Season 2, Episode 11: Lee D. Stockner--Educator/Author/Creator of a New Language of Music

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Welcome back to The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song.

Hi everyone, I'm Clara Zhao.

For anyone joining our show as an audience for the first time, so glad you're here. Clara and I are both classical pianists and piano teachers from New York City. This podcast is for anyone who plays the piano for fun, loves listening to the piano music, or for someone who is pursuing a career in piano, or simply is just curious about the world of piano music. That's right.

In each episode, we interview a guest speaker who has been breaking exciting new ground in the music industry. Before getting started, we want to thank our listeners for tuning in. Please rate our show or review on Apple Podcasts because every rating and review will help people to find our show.

For this episode, we invited Mr. Lee D. Stockner from New York. He is a music educator, author of Occupational Octaves Piano, president and CEO of Musically Inclined Guy, Inc., and creator of A New Language of Music.

We had a brief pre-interview meeting with him the other day, and he mentioned that he had extensive work with special needs students, and from that experience. He created a new language of music for people who can't read traditional music notation.

And do you remember, Clara, about a year ago we invited Selena Pistresi from San Jose, California as a guest of Season 1, Episode 11, who specializes in teaching neurodiverse students? And it turns out Lee is her coach.

Oh wow, that's quite a small world we live in, right? And so obviously his method has had such a significant impact on special needs students across the nation and their teachers.

So there's a documentary about Lee, how he was helping students with autism through piano, which was nominated for an award at the 2020 Pasadena International Film Festival. He's quite amazing, and I think it's also timely to interview him because next month is Autism Awareness Month. So, and well, last year that's when we interviewed Selena Pistoresi.

That is correct, yes, and that was such a great episode and I loved interviewing her and learned a lot about the episode. And now let's get to learn in depth about teaching special needs or neurodiverse students, and I'm curious to know about Lee Suckner's program, what Occupational Octaves is all about.

Yeah, me too. So let's get the show started. You are listening to The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song, where we talk to the brightest minds in the industry about how they are bringing the piano into the 21st century. We're very excited to introduce our guest of episode 11, Mr. Lee D. Stockner, to the show. Mr. Stockner is the author of Occupational Octaves Piano, a series of piano method books which hundreds of music instructors across the nation have used to teach piano lessons to special needs in the past decade. He is the creator of the new and user-friendly language of music featured in Occupational Octaves, which was invented for anyone with basic color and letter matching skills. Using this language allows students, including those with high support needs, can play challenging music such as Piaoli or exercises like 4-octave scales in parallels. We are going to cover topics including Mr. Stockner's own diagnosis of ADHD, experiences of teaching special needs students, the science behind optimal flow experiences at the piano, and his newest method to teach traditional music notation. Well, hopefully we can cover all of them in such limited time today, and fingers crossed. Welcome to The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Clara. I'm very excited to be here.

Thank you so much. We appreciate your time. So we met, you and I met recently via LinkedIn. I made a post about my young student who was able to perform one of Chopin's piano etudes in the flow during the piano competition, and the word flow refers to the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experiences written by Dr. Csikszentmihalyi, Hungarian-American psychologist. We started having conversations on that platform and now here you are. So first and foremost, tell us, what is Occupational Octopus in, let's say, 2022? I know it's been through quite an evolution already since the creation, so So maybe right now, as of now, it's like Occupational Octopus 7.0, let's say.

Something like that.

Yes, tell us please.

Sure, sure. It's been the ever-changing identity behind this program with the colors and letters and rhythmically designed boxes that I love teaching from. So the inception of this program came many, many years ago when I was working with a number of students on the autism spectrum with high support needs whose families wanted to help them play the piano. And most of the experiences that they'd had with other piano teachers did not go so well. So when they reached out to me, I knew I had to come up with a new idea. And I had this idea rolling around in the back of my mind for a system of colored letters in rhythmically designed boxes. Basically something where if people could match the program, they would be able to play the piano. So I started working with a handful of students who could do this basic color and letter matching while I was also working in a school with them where we had to work on everything everything from the basics of what we call ADL, activities of daily living. And these ADL skills had to be broken apart in such a way that I learned how to support little tiny steps in big processes. For example, you would never think that helping a student brush their teeth could be a 12-step operation. And one of the steps you can get wrong is walking into the wrong room or holding a toothbrush upside down. So getting to work with individuals that had some of these really severe challenges was something that helped me see educational processes in a different way than frankly most other piano teachers out there. It's not— you don't have to break things down so far in traditional music notation, or so we thought. So occupational octaves became a new language of music with the colors and the letters that I started with the individuals at this school for students with autism that I was working at. So that was the inception. And I also had a lot of skills in terms of working with people that had behaviors that could be what we call maladaptive, sometimes violent toward themselves and others and property, and a number of situations that were quite uncomfortable, to say the very, very least, and things that if we didn't have to have people go through, we would always choose for them not to have to go through. Very stressful situations. We started to use the program with these individuals. And as a 10-year classical piano teacher at that point, I knew exactly how to teach a classical piano lesson. I knew how to start it from two thumbs on middle OC and work the way outward little by little. And I knew the value and the efficacy of starting in a position like that. So with this new language of music that I had, I started putting together a curriculum very similar to the one that I used as a teacher for 10 years and as a student 20 years prior, and developing a similar method into the new language of music. So what Occupational Octaves is is a new language of music written out into a full classical curriculum.

Okay. Well, you know what? We'll get to this new language part later. Yeah. But I'm very excited to find out more. And so tell us this, the level goes from obviously from the very beginning, beginners, to up until what level?

