On my long way home - it is two hours one way from Manhattan to Olathe - I kept thinking about how she could have missed the sharps and the B flat in this song.  Played on white keys only, it sounds kind of like the song, but not really, and I didn’t understand why she didn’t hear that.  I concluded that she must have picked out the tune by ear and “all white keys” was as close as she could come to the real thing.  I also concluded that the sharps would make sense once she’d know about modulation - something we hadn’t covered yet, at least not in enough detail to relate to this song.  So, always looking for a chance to teach a new theory concept, I planned to introduce modulation at the next lesson. 

I started yesterday’s lesson by sharing with her that I had been thinking about the song, and my conclusion that the necessary black keys would make more sense once I taught her about modulation.  She had a smile on her face and was getting ready to say something but I was too enthusiastic to teach about modulation, I didn’t want to stop and listen to what she had to say.  Short intro to modulation, demonstration, she got it, and then, when I finally finished, she spoke up. 

The reason why she had played the song on white keys only, she explained, was that that’s how her school music teacher had taught it to her class.  I didn’t understand.  Surely her music teacher wouldn’t teach a song with wrong notes?  Well, she continued, white keys only is easier than a black key here and there, and the teacher had explained that teaching about sharps and flats would be too difficult and the students wouldn’t get it and that’s why she left them out.  Apparently none of the other students noticed or were bothered by this.

So, I suppose we could, in order to - simplify?, also play Für Elise on white keys only:  try it, play E-D-E-D-E-B-D-C-A.

Or we could teach to spell with consonants only, leave out vowels. 

Simplification gone wrong.

.

Simplifying and arranging is a skill, it is actually something that I include in my lessons: how to simplify without losing the essence of the story. 

I refuse to teach - I won’t even listen to - “easy arrangements” of piano literature.  Things like the Moonlight Sonata transposed to D minor, condensed to one page and arranged to fit a five-finger “position”, etc.  (heard it at a Talent Show once).

But skillful simplifying teaches the students to find that which is most important.  Which note out of a difficult-to-reach chord can be left out without changing the character of the chord?  Which of the way-too-many notes in a melody can be cut without losing “the melody”?  Whether or not we actually end up playing a (slightly) simplified version, the students have gained a greater understanding of that which they are playing. 

I recently came across a cute little peom that, years ago, I enjoyed reading to my young students.  The poem is called “Dandelions everywhere” and was written by Aileen Fisher.  I had copied it onto a worksheet and included a coloring picture; that way they would be able to have it at home and hopefully re-read it or have it read to them, for the young ones who didn’t read just yet. 

Looking at it now, I realize, with sorrow, that it would probably be meaningless to the students I have here in the greater Kansas City area: sadly,  they have perfect lawns, with not a weed in sight.  I’m afraid to even try to share this poem with them, I don’t think I could bear their asking me, “What’s a dandelion?”

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. 

I wasn’t sure what exactly I was going to do, but the general idea was to open a studio here, in the Overland Park / Olathe area.  I was going to travel to students’ homes instead of teaching out of my home.  I was open to new ideas.  Or so I thought.  When it became apparent that finding new students was much more difficult than I expected - an unfortunate combination of “the economy” and the fact that reputation doesn’t travel -, I realized that I was much more fixated on repeating the old (tried and true) than “open to new ideas”.  I realized that I missed my studio in Manhattan and that, despite being open to new ideas, what I really wanted was - my studio in Manhattan.  It also became clear that my identity is tied to being a piano teacher to a much larger degree than I had realized.  Without students, unable to teach, I felt like a fish out of water.  I felt bad for not taking advantage of the fact that I had all this time - time I didn’t have before when I was teaching all the time -, except I didn’t want all this time.  I wanted to teach.

My friend Linda tried to comfort me by saying that, many years ago when she moved from Manhattan to the KC area, she started her studio with three students and by the end of the first month, she had 36. I started, after weeks of advertising, with two siblings, and after two months, I still had - two siblings. Mark, patient saint that he is, kept telling me that “they’ll come”. Ever so slowly, I am now adding a family every couple of weeks.

We had discussed the possibility of a very slow start beforehand and knew that financially, we would be ok.  Spiritually though, and emotionally, it has been hard.  It took quite a bit of soul-searching before I came to realize, a few weeks ago, that while Linda may have had a full studio at the end of the first month I do remember her complaining about the difficulties she had with her new students: so many of them had had poor training prior to studying with her which turned teaching into damage control, and there were problems with the parents as well. 

