Geometry, Pool and Piano Playing

I’ve heard that music and mathematics are related; I might believe it, but I don’t feel it.  I don’t like math very much… well, let me rephrase that:  I don’t like REAL math.  Real math would be, in my mind, algebra, and all the related abstractions.  I could do algebra; I got B+ in most of my math courses, and I actually took more than four years of math in high school.  The kind of math that I did like was geometry.  Geometry is math, but it’s probably math for those people who don’t like math.  Thank you, whoever invented geometry.

What I feel is related to music, especially piano playing, is athletics.  Of course I was not very good at athletics, but I know and feel a real relationship to my piano playing and various sports at which I failed miserably.  Like baseball; and like basketball.  Or pool!  Now, that’s a sport for people like me.  I’ll never forget the little guy that showed me how to bank a shot, and actually plan where the cue ball would be after my shot.  That opened up new vistas in the noble sport of billiards for me, full of plane geometry.  The angles were beautiful to me; I could see them, almost as if they were holographic projections.  I assume that I was blessed with excellent eye-hand coordination.  That serves me well in both pool, and piano playing.

I was especially terrible at basketball.  It moves way too fast for me to process the plays.  I was driven to basketball, however.  Most of my friends played basketball.  I even, in my senior year in high school, went out for the basketball team.  I wasn’t even on the second team; my skills were reserved for one or two games, when we were either so far ahead I couldn’t hurt my team, or when we were so far behind it didn’t matter.  What drew me to basketball was shooting the ball.  If I didn’t have to dribble, and I didn’t have to put up with a defense, I really could shoot well.  I was the HORSE champion of Jesup, Iowa, for at least one short period of time.

It occurred to me, in my performances and in my teaching of piano, that pool and shooting basketballs and playing the piano have several things in common.  They all use geometry, they all require eye-hand coordination, and they all use rebound.  All are athletic in their use of efficient motion, controlled musculature, and the ability to be “in the zone”.  I use the athletic concepts of rebound, pivot and the geometric concept of angles in my playing and teaching of the piano.  All are indispensible.  I find myself teaching my students that the real problems in piano playing are not the notes and rhythms at all, but the balanced, aligned and free movements of their playing apparatus IN BETWEEN THE NOTES.  Every time I begin the process of communicating these concepts, I meet a blank stare.  Students think it IS about the notes, about their fingers, about those keys that they strike, one at a time, sequentially.  I do my best to convey that what they are thinking of is typing.

Ergonomics, the science of efficient motion is related equally to geometry, pool and piano playing.  I find that when I can teach my students how to move… what it feels like when they are balanced and relaxed in motion, and aligned properly upon landing, they begin to excel at playing.  The last concept that occurs to most students is that any journey has both a beginning and an end.  When they work with the concept of efficient movement at the piano, most students are fixated solely on their “landing spot”.  Unfortunately, this leaves a few holes in their movement process.  “First”, I say, “you have to know exactly where you’re coming from; then, you have to know the route to get where you’re going.  Find the landing spot with your eyes, before you begin any motion; then simply aim and bounce to your location!”  I have found that those who are trying to find their destination while they are moving stiffen and miss.

Two vignettes from my family are appropriate, somehow, to this whole discussion.  The first was when my dad and I were tossing a baseball around.  I went across the street to the school grounds, and my dad stayed in our yard.  He was trying to help me refine my catching abilities, I think.  As he threw the ball higher and higher, I got more and more afraid.  The last time, he threw the ball as high as he could… pop fly!  I like to think that the ball got lost in the sunlight.  But, actually I made The Big Mistake!  Trembling, wishing the ball would never fall, I stared at my glove.  The ball came down directly on my forehead.  You could see the indentations of the baseball’s seams on my forehead for a week.  Keep you eye on the ball, Rory, and keep your eye on the piano, where you intend to leap in virtuosic brilliance.  The baseball seams helped me with that.

The second vignette has to do with my poor mom getting lost on her trip to Minneapolis from small-town Iowa.  When I first moved to Minneapolis, I wrote out detailed direction to my house.  They worked for twelve years, until the Minnesota DOT tore up most of the highways that my mom was used to.  Due to poor signage, and the construction mess, mom ended up lost.  She called, and the first thing out of her mouth was, “I think I’m in Minneapolis, but I got lost.  How do I get to your house?”  “Where are you,” I asked.  That didn’t go over very well, since she was lost.  I tried to explain to her that I couldn’t tell her how to get here if I didn’t know where she was.  I guess she was too flustered to care about MY problem.  She finally found her way to a convenience store, and I talked to the manager.  When I found out where the store was, I knew what route to give.  My family got here, finally, in one piece, just a little the worse for wear.