Well, there is no limit on the level in the same way that traditional music notation has no limit to what can be written. You could always write more and more. Same thing here, because it is simply a new language of music. So in recent weeks, I've written up a couple of different Chopin nocturnes. I wrote up the Liebström-Liszt nocturne, which is just beautiful. Wow. Oh, it's so beautiful. And to have a nocturne that is so based in major key and still have that haunting effect is so beautiful and so amazing to introduce to students who outside of the lesson may need help on everything from tying shoes to crossing streets. So it's a, it's an incredible thing to see, but there really is no limitation. There are complications because it is challenging to write up, say, things like 32nd notes in a system like this, right? Things like that can get challenging and complicated for sure. However, the limitations are low. I've written up Phantom of the Opera. I've written up Seasons of Love. Piano Man, The Stranger, Canon in D, Für Elise, Beethoven's Fifth, Moonlight Sonata, just tons and tons of material. And this is, this is just the very beginning.

Yeah. Wow. That's, that's very exciting. And it's, it's growing and growing and reaching out to more people. That's excellent. So now tell us about your background, because I have a feeling that your childhood experiences really impacted and influenced you to be who you are as a teacher, as a person, obviously, and as a business owner?

Sure, sure. Well, in certain ways, I have the, the luckiest of upbringings possible, you know, a wonderful middle-class family from Long Island that raised me with all the love in the world. However, I had two complicated things going on. One thing was I had a major set of injuries to my leg that kept me out of school for a long period of time and out of growth and development. When everybody else was out there playing in games and playing sports and whatnot, I was in a body cast, I was in traction, I was in rehabilitation, I was in the— out of hospital. So while there was plenty of positive along the way and wonderful experiences and enriching experiences in my life, in the background of it, I had this thing that really, for a lack of a better word, fractured the continual development that one would want to achieve. The other aspect is that I'm diagnosed attention deficit, and I had a pretty rough time in school when it came to things like concentration. And concentration was rough for me in every single aspect of life, except for in my piano lessons, where my talent was always something that was obvious. I'm very proud of it. And not everybody is able to say that they're talented classical piano players, just like I'm not able to say I'm a, you know, talented neurosurgeon. There are things that everybody could reach to, and you have to be super proud of those things. So I'm a very, very proud piano player, but I struggled mightily in school. And with the combination of these two things, what might have actually been the heaviest of struggles was apathy. Because along the way you have a number of failures, and when those failures start to become a little bit more normal than the successes, there's a lot of disconnection that starts to happen. And disconnection is, is very, very difficult, especially at young ages. And the thing that kept me connected The thing that always kept me believing, the thing that kept me away from being able to say the most apathetic things that one could say about themselves was music. It was the piano. It was that when I sat down behind those keys, no matter what, things came alive and something came out of me that was above and beyond anything that I ever imagined for myself or expected for myself. But when I, when I say that music saved me back then, I really, really, really mean it. Like, I really mean, I don't know what I would do without it. And there are certain albums that I could still hear today, um, apart from what the title is, but Green Day's album Dookie, that first album that came out in 1994, I listened to that in a hospital bed over and over and over and over. And there's a couple little drum hits that start, a couple little snare hits that start out that album, and I hear that and I'm back in that hospital bed. I'm back to that music being the thing that drew my mind out of a place that was not very pleasant. But then even after all of that, you get back into school, and I'm supposed to just kind of kick back up with things and get back on with where everybody else is. And quite frankly, I was just disoriented with everything that was going on. I didn't know my place. I didn't know if I was going to be out again the next week. It was, uh, you know, certainly an emotionally confusing time for anybody, but especially with the, um, the bit of a roller coaster that I had to manage my way through. But without music, I don't— I have no idea what I would have become. I don't foresee that it would have become something that was contributing positively as I believe I am now. And, you know, it's just— it's all the credit to music. That stuff saved me.

So that is so beautiful. Yeah, Lee, wow. I'm sitting here and listening, you know, to your story, and I'm really very touched. You know, I obviously, to prepare for this interview, we've been doing some research, and I've been going to your website and then watching your documentaries and videos. You know, they say the magic of music, right? So music really saves us all a lot of times. And then I'm very curious, earlier you mentioned something about this new language you've been writing, and I know we have a lot of other questions, but I'm just very curious. Can you just briefly explain a little bit of that?

Sure, sure. If you don't mind, I'm going to use some visuals to do so.

Perfect. Yes, please. All right.

I'm going to go ahead and take over the screen over here. I got a nice little PowerPoint ready to go over here. So let's just get right into a couple of technical things over here. We have to make a transition because I just got everybody all emotional with everything. And now we're going to talk about some very technical items. So I'm actually going to, in the favor of time, skip ahead a little bit over here and get through this here. But in order to discuss what a new language of music means, what we really need to do is establish what what the original language of music is designed for and the purpose behind it. And there are 3 main purposes. While there are certainly so many more, there are 3 main purposes. The 3 main purposes are knowing which notes to play, which fingers to use, and how many beats to hold for. If you have those 3 going on, you could put together some competent music. Whether it'll be beautiful, that's another story, but you could certainly put together some competent music. Now, when you look at something like Beethoven's Fur Elise and you're trying to figure out the notes you're looking at, whether it's on the line or space, what line and space. Of course, as we know, when you're talking about the fingers, you're talking about which finger to use based on a little number above or below the notes. But we also know it's part of a complicated system because right over there, there is not a number for that note. However, you and I as musicians, we know what finger to use over there. So it's not only a system of reading instructions, it's also understanding an unwritten system, which is pretty tough to work with. And then of course, you have your time signature and your beats, which is something that you have to understand on a number of different mathematical levels: quarter notes, half notes, whole notes, and so on and so forth. So this is a whole bunch of what we need to understand for Beethoven's Für Elise. And this is Beethoven's Für Elise written for occupational octaves piano. And when you look at these two, believe it or not, you are looking at the exact same notes, the exact same fingers, and the exact same beats. The instructions are 100% identical.

So basically the language is from those finger rings, right, the different colors.

