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.

Recently, I joined Music Teacher’s Helper.  That’s a website designed to make the business aspects of the Music Teacher’s life easier.  I’m not sure that I’ll sign up for the full service.   While the general idea and layout are very well-designed, uncluttered, there are a few things I don’t like, such as the fact that it’s a “fill in all the blanks” kind of thing:  I can’t leave any blanks – blank.  I would like to have a choice whether to fill in – or not – the composer of a student’s piece, or the student’s tuition, etc.  It won’t allow me to save the page until I have filled in all the blanks, which I find unnecessary and time-consuming.

They also have a standard format for dates, but they don’t tell you until you have filled in all the blanks and try to save the page; then they say that the way you input the date didn’t conform, so you have to go back and redo it, which to me is a waste of time which goes against their claim that their website will save me time.

As part of the package, they are sending me informative emails.  How-to’s.  And their ideas on how to deal with potential problems.  Much of it seems geared toward the new and inexperienced teacher, the teacher who has to be convinced of the importance and usefulness of a studio website, the teacher who doesn’t have a lesson cancellation policy, the teacher who struggles with parents who don’t pay, etc.

I don’t know how to say this without sounding arrogant:  I already have a professionally designed website, and many – all – of the potential problems that are listed in those emails are simply not an issue for me.

Last summer, when I told colleagues and friends that I was going to travel to students’ homes to teach, one colleague in particular warned me, “I did that for a while. It was a nightmare!  You get there, they aren’t home, you waste your time, they don’t pay …”   I have been teaching in students’ homes now since last October and have yet to arrive at a home where the student wasn’t there.  Not only are they home, they are ready and prepared to start the lesson on time.  When I taught in my studio in Manhattan, it would occasionally happen that a student didn’t show up – rarely, actually – but they always called soon after and had a satisfactory explanation.  And when, very rarely, a parent would explain, “I just completely forgot!” I would smile and remember that I, too, forget things once in a while. 

I am perhaps different from other teachers in the way I handle missed lessons:  as a mother, I understand that children don’t give you 24 hours notice that they are going to be sick the next day and won’t be able to attend their lesson, so, in my opinion, requiring 24 hour notice (- or else!) is – just not reasonable.  In my studio, the parents respectfully call as soon as they know that they can’t be there for the lesson. 

Such an attitude goes both ways:  there have been times when I called parents, students, and asked if we could reschedule the lesson.  I do get migraines, completely irregularly, unpredictably, randomly, sometimes two in a week and then nothing for two months, and the only thing that helps is to take my meds and crawl into bed and try to sleep it off.  Over the winter, I was struggling with fatigue and minor depression (what an insulting name for something that over the long run can be just as debilitating as “real” depression), and there were times when I called and asked to reschedule a lesson.  I wasn’t sick, but I was in no shape to be teaching young children.  24 hour notice?  Hardly.

I understand that things come up, short notice, and I always make an effort to reschedule the lesson.  For other teachers, such a policy might spell disaster, but I have to say that for the last ten, fifteen years, no parent in my studio has ever abused that privilege.  I know that a lot of teachers will, out of principle, not reschedule lessons that are missed because of birthday parties, etc.  I understand that it can create a lot of work for the teacher to have to reschedule these lessons.  But – attending that once-a-year birthday party is probably more important to the student than attending a weekly piano lesson, so if it can be done at all, I will reschedule the lesson.   

If you give them an inch, they won’t take it.  My piano parents occasionally call and apologize for the inconvenience and ask if a lesson can be moved.  They also understand, and accept, that if the lesson can not be moved, they are simply losing it.  There were a few lessons last year where an unusually busy student just couldn’t find the time for the lessons, nor any make-up times I suggested, but the parents kept paying the tuition, and once in a while, she was able to have a lesson.

Tuition.  Apparently, there are parents who don’t pay.  Or don’t pay on time.  Or try to argue about the amount.  I think this is a matter of communication:  I assume that when parents don’t pay, on time, it is not out of malice or because they don’t value my work, I assume it is simply because they forgot about it.  Paying the monthly tuition is not exactly the only thing they have on their plate.  So.  In Manhattan, I used to send email reminders, and a surprising number of parents thanked me for that.  Here in Olathe, Overland Park, Spring Hill, if I need to remind a parent, I get an embarrassed, “whoops!  I completely forgot!” and then they write the check right there and then.  For parents who want to argue about the amount – I make sure they understand that the monthly tuition does not necessarily reflect the number of lessons in any particular month, but that it is an average, based on the tuition for the semester.  If a parent ever were to argue with me – attempt to argue – about how much I charge, I know that that parent would have no place in my studio. 

It is my choice whom I teach.  I accept students not on merit of “talent” but based on their desire to learn and based on parental support – and that includes their willingness to accept and pay the tuition. 

Bilanz means balance sheet, Bilanz ziehen means to take stock.  Taking stock, I would have to say that life is good, teaching is good, and I think I have one of the most wonderful jobs in the world.

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.