My students, all five of them (beginners between the ages of 4 and 8), on the other hand, are simply wonderful.  We make good progress and the lessons are enjoyable.  They present me with pictures of pianos (labeled “peanoe”) and rainbows and flowers, one little girl can’t end the lesson without giving me a hug, I’ve already been nominated for the “Official 18th Kindest Kansas Citian” award, and I feel I have the full support of their parents. 

Still, there is the thought that on my own, without Mark’s support, I would not be able to make it. 

This video was recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. (Duration: 18:44).  Here is a link  to the page with the video; it also contains a transcript.

Also obvious was that there were holes in her knowledge.  Like most piano students who come to me from other teachers, she didn’t really know how to practice.  Her knowledge of music theory and history was rudimentary at best.  Her sight-playing and sense of rhythm were lacking.  Although she loved playing fast pieces, she didn’t really have the technical skills to do so without straining which in turn affects the sound.  But she loved to play and was determined to learn and improve.

We talked about all of this - she was well aware that her previous instruction had been somewhat random, and also that further progress would sooner rather than later stall unless we filled in the holes and therefore created a solid and reliable foundation upon which we would be able to build - I wanted the sky to be the limit.  I explained that we would choose material which would address the issues that needed remedial work but which would - hopefully - also be interesting and challenging.  A heavy dose of Burgmüller Op. 100 and Level 7 of the Celebration Series, Robert Vandall’s Preludes, etc., all of which she liked a lot, seemed appropriate.  We used the Music Progressions curriculum to get her theoretical knowledge and functional skills up to snuff.  We had a plan.

And so we went to work.  One of the highlights was when she fell in love with the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata, and, with my permission and support, quickly learned and memorized the piece.  She would have liked to play it much more passionately, faster, louder, but understood (intellectually at least) that this was a piece that needed restraint, with the dynamic level never above mp.  The expression had to come from her touch, not from increasing the tempo.  She performed it a few times, and I think she really grew.   

Last Fall, we started work on a Haydn Concerto (in F, rather obscure, but rewarding to teach and learn) which she performed at the Annual Piano Concerto Competition in February. 

And then a couple of things happened, and I am only now putting the pieces together.  In September, Kirstyn turned thirteen.  And even though she was making good progress with the concerto - mastering a few lines of tricky scale patterns she thought she’d never get -, her progress in Level 7 (yes, still the same book) was stalling.  It was apparent, or should have been, that she had lost interest in that kind of music.  After weeks of “practice”, she still hadn’t mastered Beethoven’s Bagatelle in G minor.  I would occasionally ask her what kinds of pieces she was looking forward to learning, and among her favorites was always the Maple Leaf Rag - which I told her was too difficult just yet; remember, we were trying to build a solid foundation from the bottom up, still filling in the holes, and that meant finishing - mastering! - Level 7, so we could go on to Level 8. 

In teenage (?) defiance of her teacher’s words, without telling me, she taught herself to play the Maple Leaf Rag.  With the help of another of my students, she learned to play much of the music for The Phantom of the Opera - by ear, with Jamey coaching her.  When I saw them, for the first time, rock away, their version of The Phantom for two pianos - I was shocked.  There was so much unrestrained joy and passion in their playing, I’ve got it on video, Kirstyn’s smile is just heart-breakingly beautiful and - most shockingly - her “technique” which had been such a big issue with her other pieces, seemed to flow almost naturally.

It’s not like Kirstyn suddenly and magically had filled in the holes; her technique, though improved, was still not entirely reliable, and there’s still room for improvement in other areas.  But I knew we had to change course.  So we did.  I have done this only once before, many years ago, and, as it turned out later, it worked, so I am confident (I think …) that it’ll work again:  out of sheer desperation, we are completely abandoning current literature, the stuff she still hasn’t finished.  In complete defiance of rational leveling of repertoire, we are jumping ahead to Copland’s Cat and the Mouse (a Level 10 piece), with the goal to use this so incredibly much more difficult piece to learn everything she needs to know. 

Cat and the Mouse is actually not that difficult as a first “difficult” piece:  none of the particular difficulties (and there are many) lasts more than a few lines of music; while the technical challenges are many and varied, there’s no endurance required for any kind of technical challenge.  There is great variety, it’s mentally challenging but, once you understand what’s going on, it actually makes sense.   What I like about it, especially for Kirstyn, is that it addresses so many different challenges, technical, musical; and it introduces new aspects, new terminology, pianistic challenges we haven’t had before.