Let me get you right there. I'm going to take you, take you on that journey right now. So even though we don't use this term so much anymore, because we are not 100% focused on the special needs community, we're focused on a community of anybody who could match colors and letters. That's who could have success with this program, even though its inception was with the special needs community. But for something to be user-friendly for the special needs community, your, your biggest goals and your biggest struggles have to be with clarity and with ease. That's what the big purpose behind occupational optis is. So as you saw, you had the rings on the fingers and you had a labeled keyboard. Let me just go back there for one second. You can see that the keys are labeled in a very specific way. So when you come across a nice easy song like Mary Had a Little Lamb, you'll have something like a green D. All this means is that the D matches with the letter on the piano and the color matches with the ring. And this way You'll know exactly which key to push down and which finger to use on every single box, and two-thirds of the battle is already won. But a little bit more complicated is total beats to use. And what's great about traditional music notes is that we all understand our general system of counting, and once you get it, you know, it's like magic. You could bring the rhythm of strangers together through a piece of paper. It's, it's incredible. Same thing over here. The same system exists, it's just designed in these boxes. And you know something, the counting could actually be a little bit too tough for certain students that I work with, so we just learned that you hold when there's an arrow and you just point and you go one at a time. So whether you're using the counting or you're not using any counting at all, you have a special needs user-friendly approach. And special needs user-friendly, what that really means is user-friendly to many, many, many people. So now we know exactly which notes to play, which fingers to use, and the beats to hold for.

Got it.

Wow.

So the 8-book curriculum more or less gets a little bit harder each book that you're going through. You can see flats and sharps being added, chords. Yeah. 3-note chords, larger chords. Book 5, you get into minuet in G major, a nice big bold Jingle Bells here with a bunch of good chords, the Für Elise that you saw, and one that I love showing off, it's the Blue Danube, which is It's a journey through that piece over there. And that is the basics of how the new language of music works. And it's also why I'm willing to go out there and say something as bold as new language of music, because I've had a number of people over the years just hang the phone up on me when I say this idea. Oh no, we don't use traditional notes. We use a new language of music. Click, done, you know, right away. So I always appreciate the opportunity to share exactly what it is so that you could see.

Because, yeah, because, you know, honestly, I don't mean to confront you or anything, but hear me out. So I've been teaching piano lessons over 25 years, and then, you know, I have been taught with this traditional notations, and, you know, classical musician, and it's— this is— this notation, classical way of notation, is not something that just popped out of nowhere, but it's the tradition coming from 1,000 years ago approximately, and then over time it evolved and it keeps evolving still. So then when I hear new language, what is that? And it's— you're completely out of your innovation and creation. So obviously I had a huge question mark instead of rather resistance, but it's like, hmm, Okay, tell me. So what's different about it? So you just showed us using color and also boxes so that for those people who are struggling to read traditional way of notation can read and play the piano, right?

Yeah. The term that we've begun to use more than anything is Read and Succeed. And the reason why we use that term so frequently is that there's a lot of people out there that could tell you this note is an A, this note is a half note. This chord you should hold for 4 beats. They could tell you these things, but whether or not you could functionally put your hands onto the piano and play, whether you could sight-read a brand new piece of music like a student would have to do in MISMMA, that's where the real questions lie in my opinion. Because I know very well that due to the magic of muscle memory, anybody could be taught to play a song, virtually anybody, not everybody, pardon, but almost anybody could be taught to play many, many songs just by what muscle memory is. But the question becomes, can you hear a song on the radio, you know, something like, let's say, Piano Man, and say, I want to, I want to play this, and go home and go online and order the sheet music and have the download come, sit at the piano, open up the sheet music, read it, and play it successfully? And very frequently the answer to that question is no. However, if you say to yourself, I have the rings for the fingers already, my keyboard is all labeled up, I just heard Piano Man on the radio. Let me see if Lee made that song for occupational octaves. You could play it instantly. So not only is this read and succeed at the piano, it's play challenging music with a simple language.

You know what else I also saw that I was, you know, while I was watching your demonstration, I was thinking, you know, I can actually introduce to my dad because my dad is someone who has perfect pitch and he, you know, He's not a musician. He just play by ear. So he can play on his harmonica anything as long as he hears it a couple of times. But on the piano, I realize it's been a little difficult. Like, you know, lately I've been trying to teach him a little because this notation, right, the staff line, he learned with me when I was 3. But, you know, it's been many years. And so now my language, because I was eventually trained here and that I use ABCD, like C, D, E, F, G, right? But in Chinese, we actually have a system very similar to the one you're showing except with numbers. So do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do, just 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. So that's what he, if he reads that, he can play right away. But there's not so much classical piano music that's written in that language. So I'm like, you know, we can translate that. This is actually cool for like international audience.

Right?

So, that's cool. So, I'll tell you, there's one of my clients, she's based out of Amman, Jordan. She's an occupational therapist out there, and she does the lessons. She's a piano player as well. And she sent a video of her using the program with one of her students, and she's speaking in Arabic. And I can't understand one word she's saying, but if you listen to the entire thing, you hear all these words in a language you don't understand and random pink bees. Green D. And it's the, uh, the funniest thing to hear, but also amazing to, to actually witness and see a, a young, a young child in Jordan playing Row, Row, Row Your Boat with the right notes, the right fingers, and the right beats a few weeks after being introduced to the program, which is of course all written in English because it's the only language besides music I know how to write in.

Right, right, exactly.

So you're impacting not only the students in the United States but also beyond. So you're really reaching out across the pond.

We've had many, many book orders from around the globe. We've had people— we have students, I have a student myself that's in Australia that I see. There are people all over the UK and France and Israel and Germany that have purchased books. Yeah, it's gone into a couple places in South America. It's fun for something that that could turn you off so easily with that whole new language of music idea. If you're, you know, even moderately skeptical, it could turn you off. In spite of that being there, which for me, I wanted to be there from the beginning and always, I want there never to be a doubt or a question about exactly what this is. This is a new language of music for many of the reasons that I laid out earlier. I've decided that it's worth it to have those words there from the beginning, even if some people are turned off to it.

