The Free is Not

The first time I quit a day job I felt it was a promotion and a raise in pay. That was decades before the intrusion of electronic media into most facets of our waking lives.

Now that the Internet has tricked us into thinking that we can hide in front of an anonymous screen, that no one will notice, that raise in pay becomes an issue.

I am no less committed to a point of  view not determined by anything (insofar as I am aware) but my own observations of life around me.

If you value it, support it!  Go to www.tonalrefraction.net to learn how.

Talent and the Family

As a child I played the piano at every available moment, starting before breakfast.  Bliss was a day home from school with a minor ailment that did not interfere with my music, habitually accompanied by a vacuum cleaner.  I was in my 30's before my mother commented favorably on my playing--a response I had craved, lo, those many years.

As for siblings, of which I am fourth out of five, I am convinced that my obsessive delight in playing distanced them from me in ways too complex to analyze, creating persistent barriers.

My determination not to pass this isolation down to the next generation involved installing outdoor weatherstripping for effective soundproofing on all my apartment doors.  My children needed to have the option to listen or not to listen.  When we enjoyed music together it was mostly improvising with found objects rather than what the media call music.

Two important results of this approach:

• Both my adult children are musicians, one a professional cabaret singer/songwriter, the other an avid amateur hornist who plays orchestral and chamber music as often as possible.  We enjoy one another's music without restraint. 

• I am embarking on a new system of teaching children along with their parents, in which communicated affect takes precedence over skill.  Ideally this training begins with very young children - pick an age; I started mine at day one.  How rigorous it becomes depends solely on the situation, but always in the company of other families, other children of mixed ages.

Teacher as Model = Student as Inept

The danger in the piano teacher showing how a piece goes is that inevitably the student knows that he or she will not measure up.  I believe in the teacher playing for the student, but not the pieces that the student is working on.  Keep the student's personal affect intact by not imposing an adult sensibility on the material.

There is a big difference between the teacher presuming to be the model for a given piece and the teacher generously modeling rich musicality in relation to playing in general.  I work on this by having children improvise on percussion instruments (bells, triangles, etc.) while I play complex lyrical works.  This trains them to listen while moving internally and externally.  I have enjoyed some wonderful ensemble improvisation with even very young children. 

Social Learning: Now More Relevant than Ever

After ten years of conducting an experiment using social learning techniques to teach piano to young learners I am astonished to realize that their learning has been modeled on two distinct areas::

The first is listening.  I, the teacher, furnish the model for listening.  They know that I really pay attention to what they play and value their instinctual responses to music, whether manifest in right notes or wrong.

The second is motivation which they, the students, model for one another in a way that I never could without making assumptions I find inappropriate--more about that in another post.   Listening for them seems to entail the in-depth perception of the drive that motivates each student to play as they do.  This is music making at an intensely personal level.

Striking is that the students never repeat themselves: They do not want or attempt to play a given piece the same way on two different occasions.

Also, that they trust one another to perform at their very best.  No judgment is involved, so why not? 

They surpass their own capacity over and over again.

Schubert and Rossini

I enjoyed the Mannes Opera's wonderful production of Rossini's La Scala de Setta  just one day after reading how much Schubert admired Rossini--a connection I would not otherwise have made.  In the Rossini there is a magnificent drunken scene in which the servant, Germano, holds forth at length about how smart he is, leaving the audience to substitute for the word "smart" the more apt word "drunk," as inferred not just from the bottle from which he repeatedly swigs, but even more explicitly from his nonsensical coloratura singing.  Displaced accents, unresolved harmonies, abrupt switches of direction are the giveaways.  When coupled with the text it functions as a lesson in the technical skill required to render total inebriation.

Schubert;s delight in drunken music is explicit in some pieces, especially the four-hand piece Notre amitie est invariable, which veritably hiccups.  But there are traces of it in many of his works.  

Music and Social Learning Theory

I recently found out about social learning theory as expounded by Albert Bandura at Stanford University.  It offers a psychologist's view of the approach to teaching at which I have arrived after decades of experimentation.  The essence of it (in my words, of course) is that we learn by modeling.  When there is no leveling according to age or skills each individual within group of learners will pick up characteristics from the others, usually at a depth that far exceeds superficial skills.  In my class, which ranges from a blind autistic individual to some superior intellects, the students apparently respond to one another's motivation.  The integrity of the learning is extraordinary as each student surpasses his or her own expectations.

Bandura does not address music in his study.  The essential skill that I as teacher model is not playing so much as listening.  As I listen intently to each student, so they learn to listen intently to one another and to themselves, from many musician's standpoint, the hardest skill to learn. As for the musical standard, it is set by the composers, who seem to be included in our community of human openness.

Never have I seen young people go so far with their ability to comprehend works of the masters.   

My Moderato Instincts Backed Up

Reading Albert Einstein's exhaustive study of the life and works of Schubert I was interested to find a sentence in which he points out that Beethoven never used the term 'moderato.'   He goes on to say: "The lyrical quality--that's the answer."