As a supporter of The Carter Center, I recently received a letter from President and Mrs. Carter.  Here is what they had to say:

To our donor friends,

Rosalynn and I are honored and humbled by the generosity of you and our other Carter Center donors. Because of your generosity, there are millions of people whose suffering has been alleviated, whose rights have been protected, and whose lives have improved.

At this moment our country is suffering an economic upheaval and, as usual, the poor and those with a small or no voice, will suffer the most. Because of your past generosity and our prudent financial management The Carter Center can absorb a short term donation downturn.  However, many of the charities and groups in your community may not be as blessed.

Rosalynn and I understand if you need to direct your usual Carter Center gift to other needs at this year end.  We are proud to have donors who care about their neighbors – whether next door or across an ocean, but we did want to be sure you had the latest information on what you’ve helped us accomplish during the past year and what we’ll continue to do in coming months.

We’ll be writing you again to let you know how that work is going and hope we will still be able to count on your continued involvement and generosity.  Until then, we wish the best for you and your family during the upcoming holiday season.

Your friends,

Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter

Today is November 9.  Throughout recent history, there have been four hugely important events, each on November 9, which shaped Germany and its history. 

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the Kristallnacht anti-Semitic pogroms.  Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, is often regarded as the starting point of the Holocaust.  Nazis ransacked Jewish homes and businesses and burned synagogues as police and firefighters looked on.  More than 90 Jewish people were murdered and about 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps on 9 and 10 November 1938.  Millions were killed by the Nazi regime, including about six million Jewish people. 

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I cannot imagine anyone who, looking back at this, does not recoil and ask, “How could this happen?  How could people allow this to happen?”  But then, I see some parallels in the way some people in this country are trying to vilify certain groups of people, and even our President-Elect, not because of what he says and does but based on rumors and assumptions – not too different from how Germans were told, some 70 years ago, that Jews were the bad guys and that Germany would be so much better off without them. 

In that context, I would like to offer a quote from Henrik Mandelbaum who survived Auschwitz:

“Ich bitte Euch um alles auf der Welt, lasst Euch von niemandem einreden, wen Ihr zu lieben und wen Ihr zu hassen habt.”

(rough translation: “I implore you, don’t let anyone tell you whom to love and whom to hate.”   ~  I would gratefully accept other/additional translations. )

Here we go again.

Last Saturday, October 18, two of my students attended the Fall Festival, an event organized by kcmta (Kansas City Music Teachers Association).  According to the kcmta website,

The Fall Festival requires the performance of one memorized piece of literature for an adjudicator. (Adult categories may use music.) Performances are open to the public. Each student will receive a written evaluation, rating and certificate. In addition, a student earns a ribbon and points toward a Fall Festival Award plaque engraved with his or her name and the year in which the award was received. A minimum of twelve points must be earned to receive a plaque.

Rating	Points	Ribbon
Highest Honors	4 points	Purple Ribbon
High Honors	3 points	Blue Ribbon
Honors	2 points	Red Ribbon
Honorable Mention	1 point	White Ribbon

Grace, one of the two beginning students to participate this year, is competitive.  Not that she doesn’t normally work hard, but knowing that there’s a ribbon or prize at stake makes her work even harder.  I will admit that, having recognized this trait in her, I make use of it.   In our preparations for the Fall Festival, I explained the points and ribbon and plaque system.   With my encouragement, she did the math:  if she gets 4 points, it’ll take her three years to get the plaque.  If she gets 3 points, it’ll take four years.  So.  We talked about what it would take to get 4 points:  everything in the score had to be played exactly as written – every staccato super crisp, balance between the hands clearly in favor of the melody which in this case was in the left hand, crescendo meant that every note was louder than the one before – not just so-so and leaving it to the listener’s imagination whether or not it was getting louder.  And so on and so forth.

She was motivated to get it just right.  She’d ask me to evaluate her playing, “Was this a four?” and I would answer, “Not really yet.  More like a 3.7 because your staccato was kind of but not really crisp.  Try again.”  And again, and again.  “Was this a four??”  – “I’d say 3.9 because there was this very tiny break in the melody.”  For once, we wanted more than mastery.  We wanted perfection.