Well, you know, always having to have new ideas or innovation, you deal with those resistance, right? Yeah, of course. Yeah, but it will— the people's mindset will change over time by spreading the message in a positive way. So that's why we are here, right? I saw the documentary nominated for the award at the 2020 Pasadena International Film Festival., and the documentary's name is your business name, Occupational Aptos. And I was in tears. Wow. That was such a powerful documentary. And I wonder why you didn't win. It's like, come on, people. But, uh, the, in a documentary, two students of autism spectrum were featured. One, uh, his name is Brandon Sweet Student, and the other, uh, student is Jason. He's also very, very passionate, energetic student. And then Brandon is nonverbal and Jason is not. Now I get to see both of them playing the piano and expressing themselves. Wow. So with all these success, I mean, of teaching of neurodiverse students, I know you have some, a lot of extensive teaching experiences with students with neurodiverse, ADHD, autism, autism dyspraxia, you name it, and also students with high support needs, physical needs, intellectual. You may have experiences, if you don't mind sharing some stories.

You know, I'll actually go with one related to Jason from the documentary. What you might need to do to handle in order to have success in a situation where, again, neurodiversity— neurodiversity means everybody's going to be different. So what's, you know, what's going on here? Jason, when I first started working with him— now you saw in the documentary, he plays beautifully, and he's only gotten better. He took lessons online straight through the pandemic, and he's just gotten better and better and better. He started to sing a little bit while he plays some songs, which is, you know, a wonderful, wonderful accomplishment. However, there are two things that I think are really worth discussing for a moment with Jason. Number one, the biggest struggle that I had with him in the beginning, besides for some behavioral struggles, which we have a few videos up on the YouTube channel that display from years before we worked together when he was just yelling and screaming, "Wala, green D, green D!" And he's yelling and screaming, and we, you know, we bring it all together eventually. But one of the biggest issues and one of the biggest reasons why Jason had the behaviors in the beginning, in in the first place is because even though he was 150% capable of matching colors and letters, and even though I pointed to the spots that he had to look in over and over independently, he was not understanding exactly where to look. I have to go through an entire process with him where we have to limit his field of vision just to the letter on the keyboard. And that was a lot of work to get it to the point where you look up at the F on the page, you can find the F on the keyboard, and then on top of it, you find the F on the keyboard and you find the correct color ring All of these things took an immense, immense amount of work. But what I've always said is— I've always said a lot of things. One of those many things is fundamentals equals flow. People are able to get into the flow of music when they have a good grasp on the fundamentals of what they have to do. And Jason had no grasp on the fundamental of looking at the right spot. So we had to go through a lot of lessons that were not fun for either of us to get him to finally look at the right spot. Because every time I tried to get him to look at this specific thing, because he was a challenge for him, he chose to be behavioral instead and chose to make noise and disruptions and whatnot. And we had to get through it together. And eventually he finally slowed things down enough where he was looking at the right spot, look up at the right spot, look down at the right spot. And it was such a struggle. But the point is, don't go past fundamentals with students. Make sure your fundamentals are in check because a lot of people try to save the music lesson that isn't working out so well by just moving a little bit forward. Let's get them to play a song. I'll show them how to do this. They'll love it. Mom and Dad will hear the song happening. Everybody will be pretty happy. And then we'll fix up that other problem later on. Like, nah, it just doesn't work out well like that. You need to stick on fundamental issues when you encounter them. That's number one. Number two, there's a blog that I wrote that I'll share a link with you guys for later with how you could think about the little fundamental steps in so many more ways in life than you would imagine. So I'll bring up a little story, another little story with Jason. For a long time, Jason was saying the word "argenj" every time he wanted to say the word orange, and he could clearly say all of the different syllables, but he wasn't putting them in the right order and sequencing them properly, which is something that we experience all the time as piano teachers. We have students constantly struggling to do things like sequencing things properly. So he's saying this word "ar-jinj, ar-jinj," and I want to correct the problem for him. I'm not a speech teacher, but I could figure out the movements of the mouth to say the word orange. And what we started to do was I said to him, Jason, Jason, say 're' because when he was saying 'rejin,' he was keeping his lips together. I was watching just the motion of his lips. He's keeping the lips together. So I said, Jason, say 're,' and by saying 'e,' he had to open up. And by opening up, he was able to say 'reng' and not be stopped from making those sounds by the poor positioning of his lips. So what's the idea behind that one? Positioning, positioning, positioning. You want to have students that you want to make sure understand the fundamentals of the music language that they're reading and understand the fundamentals of the position that they're in. Because when you could put those two things together, whether you're doing traditional notation in a traditional lesson or you're using my special language of music in a specialized lesson, if you don't have those fundamentals set and in a way that they could work off of each other, you're going to struggle through your beginner piano lessons in my estimation.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's not just the neurodiverse students, but neurotypical too, where, you know, the beginner, you kind of have to give them the frame, right? And don't show it too much. This is where you start. And then this isn't the only thing you need to know right now. That sort of thing.

That's it. When you start out with a student, You should have them in a certain position and their hands should stay on those notes. But nobody ever says why. Everybody misses saying the reason why. As teachers, we know it's 100% crucial, but why for the student? And the answer is because many times you already have the right fingers on top of the right notes. That's simple fundamentals that I'm talking about. Not understanding first space, second space, third space. Those are things that could all be filled in later. Later. But the general idea that if you're sitting at the piano and you have your hands on it, you might already have your hands in the right spot. So stay still, check to see where you are, and if you already have it there, just push right down. How many times as teachers have we seen a student shift their hand away and bring it right back to position? It turns out they were in the right spot already. So it's deep fundamentals that empower learning and empower concentration.