I made sure both Kirstyn and her mother understand that this is highly unusual, untraditional - how can you attempt multiplication if you haven’t thoroughly mastered addition yet?  Aren’t we supposed to go step-by-step, one thing at a time, mastering each step before attempting the next, scaffolding, building on previous mastery?

Well, we tried, but she didn’t play along.

So, Cat and the Mouse it is.

The International Center For Music at Park University was established to foster the exchange of master teacher/performers, renowned young musicians, and programs from countries across the globe.  [...]  By involving the highest caliber artists of our generation, as educators, we will enable our students and audiences to experience the wealth of musical literature that has impacted generations of our global society.

And highest caliber artists they are.

At the moment, from March 6 through 9, the ICM is hosting The Grand Piano Festival: concerts which feature international competition winners from the Ioudenitch studio, and, of even more interest to me, masterclasses, all of which are open to the community and free.  Guest artist and Master Teacher Boris Berman is giving masterclasses from 2 to 5 p.m. Thursday through Saturday.  

At the end of my piano studies with Barbara Fry, I was lucky enough to be invited to a piano course given by her teacher, Bruno Seidlhofer (Vienna) in Switzerland.  Professor Seidlhofer explained that he disliked the traditional term “Meisterklasse” - master class - because it implied that either he was a master and/or that the students were.  Of course, he was a master, but out of humility and perhaps to draw attention to his emphasis on artistry , Professor Seidlhofer called this particular course an “Interpretationskurs” - interpretation class. 

William Westney, in a similar yet different attempt to get away from the traditional “master class” is promoting his Un-Master Class (R).  I remember his presentation from a few years ago. While I whole-heartedly agree that there are teachers who are so imposing and so intent on perfection that they stifle natural physical intuition and artistic expression in the student, I found Mr. Westney’s approach not quite as liberating as he probably thought it would be:  his shouting at the student, “Make a mistake!  Go ahead, make a big, fat mistake!!” was, to me, no less intimidating and stifling than a “master teacher” staring down a student for having played a wrong note.

Boris Berman, not that I expected any different but as I have witnessed yesterday and hope to see again today and tomorrow (weather permitting - it snowed, again!), is a true Master as well as Teacher.  Even if you didn’t know anything about him or hadn’t read his book Notes from the Pianist’s Bench, it was evident from the very beginning that he not only knows his stuff but knows how to present it to the student as well.  He took his time explaining what and why he wanted the student to try something different; he shared with the (pitifully small) audience of piano teachers his observations on how teaching certain aspects - in this case, functional harmony - has changed over the years, etc.  Given the format - a teaching situation - there were opportunities to put a student down, or ridicule a student’s lack of theoretical knowledge.  While Professor Berman never sugarcoated any criticism, he always remained warm, friendly and polite, occasionally using gentle humor, never sarcasm.  How truly liberating it was to hear him say, with a warm and comforting tone in his voice, “You look so worried when you play this.  Please don’t be so concerned!  You know this piece, you don’t need to worry about wrong notes.”

I am looking forward to more of this.

Another observation of Mr. Berman’s Master Class can be found here.

to relax some of the formality of concert etiquette that might discourage people from attending classical music programs. We don’t mind when people applaud between movements of a work; it just means they like the music.

Say what?  Dilute the clear distinction between the educated who know that thou shalt not clap until the end of a work, and on the other hand the hapless, uneducated, uninitiated, who - heaven forbid - applaud enthusiastically after a particular beautiful or rousing movement even though there’s more to come?  (I am not talking about the people who clap because they think they are supposed to clap but have no clue where and when.)

Why is it that we hold the inseparatability of a multi-movement work so sacred? Can you imagine an opera where no one claps until the very end?  The singers wouldn’t know what to think!  Or imagine a rock concert where people start to clap at the beginning of a song because they recognize the song and show their enthusiastic anticipation of what’s to come. (Ah, yes, I hear ye, “But a rock concert is not the same as a classical concert!”  That’s right.  A rock concert is usually sold out, to tens of thousands of people, who want to be there.)

I once attended a concert with a woman who politely started to clap immediately at the end of a piece - even though the end of the piece was particularly quiet and there was the afterglow of the last couple of notes still in the air.  Her clapping actually disrupted, destroyed the lingering scent. When I mentioned this to her she said that she felt obliged to clap because otherwise the performers might think that she didn’t like the piece.

What I would really like is a performance world - and I have read that this is how they do it in Israel - where you clap when you feel like it, but only then.  No more holding back your enthusiasm after a movement that excites you, but likewise no polite applause at the end of a piece whose performance you didn’t like.  