With their parents’ help, and a lot of work on their own, both she and her brother John prepared for the Fall Festival.  We even went to the location to try out the piano and see about the bench, look around – which in the end didn’t do us much good because the performance room that was listed in the program was different from the room on the sign-up sheet.

As one of the teachers, I helped out in the “recording room” – filing critique sheets and ribbons into the teachers’ envelopes.  For Grace’s and John’s performance, I went to their performance room and listened.  Both did well, but neither was perfect:  Grace’s right hand was a bit too loud, and John, unfamiliar with the instrument, sat too far to the right and ended up playing his piece perfectly but an octave too high.

In the recording room, looking at the critique sheets of so many other students, I noticed that the grading system was not just from 1 to 4 points, but judges often added a minus or a plus.  Makes sense – there can be a huge gap between a 3 and a 4, and being able to modify, say, 3+ or 4- made it easier to bridge that gap. Had it been up to me to judge my students, I would have awarded them a 4- because they played almost perfectly, better than a 3 but not good enough for a 4.  After all, a 4 equals “highest honors” – presumably the highest grade possible.  Or so I thought.  Then I noticed that occasionally a judge would award a 4+  – apparently for an exceptional performance.  If we only had points, I’d be perfectly ok with awarding a 4+.  But getting 4 points equals a “Highest Honors” rating already.  How on earth can something be better than “highest honors”??

We seem to be reinventing the English language here.  High, higher, highest.  Awarding a 4+ would have to be “highest-er” than highest.

My concern, as usual, lies with what we are teaching our students:  both Grace and John received a 4 which at first surprised and then pleased them.  Of course a 4 is nicer than a 3, but the rating – highest honors – is not appropriate to their performance.  I had taught them to listen to themselves and learn to evaluate, very specifically, not just “yeah, that wasn’t bad” but “the staccato needs to be crisper” and such.  They had evaluated their own playing and they knew that it wasn’t perfect.  Definitely not highest honors – which, by definition, does not leave any room for improvement.

I trust that their parents who have high standards for themselves and their children will somehow make sense out of this for Grace and John.

For me – I am disappointed.

Political posting.

http://www.n-tv.de/1023685.html

When I closed my Manhattan piano studio in May of 2007, over half of my students had been with me since they first started lessons (the others were transfer students), some for over nine years.  That’s a long time. 

This summer, at the end of June, five of my students came together at a student’s home for an informal concert.  Two of them represented opposite ends of my studio:  little John, four years old, had just started lessons some five months prior; Jamey, though at fourteen not my oldest student, was finishing his tenth year with me.  

Jamey had, from the beginning, a passion for the piano, he’s always delighted in figuring things out by ear – most recently parts of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet Suite and Rachmaninov’s C minor Concerto, and he has a natural talent for piano technique – there wasn’t much teaching or correcting I had to do, it was more guiding him; I’d show him once or twice, and he’d get it.  At the moment, he loves romantic piano music, likes ragtime, tolerates Beethoven, and strongly dislikes Bach.  Over the years, our relationship changed from teacher-student to a more equal, collegial one.  We share the love of discovery, and immersing ourselves in piano music, listening, playing, sharing.

Even though there’s still so much I could and would like to teach Jamey, I decided a while ago that it was time for him to move on to a new teacher.  I felt he needed a fresh face, a new voice, a new – everything, different gender even.  Somehow, since the decision to transition to a different teacher was made, our lessons have changed:  they are now even more relaxed and enjoyable.  Gone is the pressure and my expectation to make progress all the time – and thus my frustration if things didn’t move as I thought they should.  I enjoy hearing about the lessons he’s had with his potential new teacher (we intentionally overlapped for a bit), and he enjoys showing me new things he learned. 

Two days ago, on Friday, we had our last – official – lesson.  He’s now not “my student” anymore.  Soon, he will have a new piano teacher (he has a meeting scheduled with another potential teacher in a week).  We confirmed, again, at the end of the lesson our desire to stay in touch, and that I will always take a strong interest in his piano education.  His mother who has over the years become a wonderful friend presented me with a picture book they had put together, pictures and memories covering these past ten years.

