me.

LYNNE PHILLIPS

The score for it is really bizarre. It’s like a phrase, the same twelve notes, and then you play them over and over and over again. Somebody else is playing them. And then one piano starts playing it very slightly faster until it kind of loops around and it's it lands on the next note in the phrase and it just keeps and then it loops round again, and it gets slightly faster and faster until the first note is the third note.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Sounds quite mathematical!

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Yes, it's really hypnotic to listen to, really bizarre, and I actually love it. I just remember quite a few years ago somebody showed me a YouTube video, which I’ll try and find of one guy [Peter Aidu] and he’s got two grand pianos.

LYNNE PHILLIPS

He’s doing one phrase with his left hand, and one phrase with his right hand, starting both together, and then his right hand has to speed up very, very slightly and then come back down at the same time and I’ve tried to play it, not with two grand pianos (because I don’t have two), but I can do about three phrases before I collapse in a heap and say, I can’t do this anymore. It is crazy hard. The concentration on his face.

And I also love listening to ‘It’s Gonna Rain’, might have come out when I was at university. I remember a friend of mine saying, oh, he's found this amazing new music, but he’s using sampling. There's something quite genius about the way he like splices it and it reattaches itself and splices it, and you can hear the beats of the pigeons’ wings.

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LYNNE PHILLIPS

I can’t memorise stuff. Every time I’ve tried to perform from memory, it’s gone horrifically badly. So I just don’t, now – and I’ve made my peace with that. I can memorise certain things. I’m really good at remembering things faster on a score. So I don’t have to have everything written in, by me. I can remember phrasing. But I tend to think of the score as like a script for an actor. All it is, is the words, some basic stage directions. You need to get away from it, either doing it from memory or – as I do – doing it from half-memory, where you’re sort of reading it, but you’re not really reading every note. You’ve got the shape of it…

JUSTIN LEWIS

You know it in your head…

LYNNE PHILLIPS

And again, if it’s a script, it doesn’t say everything on it. So if you were reading it out, there’d be certain inflexions you’d include. Sometimes, naturally, you need a little bit of help, but you turn what is quite basic, like text, into something much more meaningful. But the point where that happens in music, I think, is so, so very different for everybody. Some people are like me, they can say ‘It’s there’ very quickly, I can see the phrases straight away. Or, as I’m playing it, I can kind of work out on the first run-through… I might make some changes, juggle things around a bit. But basically, I can instantly see, for instance, a hidden melody, or where phrases are, even if they're not actually marked. And most people I teach know when they’re like that, so either they have to learn every single note, and have to be playing it well before they can start phrasing it like somebody who’s reading a script… Some people are instant, and some need to learn the words first before you can start inflecting it.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I can remember, in the early days of learning the flute, my teacher would have to sometimes pencil in accented lines across certain notes, particularly in a run of semiquavers: ‘These are the important notes to emphasise’, when I was just playing them all equally.

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Yes, it’s about the musical narrative, and about finding that journey. You start at Point A and you need to get to Point B and then from that point to Point C, to know where you’ve been, and where you’re going. Some people can do it straight away, and some can’t, and that’s fine. Some people need to have listened to the music in its entirety first, before they can even begin thinking about what the notes are.

JUSTIN LEWIS

And how to interpret them?

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Or just that they need the whole picture first before they can start breaking it up, whereas other people need to work on the broken-up bits before they can start. I’ve got a student who’s Grade 7, and she’s really talented and she's one of the ones who needs to find the notes before she can build up. At the point she starts building up, that’s when it gets really good. So I think it’s all very different for different people and a lot of it I think depends on how well you read as well and that’s something that I've always found really easy. Not necessarily sight reading, because there’s a whole coordination thing there. I’m a good sight reader with certain things, but not with others. I’m fairly good if you give me a little bit of time to look it over, to process things.

JUSTIN LEWIS

So longer than an exam, say, where you have about 30 seconds to look over something.

LYNNE PHILLIPS

You’ll never find that in the professional world! You’d never be asked to sight-read something with 30 seconds’ notice. It’s so ridiculous.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I seem to remember you saying once that all this ‘playing from memory’ was Liszt’s fault!

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Yeah, the bastard! [Laughter]

JUSTIN LEWIS

And so students were then expected to memorise everything all the time.

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Yes – why is there this kind of intense thing. You see concertos, at the Proms, and you see the orchestra and they can read from their scores, but the poor bloody soloist has to do it from memory. But the problem is, if you’re a good pianist, but you’re not a good memoriser, you never get to those heights of performing, because of convention. From a certain level, you start doing things from memory, but if you’re no good at doing that – which I wasn’t – it starts to cause big performance anxiety. Looking back at the times when I’ve done best in performance, I’ve had the music in front of me.

I mean when I think back to the hours and hours and hours I spent at uni trying to memorise little things so that I could perform them in a concert where it would be playing from memory. There was no point. If you can memorise, brilliant. But I just do not get this kind of obsession that we have to be able to play from memory.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I didn’t have to do that very often in studies. Presumably you did, though.

LYNNE PHILLIPS

We had to play from memory sometimes, and I remember my final practical exams weren't from memory. But there is a big pressure of being able to play stuff from memory because there’s this idea that if you need the music, you don’t know the music well enough.

Funnily enough, talking about memorising stuff, I could memorise John Adams’ ‘China Gates’. But I can't memorise stuff like a Mozart sonata, which you’d think would be easier because it’s got a nice melody.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Do you know why that is?

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I think I’m just weird. [Laughter]

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LYNNE PHILLIPS

I remember, in high school, around GCSE time, somebody came in about careers advice, and they had these questionnaires that you fill out, and then it comes back with your ideal career. And mine came back with ‘teacher’. I thought, ‘I don’t want to teach – horrible job.’ So that was that.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Was that because of how you felt as a pupil, though?

LYNNE PHILLIPS

No. I think, even now, the thought of doing school teaching fills me with such [dread]. One to one teaching, fine. Teaching very small groups, if I’ve got somebody else there as well. But oh god, otherwise… I know people who finished their university degree and went off to do their PGCE… And I was like, No. But yeah, careers advice. My friend got ‘ratcatcher’. [Laughter] And she’s now a teacher and school governor.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I suppose it beats the other way round!

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