There are other cases of  ”thou shalt” - traditions that we hold onto religiously, because we think we’ve always done it this way, although a closer look at history would prove us wrong. 

Among the most passionately fought wars in piano pedagogy is the issue of memorization.  For most of the 20th century, pianists performed from memory, and teachers required their students to memorize.  While there are students who seem to memorize effortlessly without even trying, memorization is actually a skill that can and needs to be taught and learned, just like sight-reading, or playing by ear.  The issue of whether to require, some will say “force” students to memorize, has been at the heart of many articles and discussions in professional journals such as Clavier, American Music Teacher, or Keyboard Companion. 

What seems suspiciously absent from these discussions is the distinction between memorizing and performing from memory which is a completely different issue. 

I teach memorization skills because they are an important part of a good piano education.  Those of my students who have studied with me for a while know better than to ask, “Do I have to memorize this piece?” because my answer is always the same: “If you do a good job practicing then you cannot help but memorize along the way.”  The implication being that good practice trains all the elements of memorization:  finger memory (because you have played the piece a million times), intellectual memory (because I have asked you to explain all the details of the piece and you have trained to play hands separately and from anywhere in the piece), aural memory (because you know how it sounds), visual memory (because you know what it looks like), and so on.  Memorization then becomes a mere extension of practicing, a different aspect of practicing, but not a separate issue.

My students are required to memorize their performance pieces.  But I don’t require them to perform from memory anymore.  If all that separates the student from a great performance is the comfort of having the score in front of him (I call it a security blanket), as a visual reminder, then he gets to use the score.  If there’s any suspicion that the student needs the score to read the notes, then we know that the piece is not ready for a performance.

The one criterion for a good performance is that the performer enjoyed performing and the audience enjoyed listening. 

The Competition is open to students in grades 4 - 12.  Contestants are grouped by grade level, Elementary (grades 4 -5), Lower  Intermediate (6 -7), Upper Intermediate (8 - 9), and Advanced (10 - 12), and perform one concerto movement from memory.  

There were some changes this year, perhaps most noticeably the fact that instead of the 23-25 students we’ve had at each competition over the past couple of years, this year we had only 11 contestants.  There were questions and concerns as to how this low number might influence the issue of awards:  the thought was that it might be a foregone conclusion that if there were only two contestants in a division, there would be a first and a second place, and therefore not as much of a competition as when you have six or seven contestants in a division. 

Fortunately, these fears turned out to be unfounded.

For once, we had an adjudicator who was not afraid to not award a prize unless it was well-deserved.  In the past, while it was nice to have so many first and second places (which come attached with a gift certificate to the local music store as well as the honor of performing again at the winners’ concert), I have often felt that prizes were awarded too liberally.  Instead of judging the quality of the performance, most adjudicators seemed to rank the performances:  whoever played best in any given age category got first place, regardless of the quality of the performance.  Second-best got second place, etc.   Of course, many times the two overlapped, and the “best” performance was indeed worthy of a first place, simply because it could not have been done any better.  But many times, “best” wasn’t really good enough.

This year, for the first time ever, there was no First Place in the Elementary Division (grades 4 - 5).  There was no Second Place either.  While at first it was disappointing to receive “only” Honorable Mention (we practiced so hard …), it was actually exactly right and justified.  Anything higher than Honorable Mention would have sent the wrong signal to the student as well as the teacher, and the audience.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart to this year’s adjudicator, Dr. Virginia Houser, for having the

integrity in refusing to bestow praise on those who do not fully deserve it.

Prizes are only valuable if they are restricted to the very few. Not winning a prize is not something to be seen as shameful – it should be the norm, something that happens to the overwhelming majority of people.

(Dylan Evans, in an article that was published in The Guardian.)

Another observation of this year’s event can be found here.

What we didn’t like, and what led us to discontinue after a few weeks, were two things:  one, our being very detail-oriented and interested in doing it right, all of it, conflicted with the instructor’s emphasis on getting the big picture.  Where Mark and I would have preferred to spend a lot of time building a solid foundation by learning isolated and minute parts of a movement, with tons of repetition, before attempting to put it all together, the instructor taught and expected us to go through the entire movement immediately without “worrying” about the details.  