But that philosophy, I think, is coming from Going back to flow, Dr. Csikszentmihalyi's book, in which we initially connected, got connected on LinkedIn because I posted something about it. So for me, you know, I love the philosophy of Dr. Csikszentmihalyi because I want to help my students what music really means to them by, you know, in a state of flow, like So to me, state of flow is that despite of the challenges, with the right kind of feedback that we give to students and the students receive which aligns with their goals and intentions, and then they can be in the state of flow, right? And the energy is flowing in the direction that they were heading. That doesn't mean it's always positive, that doesn't mean it's always the compliments that I give So feedback can be, you know, you need to correct this, correct that. But also, I feel like as a teacher, right feedback also means giving them the right amount and level of challenges, right? Not too much, not too much information like we talked about, but also not too little, because if it's just a little too elementary for them, it's very boring as well. So that's my interpretation of that flow experience. So tell us a little bit more about your experience with that.

Sure, sure. So what you're discussing right now is the first of 9 dimensions of flow, and that is the challenge-skill balance, which basically says that you are trying to create an environment for your student where the challenges are not so difficult they create anxiety that makes you wanna leave, nor so easy they create boredom, which could bring on apathy, which as we discussed earlier is one of the biggest things we need to avoid for all of our students and all of our own livelihoods even. Apathy is not good. When you put things together in order to stay away from that boredom, you need to have some basic levels of expertise. Because if you don't have basic levels of expertise, you're going to make too many mistakes to engage. And if you make too many mistakes, engagement's out, apathy is in. So you need to make sure that you're— you have the basic expertise. And with playing the piano, it's what I discussed before, knowing the right notes, the right fingers in the right beats. Then you also need to make sure that it's not something you can't do. Every single time I open up Rhapsody in Blue, just page 1 alone, I'm just like, I'm out of here. I'm not doing this. This is just not happening for me. I know myself well enough. This— just getting through the first page is going to create so much stress for me that the overall holistic nature of what I could accomplish here for my heart, for my mind, for my soul, for my future juice ain't worth the squeeze, just not going to do it. So you want to be in what educators call the zone of proximal development. And people also refer to it as being in the flow channel. Because when you're in the flow channel, what that means is you're setting your goals to do something where you're going toward that anxiety because it's a challenge. But eventually what brought you anxiety will bring you boredom. So you have to go to the next level of anxiety, to the next level of boredom, next level of anxiety, next level of boredom. And it just creates a channel that you could just keep on traveling up, up, up, and up. And, you know, I'm probably making a mistake in my attitude with what I say about the— about Rhapsody in Blue, because in reality it's something that's just high up in the flow channel, and it just means I haven't put in the work yet to earn the rewards.

With— in your teaching experience, what are the different type, maybe to educate our audience too, right? Um, what are different types of, uh, special needs students or neurodiverse students that you have taught?

I open my doors to anybody. You know, people will ask me, do you do like an evaluation or an intake on your first lesson with somebody? And I don't really do that. I just open up my doors. I tell people in advance, if there's no color and letter matching skills, chances are I'm not going to be able to give you good value for your time and your money, because that's the basic that I need. So if you want to come in, I'd be glad to experiment and glad to try. However, what I need to know that things are going to go okay is the basic color and letter matching skills. We bring the students in, we get those rings on, and we get kids working right away. And we basically see what the reaction is. Some kids get into it incredibly quickly. They're on page 1, they turn to 2, they turn to 3, they see the rings are sitting out, they put more rings on by themselves, 100% independent on day day one. Other students might understand the program perfectly, but 2 songs could drain out all of their attentional resources, and they could, you know, more or less need a nap after that. Then you have other students that you'll encounter who might have behaviors that again could be sometimes violent to themselves and to others and to property and whatnot. And we have to establish the learning environment and the reasons why it's worth having self-control. And one of the reasons why it's worth having self-control is maybe I can convince somebody, Hey, I could show you how to play the piano. You don't know how to do that today. I could really show you how to do it. And then, you know, you have a situation where let's say you're in my, um, the studio that I'm doing my lessons out of. We have drums in that studio. So it's like, okay, sit down here, let's do 3 songs together, and then we'll take a break and hit the drum set. So in that situation, you're much more worried about the learning environment than the learning itself. And here also, I'll give you, I'll give you one more in terms of just like our level of adaptability. On my staff, I have one vocal teacher who is actually so busy she can't even take on anybody new. But one of the students that we had had a— please forgive me for I can't remember the exact diagnosis, but her abdominal muscles did not function. They did not work. So in order to breathe, her body had to constantly be brought upward and then allowed downward, like an accordion basically. And this young lady loved to sing. She just loved to sing. And the two of them, they worked it out together, and they, they figured out a way to basically use her body like an accordion and to lift up and come back down. They sung together. She was part of a couple of school plays. And it's completely separate from anything to do with the rings on the fingers and occupational octaves itself. It's just one of the amazing, amazing things you can encounter along the way when you open up your life and your business to people who struggle but have passion for the arts.

That is so touching. Oh my gosh, I mean, I'm, I'm just blown away, you know, with this. And also your passion on, you know, helping with different type of students coming in, right? And being curious enough to just learn about, okay, how can I help, right? That coming from that point of view, really. And you mentioned the word, you know, business, right? And it's, uh, I think in this 21st century, we should all be pretty proud of ourselves that, you know, not only we're musicians and we also have our own businesses. But for you, I mean, we were looking at your website, your documentary, your method books. Can you tell us a little bit of your company, your brands, and how did you even get started with the 8 Books curriculum? And I believe you said you started at age 25 or, you know, yeah, around age 25 is when I first had the idea, 25, 26.

