Ear Worm

Anyone that has been around me for any length of time knows that I am always either humming or beating a rhythm on various and sundry body parts.  This latter only is a problem when the body happens to be someone else’s body.  I’ve often told my wife that she makes a wonderful percussion ensemble!  I just about always have music happening in my mind.  This has even caused discord when I have simultaneously heard music playing through speakers when other music was playing in my mind.  OK… I’ll admit to a certain degree of "weirdicity".

Recently, one such earworm has boiled over into a compulsion to create.  The Middle School choir that I accompany twice a week is preparing an arrangement of the spiritual, Joshua ‘Fit the Battle of Jericho; as I drive back to my studio each Monday and Wednesday, I have been singing the tune for myself; after a few sessions of this, I have begun improvising variations to the tune, the words to the extent that I have a whole arrangement tucked up in my head.  I hear soloists, back-up singers, and of course, a trumpet.

Although not an everyday experience, I have done this before.  I wrote one piece as I was driving from central Iowa to Chicago.  When I arrived at my uncle and aunt’s apartment, I clamored for scratch paper, so I could write down the basics; I knew if I didn’t I would forget the whole thing.  And, then there is the choral piece I wrote while mowing the lawn.  At one time I would have said these incidents were a mystery to me; I’ve now decided that it really has to do with the war & peace between the “right: and “left” brains.  When I am forced into a left-brain mode, my right brain fights for supremacy.  It seems to feel the pressure of the back burner, and if ignored, it finds a way to disrupt meals, sleep and any waking moment… until it gets the attention and control that it seems to require.

Before I explain further, I have to say that I thank up to a hundred thousand hours of piano practice for the fact that I can use both a right and left-brain.  I believe I was born mostly right-brained.  The right brain is the intuitive, creative part of the human mind.  The unfortunate fact is that discipline is lodged in the left-brain.  If both spheres are not developed, even superior creativity might never come to fruition.  In his wonderful book, With Your Own Two Hands, Seymour Bernstein discusses how the act of practicing the piano changes a person.  The creativity of a dominant left-brained person can be unleashed through hours of good piano practice.  For me, my unruly right-dominant brain was plenty creative and imaginative; what I needed was the logical and disciplined side that was mostly dormant.  Bernstein makes a very interesting case for the amazing results of piano practice.  I quite agree.  I have learned to accomplish things that those who knew me in my tender years never would have imagined for me.

I am eternally grateful for the activation of my left side.  When pressed, I can be quite logical; I have learned discipline, although it often seems totally bland, robotic and unimaginative.  When I need it, I can call it up.  It’s just that my right brain wants to stay in charge, with assistance from the left.  That, unfortunately, is not always possible.  Since September I have been forced into allowing my left-brain to dominate too often.  Piano teachers MUST be organized.  Getting a school year launched successfully means organized planning, and thinking ahead well into the future.  It requires familiarity with deadlines & schedules.  And we have to command those traits well enough to teach our protégés.  I have been busy planning repertoire, recitals and contest engagements for most of my students, as well as ushering several students through the necessary, but often boring task of studying for music theory exams.

Usually when I am overwhelmed by left-brain requirements, I satisfy my right brain by practicing, and playing the piano.  When a “brain emergency occurs”, the right brain has a tendency to emulate a protestors mugging for the CNN cameras.  This is one of those times.  I have been busy scheduling the timeslots for the Junior Festival, sponsored by our local club of the National Federation of Music Clubs.  Each student gets scheduled for a specific time to perform two pieces that will be critiqued by a judge.  This is a very positive experience for the student, as they take an opportunity to challenge themselves to perfection… to reach in to their knowledge and musical sensibilities to play beautifully for another human being.  This takes great focus and poise, and is not something that most children experience regularly in the 21^st Century. 

It might seem like creating a schedule for this event would not be too taxing to someone with advanced degrees; unless you consider that there are multiple rooms, with students performing on multiple levels of difficulty.  Also, the times of siblings and carpool members have to match closely.  And then, there are the requests that some students need to perform in the morning while others need the afternoon.  One mother still thinks that her request to carpool her two sons, while giving one a morning time and the other an afternoon, is completely reasonable.  The schedule is further complicated for those really wonderful students who play more than one instrument, or enter more than one event for that day.  It is like a giant, human jigsaw puzzle.  The schedule required every cell of my left-brain.