The other thing that bothered us was the instructor’s personality (separate from the fact that his teaching style conflicted with our learning style):  while he seemed perfectly nice, there was something intrusive about him; he always stood a couple of inches too close, I always felt like backing off, I felt un-safe.  And then there was the rather subtle impression that deep down, in his heart, he was still a karate martial artist who for some reason had given up karate in favor of tai chi:  he kept stressing how useful tai chi was for self-defense, and his demonstrations of attack and defense seemed not only showy but were very unsettling to me.

After taking some time to think about where to go next, we decided to explore yoga.  One of Mark’s colleagues recommended a teacher, and after looking at her website and exchanging a few emails, we signed up for the class.  Unfortunately, we are now again in a situation where we are expected to do way too much way too soon. 

The instructor is a wonderful young woman, she comes across as sweet and sensitive, and there is no doubt that she most definitely knows her stuff.  But perhaps because we are in a class with other people who, unlike us, are not beginners, we are, again, being led through poses and movements that are beyond what we can do.  And while at the beginning of each class the instructor emphasizes the importance of doing only as much as one can do, never feeling pressure to do more than what feels comfortable, what happens during class is different. 

Perhaps because her class format does not allow for a short individual consultation or interview before the first class, Mark only told her, very briefly, during our first two-minute greeting (we didn’t want to take any more time away from class time) that he has arthritis in his lower back which means two things:  he’s looking for ways to strengthen his back but also needs to be cautious not to aggravate it.  He didn’t tell her that because of an elbow injury many years ago, he cannot straighten his right arm; and I didn’t tell her that I was born with hip dysplasia which, although it was treated when I was a baby, not only limits my range of motion (I was never able to do the proper pre-natal exercises because of this; however, childbirth was completely unproblematic) but also makes certain “normal” movements painful.  We figured that we’d take her suggestion and simply do as much as we could and leave the rest.

Taking any kind of class is always interesting for me.  Not only because I learn something about something I didn’t know before, but also because I experience a teacher.  It allows me to reflect on my own teaching. 

One of the things I learned early on, perhaps more from personal experience than from being taught, was to never, ever, tell a student, “You can do it.”  I know, I know, it’s the standard American cheerleader slogan.  But it’s the wrong thing for a teacher to say.  Here’s why:  for one thing, how do you know your student can do it?  What if, for some completely stupid or unknown reason, your student can not do it?  Not only will you have lied to your student (not the best thing to establish trust), but worse, you made the student feel like he failed (because you believed in him and he let you down).  Hypersensitive?  Perhaps.  But that’s what students are.

Unfortunately, during yoga last night, Mark had to experience firsthand - and I, as his lover, vicariously, secondhand but no less immediate - the sensation of failure.  We are in our forties, pretty established personality-wise, not easily shaken these days, but fragile in this new learning experience.  Our instructor was leading us through a pose and saw that Mark was struggling.  She came up to him, knelt beside him and cheered him on, “you can do it!”  I immediately knew, and Mark told her in a voice that probably sent chills down everyone’s spine, in a voice that left no doubt, that, no, he could not do it.  There are physical limitations which make certain poses impossible, no matter how hard we try, or how long we practice, or how much we are being cheered on.  I was furious at this discrepancy between “do only as much as you can” and then the expectation that if we only try harder we can do more.  Mark told me later that he had felt shamed by her.  We both know that there is no way that she would ever intentionally do that.  But it happened.  With just four words.

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.

There’s a misconception here in the United States, arising from the statement, “All men are born equal.”   People equate “equal” with “the same”.   The fact is, we are not all the same.  We are born male, female, (or, in moderately rare cases, intersexual - persons incompatible with the biological gender binary); we are born tall, short, in-between, easy-going or not; we are born first, second, the last of ten.  We are not all the same.  Nor should we be.  In a truly great society, everyone finds his/her place, with room and encouragement to develop his/her individual talents. 

Dylan Evans, in an article that was published in The Guardian, speaks of talent:

We can’t bear the idea that some people might be better than us, so much better that we could never be like them, no matter how hard we tried. That upsets our democratic ethos, our belief that all people are born equal.

But raw talent is not distributed equally. By definition, most of us are not exceptional. We are neither particularly stupid, nor especially intelligent. Only a very few are extremely gifted. [...] The Mona Lisa, the Goldberg Variations and King Lear were not the work of ordinary people like you and me. They were the work of geniuses, people so much more talented than us that we could never paint or write anything comparable to their achievements, no matter how hard we tried or how long we lived.