This last story has been important in my teaching, and has made lots of sense to my students.  I usually don’t tell them that the “star” of the story is my mother (once in awhile, just for fun, though); but the story itself leaves an impression.  They get it!  Without considering their location on the keyboard, they can’t get proper bearings to get where they’re going. 

By the way, mom… the highway construction is done.  It’s safe to come back!

My Compliments

I have a difficult time receiving compliments.  Maybe I’m not the only one who has that as a personality flaw, but it does adversely affect those who are performers.  It’s not really a “humility thing”; I fully embrace my need for approval.  It’s at the moment of the compliment, that I have no idea how to respond. 

As performers, we a taught to bow; the lucky among us are actually taught how to bow.  We are told by our teachers that a simple "Thank You" is the proper phrase when, in a receiving line, we are told how well we did, how much the person enjoyed our playing, etc. etc. etc.  Of course, I can do those things.  But it feels so awkward, and artificial.  I often feel the urge to quickly leave.  Too often, I hear myself transform the compliment of my playing into a comment about the greatness of the piece, or of the composer.

I think the source of my feelings of discomfort is my college undergraduate years as a piano performance major.  I started school with a bang, went through a terrible second year, and found a way out of a slump the likes of which would have been nightmares for Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds.  But first, some background…

By ninth grade, I already knew what my career was going to be.  I loved practicing the piano.  I asked my piano teacher what kind of job I could get that would allow me to practice for hours during the day.  She replied that being an independent piano teacher, as she was, would not be the route to go; she told me that university professors not only were able to practice a great deal, but also were expected to practice and perform.  I wasn’t sure about the performing part, but since I would be guaranteed practice time… even paid for it (!), I knew definitively what my career would be.

Since I am born to naïveté, I had decided that during my first two years in college, I would be the best student pianist in the music department.  Quite a first goal, but it pales before my second goal:  I was determined to outplay the entire faculty by my graduation.  I knew that fours hours of practice per day would get me there.  And, I fulfilled my part.  I was at work at 6:00 a.m. in the food service 6 days a week, went to class, practiced two hours in the afternoon, and two hours after supper.  I practiced on the weekends, and sometimes hid in the music building around 11:00 p.m., so I could practice in the auditorium on the Steinway concert grand after the building closed.  My freshman year was great, and I was simply in heaven.

Unfortunately, in my sophomore year, I never had a successful performance.  I crashed every time.  We had studio performance classes, weekly seminars for all piano majors (in “my” auditorium!), and Recital Hour once each week; music majors were required to perform several times each semester, so my failures were there, for all of music-majorhood to witness!  Many students, in a situation like that, would have changed their major; but not me. 

I can’t really remember what was said, or who said it; but I realized that my problem was the way I thought about the whole matter of performing.  My focus was on ME.  What did they think of ME?  Did my peers think I was ever going to be a performer?  I realized that the focus was the problem.  I developed a little mind-game that helped.  I refocused… on the music!  I imagined that I had invited just a couple of my friends, into my practice room; that I had become excited about a piano piece that I LOVED, and I just wanted them to hear the greatest piece ever composed.  Sometimes, I would even focus on certain things about this piece that gave me “goose bumps”; those were the places that I especially wanted my friends to hear.  It was a sharing thing.  I thought only about the music, and… that whole change of focus revitalized my ability to perform.  My junior and senior years were glorious.  I had chances to play with orchestras twice, performed in small ensembles, got into a jazz band, and went on tour with the college orchestra…

I’ve often wondered if my discomfort at well-intended compliments had to do with avoiding a “jinx”.  I was determined that nothing would put me back on the ego track that led to failure.  I’ve not had a bad performance experience since I changed my attitude.  But, back to a point I’d like to make about compliments; I can still remember the time that a compliment touched me, heart and soul. 

I am a big fan of “trial performances”.  When I would get near to a recital date, I liked to arrange for small groups of people to hear me play brief sections of that recital.  I often arranged several small groups for each recital portion.  These informal performances were usually held in my studio.  This is the way that I gained total focus; they reinforced my mental game… “Come here, I’ve got this wonderful piece that I’d like to share with you”.

On this occasion, I was getting ready for a recital that included Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.  This is a massive, thirty-minute work, originally written for the piano (although perhaps better known as an orchestra piece).  I invited a friend, who was also an adult student of mine.  She taught in the Foreign Language department at the university; she came to my studio to assist me with my “trial performances”, and after chatting about Mussorgsky, and composing of the Pictures, and some discussion about how I prepared my interpretation of the piece, I launched into the first Promenade.  The piece is very easy to get lost in, and I was aware of nothing else for the next thirty minutes.

