ten thousand stars

August 30th, 2008 :: Recipes for Technique

For many students, learning an instrument requires skills, behaviors, and thought processes like no other activity. It requires intense listening, something not usually required in our noise-polluted world. It requires great concentration, a skill not often tested in a society of 22-second commercials and 30-minute sitcoms. It requires a great amount of discipline and engagement from the very first lesson, which can be very challenging in a world where we prize convenience, speed, and the technology that makes our lives easier. In an internet-fueled society, where everything is available at the touch of a button, we do not value highly skills that take months to acquire, or music that may take us a lifetime to learn.

Because of this, it is crucial that we teachers work to engage our students’ minds and concentrations as deeply as possible. We must demonstrate through our own actions and behaviors, that the skill of playing the piano demands not only the students’ complete attention, but ours as well. We must show that, even though we may be teaching the 45th lesson of the week, we aren’t phoning it in. For two years, young Auden wailed at me every Friday night at 5:30 when he arrived at his piano lesson, “But Miss Amy, I am sooooo tired.” At that point I had already taught 40 lessons that week. “What number lesson are you?” I would ask him. “Number 41,” he would reply, “just like the Mozart symphonies.” “Exactly, kid. I am tired, too. We can do this together.”

I tell parents that the most important skill needed to be a pianist is not talent, but the ability to practice constructively and faithfully day after day. It is this skill that we must teach and teach and teach again. After a lifetime of practicing, I know that practicing can be tedious and boring, or it can be engaging and fun. If we can teach engaged practicing even with the very youngest child, from the very first lesson, then we can set students on a lifetime of active practicing and music making.

There are a million ways this can be done. But technique work, which has often been considered to be brainless exercises and necessary but boring drudgery, can be a perfect place to teach active learning and thinking. Instead of assigning or practicing the same old thing week after week, we constantly should be changing things in some small or great fashion. Students may be working with five-finger positions for six months, but they should never play them the same way two weeks in a row. Even in the beginning stages, when students are struggling to learn the positions, the assignments can be altered. They can be played piano one week, forte the next. Still better, students can alternate playing every other position forte then piano to really shake things up and get their minds and ears working.

My challenge to myself in my own practicing and my teaching is never to do the same thing two days or two lessons in a row. I try to practice differently every day, and no matter how badly the student may be playing, I never assign the same thing to be practiced the same mindless way. “Do this again,” isn’t in my repertoire of teaching phrases. Instead, I might assign five-finger patterns to be hands alone with left hand legato and forte and right hand piano and staccato, even if they have been playing them successfully hands together. Or I might rewrite the solfege pattern, but leave the musical concept of crescendos and decrescendos in place. My hope is that giving such deliberate technique assignments from week to week might produce deliberate and equally thought-provoking practicing of repertoire.

All of the previous variations I have offered in Recipes for Technique were written to be played in parallel motion. The next ones introduce contrary motion in two ways. Contrary direction is often easier and more natural for students to play physically; however, negotiating the note patterns of all twelve positions makes contrary direction more challenging for the brain. Because of this, I always assign students to start by playing Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-Fa-Mi-Re-Do in parallel motion to "set-up" their hands. Add different dynamics and articulations as you desire.

22. Play starting on thumbs in BH: 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1

23. Play starting on finger 5 in BH: 5-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-5

Lightning Strikes Once

August 22nd, 2008 :: Extraordinary Days

Recently I was standing in my kitchen studying a recipe for pizza dough when lightning struck the 70-foot elm tree outside our front courtyard.

I had been meaning to tackle pizzas for months--going so far as to even write on my summer wish list "learn to make tarts and pizzas". But it has been an unusual summer. I'm sure this is a character flaw of some kind, but I tend to develop one great friend from each area or era of my life going all the way back to high school:

There's Lisa, my "twiend," separated-at-birth, best friend from high school. When we were sixteen, we looked so much alike that people could confuse us. I look back on blurry photos taken from those years and can't tell who is who. Even now, 20 years later, we look more alike than not, passing easily as sisters if not twins.

Julianne remains my closest friend from my three semesters at Trinity University. She lives outside Dallas and still manages to call several times a month, even while working full-time and raising three kids.

Missy is my best friend from Mizzou. We studied with the same teacher, and both practiced too much. We should have been having more fun; we know that now. She teaches piano and raises three kids in Springfield, Mo. For my 30th birthday, Matt surprised me by flying Missy to Boston to visit. She arrived the day we moved into the smallest apartment imaginable on Beacon Hill. I will always owe her for the days she spent scrubbing and cleaning and unpacking with me in a horrible heat wave.