I have to say that even though this is a demand of our more logical natures, and it seems that an objective way to accomplish the task would be possible, I felt my right brain protesting.  I was tempted to look back at the way I did it last year.  You could save time, I said to myself.  And yet, I couldn’t do more than open the 2010 spreadsheet.  It looked so foreign that I closed it, and decided that I was certainly more intelligent in 2011, and I would just invent a better way.  I think I moved through the various permutations of creating this schedule in the most right brained, intuitive and creative way possible.  I’ll never be able to write down the process, just as I find it impossible to write down a recipe for making jambalaya.

But the real triumph of the right brain is in the way that it asserts the creativity of a full arrangement of Joshua ‘Fit the Battle of Jericho.  I will create this arrangement.  It will be a real, tangible creation; and it will have been created to spite the left-brain, in all of its presumption.  I can hardly wait.

“What’s He Like Today?”

I can distinctly remember the awe that I felt when I first realized that my grad school piano teacher was practicing at 11:00 pm.  I learned, after inquiries, that he worked from 6:00 to midnight frequently, after teaching all afternoon.  He was a consummate artist that had set about recording all of Alexander Scriabin’s piano works, including the mystical “Prometheus:  Poem of Fire”.  I was proud to attend a historical performance, with my teacher at the piano.  This is the first and only realization of Scriabin’s fantastic conception.  See http://www.lowellcross.com/artmusic/prometheus/

My memories of, and respect for, this man, as well as my undergraduate teachers, pose an impossible model for me.  There was to be no easy answer, no short cut, and no prescription for my becoming an effective piano teacher.  Like most of the things I have learned to do, I had to make it up as I went along; I couldn’t be James Avery.

I have never known exactly how my students view me; I have had glimpses over the years.  I remember two students passing… one just finishing a lesson, the other ready to begin.  “What kind of mood is he in today?”  That was a shock.  Mood?  Do I have a mood that affects a lesson?  Does this mean that sometimes I’m grouchy at my students?  I didn’t think so; I’ve never quite found out.  I’ve usually had good relationships with students, and I think they’ve always felt comfortable in my studio.  I don’t remember wondering if James Avery or John Holstad were in good or bad moods.

Recently I’ve been working very hard with an 11 year-old boy; he has inherent talent, an obvious love of the piano, and a developing prowess for performance.  He has had the luxury of having his mom as a practice partner since he began lessons.  She has been his discipline, and now it is time for him to take the lead.  The problem is, he is having a hard time doing that.  I work during his lessons to focus him on what needs to be done on each piece, in a broad sense; he seems to understand the scope of the work that needs to be accomplished.  I ask him to become more aggressive in his approach to conquering his music, rather than waiting for “further instructions”.  All the while, I feel I have to remind him of his abilities, his accomplishments, and the fact that I recognize all the good things he has done.  How do we teach initiative, self-reliance, or the strong desire to achieve?  I told him yesterday that I get tired when I feel that I am pushing him up hill. 

Then I had a brilliant idea.  “Stick around for a minute at the end of your lesson today; ask the next student what I’m like during his lessons.”  “Well,” he said; “you’re probably just like you are with me.”  I told him that I was a totally DIFFERENT teacher with each student.  His face showed surprise, or maybe confusion.  When he probed the next “victim” for Wednesday, he got quite an earful!  “Rory gets quite agitated sometimes; he will sometimes yell out, ‘YES!’ or more often, ‘No, No, No!  You’re killing me’!  I’ve seen him jump up in the air, pace around the piano bench, get down on his knees and BEG me to do it again… but with my brain engaged this time!” 

“Really??” said the younger student.  I thought maybe he was confused, and my “brilliant idea” was falling flat.  Then the older student saved the whole thing; “He only does that when he thinks you’re getting better, and he only does that when he thinks you’re capable of more.”  Oh, yeah!  How did he know my whole teaching philosophy?  I’m much more calm with those students that try hard, but just aren’t ready to achieve.  But, when they are moving, changing, evolving, becoming… I become, shall we say, vociferous!?

