The Music Part

In the face of a 3-year-old visiting my new neighbors across the hall I see an expression I now recognize instantly:  while waiting for the elevator she has heard a piano.  Her mother introduces me as the person who plays that piano.  The eyes light up with an expression of hunger.  "Invite me in!" 

I have seen this before.  In fact, one of my most successful students was a child who lived in that very apartment from birth until graduating from high school.  Was part of her success that she heard that piano playing every day? (Not that I practice constantly, I don't; neither did she.  "I don't have time," she once told me.) 

But her deeply insightful musicianship was fed by a clear experience of dedication--not tedium, not mindless repetition, but pure dedication.  I refuse to be bored, to be lured into repeating what I did yesterday or last week.  (I do sometimes repeat myself in conversation, but those are senior moments, which I do not have when playing the piano.)

That kid's sight-reading of a Mozart Adagio would have me in tears.  As a teenager I had no patience for adagio, much less the ability to focus my conscious attention on anything that lacked surface movement.

Respecting the Complexity of Hearing

Playing the piano looks so easy.  Listening to the piano while playing it is anything but easy.

The instrument gives off incredibly complex overtones - so complex that the sound of the piano defies synthesis.  Think about that.  You are a child (remember?) whose hearing is very much more sensitive and detailed than your teacher's.  Hard to imagine?  Well, the acuity of the child ear wears off over time, for a variety of reasons, some of them cultural.

And there is your teacher imposing upon you, the child -- by definition more "with it" -- a version of hearing that is woefully simplistic, if judged according to the only applicable standard, that of your sensitive ear.

So why doesn't pedagogy take this into account?  As a distinguished colleague (Professor of Piano Pedagogy, by the way, which I am not, thank you) answered when I asked her: "It takes too long."

Odd Numbers Within Even Bars

It fascinates me that Beethoven goes to so much trouble to indicate the tension between passages based on three's and five's within squarely symmetrical meters:  15 unslurred sixteenths within a 2/4 bar followed by a clearly slurred run of the expected 16 sixteenths.  Why do we not get it?

Because it's hard. 

Is that a good reason?  Test it once.  See how much more fun it is to play this way, despite the risk that you will fumble.  See how much more interested your audience will be in the results you achieve, whether or not they are 100% "accurate."  What is the point of accuracy if the results are dull?

I have been working Beethoven this way for years now and am always astonished that people notice the difference - ordinary people, not just musicians.

I Work at it Because it is Hard, Not Because it's Easy

As I continually point out, counting is over-rated.  It is set up as the first requirement of good musicianship and all children are expected to do it and listen at the same time.  Because I could not do so I have been fascinated all my life with the relationship between tone and time on all its levels. 

I would have been eliminated in any competition for piano skill - thankfully such things did not exist in the culture in which I grew up.  As it was, I eliminated myself from that kind of running, opting instead to work at the instrument, at the music, at my problems on my own.  Would I succeed?  Who could say? And succeed at what, precisely?

Along the way I was fortunate to have mentors who did not interfere with my working style and did not impose simplistic solutions where there are none.

Insisting on the steady beat is a cop-out.  It only turns people off.  It turns everyone off Classical music.  Ask around....

Music and Disability

In some circles the aim of teaching children with disability is to mask their specialness by getting them to produce results commensurate with those produced by more typical children.  I couldn't disagree more.

The aim of all education should be to strengthen the individuality of every child, typical or set apart by special characteristics, whether of genius or any other sort.

I work at this by stressing variation.  No piece of music is ever repeated mechanically, but always with variations of timing, tempo, dynamics, articulation.

This morning I witnessed the triumph of that approach as a young man with severe developmental disability not only figured out how to coordinate his two hands in a tricky assortment of eighth notes vs. quarter notes and consonances vs. dissonances, but - even more impressive - he slowed himself down in order to do it with greater accuracy.

Slowing oneself down voluntarily is one of life's more difficult adjustments.  That he did it of his own accord is proof that teaching variability is critical to the heart of the person.  It gives them choices, empowers them.

Amateurs, Children, and Superficiality

I just spent a peculiar several weeks, peculiar because vacillating between the fury of being without my customary email server (don't ask) and the bliss of being therefore undistracted from clear thinking.

It is not easy to reconcile the forces behind one's own life with those of the culture in which that life has been lived.   One question emerges as central to my life and work: Why have I devoted so much time and energy to the two least-valued populations in the music world: amateurs and children?

It is my own childhood experience of specific sounds that has kept me on track musically and that continues to inspire all of my playing and my teaching.  Because I refuse to believe that I was that exceptional I have taught children of all levels of "talent" as though they were myself, assuming that that level of intensity is accessible to all.  I was quite right about that.  That has to be the reason my young students do not quit taking piano lessons.

What is an amateur if not an adult who has opted to get back in touch with those elementally powerful sensations?  And that is how I have dealt with amateurs.  I was quite right about that one, too.  By not encouraging amateurs simply to imitate professional players I have enabled them to get into the substance of Beethoven, Bartok, Mozart, et al.  Despite limited practice time they experience deep affinity with the music they play -   not quantity but quality.

Nothing superficial about it.

The Child Meets the Adult on Equal Terms

Arts educators constantly bemoan the well-established fact that, usually by age 7 at the latest, children have already lost their innate receptivity to the primary experience of sound, color, rhythm, etc.

It gets trained out of us, as one eminent music theorist put it to me.

Not all of us, I would reply.  Some timeless artists have said it in writing: The older they get, the more artistically mature, the closer they feel to the child they once were, in other words, to their artistic beginnings.

All of my work integrates the sensations I had as a young child with my continuing fascination with the elements of music.  In teaching children I focus on their developing confidence in their own perception of those elements, not on my "more correct" perception.  Often I find that their perception of sounds in, say, Beethoven, actually instructs me.  My problem is that I know too much, that I was led to believe that what I dutifully learned in music training corresponded to the thinking of the masters.

Not so.   The children come closer than I ever will, though I do continue to work at it.