Julia is a soul-mate that I discovered within weeks of moving to Albuquerque. She had grown up here and was back for a year of intensive study in flamenco dancing. We became fast friends and met weekly for coffee. She left the next summer, but I was in her wedding two years later. This summer she has been living in Santa Fe, while her husband coaches at SF Opera.

Lora is my best friend from Boston, now living around the corner, much to my constant surprise and amazement. She is now my weekly hiking partner, and my permanent cat and plant sitter. She is always up for a drink, an emergency shopping trip, or a day in Santa Fe.

Anne is my newest dear friend. She's a terrific pianist and a favorite musical partner. She teaches piano, and raises three brilliant boys--the oldest, Simon, is in my studio. She and I suffer from the same trait of always juggling ten things at once. Just yesterday, we had an hour to do a rehearsal of a four-hand piece we are performing in a couple of weeks, and it took 50 of those minutes to simply get up to date on one another's life. That left 10 minutes for practicing, which is not setting a good example for our students.

Never have the stars aligned so that I had multiple best friends in the same place at the same time. But this summer, it happened. Lora had moved here; Julia was living nearby; Anne was five minutes away. Thinking tarts sounded easier than pizza, I started there and in June hosted a dinner. "Come to Girls' Night with Tarts" (I mean that EXACTLY like it sounds. Tarts, as in the pastry thing.) I invited Julia, Lora, and Anne. "You making tarts. Now THAT is something I can get behind," Anne responded enthusiastically.

The tarts were pretty decent. I made a savory mushroom tart with a corn meal crust. A tomato, mozzarella, basil tart and a fruit tart for dessert. We drank Campari with soda in the garden, opened a bottle of wine with dinner, sauteed green beans in butter, nibbled on cheese and olives. It was a good night.

If only life wasn't so busy. I thought the summer would be full of such evenings. But alas! My regular life of teaching and performing got in the way. Lora, Julia and I went to see "Sex and the City" one afternoon. There was the "ladies hike" with Anne and Lora, and a day puttering around Santa Fe with Julia. Various spontaneous drinks, dinners and walks in the neighborhood with Lora. I have hardly seen Anne, except for quick drop-offs for Simon's piano lessons.

But back to the "learn to make tarts AND pizzas" goal, which I was determined to see through. Tarts weren't exactly easy, I discovered. Would pizzas be harder? After all, there was yeast involved in pizza crusts, something I generally try to avoid. But here I was standing in the kitchen trying to figure out the pizza crust recipe when the loudest thunder I have ever heard exploded around me.

I wasn't immediately aware of what just happened. I glanced out the window to see dozens of birds taking flight. The air looked, well, struck, for lack of a better word. The cats streaked by me in panic. At that moment, I realized with alarm, my beloved husband was sitting in a bathtub full of water, perhaps having just been electrocuted. I called out, "Matt. MATT!" "Yeah," he answered casually, "that was loud."

On closer inspection, it wasn't just loud. The lightning had struck our huge old tree down the middle. It had also (pierced? burned? what would be the correct verb here?) a hole right through the strawbale wall in our front courtyard. Smoke was pouring out of the hole in the wall; limbs, leaves and bits of wood were everywhere. Neighbors whom I had never met began spilling out of their houses to examine the damage. Cars slowed down, one man claiming he had seen it from down the street. A guy living across the street came to gawk. I have seen him around, said hello to him when we passed on the sidewalk. But as we were standing there staring at the wreckage, I realized that I had either been struck by lightning myself and was seeing double, or this young man has an identical twin standing next to him. I have been greeting one or the other of them for years now, not realizing there were two of them. It was a surreal moment.

They say that lightning only strikes once, and probably never again will I have so many good friends living nearby. But given this fact, I wasn't about to let this year's birthday celebration go ignored. After the last performance of the summer, we invited a group of friends over for ice cream cake and champagne, new friends and old rubbing shoulders for a few hours. At the last minute, our dear friends from Texas, Mary and Glenn, came, which was more icing on the cake than any birthday girl deserves. Anne and Dan, the die-hards who are always ready to finish the last bottle of champagne after every party, stayed late enough to eat eggs with us at 1am, . The evening was one of those strange slices of life, friends gathered from different periods. It happens at weddings, when most of us can't appreciate it (In our case, Matt and I were too young to have collected the treasures of friends we have now). Lora said later that she could only imagine such a gathering of her friends at her funeral. What a gift to be around to enjoy it.

Lightning only strikes once. And that pizza? Amazing.