I'll start it out with a much more frank way of describing it than like the, you know, technical business side. When I realized what this program was, and that it was a new language of music, and that all this unbelievably high-level stuff could be written in it. And the thing that saved me can be just— even, even if it's just helpful for some people that are suffering way, way, way more than my worst day ever. You know, I, I talk about what I went through, but part of why I do what I do is because as bad as what I went through was, it's nothing on the scale of having the, the, the conditions that I've come across. You know, when, when Yukimi and I had our first conversation, she seemed taken aback because at the first job I had working with students with autism, for a particular young man to hit himself with a closed fist on the head many times throughout the day, so hard that you would feel the hit in your feet through the floor—

oh my gosh—

that was, that was a regular, that was a regular Tuesday.

Day.

So I was around a lot of people that were suffering. And then being diagnosed with ADHD, ADD myself, I saw how the structures were trying to help people organize their lives when they couldn't concentrate to organize their lives themselves. And as somebody with an attention issue, I got some of that going on for Sure. You know, I put together all this high-level stuff with occupational octaves and whatnot, but in other aspects of my life, it was some, you know, some, some big struggles. So as big as the struggle was next to what these kids and adults go through, it's just like nothing. So to give up my space to try to help these individuals, especially as part of a job, as through music, as through music teaching, which I started doing at 15 years old. I, my first lessons taught were at 15 and 25 is the first time I started getting into special needs. Lesson. So I already had a 10-year classical piano background as an educator behind it. So with all of these things that came together and seeing the first handful of times that I tried it out, just how well it worked, like, oh my God, these kids with these rings on are doing the same type of curriculum that I did as a student myself. And look where it brought me with the right instruction. So it, and this is like the frank part of it, it became like, over my dead body does this not get out there to to the public. I'm a guy with an associate's degree that, that struggled through school. I got no letters that come after my name. I got no notoriety and no position. I don't— nobody knows me from a hole in the wall. But I started my first website. I wrote a note to the public. I said, dear parents, this is me. This is who I am. This is what I can do. If you want to give it a shot, I would love to welcome you in. Or if you'd love to welcome me to your house, I'll drop by. And I literally started this with, you know, there were autism stickers all over cars all over Long Island for the— I mean, still are. But at one point, they were on almost every car. I actually got out in the middle of a main road at a red light once because I saw a guy with an autism sticker on his car, knocked on his window. I said, hey, buddy, I know this is crazy. I just want to give you my business card. And as an entrepreneur, I just went with— I went with street hustle, showing up to fairs and events, getting tables and just speaking to the public and telling them what I do. Here's my story. Here's my books. Here's my system. Put the rings on, try it out yourself. And, uh, I was able to bring a lot of people together that way. But then the interest in making a lasting impact was greater for me personally than my interest in, in business, which is why I had to go through a number of processes. And that led to a couple things like the documentary, you know. I stuck to— I stuck to the, the heart— helping the hearts and minds of the students as much as possible. And because of that because I maximized that as much as I could. The documentary came my way, and, you know, that's not anything that was paid for or anything. That was what a filmmaker chose to make about me in the program. And then—

can I interrupt? So for those who are watching and listening, I want you to watch the documentary. It's available on YouTube, and I'm just— I will make sure to list the link in the description. So sorry for the interruption.

No problem, no problem. So So it, it took a long time to, to follow through with the end result that I was looking for. And it was never very well defined, but there were— I more or less needed to do a couple more things so that I could finally walk away from the concentration of creating the programs that will help people to running an awesome business. And the two things that I needed to get done, which I'm very pleased, very, very pleased to have off my shoulders, is the paper that I was able to have published in 2020 in Traditional Medicine American Music Medicine Research's special issue on brain science. And the name of that paper is Classical Piano as a Pathway to Flow States for Learners with Disabilities, where I really got to put my full manifesto out there, I guess, in a certain way, to really show the science behind how the flow state could help people, which is actually already well established, but exactly how those colored letters in those boxes and dots and symbols all over the place can bring you to that same place that you and I have been brought to as classical pianists using traditional music notation. That was one thing. And then the other thing was publishing the Stockner Method. And the Stockner Method was originally designed to be a transitioning program to go from occupational octaves into traditional music notes. However, as I let it evolve naturally, what it became was a beginner piano book for anyone. And what's unique about this beginner piano book is it does use some of the occupational octaves material, has a little bit of prep and a little bit of warm warm-up, but then later on in the book, it uses it as what I believe is the first ever set of answer keys in the back of a music instruction book. The same way that a math textbook, there's a teacher's guide and the back of it has all those answers. Same thing with this. You open up to the back of the book and you'll know the notes, fingers, and beats to use, even if you've never read a lick of music before. In terms of training other teachers, we have, well, I have a system that I think carries great value that is not the most basic system that's used out there. Now, the most basic types of systems that are used out there really start in the form of seminars and learning big broad principles and ideas about special needs. And special needs is a massive umbrella. As a matter of fact, autism, my specialty, is only a small part of that huge, huge umbrella. So if you're going to go for a training for special needs because you have encountered a special needs student, you might learn everything about other students but not your own student. So if anybody wants to head over to the training page over here on occupationaloctaves.com, you can go through here and see about the training that I did with Lisa Barnett, who is a music therapist and an adaptive piano teacher of the past 25 years. This is a person that knows what she's doing, and she had a student she was working with that had some issues going on with fine motor skills and with some concentration, and she started to use occupational octaves and was having a pretty good time with with it. She actually had the student that is in these videos play at her recital, which was fantastic. However, we all got together and I saw, ah, the fundamentals are not in place.

