Four weeks / lessons suggested four different areas of focus:  week one, LH alone; week two, RH alone and some hands together; week three, practice to start from anywhere, hands separately as well as hands together, with metronome; week four, get back to practicing to perform.

The first three weeks were meant to find anything that wasn’t absolutely perfect, anything where things might possibly fall apart.  I kept telling my students, “If I smile happily when you make a mistake it’s not because I am mean but because I am glad we found this snag at your lesson – and not at the competition!”  Most students had snags here and there, things they were not aware of, things they thought they had down just perfectly fine …

Next week will see some of the same work we did the week before the district auditions:  the major challenge for pianists is that we don’t get to take our instrument with us, we have to make do with whatever instrument we encounter at a competition / recital / audition.  To prepare for that, I ask my students to perform on the other piano, the one they don’t normally play.  It looks just like the one they normally play but it feels, plays, and sounds completely different which means they have to instantly adjust their touch in order to get the sound they want.  We may leave the bench too low, and not use the footstool which really cramps the smaller students.  They have to kind of crouch, and reach, and – do the kind of playing that when I see other students do it at competitions gives me the hives because it is just so unnatural and uncomfortable and unhealthy, but I explain to my students that this may be what they have to deal with and adjust to at a competition. Kind of like preparing for disaster and hoping that we will not need it.  (So far, we haven’t.)

We may review the videos I took at the district level.  They are interesting and revealing because I had the camera at the very back of the hall = some of the sounds disappeared before they reached the camera – even though the student, up on stage, was able to hear everything just fine.  But – for a performance – we must aim to project the sound to the very corners of the performance hall, not just the few feet around the piano.

For some of the students, it will be their last week of lessons with me.  I hope to make it particularly successful and fulfilling.

For instance:  last week, I judged the KMTA Music Progressions in Kansas City.  Over the course of five hours, I saw nine students who each had 30 minutes to show me what they knew:  two contrasting pieces (one memorized), music understanding and vocabulary, scales, chords, chord progressions, arpeggios, rhythm clapping, sight-playing; and, for the lower levels, more applied theory such as playing intervals and “sharped and flatted notes”, they also did their listening test with me.  As we were going down the list of things to do, I wrote comments on the pre-printed form of several pages, I checked off items on the list, giving appropriate points for each.  When a student didn’t do well on one of the items, I tried to write a little comment on why I only gave, say, 8 points out of 10 points possible, etc.  The event was well-organized, most students were well-prepared, some were not, one was a complete disaster.  A normal audition/judging situation.

When I finished, around 7:30 p.m., I was exhausted.  Not just tired.  Exhausted.  Wiped out.  Mark and I had planned to attend a concert (same location) after my judging duties were done - I had really been looking forward to that.  Now all I wanted to do was go home and crawl into bed.  I shared this with Mark, and my confusion about it:  I didn’t understand why I was so exhausted.  When I had 25 to 30 students in Manhattan, it wasn’t uncommon to be teaching for five hours, with only a short break here and there.  Yet at the end of a long teaching day, I was invigorated as much as I was tired.  So, why would judging feel so different?  We looked at a couple of different reasons:  the fact that the audition students are strangers, the time constraints, the having to assign points for accomplishments, the knowing that my written feedback on their performance pieces would carry a certain weight and that therefore I had to choose my words even more carefully than I normally do in a lesson (where I get the chance, if necessary, to clarify any remark or comment at the next lesson), etc and so on and so forth.  What made the biggest difference, though, in how I looked at the audition, was this:  Mark has experience in both teaching and judging martial arts.  As I was complaining about how exhausted I was, he suggested that the energy that the to-be-evaluated students bring into the room is different from the energy they bring to a lesson.  That different energy tends to sap yours.  This insight didn’t take the exhaustion away, but it felt good to be able to put these feelings into words, to be listened to and heard.

Sometimes when we talk about things, we don’t get anywhere.  Sometimes his feedback results in a new insight.  Sometimes, his feedback is brilliant, sometimes it’s – not.

Practicing, for me, is similar to these conversations:  I play something, with a more or less vague idea of where I want to go with this piece; I listen – to the sound, to my body -, I take mental notes of what I’d like to improve and how, then I play some more, listen, watch, and in the end I have made progress.  To an outsider it may look like I just played the same thing over and over, which would be true of course, but every repetition yielded subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, changes.  I listen, I pay attention, I use the feedback I receive from my ear, my brain, my body, my heart, to make necessary changes.  Sometimes I stray, it’s not often a straight road, but in the end, because I listened, I have made some kind of progress.  It’s what I call mindful practicing. 

Simone Weil, French philosopher and passionate teacher, once said (something to the effect) that if you study something and it seems that despite your efforts you do not make progress, you made progress nevertheless.  Every attempt, fruitful or not, to learn something results in growth.   I try to keep this in mind when I practice.  And it occasionally proves true – when, occasionally, things seemingly suddenly fall into place, after having stalled for a while.  They were fermenting, gelling under the surface.  So, while an individual practice session may not have been as successful as I would wish, it still did its part in the bigger scheme of things.  And that, to me, is efficient and effective practice. 

How does the average guitarist practice? In the years before I started getting serious about lessons, I played a lot — 6 to 8 hours a day for about 5 years. I learned a lot of songs, all by memorization, and I had to play them constantly to keep them in memory, so at least 2 hours of every day was wasted just running through the pieces. Through brute-force effort I eventually started to sound like I knew what I was doing. Fooled myself and most of the people around me, anyway. [...]

The problem was that I had no idea how to practice correctly. The saying “practice makes perfect” is inaccurate, as any music teacher will happily tell you. Perfect practice makes perfect. I’d been practicing sloppily, and had become very good at being sloppy.  [...]

Real musicianship is the result of studying and applying the theory, history, and performance of music. Many musicians also advocate studying the physics of sound and music, the construction of musical instruments, the mechanics the human hand and ear, and the psychology of performers and audiences. The average guitarist is no more aware of these sub-disciplines than your average laborador retriever. I sure wasn’t. I just wanted to play guitar. [...]

(R)eal musicians don’t practice by playing the piece over and over from beginning to end. They dissect every piece of music into tiny components and work on each one individually — every phrase, every note, every fingering, every transition, it’s all worked through, mechanically and musically, for countless hours. They play it slow, fast, quietly, loudly, even in different time signatures and beats. And they do daily drills: right- and left-hand finger exercises for building stamina and dexterity. Sound like a total pain? Actually, it’s not too bad at all. Takes a bit of getting used to, but once you start doing it right, your overall technique improves rapidly. And you’re no longer “capped” at a particular difficulty level, because you’re not exhausting yourself, and you know how to tackle complex technical passages. Oh, and one hour of that kind of practice is as good as a week of playing songs over and over. [...]