Lest you begin to think I am that “warm and fuzzy” piano teacher, I have to share my Memory of the Year.  I allow one major reminiscence each year to myself; I would rather focus on what’s coming, but this has become a tradition in my own mind; so, here goes…

I am remembering Sophie (name changed to protect the not-so-innocent), a married graduate student.  She had studied at a different university for her undergraduate degree; Sophie never missed a chance to tell me how much she adored her undergraduate teacher, how well they got along, and how much progress she had made studying with him.  In my mind, I conjured up this amazing god-like pedagogue, somehow thrust into the bowels of a Louisiana university… a teacher with whom I could never compare.  OK, so I’ll just do my best!  I have always required my graduate students to work from memory in each lesson.  I do not think I need to Master of Music candidates reading piano repertoire for me.  At first, Sophie seemed to come well prepared, even if the quantity of work seemed to be less than I expected.  She was fairly flexible during lessons, and was able to try new things, although she LOVED to argue a point.  {Psst, Sophie!  I LIKE that, so you’re not bothering me.} Within 3 months, after becoming fairly comfortable in our relationship, Sophie started to make excuses about her lack of memory work.  I let it slide a time or two, but soon I tired of hearing “husband excuses”.  So… I called her into my studio for a “sit-down”.

“Sophie, we’re going to try another kind of schedule for your lessons.  From now on, I will make your assignment, you will follow through, memorize your music, and when that has been accomplished, you call me, and we’ll schedule a lesson for you.”  Well, I tell you, Sophie had not used up all of her ‘surprise” at that point in her life.  I think she was almost relieved that she could control the situation.  “But wait, I’m not done”, I told her.  “Every day, twice a day, you will call me here in my studio.  In the morning, you will tell me what your practice goals are for today.  By 4:30, you will call again, and tell me what you’ve accomplished.  If you have specific problems or questions on your music, you can make an appointment at any time.”  I told her that I didn’t want to lose track, even for a day, of how she was doing.  If I were an artist, I could have painted a portrait of shock that day.

It worked!  Months later we went back to regular lessons; Sophie won the Concerto Contest, and played Beethoven’s 4^th Piano Concerto with the University-Civic Symphony that year, and her graduate recital made me proud.  She became an independent piano teacher, first in northern Arkansas, and later in Florida.  I haven’t heard from her for a long time, and I’m sure that she doesn’t remember me as warm & fuzzy.  But, I think I did my job well with her.

On Silence

{Reprinted from an earlier posting elsewhere in the blogosphere}

“Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.” ~Jean Arp

“Everybody should have his personal sounds to listen for - sounds that will make him exhilarated and alive or quite and calm.... One of the greatest sounds of them all - and to me it is a sound - is utter, complete silence.” ~Andre Kostelanetz

“Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not to be ironic, but Thursday night my mind wandered of to the concept of SILENCE. I was waiting in my assigned place, for the prescribed time for me to go to the piano to accompany the Northeast Middle School choir on their portion of the concert. Preceding the choir was the Beginning Band.

It would be easy for the reader to assume that a Middle School band might make one wish for silence, but that would be a false assumption, I assure you. My daughters are former denizens of Middle School bands, and some of my old friends (and current friends) direct Middle School bands.

The truth is that the time, waiting for my portion of the concert, was the first opportunity to think back on something the Pastor said during Ash Wednesday service... about silence. In my experience, silence in church scares people. It shouldn’t, and indeed, we plan silence into the service; have you noticed that planned silence needs a good introduction… an announcement, to legitimize it? Even then, the length of the silence is often truncated, to avoid the discomfort that it causes. Silence must be filled, we too often think!

We fill our grocery stores and elevators with sound (music); movies blare music to cover a lack of constant dialogue; people we know become nervous if we sit in silence. Is it about control? If we don’t hear words spill from someone, we don’t know what they’re thinking? And then, we can’t CHANGE what they’re thinking? Is it about loneliness, and the sounds of voices calm us?

I have to confess that, in my teaching, the silent students are the most challenging. I want to know how they are reacting, absorbing, interpreting; I rely on musical actions and verbal reactions. If I sense a lack of audible engagement, I tend to “fill in” the silence with more “help”; this is undoubtedly NOT helpful. Talking too much in our teaching is indeed, a sin!

I fully understand the function of silence in music; it is completely necessary. Rests, in all of their rhythmic vividness, are the punctuation, the spice, of music. In accompaniment, and in improvisation, less is more; silence… a reticence to fill in the void with sound, is laudable.