In March, when my accountant informed me that the IRS allows me to deduct mileage when I travel to a student’s house to teach he also admonished me for traveling to Manhattan to teach.  His argument:  if you make, say, $4,000 a year in lessons and the IRS allows you to deduct $5,000 for mileage you may want to reconsider why you are doing this. 

A $5,000 deduction for mileage, even though you earned only $4,000? The math is correct.  Currently, the IRS allows 50 cents per mile.  A roundtrip to Manhattan is 250 miles, a $125 deduction according to the IRS.  While the gasoline+toll costs are “only” about $50 (that’s in the Lexus; I don’t dare take the Jimmy because of the poor gas mileage it gets), there are other, not so obvious, expenses – maintenance comes to mind, so this seemingly generous $125 per-trip-deduction is probably quite justified. 

While at first thought the idea of having such huge deductions and the resulting lower self-employment tax bill may seem intriguing – who wouldn’t want to pay less taxes? – , at second thought, and as Beth Gigante Klingenstein points out at every workshop, it’s not in your best interest to lower your self-employment income this way.  Taking the above calculation, earning $4,000 but having a $5,000 deduction (for travel alone, there’s more in addition to that) means that I spent $1,000 for the privilege to teach – or, if you want to look at it differently, that I lost $1,000.  Negative income. 

Of course not all of my earned income went directly toward travelling expenses, so it’s not really negative income, but let’s look at what those taxes are.

Self-employment tax is the Social Security (and Medicare) taxes.  Which means that by lowering my income through deductions (which results in a lower tax bill), as far as my retirement is concerned, even though I worked and earned money, I had practically no income this year which means that no money went toward my retirement.  As far as the Social Security Administration is concerned, I didn’t work this year.

Sobering.

Of course, one solution would be to not take that mileage/travelling deduction.  But the fact is that I do have expenses from travelling.  I do want to teach my students in Manhattan, but the expenses, all expenses – gas, deductions if I take them, time – do add up. 

In the course of discussing ideal first pieces for beginning piano students, one of my teenage students suggested “the Do-Re-Mi song from The Sound of Music“  – not so much because it is easy but because she loves it, and “everybody knows it.”  She proceeded to quickly play through the tune – melody only.   She started from C, and curiously, played the entire song on white keys only.  She didn’t seem to notice? or mind? that it didn’t sound quite right.  There are a few modulations in this song which necessitate a few sharps here and there, and a chromatic passing tone (B flat) at the end.  As this song wasn’t really the topic of our discussion I didn’t want to spend too much time on this, so I just quickly played the tune for her, correctly, and pointed out that she had missed some black keys.  We proceeded to other pedagogical issues and then her repertoire. 

On my long way home – it is two hours 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 live in the old part of Olathe, where the houses are small and the trees are tall.  Hardly anyone here has a real lawn, it’s more like just lots of grass with some weeds here and there.  In my backyard, the first flowers to appear in the spring are usually dandelions and those prolific purple groundcovers (name?), and tiny plants with tiny sky-blue blossoms that look like they just fell out of the sky, and violets (the weed, not the kind you buy at the store).  I especially love the cheerful dandelion yellow – which happens to be my favorite crayon color, too.  It’s a rare sight to see the “chemlawn” guy drive through our area.  People here don’t have much money, and a weed-free, year-round-green lawn is not a top priority.

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?”

My style of practicing is similar to the way I discuss things with Mark.  He’s a good listener and I appreciate his feedback, so I like to bounce ideas off him, things big and small, issues I have with students, parents, colleagues, teaching challenges, logistics.  Usually, I start out with a more or less vague idea of the issue, and as I talk and then listen to his feedback, and talk some more (lots …) and listen some more, things tend to become clearer, more focused.  Mark knows that I don’t want him to solve my problems.  But he understands that it helps me clarify things when I talk about them. 

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. 

When Kirstyn started lessons with me, in the summer of 2005, shortly before her 11th birthday, a couple of things were immediately obvious:  she loved playing the piano, she had progressed very quickly to early intermediate material with her previous teachers, and I was impressed by her desire and determination to learn and practice and study and learn some more.  Her mother’s biggest complaint?  “I can’t get her away from the piano!” 

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.

Park University in Parkville, Missouri, is different.  Perhaps not so much in that Parkville is not your typical college town, or even in that Park University offers undergraduate and graduate programs on 43 campuses in 21 states and Online.  Park University in Parkville, MO, is different because it is home to the International Center For Music and Park’s Youth Conservatory For Music.  According to their mission statement,

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 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.

There is a reference, in the current issue of Clavier, to an article which appeared in the October 2006 issue, in which Greg Brown says the goal of The 5 Browns is 

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 Manhattan Area Music Teachers Association (MAMTA) hosted the 11th Annual Piano Concerto Competition today. 

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.

Last summer, Mark and I, in an attempt to find some kind of exercise we enjoyed and would therefore be more likely to stick with, tried out Tai Chi.   I liked the idea of a martial art that was non-aggressive, I liked the focus on body-awareness, balance, the mind-body connection, I liked that it challenged me physically without being stereotypical “exercise”. 

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.

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.