A Drop of Kerosene in Your Glass of Milk

Yesterday I was witness to something of a musical miracle.  OK, maybe that is overstating, but at least we could fairly call it an impressive musical phenomenon.  This phenomenon is otherwise know as a Seventh Grade Middle School Choir.  I am the piano accompanist for this choir, and I have known, and worked with, the director for over 16 years.

Middle School Choirs are not necessarily the ensemble of choice for the concert-going public.  Their voices are mostly immature, and the boys range from soprano to baritone, with some forcing an almost frog-like sound due to some misplaced social requirement.  But Middle School Choirs may be the platform for the shaping of the future concert-going public, so don’t be too hasty in judging!

The beginning of this rehearsal was absolutely terrible.  The director was not able to get a reasonable reading of a selection the choir had been learning for over a month.  The altos seemed to want to join the sopranos in singing the melody, but down an octave.  They had been well-rehearsed, and they knew their part.  The problem was that the room was in actual chaos.  A casual observer might have wondered why the choir director couldn’t manage his classroom.  

The facts are this:  according to a school system, a choir is a class.  But musicians know this to be an over-simplification.  A choir is more like a team.  No one expects a football team to act like a class.  It is much more homogeneous than any math or science class.  In those classes, the teacher speaks, give illustrations or descriptions, lectures, and the students are free to pay attention, ask questions, answer questions, or… tune out.  In a choir, the class is front and center.  The action and the activity are vested in the students themselves.  Those that choose to not participate are not benign, they actually inhibit the progress of the whole.

It would be hard to imagine a basketball forward simply not paying attention, or a guard not closely monitoring the activity on the court.  It would be harder, still, to imagine the coach not immediately “benching” such a drag on the team effort.

If we think of the choir as a team in every respect, we can easily understand the actions taken by our choir director.  One singer had decided to not participate.  Not only that, she decided to distract others by engaging in conversation during parts of the rehearsal.  When she was asked to remove herself from the group, to sit in the back, she found it necessary to disrupt the room even further.  From this single misbehavior, several other students became disruptive.  

My focus was on not the disruptive students, but those that were there to make a choir.  Singing is fun, but these students had learned the magic that can be created when people sing together.  A choir is one of those entities that we say “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”  But choirs are not easy for children.  Choirs are especially difficult for American children.  Most of us have grown up with the idea of personal freedom, liberty… our rights as individuals.

A choir cannot exist with groups, or individuals.  You might wonder “how many individuals it would take to ruin a choir?”  My question to you would be “how many drops of kerosene would be too many in your glass of milk?”  In order to benefit from the musical magic that occurs with a choir, we all have to give up our ideas, our rights, and we have to form a unit led by a truly benevolent dictator.  We have to form a homogenous entity.  A choir has nothing to do with democracy, and it certainly cannot exist with its parts in defiance of the one who leads.

I believe the students in this Middle School choir have come to know this, at least on some subliminal level.  Their faces showed their dismay when the intangible was being stolen from them.  The director had to, one by one, have the disruptive girls removed.  They probably did not want to be in the choir, and they certainly had no understanding of their place on any team.  It is the failing of the school system that places students in classes that they are not able to manage.  Forcing these students into an ensemble that is team-oriented, team-dependent is a travesty.

But… yesterday when the disruptive girls were finally “benched”, the Middle School Choir sang.  They smiled, and they lifted their voices and the made music.  Each and every one willingly gave up their individuality for something that most people never experience.  A unit, a team that is focused on achieving together.  That was my musical miracle for yesterday.

Boxes! We Don’t Need No Stinking Boxes!

I sometimes get tired of hearing about the delights of “thinking outside the box.”  This probably has to do with the fact that I have trouble thinking inside boxes.  If I see a box, I run the other way.  For any given activity, I would rather invent my own method than read the directions, or get advice as to how other people have proceeded.  Maybe I’m just sensitive about being odd!

I noticed this sensitivity creeping up to the surface the other day as I was clearing leaves from my lawn.  We have just finished the first stage of the landscaping of our front yard.  The wonderful trees that we planted, four altogether, shade the lawn so efficiently that any attempt to grow grass has ended in calamitous failure.  We had a retaining wall built along the sidewalk, and the lawn filled in with black dirt and wood chips.  In the spring we will have lots of new plants installed, and the grass can just take a flying leap off a short pier!

However… as you know, with every solution come new problems.  The multifold dead leaves that drop every day are now lying on a bed of mulch.  You can’t rake them up because the mulch would dislodge, too.  I decided to try the leaf blower.  Huge success!  The leaves blow away and the mulch, much heavier, stays put.

In Minneapolis we’re now using the biodegradable leaf bags.  They are really nothing but huge, heavy grocery bags made of brown paper.  They stand up a little better than plastic bags, but they sag, especially when you have a bunch of leaves you want to drop in.  Dropping leaves seems to offend my OCD nature.  Luckily some “out of the box” mind invented a leaf funnel made of cardboard.  It inserts into the bag, helping said bag to stand rigidly.  The funnel part allows the leaves to flow down, where they can be packed into the bag.

I blew the leaves out onto the sidewalk, and proceeded to gather them up with a leaf rake and a free hand.  The rake is wide, and gathers up lots of leaves, but it was too wide for the funnel.  The leaves continued to drop around the bag, back onto the sidewalk.  Now understand, the sidewalk was an intermediary destination, and I had just a wee bit of trouble allowing them to fall back onto the sidewalk after I picked them up the first time.  Now is where the story gets interesting…

I went to my shed and got out my snow shovel.  The snow shovel gobbled up a huge pile of leaves, and by turning it to the side, I was able to get the leaves into the funnel with no spillage!  The shovel held more leaves than the rake, it scooped them up efficiently from the sidewalk, and my problem birthed a bouncing new baby solution.  Yea!

Now, I know there were probably neighbors on both sides of the street, peering out from behind curtains, looking at the strange piano teacher, shoveling leaves.  But, they’re really the same people that have seen me leaf-blow the first light layers of snow from my walk.  Who was it that said to use the “right tool for the job?”  He probably wasn’t thinking of me.

I’m sure I’m not the first, or the only, person to shovel leaves.  I really don’t care because I solved my problem in the most efficient manner I could imagine.  It made the mundane job of removing leaves intellectually stimulating, and satisfying to the inner efficiency-expert in me.

This, I told myself, is the essence of practicing the piano.  Yes!  Find a problem.  Determine the nature of the problem.  Find a tool that addresses that problem directly.  This eliminates the mindless repetition that many believe is piano practice.  If that were true I could understand those that don’t like to practice.  I wouldn’t either.  But defining a problem, finding a solution, and giggling at the amazing outcome… that is compelling!

I try to teach my students, in every lesson, to think of practice as an Emergency Room experience.  Assess and diagnose.  Practice TRIAGE.  Always do first-things first.  The piano equivalent of “opening the airways, stanching the flow of blood.”  When they learn to think and plan, set goals and take direct action, they start to play music.  That, of course if good, because if they came to me merely playing notes, I would be bored silly!  Practicing is nothing but defining problems and finding elegant solutions.