Composer John Cage, a true revolutionary in 20th century music, was fascinated by the relationship of music to sound, and sound to noise. He composed a piece entitled 4:33 (four minutes and thirty three seconds). The composition is for any sound medium. The performer is directed to come out on stage, approach his/her seat, and prepare to play… for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. The performer never does play; in one way, it is theatre. In another, it is an experiment. The joy, for Cage, was that the audience invariably fills in the silence; with rustling, fidgeting, coughing, murmurs, etc. That, for Cage, was the music.

In 1974, while in graduate school, I took classes in Transcendental Meditation. These were fascinating; there was the ubiquitous mantra that had to be repeated; this, I was told, should be done silently. One never repeats his mantra out loud. At first I was uncomfortable with the mantra; it seemed nigh unto superstitious that a word would have some, almost magical, significance. Ah! I was told, the mantra is not a word, and we don’t care about the word itself, but the aspects of the word. Sibilants, glottals… the sounds that are the mantra, when one considers it from different “angles”. The mantra was hypnotic, and cleared my mind of other things. For 20 glorious minutes, I could feel the tension dissipate; I would be award of sounds in the room, or movement, but my mind was somehow relieved of the commotion. When I would finish my meditation, I would feel very clear, energetic; somehow invigorated. I think I never would have made it through graduate school without this vehicle for removing the residue of sound/noise pollution from my body and mind.

I do not fear silence; I am alone with my thoughts at times, and I need that. My creative juices will not flow if I can’t have silence. And, like rests in music, giving shape and meaning to the music, the lack of sound, dialogue, conversation, make those things more meaningful when they are present.

On Nurturing Students

Last weekend two of my students shared a recital.  One is a high school junior, and he played the bulk of the program; a high school sophomore “assisted” with a nice set of pieces in the middle of the program.  Her role, besides the experience of performing a larger set of pieces than usual, was to give a little focus-time to her cohort.  They did marvelously!

I’ve thought about the recital quite a bit this week.  I try hard to give my students perspective when they accomplish something significant.  I think they look up to me, and my playing abilities, so when I tell them that I had never done such an extended performance until college, they are amazed.  And, I think, flattered.

I’ve also pondered the array of things that I am trying to teach my students.  They learn how to read music (a much greater task than learning to read notes!); they learn how to practice; learn how to listen and interpret a score, and how to memorize their music.  Finally, they learn how to perform.  None of these items naturally lead to the next.  They form a comprehensive curriculum to be mastered, and then integrated into a whole, a total musician.

I spent a whole day re-amazing myself that these two students have come so far on the path to musical magic in the age of short attention spans, digital devices and a demand for instant gratification.  These two students are not the only ones that are developing in such a positive manner.  How blessed I am to be able to hang out with superior people!

Actually, I think all of my own accomplishments are the result of luck, fate, or whatever it might be called.  So much came so easily to me.  Reading musical notation never posed a problem.  I had a teacher that assigned me mass quantities of music every week.  Virtually no polishing was done, and no finesse was expected.  Once a year I would perform one piece in her home, along with all of her other students.  I loved spending time at the piano, so inefficient as my “practicing” was, I absorbed a love for the piano, and the ability to read music easily.

Learning how to practice well, and how to perform came with some pain, and only small successes for a long time.  Memorizing was my curse.  I don’t think anyone ever attempted to help me with that.  Trial and error was my god!  In a large way, I think I was as much self-taught as I was tutored.  Even through multiple degrees in piano performance!  I think that the teacher I am is the result of being the best in my own teachers, and being what none of my teachers ever were… nurturers.  As a result, my students are stunningly better at being students that I ever was.

The Miracle of Singing Together

The chills were running up and down in the most predictable way; I just wanted to avoid melting onto the floor in a simpering, weeping puddle.  “Dona nobis pacem, pacem”.   The music was enveloping us; it almost sounded as if it were above us, and below us.  It surrounded us.  As a round, there would be no official ending to it; and I could see that no one wanted an ending.  It was taking on a life unto itself. “Dona nobis pacem, pacem”.  A beautiful sound from over one hundred college men.  Only a handful claimed to be singers, but it didn’t matter.  The singing was totally unself-conscious.  It was a revelation, and an important bonding for these young men, and for me.  I’ve not forgotten this experience, and I hope I never will.  But how did a piano-picker like me wind up in an auditorium with one hundred men I didn’t even know?  We were introduced by a common love.  We learned to know, respect and love each other through the one thing that we had in common… the love of music.  But, let me give you a little background.

