A magazine article coauthored by a University of Louisiana at Lafayette professor hit all the write notes, according to the nation’s oldest professional music teachers association.
Chan Kiat Lim, a professor of music at UL Lafayette, and coauthor Siok Lian Tan received the American Music Teacher Article of the Year award presented by the Music Teachers National Association. Tan is associate professor of piano at Miami University in Ohio.
Their award-winning feature article, “Listening With Your Brain: An Aural-Cognitive Approach to Teaching Musical Understanding and Artistry,” appeared in the October-November 2022 issue of American Music Teacher magazine. In it, the authors suggest that deficiencies in listening skills among music students affect how they process and understand sound in musical passages.
“We need to expand our perspective to view and teach music listening as a mental process, beyond the physiological act of hearing, in which we internalize and understand the sound we hear and the sound we imagine,” they wrote. “Adopting a comprehensive approach to listening that engages the brain and interconnects all our senses in music making will enhance true understanding and help formulate interpretations.”
An endowed professor of piano at UL Lafayette, Lim teaches piano performance, keyboard literature, class piano and the heads the keyboard studies area. In 2015, he received the UL Lafayette Distinguished Professor Award and the Louisiana Music Teachers Association Outstanding Teacher Award. He was honored as a 2020 Music Teachers National Association Foundation Fellow.
Lim has performed solo and chamber recitals in globally and throughout the United States. A teacher and clinician, he is an active presenter at international and national music conferences on performance and pedagogical topics. Along with Susanna Garcia, he developed the online multimedia curriculum eNovativePiano. It received the 2021 MTNA-Frances Clark Keyboard Pedagogy Award.
MTNA is a nonprofit organization of independent and collegiate music teachers committed to furthering the art of music through teaching, performance, composition and scholarly research. Founded in 1876, it is the oldest professional music teachers association in the United States.
Photo caption: Music professor Chan Kiat Lim, right, works with a student. (Photo credit: Doug Dugas / University of Louisiana at Lafayette)