For  I-don’t-remember-how-long  I have been taking the last week of May off, starting the piano summer the first full week of June.  This week “off” is of course no vacation for me as this is the time when I am busiest putting the (somewhat) final touches on the summer schedule and calendar. 

I am looking forward to teaching lots of private, one-on-one lessons - not only the regular once-a-week kind, but as many as the students show up for and my schedule allows.  And my schedule allows for quite a bit, and quite a bit of flexibility, too:   I am actually looking forward to being able to adjust my schedule to my students’ summer schedule which means working around their vacations, summer camps, and other activites.   Where other teachers get exasperated because their schedule changes from week to week – I think it is wonderful that I have that flexibility.

In addition to the private lessons, there will be group events, all kinds of different activities – performance classes where we learn what it takes to perform (performing is so different from playing and therefore requires a different kind of preparation), history lessons, learning about and listening to recordings of pieces by different composers, etc. 

When I’m not teaching or preparing lessons, I will be outside, playing with dirt.  This now is the most beautiful = prolific time of the year.  On our walks, Mark and I find something new in the neighborhood gardens every day!  Our own yard is still very much at the beginning, I only started planting a few weeks ago, and that’s what it looks like.  But it is starting to come together, a bit greener and more colorful every day now, it seems. 

It is going to be a beautiful summer.

Source: diveintomark’s twitter tweats

1.
The boys are having a pillow throwing contest. I can’t imagine how this could possibly get out of hand.

2.
The tweet is coming from inside the pillow fort. I repeat: the tweets are coming from INSIDE THE PILLOW FORT.

3. (about an hour later)
Update: the attack has been rebuffed, the pillow fort has been razed, and a peace treaty has been forged. It involves ice cream.

(In case you wonder what this has to do with piano or music or teaching or learning – absolutely nothing.)

an abstract from an article by Isabelle Peretz, Elvira Brattico, Miika Jarvenpaa, and Mari Tervaniemi in Brain. A Journal of Neurology

Like language, music engagement is universal, complex and present early in life. However, ~4% of the general population experiences a lifelong deficit in music perception that cannot be explained by hearing loss, brain damage, intellectual deficiencies or lack of exposure. This musical disorder, commonly known as tone-deafness and now termed congenital amusia, affects mostly the melodic pitch dimension. Congenital amusia is hereditary and is associated with abnormal grey and white matter in the auditory cortex and the inferior frontal cortex. In order to relate these anatomical anomalies to the behavioural expression of the disorder, we measured the electrical brain activity of amusic subjects and matched controls while they monitored melodies for the presence of pitch anomalies. Contrary to current reports, we show that the amusic brain can track quarter-tone pitch differences, exhibiting an early right-lateralized negative brain response. This suggests near-normal neural processing of musical pitch incongruities in congenital amusia. It is important because it reveals that the amusic brain is equipped with the essential neural circuitry to perceive fine-grained pitch differences. What distinguishes the amusic from the normal brain is the limited awareness of this ability and the lack of responsiveness to the semitone changes that violate musical keys. These findings suggest that, in the amusic brain, the neural pitch representation cannot make contact with musical pitch knowledge along the auditory-frontal neural pathway.

So, in essence, and pushing this issue a bit further:  this is like autism with regard to music?  Just like an individual with autism who can perfectly well see and hear – but then doesn’t know what to do with this sensory input (what does it mean when someone “smiles”??), an individual with an amusic brain can hear and distinguish musical details just as well as everyone else – but what is being heard has no meaning because there is no “contact with music pitch knowledge” due to a “lack of responsiveness”.

The question, as always, is:  what do we do – now that we know?

From the book “Art & Fear” :

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Analysis Paralysis.  I sometimes tell a student that while mindless “practicing” (which isn’t really practicing, it’s just putting in time)  is counterproductive, dangerous and generally bad, mindful repetitions, playing something over and over, observing along the way, making minute corrective changes as you play, over and over, can lead to better results than highly sophisticated, well-thought-out ideas that never make it out of your head.  

There is a difference between making clay pots and practicing the piano:  if your first clay pot doesn’t turn out to be a masterwork, you can just set it aside and go for another one.  When you practice, which is an athletic activity, every repetition has the potential – for good or for bad – to form a habit, to cement one certain way of playing.  There’s nothing – well, not much – more frustrating than finding out, after having played something numerous times, that you practiced a mistake – wrong note, wrong fingering, wrong rhythm, wrong motion.  It tends to become ingrained, and thus a pain to undo. 

Still, there is something to be said for just jumping in and doing it, mindfully, listening, paying attention to what you just did, over and over, correcting as you go.

My name is Sibylle Kuder, I am auditing Teri Holmberg’s Intro to Music Therapy class.  Before our weekly observation today, I arrived early and sat in an observation booth, watching and listening through the one-way mirror to the group in the room.   This had nothing to do with the Music Therapy session, this was just the “regular” pre-school group, doing their various pre-school things:  some children painted, others drew on paper, or read, built castles, etc.  There were three adults in the room, young women, students of the Early Childhood program? 