The hand—

he's got his hands moving around when the right finger is already on top of the right note, even though that finger is not gonna be used till the next line. And those fundamentals are really, really, really important. So instead of Lisa getting this big generalized training on how to work work with a handful of different people on a shallow level, she learned to work deeply, deeply, deeply with this particular student and learn the deep fundamentals of how to use not only this program but other piano programs properly. Again, starting with the two thumbs on C and having hands positioned with the student knowledge that they're all set up and ready to go. So what we did was we worked together for a good 6 months, and in the beginning I was with them every single I was working with the teacher and working with the student, and then little by little I faded out. I was there every other week and then every 3 weeks and then every 4 weeks, and then they're off on their own. And this system has been going really, really well in terms of empowerment because the teacher gets to see problem solving on the spot and they get to just ask the expert right there. So Lee, we did these 3 songs so well this week. What should we do next? I think we should try this one again. 'What do you think?' And I'm right there to say, 'No, this was my original purpose in placing this particular page in this particular spot, so I think you should totally use it or not.' And it goes very, very well.

I'm just curious more of, you know, you as, you know, as you mentioned to us, your beginnings, your background, and then eventually start teaching and, you know, with— it's quite unique, right?

I've had a lot of young students that have had— that have done seminars and things like that with me. I've taught a handful of college classes along the way, and I've had some kids, you know, 17, 18 years old, ask me for advice. And for me, it makes me very uncomfortable because my story and the way that I did everything is very, very unique. And I don't have a lot— I don't have a lot of advice for people out there in that way because it is unique. The thing to take out of this is fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals with whatever you're working on. You know, it falls apart without the fundamentals.

Right. And now you have the Musically Inclined Guy, uh, Inc., right? That is your publishing company. How did you start that one? You just, uh—

I had no intuition that I was going to find myself in a situation where somebody was going to publish my books and not take everything to do it.

Ah, I see.

So I said, let me just take care of it myself. So I opened up a music publishing company, and it's all— it's just, you know, it's our corporation, is what we do everything under. But it is a music publishing company. If you have music you're ever looking to publish, we could do it for you, no problem.

Wow.

And actually, recently we printed our first occupational office book that was written and arranged by somebody else. A woman named Sabrina Lu who put together two different hymn books. One of them is a— it's called The Book of EJ. It's her favorite hymns with her and her son. And the other one is a Christmas collection.

All of— despite, you know, what I should say, like, challenges as your childhood and now that all you overcome, all of that, and helping others, what do you think as a person or, you know, people that inspired you or helped you? Um, who was your mentor or inspiration?

That would definitely, definitely be my piano teacher. And she's not my mentor and inspiration for everything in life, although many things, but here's why she was my inspiration. After everything that I went through, getting back into lessons, my fingers were fine, my brain was fine, anything that I didn't do well, I had no excuse for. There was no room for that apathy. There was no room for the BS that I was giving to a lot of people. Because believe me, when you're, when you're apathetic, you're going to give people some BS in life because you just don't want to deal with things. That's what apathy is.

Yeah.

So with Diane, who, you know, she's like the beloved Diane— if you know this woman, if she's touched your life, your life is better. She's one of those people in, in every sense, you know, just every sense. She's She's— I don't know what my life is without her, plain and simple. Um, but the biggest reason why, besides bringing me through the classical music upbringing, besides being there for me in so many different ways in my life, she did not stand for the BS. She knew it was BS. She was able to see right through it, and she never let me get away with a single thing that I tried to make an excuse for. And I will be forever grateful to her for that, because I'm able to look back on that time now. And when I have to evaluate things for myself, I have to sometimes, you know, call out some, some BS on myself, as we all do in life. And, you know, I credit her a lot for that. She was a huge influence in that way. I'll give you, you know, another one that people always kind of smirk about. I don't know if you know who the comedian George Carlin is, but George Carlin is one of my biggest influences in life. And if you have— if you purchase Book One of Occupational Authors, there's a list of people that I thank at the end of it. One people is Diane, and the last person I think is George Carlin. Because you have to learn— you could take in lessons from everywhere. But yeah, a lot of people in life, they're going to try to bring you down, they're going to try to sell you on some words. And those things that you hear people say might not line up with reality, it might not line up with your heart. And when things don't line up with your heart, and then you have to say things that don't line up with your heart, there are some, some things you got to put a firm line down on and not, you know, not cross that line. And Karlan taught me how to do that. And he made it very much possible for me to see the light with everything, to see the good in people, to see the things about human beings that bring us together and make us the same. And also how to spot a lot of nonsense words that people might use to try to convince you that something is real when it's not. And I needed to make something real. And that's what occupational autism is.

Any advice for young piano students?

Yes. Turn off your devices. Turn off the phone. Turn off the iPad. Print up the music, put it on the piano in front of you. Feel those pieces of paper. Take a pen and mark up the spots that you're having difficulty with. Go through it over and over and over. Get 30 minutes in front of that piano, away from the screens, away from the distractions. Connections. Let your mind do something a million times more amazing than anything you can get out of any device anywhere in the world. There's one thing that money can't buy, and it's experiences where you climb the mountaintop and get there by doing something over and over by yourself and facing the challenges yourself. Get off the phones, get off the tablets, get off the iPads, get to The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song with Yukimi Song.

Great advice. I've been telling my students too. Yes, exactly.

Okay, I'll go back to 1960s, right?

I was perfectly happy in the '80s and the '90s.

Yes, me too. Now, so before we do the fun segment, uh, tell us what you're currently promoting.

What I'm currently promoting is what I explained to you a bit earlier, and to be frank, it's the hardest thing for people to really take the leap with, and it is that training, because I am going to come on with you and I'm going to kind of take over things in the beginning, and I'm going to establish how you're running certain aspects of your lessons. However, you can think of it almost as like a big cleanup of all the things that might be a little bit messy in the way that a student is playing, or in the way that you guys are communicating with each other, or they're, you know, as I pointed out to you earlier in this conversation, had you ever thought before that 18 of the first 21 notes are spoken about completely differently than the first 3? Very, very confusing. And when you have little things like that going on, you are able to understand your purpose, you're able to understand your goals better, and you're able to see the future and how things will evolve for you and a student if you take certain approaches. So, my biggest goal is not to make people— an impact by showing people big general things. You know, as wonderful as the documentary is, there's only so much info you can get out of it. There's only so much success in your own lesson that you have from it. So whether you're a piano teacher, music therapist, occupational therapist, special educator, I could help you bring the piano into whether it's the classroom or your actual lessons that you're doing in a highly, highly effective way that is going to bring some levels of life quality and flow in ways that I don't think have been in special needs classrooms before, per se.

