Being Listened To Encourages Listening

A few weeks ago a former student who hasn't studied piano since she went away to college, joined the community of students and families that is my studio for a get-together that included some extraordinarily generous playing.  On that occasion I did something new: I interpreted each student's playing to the listeners, essentially instructing them what it is that I find so fascinating in the work of each young person.

It varies as widely as the individuals vary.  But the quality of their work is not comparable to the work of anyone else on the planet.  It is precisely that individuality that attracts me to teaching; cultivating that quality is my purpose in teaching.  Confident expression of that individuality constitutes mastery.

The other day the mother of that former student informed me that her daughter had played the piano a lot after that afternoon.  I don't think it is an accident.  Learning to listen is the hardest part of studying music, just as learning to see has to be the hard part of being a painter.

When she was a student, before she went away to college, she wrote a statement that shows she was aware of this:

""I took piano lessons from Nancy for twelve years, and over the years I learned much more than how to look at little dots on a piece of paper and press a corresponding lever. Nancy encouraged and drew out from me emotional involvement and conscious thought about music, both in general and specific to certain pieces. Essentially, she taught me how to listen, one of the most difficult skills there is both to teach and to learn."

Where Connections Come From

Without the need to conform to historical or stylistic program arranging I find it wonderful simply to free-associate composers, styles, genres.  I find myself listening to myself listening and enjoying every unlikely minute of it.

In the process I am getting a whole new sense of what a sonata really is: It is a mini-program, complete unto itself, with a song, a dance, a complicated puzzle piece (usually the first movement) and a game at the end combining two or more of the above.  So why on earth would anyone play more than one sonata on a program?

There must have been a reason.  Probably a pretentious reason.

One afternoon my adult children and I were invited to a concert featuring three (count them) Bach cantatas.  On the way home my daughter (a singer/song-writer/musician of extraordinary versatility) remarked that it was too much: Surely one cantata was meant to be sufficient for one occasion.

She was right.  The programmers got it wrong.

Or perhaps it is that we, the consumers of CDs, now want the experience of live music to be as much like that as possible.

Autistic Achievement via Bartok

One of my longtime (16 years) students is blind, autistic, and severely developmentally challenged.  Underneath all those opacities he is a real human being and music is his only access to shared experience and to real expression.  He has long been fascinated by the music of Bartok, specifically For Children.  His many problems are complicated even further by the absence of a sense of touch. From the very beginning my pedagogy with him has been based on two fundamental principles:

• Variation, variation, more variation.  Never repeat yourself; never play the "same" piece twice the same way.
• Dissonance, dissonance, more dissonance.  Whatever the problems he has learning, he is bound to grow into some kind of unexpressible awareness of his limitations.  Dissonance is the musical equivalent of what he cannot otherwise express.

Today he enjoyed a spectacular lesson in which he accomplished some coordinations which had, not long ago, been impossible for him: He opened his left hand to play an octave then promptly returned to a closed position for the rest of the figure.  He could combine this new challenge with the melody which is itself deceptively simple - it has asymmetrical phrasing, and is not consonant with the accompaniment in the same way in any of its three verses.  

Why could he make the effort today that he could not begin to imagine several weeks ago?  I think it's because he has grown to love the piece, to such an extent that he is fascinated by its complexities. I know he loves it because it's what he played when I asked him to play anything at all at the start of the lesson.

What a student loves is the key to learning, no matter who the student and who the teacher.

Knowing a Piece Really Well

I know that I know a piece really well when I grasp the importance of its pushes as well as pulls, that is, the places where the note values and the articulations require me to resist forward motion, or indeed, not to move at all.

It was a true compliment when someone noted a couple of weeks ago that the Mozart I played seemed to move backwards.  That is exactly what I wanted to convey.  Of course, one cannot move backwards, but music is full of indications of reluctance: reluctance to move ahead, to rise, to fall, to resolve.

So much of my early Wagnerian-style training was based on a model of onward and upward that it is still hard to proceed confidently in the opposite direction.

Let's Hear It For Left Hands!

How often the sense of a piano work is contained in the left hand, so often neglected because it does not have the melody.

It took me a while to figure out that the usual division of music into three elements, melody, harmony, and rhythm, was entirely phoney, that a lot of music is a magical combination of the three so that they are in fact inseparable.

Having been trained as an organist I spent a lot of time identifying and articulating fugue subjects and counter-subjects.  One day I woke up to how much more interesting fugues are if you simply relax and listen.  What you hear tends to be a fascinating dispersal of long notes amid running passages. The trajectory of the long notes is utterly compelling.

I recommend to people that they approach their music via the long notes, not via the themes or the melodies.  The long notes convey both harmony and rhythm, and sometimes (especially in Beethoven!) even melody.

Body / Piano Playing : A Real Connection

One of my favorite students is an innovative scientist who has never been tempted to ignore the powerful drive to have music in her life.

Today she was working on the beginning of a Beethoven slow movement.  It is a privilege to work with someone whose sense of detail is so cultivated that she can appreciate the connection between this small step and that dynamic result.

It was a matter of overcoming anxiety about playing wrong notes: a familiar problem.

The hint very often lies in feeling the connection between the hand and the keyboard.  We tend to forget that the hand came first and approach the keyboard as a foreign object, whereas it is really the other way around.  The fifth is beautifully expressed by the five fingers in closed position.  Extending that reach ever so slightly to produce a sixth can be an utterly expressive gesture, in fact, an extension very like what a fine dancer executes to command our attention.

Treated mechanically the sixth is not expressive at all.  It was beautiful to hear what happened when notes stopped being notes and became actual physical gestures which, like fine choreography, conveyed real feeling.

Competing with Oneself

What am I doing when I get up to play for other people?

It is hard to shake the many years of feeling as if every performance is competitive, even when it is not.  But the possibility that I might be competing with myself did not occur to me until a pre-performance chat with a fellow pianist.

Even with maturity it does not get easier to go to the source and find what one needs to know and get the courage to go in pursuit of it.  There are so many factors pulling us down into the pre-judged, not-good-enough mode of much of our learning years.

This learned put-down keeps us from hearing in the here and now, that precious, fleeting moment when Mozart might reach us with a tone or tone relationship that we had never noticed before.