I have always loved to practice the piano; well, let me rephrase that.  I’ve always loved to play the piano.  It was years before I really learned HOW to practice.  I enjoyed time at the piano, and by the laws of probability, I must have accomplished something, no matter how inefficient I might have been.

Of course I know, as a teacher, that I can’t count on my students to spend as much playing as I did, or still do.  Their practice needs to accomplish much in a short amount of time, so I work with them, offering the experience of my years.  I try to focus every student on the sound they are making, hoping and praying that this will lead them into a more eager and lengthy time at their pianos.

Practice is a lonely thing.  It is not for everyone, especially as students get to the “sociable” age of middle school.  Since I was never that sociable, and didn’t mind the loneliness, I became the prime example of a practice-room nerd.  That was my state of being when I entered college.  This is when I learned of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, a professional music fraternity for men in music.

Lord!  A whole room full of people like me?  Guys, yet (!) who valued music above almost everything else.  This was quite a discovery.  This was not a concept in my personal experience; I came from a small town high school, and a charitable description of my place in the school would be… “he’s a little different!”  I wanted to be in this group.  The only problem was that you had to be invited.  It took me two years to really get to know enough people for that to happen.  An organ major that I knew only casually nominated me; the organ teacher’s studio was adjacent to my piano teacher, so we had chatted occasionally, waiting for our lessons to begin.

It’s hard for me to describe my experience in this fraternity; suffice it to say that Phi Mu Alpha has left a deep impression on me… on my heart and mind.  When I was hired as an assistant professor of piano at Louisiana Tech University, one of the first things I checked out was the chapter of Phi Mu Alpha.  The chapter already had a faculty advisor, but I got to know this man through our collaboration.  He played the trumpet, and I had learned almost all of the concert trumpet literature as a hired accompanist in graduate school.  Mr. Cheatham had the most beautiful trumpet sound, and I loved working with him.  He invited me to be an assistant faculty advisor, although there was no real position like that.  I got to know the members of Mu Nu chapter, and have enjoyed, to this day, keeping in touch with some of my Brothers.

It took about ten years before I briefly became the official faculty advisor.  One of my first duties was to confer with, and report to the Province Governor.  He was a pleasant man, but almost totally disengaged from the real life of the ten chapters of the Province.  When I learned that he wanted to be replaced, that he had assumed that the Province Governor was a ceremonial position, I told him I was definitely interested.  It was still a thrill to be contacted by the national executive director, and offered the position.

When I was appointed to the position, my first thought was, “I now know what it would be like to be a two-year old boy, standing naked, out in the snow, and wondering how he got there!”  I know, TMI!  It was easy to read the job description; but job descriptions don’t give a right-brained practice room nerd a clear idea about how to proceed.  I have learned, however, that just about everything I can do well relates to what I have learned practicing the piano.  I set about my job as if beginning a new, grand concert work of Franz Liszt. 

In my travels around the Province, to visit the individual chapters and meet the leadership, noted quite a disparity in the size and activity levels of the ten chapters.  The most common thing I learned was that the chapters that were very active had rebuilt themselves from ashes, usually with the leadership of one committed collegian. The chapters that were languishing had, almost in every case, formerly been very active, and had fallen into disrepair upon the graduation of one very motivated person.  I knew that these chapters needed to meet each other… to learn from each other, and to be inspired by each other.

I found that there had been no Province meetings in the recent past.  The chapters were isolated, and rarely felt any real adult support, advice or leadership.  My first goal, then, was to get these chapters to all meet together; many of these Province meetings tend to be a gathering of two or three leaders from each chapter, touching base, and possibly making plans for inter-chapter activities.  I had a completely different idea.  Everyone!  The chapters that I had visited all seemed to have their life vested in just a few individuals.  I wanted a huge gathering so that these young men could see how large my fraternity is.

I, and several college students organized an inspiring conference.  I was confident that all would leave, having met and befriended fraternity members from nine other Louisiana colleges.  We had designed an organizational structure that would help the chapters to perpetuate their successes by training everyone, and including everyone in the work of each chapter.  It was all to be SO glorious.  Except, how could I get these guys to work together?  And then it struck me… they would have to act like musicians.  Instrumental ensembles take rehearsal, but everyone can sing. “Dona nobis pacem, pacem”.  So easy to teach; so easy to do.  It was worth a try.