They moved among the children, watching and interacting.

At one point, a small girl drew a picture of a giraffe on a dry-erase board.  One of the adults started to write the name of the animal by the picture on the dry-erase board, stopped in the middle, turned to one of the other adults and asked, “How do you spell ‘giraffe’?”  – “Giraffe?”  -   ”One ‘f’ or two?”  -  She wrote it with one ‘f’ and looked at it, unsure whether it looked correct or not.  The other adult who didn’t know how to spell it either said, “That’s a hard one to spell.”  To which the first one, looking at the little girl, replied, “Yeah, that’s a hard one to spell!”

Please understand that I have no problem with someone who doesn’t know whether giraffe is spelled with one ‘f’ or two.  (In French, Portuguese, Polish it is spelled with one ‘f’; in German, English, Italian it is spelled with two.)   In English, you cannot tell by sounding it out; or someone may have trouble spelling in general; or the correct answer may escape you for the moment – all of which I find perfectly acceptable reasons.  What I find unacceptable and inexcusable, in an educational setting (which I assume the Stone House is), is that the two young women left it at that:  they seemed perfectly content with not knowing how to spell the word, reassuring themselves and the little girl that it was a hard word to spell.  I find it inexcusable that the realization that ‘giraffe’ is hard to spell was not immediately followed by a “Let’s look it up!”  – I bet that it would have taken me less than two minutes to find a book in that room that had the word ‘giraffe’ in it.  – Or at least a “We’ll have to look that up later!”  -  or sending the little girl “… go see if you can find the book with the animals so we can see how ‘giraffe’ is spelled.”  Or something.

:

While we were waiting  in a different observation booth for the Music Therapy session to start, I watched a different group.  This group was sitting on the floor, singing along with the teacher.  Or trying to sing.  While I realize that not every Early Childhood Teacher has had formal Early Childhood Music and Movement training, I do expect anyone who works with children to have at least a rudimentary understanding of the musical development of young children:  children’s voices have a very narrow singing range, they sing comfortably between about D above Middle C, and up to A or B.  This is not the normal singing range for adults who tend to sing much lower.  However, children cannot sing that low.  What you get if you expect them to sing along with you in the lower range is children who use their speaking voices, they sound like they “sing” out of tune.   One or two of the children were attempting to sing an octave higher than the teacher which, again, is out of their range.  If you keep that up, you end up with children who learn that they cannot sing in tune because they were not allowed/encouraged to develop their singing voices in the range which is natural for children (but not as comfortable for most adults).  “Children are not little adults” – that goes for singing, too!

I don’t expect only spelling or music specialists to work with the children in the Stone House, but I do expect an environment which fosters a love of learning and inquisitive minds (looking something up if you don’t know it), and in which children’s specific needs are taken into account.

The parents of my young piano students know that I have a serious problem with the name of one of the piano methods for young beginners, “Music for Little Mozarts”.  Not only do I find it presumptuous and misleading, I find it unfair to the children:  they are being taught that if they only try hard enough, they can be “little Mozarts” which leads some of them to think that they are expected to become little Mozarts.  

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.

~:~.~:~.~:~.~:~.~:~.~:~.~:~

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.”

~:~.~:~.~:~.~:~.~:~.~:~.~:~

Hard to believe that the following is apparently not common knowledge among teachers (and parents):

Developmental psychology tells us many things that, as music instructors, we need to know. Primarily, it tells us the thinking style of the child; that is, whether the child is dominated by his or her perceptions, or by logic. It tells us why children at certain ages do certain things, such as why a child may gaze away from the piano while playing. As an example, a preschooler would gaze away due to the inability to ‘not look’ at something else in the room (known as centration). A child age 7 or older may look away because he or she is not aware that looking at the score is necessary, while an adolescent may be looking away to try out a newfound skill of memorizing quickly. This is only one of many situations that require a solid knowledge of cognition as a function of age.

Developmental Psychology also tells us why children may become stressed in certain situations. Preschoolers become stressed when aspects of their environment change; the more change, the more stress. Older children tend to become stressed when they believe they have broken the rules, and therefore seek to know what the rules are. Adolescents often talk themselves into being stressed due to their interpretation of the events around them.

Find the rest of the article at merchantcircle.

Schneeflöckchen, Weißröckchen,
wann kommst du geschneit,
du wohnst in den Wolken,
dein Weg ist so weit.

Komm setz dich ans Fenster,
du lieblicher Stern;
malst Blumen und Blätter,
wir haben dich gern.

Schneeflöckchen, du deckst uns
die Blümelein zu,
dann schlafen sie sicher
in himmlischer Ruh’.

Here you can listen to the melody for this song (played on piano, no voices).

http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/12/08/vatican-solar-array-goes-live/

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. 

.

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.