Ten long years.

Here’s an excerpt from an outstanding article I found online, published last summer:

Music and Mathematics – A Divine Relationship

Most people know the aesthetic beauty music and art can offer. Many, however, may not be aware of the mathematical principles which exist in music and composition. The aesthetic perception of music is governed by the right half of the brain. Mathematical relationships and spatial reasoning are controlled by the left half. This brief article is based on the premise that music theory reflects the laws of mathematics and nature, and that great composition contains mathematical relationships which enhance the perception of its aesthetic beauty. In other words, knowing music exercises the whole-brain, the whole-person.

Composers have long been fascinated by numerology. The ancient Greeks knew of the relationships between numbers and what they considered perfection in architectural design. The Golden Sequence, also known as the Golden Section, the Golden Number, or the Divine Proportion, is one such mathematical relationship, the formula of which often occurs in the natural world. (A preliminary internet search on this phenomenon turned up over thirty million hits!) This proportion can be created by dividing a line into two parts. The point of the division should be in such a place that the square of the longer subdivision is equal to the product of the shorter subdivision times the length of the entire line. Put as a formula, A (shorter subdivision) x C (entire line) = B2 (longer subdivision), or proportionally A/B = B/C. Line B is roughly 1.62 times the length of A (B/A), or conversely, line A is approximately .62 times that of B (A/B). The same relationships hold for lines B and C. To the Greeks, the 1.62 figure is known as Phi and the .62 figure is phi.

The ancient Greeks believed that a rectangle whose sides were in this proportion were the most aesthetically pleasing and based their architectural principles upon it. The most well-known such building is the Parthenon in Athens. It is also a fundamental formula used by the ancient Egyptians and is most notably seen in the pyramids.

The Golden Sequence is also found in the Fibonacci series 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55… wherein each new digit is the sum of the preceding two. In the Fibonacci series, dividing the larger of two successive numbers by the smaller yields a result approximating 1.62 [Phi]. Or, using the above formula, the product of the outer two of three consecutive numbers very nearly equals the square of the inner.

Please take the time to read the rest of the article here!  The author manages to describe a complex phenomenon in very readable terms, without “talking down” to the reader.  Highly enjoyable!

The other day, I had an interview scheduled with an adult student.  Five days prior, Mr. B. had found my website and emailed, expressing an interest in starting piano lessons.   Some ten emails later, we had arranged a time to meet. 

As usual, I had discussed with Mark some of the details, most importantly the question of where to meet.  I normally travel to the student’s home, but on occasion arrange a meeting or a lesson in my studio (which is located in our home).  As Mr. B. and I were discussing when to meet, he asked, “Should we meet at your studio?” to which I said yes, and gave him the address.  Mr. B. had offered two possible meeting times, one in the evening after work, and one in the afternoon during his lunch break. 

When I had a studio at a local piano store, I would ask Mark to come with me to an interview when I was to meet a male student.  Not that I ever had any bad experiences, but I just felt – more comfortable, to have Mark there, even if he wasn’t in the same room, but a few feet away in the waiting area. 

Considering that I wanted Mark to be present when I met Mr. B. for the first time, I agreed to a 5 p.m. meeting. 

The morning of the scheduled meeting, Mr. B. had told me in an email that he was going to bring his wife, which I thought was an excellent idea. 

Shortly before 5 p.m., as I was going through a couple of pieces on the piano, I saw through the window a car drive by, slowly, the woman on the passenger seat intently looking out toward our house. 

Mr. B. never showed up for the meeting but sent an email later, apologizing for not showing up, explaining that his wife was uncomfortable with him “working one-on-one in a woman’s house”, as he “initially thought it was a studio in Shawnee or Lenexa.”  Also that he was terribly allergic to cats.

While I think I can relate to how his wife felt, there was something in the way they looked toward our house, the way they drove by, slowly, and looked.  I can’t help but think that it wasn’t just that his wife was uncomfortable, and his allergy to cats.  I think it was the neighborhood as much as anything else. 

