“I’ve learned more from people who couldn’t do something."
Marianne Ploger’s expertise ranges from music to spirituality and neuropsychology. She’s an aesthetic scientist, composer, educator, author, conductor, dog mom - the list goes on. Above all, she’s an experimenter. Her musical training and surrounding environment led her to question the foundations of American conservatory training as she saw her colleagues struggle tirelessly with solfege and aural training.
Marianne had some of her early music training in Paris, where she began to note the differences between the French and American methods of music education. The core difference between these methods is how they begin: the French method usually starts with solfege classes and aural training while the American method usually starts right with the student’s applied instrument.
The American method introduces solfege and aural training at the conservatory/collegiate level. With many student musicians coming from many different educational/musical backgrounds and teachers, some students are in line to succeed at solfege and aural training with their well-taught musical understanding while others will have difficulty relearning their years of faulty foundation, or hearing about this foundational musical concept for the first time.
With this discovery, Marianne created her own method (theplogermethod.com) for musical perception and cognition, with curricular insights discovered through the experimentation of how psychology intersects musical understanding. The biggest block to aural training, in her experience, is the ego.
“The paradigm has to shift.”