Yes… I can still hear it, or is it that I can feel it?  It was warm, and beautiful, and I certainly felt like crying.  But, as I looked around, scores of young college men had beaten me to that.  This is why we all loved music.  Music is the perfect.  A blend of mind and heart.  Music brings diverse elements together; music is always greater than the sum of its parts.  As were we.

Flexibility

Teaching seems to demand flexibility in us.  Extreme flexibility; sometime it seems like super-human flexibility.  I’ve been teaching for some time now, and have survived… maybe even prevailed.  That extreme flexibility is still a challenge. 

Piano teachers are perhaps unique, in that we meet our “class” often on an individual basis.  It is we, the teachers, that have to meet our students… their personalities, their moods, their intellects… and lead them to something new.  Some days it seems as if the gears were almost stripped! 

I remember once being asked what ages I teach.  “My youngest is six, and my oldest eighty-two”, was the response.  What merely seems amusing to the questioner is actually the heart of my profession.  I don’t teach piano, I teach people.  And it’s not about how well I teach, but about how well my students learn.

Yesterday, the beginning week of my winter term, I taught a first lesson to a little girl, five years old.  She’s very bright, reads and speaks on the level of, perhaps, a second-grade student.  It was no trouble to engage this bright, young mind.  She was able to participate in, and lead her lesson, and I merely grabbed hold of my seat and enjoyed the ride. 

Part of the fun is in learning how to speak to each new student.  In pursuing this, I like to have each student read a few directions from their method book.  “Circle a character at the bottom of the page each time you play this song.”  CHARACTER!  A flawless reading from a five-year-old!  One doesn’t talk down to a child that is that impressive.  But good teachers always remember that, no matter how precocious, a kindergartener is a child, too.

I always like to watch for two things with a new student:  First, what are they like at the conclusion of the first lesson.  My little prodigy was calm, and engaged through the entire lesson; when she finished, she was “pumped”.  She could hardly focus on finding her shoes, and when she did, she was out the door, leaving her mom to wonder where she went.  The second thing I will watch for, next week, and in the ensuing weeks, will be how she approaches my studio.  I expect that she will run ahead of her mother, and bounce into my house.

Yesterday, I also taught a last lesson to another young lady.  I think she was more than ready to leave piano behind.  I think the two of us got along well, but piano brought her no joy.  She was an exacting girl, and could never handle the constant frustrations of learning to play the piano.  Piano practice can be brutal; it’s an almost endless succession of self-criticism, if done properly.  That is sometimes my “downfall”, because I teach my students how to practice, how to criticize their playing, and how to solve their practice problems.  For this girl, who almost always came well prepared for her lessons, the joy of conquering her mistakes was not enough to override her exasperation and frustration at constantly having to criticize herself.

I once told a parent that, for some students, I would be the worst teacher in the world.  He was taken aback at that; he had been one of my “cheerleaders”, referring me to countless other families.  A psychologist by profession, he was curious how I could be a “worst teacher” for anyone.  I explained to him that I was most interested in the PROCESS of practicing.  I work hardest in every lesson to help students analyze what is wrong when they are having difficulties.  We work to link a process of solution to every problem.  We work, tirelessly, on the process of practicing.

I told the psychologist that I believe that for most individuals the discovery that they have the power to overcome their problems is compelling.  Learning to practice is a discovery that we can control our destiny.  This, added to the ultimate thrill of making music, and expressing ones self, sums up the joy of playing the piano.  However, not everyone wants to invest the time in self-criticism, even if they know that they can overcome their problems.  I think that for certain students, realizing that they know how to practice, that they have been taught what to do, and how to approach their music, makes piano lessons a worse experience for them.  If they have decided that they don’t want to work that hard, they will begin to hate the thought of approaching the piano. 

I don’t always know exactly why a student finds no joy in playing the piano.  For me, it has always been a joy.  Maybe this is one of the lessons I have yet to learn.  I do know that it takes much energy, and much flexibility to teach both a FIRST lesson and a LAST lesson on the same day.