So where can we get this information?

Everything is over at occupationaloctaves.com. There is information about the curriculum itself, both Occupational Octaves and the Stockner Method, the services that we offer between the live virtual lessons that we do, the training of teachers, and, um, as Clara was mentioning, we do have a cloud-based platform that is designed for schools, therapeutic organizations, hospitals, and also entrepreneurs like myself and the long and short of that is that there are musical goals that we go for and non-musical goals. The non-musical goals could be things like learning to regulate your body, which is a frequent goal for individuals that may have special needs to try to reach at school. So by bringing a full system that shows you how to reach those non-musical goals and records all the information for you in a properly documented format, we're able to bring occupational octaves directly into school schools, therapeutic organizations, assisted living centers is another great place for this type of program to go. And we're looking to be in a position where so many people could just put those rings on and have such a highly positive experience at The Piano Pod with us.

Wonderful.

Wonderful. Thank you. Congratulations.

Appreciate it.

That's really good. So we listeners and viewers, we encourage you to visit occupationaloctaves.com to receive more information. So now we are in the fun segment. So it's called The Piano Pod with rapid-fire questions, and we would like for you to answer each question in the shortest answer possible. So, okay, you ready?

No, but let's do it anyway.

All right, let's do it anyway. All right. All right, question number 1: What is your comfort food?

Mozzarella sticks.

Perfect. Cats or dogs?

Dogs.

What is your word or words to live by?

All there is is my breath.

Beautiful. What is the most important quality you look for in other people?

Calm. What is the worst quality in people you want to stay away Apathy.

Name 3 people who inspire you, living or dead.

Um, more than ever before, Beethoven. Way more than ever before. George Carlin, as I previously mentioned. You know, I'll go basic. I, as cheesy and cliché as this is, you have to put some championship grit into your thinking. And I'm a Yankee fan. Fan, and I got to grow up watching Derek Jeter play. I, I was up there in the Bronx watching him for, for decades. So, uh, let's go with Mr. Jeter.

All right, sounds good. Name one piece in your current playlist.

Uh, Beethoven, uh, Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat. Oh my God, that's what— that's why I was saying before, like, especially Beethoven Mozart, Beethoven. Um, you know, as a piano player, you know, you got— there's so much— there's— it's so easy for Bach or Chopin to become your guy, you know.

Sure.

But, but listening to, to that number 5 over and over and over, it just, it, it just brought— it just brought— yeah, yeah, it just brought him to it, brought him to the top for me. Um, yeah, I'm listening to it almost every day. I got to set aside like 45 minutes for it.

Wow, that's amazing.

Huge. Yeah, it's great. It's great. I love it.

Name one book title in your library.

Man's Search for Meaning.

Oh, Man's Search for Meaning. Yes. Uh, Frankl. Yes. Wonderful book. Yeah, he saved my life.

Oh yeah, yeah, me too. Yeah, so I'll just tell it— just let me throw in one quick little anecdote because you brought up Csíkszékmihály and his Hungarian background. His background is not only Hungarian, he is the son of Holocaust survivors. Survivors. And his family moved to Italy, I believe it was Italy.

Are you talking about—

okay, and after the Holocaust, his family moved to— I'm blanking, I'm pretty sure it was Spain, but it might have— it was either Spain or Italy. And his great fascination is, I'm looking at Holocaust survivors over here that are happy and these other Holocaust survivors that are miserable. Why isn't everybody happy to be out of the Holocaust? And flow and quality of life evolved out of that idea. And you can imagine that not only does— I am the Hungarian grandson of Holocaust survivors. So knowing his background with everything and knowing what the Holocaust meant to his own initial fascination, and me having so many similar experiences in terms of my environment and during my upbringing, I was around many Survivors. Um, sure, it was all just kind of this synergy for me personally. Not only did he have that background, but he's also got the flow background going on. It just— there's a— there— I, I feel a piece of what I do is part of the continuity of, of him. Yeah, which I'm very proud of.

Yeah. You get only one song or, uh, one, one piece to listen for the rest of your life, what is it?

That's not fair.

Um, I know this—

so I know we're on A Piano Podcast but I'm, you know, my soul like "I sold my soul for rock 'n' roll" type of guy.

All right! So just name one?

Name one.

Guns N' Roses Estranged.

All right, sounds good.

Yeah.

And last not least, last question, music is blank fill in the blank life.

Ding ding ding ding ding! You win!

Challenge me next time!

Yes, thank you so much, Lee. That was a great interview and we really enjoyed it. We got a lot out of it and thank you so much. So this concludes this episode of The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song with Lee Koonse. And thank you, Lee, for joining us today and sharing your stories, insights, and expertise. You can find more information about him at occupationaloctaves.com. I want to encourage our audience to watch the award-nominated documentary documentary of Occupational Octaves and follow him on social media. All the links are listed in the description.

Thank you to our wonderful audience and the fans for tuning in today. If you enjoyed today's episode, please rate and review on whatever podcasting platform you use. If you are watching us on YouTube, remember to hit the thumbs up button and be sure to subscribe to our channel. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. The links are in the description below.

If you have any feedback for us, please leave it in the comments or DM us via social media, or you can also email us at thepianopodnyc@gmail.com.

We will see you for the next episode of The Piano Pod.

Bye everyone!

Thank you, Lee.

Bye! You're very welcome.

Thank you.

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