In an attempt to improve my website (Mr. B.’s first impression of my studio) and avoid future misunderstandings, I looked through it to see where I could be more clear in that I do not teach out of “a studio in Shawnee or Lenexa”.  However, nowhere do I mention a studio outside of my home.  As a matter of fact, there are at least three references to my being a traveling teacher and the fact that an occasional lesson may happen in the studio in my home. 

To have my teaching skills judged by the neighborhood I live in is, at first, sad.  But then again, I reserve the right to judge, too.  I once stopped lessons with a student who was militantly religious; I didn’t care whether he was “talented” (he wasn’t …) or that he was a hormone-laden teenager who needed a more tolerant teacher than I was willing to be.  He made me feel extremely uncomfortable, there was aggressive defiance in the way he looked at me.  In another instance, a family I once interviewed consisted of a cute 4-yr old, an interfering mother, and a psychologist father who kept educating his wife about the mental and emotional stages of a 4-yr old, for a good 45 minutes after the initial interview, right there in my studio, in front of me, refusing to leave.  I am judgmental when it comes to smoking.  I do care what kind of car you drive – especially when I see two huge cars in the garage, and a third vehicle or a boat in the third garage but then you tell me that you can’t afford a better instrument for your child.  I have a sensitive nose, I don’t tolerate body odor, nor excessive perfume.  I don’t do loud and flashy.  And no matter how “cute” you think your child is, if she doesn’t have the desire to learn we are not going to have lessons. 

I reserve the right to be judgmental.  And I grant you the same right.

excerpt from the kcmta Newsletter Vol. 8, #9 June 2008

Joyce Berg, NCTM

We cannot have a successful and effective democracy without intelligent, disciplined, conscientious, and loving people. 

As teachers, we know that music prepares a student for facing life, but what surprises many non-musicians is the extent to which music lessons can train a person. Among the many things that we do as teachers, we are instrumental in changing students’ behavior. When my daughter went to Europe for a Youth Symphony tour, we noticed that the students on our bus were always on time, followed directions, and were easy to handle. The other bus had people late, lost, and uncooperative. What was startling was when we realized that all the people on our bus were all first and second chair performers. The real question that we need to address is how well a person functions. If they function well, then a lot of the other complications and social ills tend to diminish. Isn’t that the real reason behind all the terrible insurance rates and the multitude of lawsuits?

I have a CEO and two adults in managerial positions in my studio and the complaints they have about the young people they hire are explosive. People complain that they can’t get a house built decently because the workers can’t follow directions, are inaccurate, etc., etc. The complaints abound in our society.

Give them all music lessons! Then if you can, get them to gradually put these lessons into their lives.

When we face our beginning students, it’s our privilege to help them gradually stop the chaos.

You’ve heard it a million times.  “We need the arts because …” and then come all kinds of good reasons.  For instance, Yehudi Menuhin said in an interview with the UNESCO Courier that “Art develops the intellectual, physical, imaginative and sensory spheres, and hence all human potential.”  He refers to “art as hope for humanity”. 

And it can certainly be true.

Disturbing as it may be, however, and as Robert Fulford points out, “The arts won’t make you virtuous and they won’t make you smart”.  It’s not a popular thing to say, and it likely will not be mentioned in the Board of Education meetings when art and music teachers have to lobby, yet again, for more funds – if their programs haven’t been cut already. 

Robert Fulford continues,

Great art, alas, has sometimes been loved by monsters, famously the Nazis. George Steiner, the eminent critic, delivers the bad news: “We know that a man can play Bach and Schubert and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.”  [...] cultured death-camp guards [...] eliminated any foolish belief that great art comes with ethics attached. [...]

On a more trivial level, we also can’t claim that immersion in the arts will create a lively mind. Art education has produced armies of learned bores. [...] As for those who create art, we get it all wrong if we imagine their work makes them admirable in private life.

The arts come “with no guarantees of virtue or enhanced intelligence.”

What, then, does it guarantee? Those who give it their time and love are offered the chance to live more expansive, more enjoyable and deeper lives. They can learn to care intimately about music, painting and books that have lasted for centuries or millennia. They can reach around the globe for the music, the images and the stories they want to make their own. At its best, art dissolves time [...]

There is still hope.