And here’s a thought that’s particularly dear to my heart because of its relevance to piano competitions:

The just allocation of admiration is a virtue that requires judgment and integrity: judgment to distinguish genuine talent from mere showiness, and integrity in refusing to bestow praise on those who do not fully deserve it. Prizes are only valuable if they are restricted to the very few. Not winning a prize is not something to be seen as shameful – it should be the norm, something that happens to the overwhelming majority of people.

This kind of thinking usually doesn’t go over too well with American students and parents who by now are used to receiving some kind of prize or recognition for just about everything.   While I wholeheartedly believe in and teach supporting young people’s efforts and accomplishments, I think this society has gone overboard in its attempt to reward expected behavior.  Making people, especially young people, think that they are exceptional just because they follow the rules or because their work is acceptable is dangerous.

It is precisely the realisation that I will never be the equal of Mozart or Goethe that allows me to sit back and enjoy what they have bequeathed to me. It is my recognition of their greatness, my admission of the immeasurable superiority of their talent, that redeems my mediocrity. It is good to be human, not because every human can be great, but because a few people have shown us the heights to which humanity can occasionally ascend.

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So, what’s wrong with naming a piano method “Music for Little Mozarts”?  It is the arrogant assumption that all children are geniuses in the league of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  It is degrading to the genius of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to put him on the same level as the majority of people who just happen not to be geniuses.  It reminds me of the story of the 4-year old whose parents manage to grab him just as he’s about to step onto a busy four-lane highway.  The parents, distraught, demand to know, “What on earth and in heaven’s name did you think you were doing?!”  The 4-year-old answers, “I am going to cross the highway because I can do anything if I just believe in myself.”

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ALL-LISZT PIANO RECITAL

AT WHITE CONCERT HALL, WASHBURN UNIVERSITY (Topeka),

ON SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2008 AT 3 PM

Pianist and newest member of the distinguished KU piano faculty, STEVEN SPOONER performs his first area recital at White Hall of Washburn University (Topeka) on Sunday, February 3, 2008 at 3 PM. The concert is free and open to the public. The program is comprised of Romantic piano works by Franz Liszt and features virtuoso piano transcriptions of Schubert and Meyerbeer and concludes with the monumental B Minor Piano Sonata. For more info call 670-1511.

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. [...]

I enjoy teaching all ages and levels, and my goal is always to teach towards mastery. Mastery is different from perfection. A piece may be “perfect” but the skills necessary to perform the piece may not have been mastered.

People tend to think that the first year or so of piano study is not as important because the student is “only” a beginner, but they couldn’t be more wrong! Having to re-teach and re-learn after the student was allowed to acquire bad habits is frustrating for both teacher and student.

The following is from an article by Bruce Berr, first published in the Autumn 1999 issue of Keyboard Companion, a practical magazine on early-level piano study:

Newer teachers sometimes assume that because students are at an elementary level, they cannot play their pieces with mastery and artistry - this is not true! This is a matter of confusing standard with level. Instruction on any musical instrument is based on mastery learning. This hinges on the highly-successful completion of each unit of study along the way, especially and particularly the first few. Since students have varying levels of aptitude, and learn at different paces and in different ways, the main variant should be how much time and reinforcement is needed for that mastery, not the degree to which that mastery occurs.

To be more specific, when a well-taught student at any level successfully learns a piece, the student’s performance is virtually as good as the teacher’s:

• The physical approach is reliable and natural.
• Fingering is consistent and secure.
• Tone quality and rhythm are solid.
• Legato and staccato are clearly played and differentiated.
• Dynamics and dynamic differences are boldly projected.
• The performance authentically communicates the title and mood to a large degree, to any music listener (not just the trained ear of the teacher).
• There is flexibility in all of the above (except fingering!); one slight change in something, intended or unintended, does not cause a cascading failure and meltdown.
• Playing the piece is enjoyable.

This is true even for the beginner’s first few lessons! Yes, perhaps there are subtle nuances of shaping and timing and other aspects that a more advanced player might bring to an early-level piece. And an older player may understand the music on a deeper intellectual and emotional level, but these are not absolutely essential for each piece to shine and express. If we focus too much on these exceptions, they can become a smoke screen that hides from us an essential fact: if students’ final playing of most of their pieces is not excellent or very close to it, we are in effect building a structure whose foundation is of questionable strength to support what will be added on later.

Setting a goal of complete mastery right from the start, communicating that goal repeatedly to the student, and giving the student the means for meeting that goal - all of this acts as a springboard for many good habits: efficient practice, careful listening, etc. Conversely, if our initial goals for each piece are not set to the highest standards, we sell students short before giving them a chance to fully blossom into what they can become.