  

A Teaching Story

I had a church pastor that used to lace his sermons with stories.  They were wonderful because he told them to US, as personal revelations.  Not from notes prepared ahead of time, but from memory, from experience with other people.  Personal stories about real people are compelling.  I believe that’s because we worry that we might be alone in our experiences, and that no one could possibly understand.  Personal stories place us comfortably in society with other strugglers. 

  

I find the telling of stories to be indispensable to my teaching.  If I can make a point by way of a story, I find I have the complete attention of my student, immediately, when I say the words, “I have a story to tell you…” Of course, the stories have to have a point, and they can’t be overly long.  Even my pastor would, at the conclusion of his stories, say, “Now, what am I trying to say?”  He made his point, with the story as his vehicle.  So, let me tell you a story…

I just had a lesson with one of my middle school girls; she performed Midnight Escapade by Melody Bober for me at the end of her lesson.  I listened with great interest as she came to the final cadence; such mastery!  She released the keys and placed her hands in her lap, the way I have showed her; I sat there silently, with my head down just a little.  She was unprepared for that.  “What’s wrong, Rory?”  “I’m just a little sad”, I said.  “You know this is a Contest piece, don’t you.  Even though you said you didn’t want to do any competitive events this year, I assigned a Contest piece, just to see how you’d do.  Now, when I know that you would have done so well, I’m just sad.”  

She looked very surprised, but immediately began to explain that performing just made her too nervous to enter the MMTA Contest, or the NFMC Festival.  I suspected that her real concern was that she wouldn’t be ready, considering the amount of preparation she intended to invest, and that a lack of preparation would, indeed make her nervous.  When I told her that she would actually be ready two months before the event, she didn’t know how to react.  I sensed that she was thinking hard about this idea, so I told her a story.

 “Vladimir Horowitz was, until he died, the absolute KING of pianists.  I once went to a concert of his; he was 10 minutes late coming onto stage.  When the lights dimmed, at 4:10 on a Sunday afternoon, it still took a full minute for Horowitz to come on stage.  Before that moment, I had never, and have never since heard that kind of silence.  A packed auditorium, the “hero” of the day that late, and there was no sound!  The audience held him in that kind of reverence.”

At that moment, I had 100% of my student’s attention.  A middle school girl, ready to go to school to see her friends, and get on with her day; and yet, she moved not a muscle.  “You may be interested to know,” I said, “that Vladimir Horowitz was world famous, and quite rich from playing piano concerts.  Then he abruptly ‘retired’ from performing.  He said he had paralyzing stage fright.” 

She was stunned.  We discussed his long absence, his return to the stage, and the coping mechanisms that he invented for himself.  She was interested, but I hadn’t ‘zinged’ her yet.  I knew that often stories have a greater impact if we tell the stories on ourselves.  Our students don’t always think of us a “normal” people, who were once students, and wrestled ourselves with practicing and performing.

“I also have had to combat stage fright”, I told her.  I’m sure you've seen the computer emoticon that represents astonishment… with the wide open mouth and big eyes.  That is exactly what her mouth and eyes looked like.  At first I thought maybe she was astonished that I, her teacher, ever had stage fright.  On second thought, I decided that she was simply astonished that I had ever had to perform in recitals, contests and festivals.  So, I told her another story.

“I had the good fortune, for several summers, to attend a special Piano Institute at Amherst College in Massachusetts.  The Institute met there every summer, with a master teacher named Dorothy Taubman.  Mrs. Taubman had taught many concert pianists, and was known for her abilities to help a pianist’s technique.  The second summer I attended, along with about 300 professional pianists from all over the world, I was selected to play in a public “master class” with Mrs. Taubman.  I would have to play for her, in front of all those people.  That was possibly the SCARIEST audience I could have imagined; everyone in the concert hall would be an accomplished performer, and I was worried if I would be good enough.  After the performance, I would have a mini-lesson, right in front of those pianists.” 

My girl was intrigued.  What did I do?  HOW did I do?  I told her that I decided to do my job.  I practiced with focus.  I told her the thing that helped the most was what one of my teachers told me:  “Practice like you’re performing, and perform like you’re practicing”.  At that moment, I knew I had her; nothing was decided right then about what she would do with her Contest piece; but I know we’ll have a chance to discuss this properly over the next weeks.  Once again, a story made real communication possible.