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.