When I finished, I turned to get her comments; she had been seated behind me, and slightly to the right, where she could see and hear everything.  I looked at her, and she was weeping.  That might be one of the most precious moments of my life.  No words, and no reason for me to respond verbally.  We just shared the moment.  Applause is nice, but it’s formal.  Tears are simply genuine, and they validated for me the musical focus that I chose as a college junior.

Black Forest Curve Signs

I’m pretty sure, looking back on over sixty years, that Thoreau was thinking of me when he mused that some people“…hear a different drummer”.  I do not warm up to regimentation, shall we say.  It is, then, no wonder that I did not love being in the U.S. Army.  I was very lucky, in several ways during this part of my life. 

I was in the Signal Corps, and worked in a CommCenter.  The walls were thick, the doors were extremely secure, and the droves of officers on my base were not even allowed into my workplace.  We were left alone, to do our jobs, without those nasty formations, kitchen duties, or even PE tests. 

And, I was stationed in Germany; I tell people that I “fought the battle of Stuttgart”.  It was such a lucky place for me to land, and I was blessed to take full advantage of being in Europe.  I had plenty of time and opportunity to travel throughout West Germany; due to the number of high-ranking officers on my base, I was even required to live off-base.  I lived in a small German town, 14 kilometers inside the fabled Black Forest!  Thank you, U.S. Army!  I really mean it.

One of the eventualities of living that far off base, and working from 3:00 pm to 11:00 pm, was that I had to drive through the Black Forest late at night.  In the dark.  With very curvy roads.  My road, I discovered, had no center-line.  Neither did it have the solid, painted lines on the sides of the road, the ones that define the outline of the road, and the shoulders.  My worst discovery was that this road, as charming as it was in the daytime, had NO CURVE SIGNS.

I had never realized how much help curve signs were; they alert you, and let you know which direction you will be turning.  They mean the difference between driving on the road, and plowing through the ditch!  Ultimately, I had to create my own “curve signs”, mental landmarks that would alert me to particularly auspicious events along my chosen path.  It took awhile to develop my landmarks, and in the meantime, I had to drive very slowly.  Add a little fog to this scenario, and anyone would soon learn patience.

Years later, it occurred to me quite clearly, when practicing a Chopin Ballade, that all my technical problems derived from the lack of curve signs in the music.  What we most often see are notes.  But, notes don’t tell the whole story when we are playing a Chopin Ballade.  Chopin's music can be quite physical, and unless the performer understands the physicality, they are lost, plowing through metaphorical, musical ditches.  I decided to develop my own curve signs for my Ballade.  I decided to practice patience.  When I broke tempo in a series of “tempo hiccups”, I forced myself to slow down.  I watched for curve signs.  I prevailed.

Building my own curve signs has become a regular part of my study with any new piece.  It’s exciting, because, music, more than any road in the Black Forest, can have surprising curves, dips, bumps, with virtually no warning.  With the proper respect, I can avoid most of the ditches.

Fingers Dancing

I think I was born to be a late bloomer.  I have little doubt that I was late, even in the "sport" of learning to walk.  Physical aptitude doesn't seem to be my thing!  Except, of course, for playing the piano.  I have absolutely no idea where this ability came from.  I did have a brief encounter with the accordion when I was quite young.  A test I took said I had musical aptitude; my parents thought the test results were probably a “come-on” for the expense of the classes.  I did love my little red accordion, but abandoned it when we moved.

My piano career started quite casually, when my mom asked me if I wanted to take some money I had saved, and buy a piano.  I was in sixth grade, about four or five years later than any of my peers had become chained to a piano bench.  I actually started lessons before I had a piano; I practiced at a local church.  I think it must be quite rare to have a set of abilities that make an avocation easy for a person; but, piano!!?  To learn to read music, beyond merely reading notes, requires a natural ability for foreign language, for decoding.  To learn to associate those symbols with complex movements at the piano requires other, high-level brain activity.  And, the high degree of fine motor coordination required might be daunting to a young boy, much less one that always knew he was quite uncoordinated.

It wasn’t until years later that I learned I had completed a series of piano method books usually taking 6-8 years, in one year flat.  I know I had no finesse, or real musical understanding, but I sure learned to process notes, rhythms, and flying piano keys.  It’s one of many blessings that we humans get; something that comes naturally, something we didn’t have to work at, or earn.  I have nothing else that has ever been that easy for me.  And to this day, I consider myself “just a piano player”.  Everything else I do, I’m just acting!