Batman and the Boy Who Couldn’t Play the Piano

In the mid-1960s, the TV show Batman was a wonder to a 5-year old boy. Not only did my son, Lloyd, love drawing the cartoon character, he was passionate about the music. I bought the printed score and played it for him. Written by Neal Hefti, the music is clever, punchy and rhythmically complex. It took some practicing on my part to play the syncopated middle section.

Lloyd loved it. He announced that he wanted to learn to play it. Holy cow, Batman! He couldn’t play the piano at all. So I showed him one little bit at a time, hands separately. He was listening to it constantly, either played live by me – we didn’t have even a reel-to-reel tape recorder then – or on the TV.

Lloyd played the bits he knew for hours. As he was learning them, he would get frustrated and furious. When it all got to be too much, he would climb down from the piano bench and hop with rage. This was fascinating to watch because I had only read about people hopping with rage in the fairy tale, The King of the Golden River. I would think to myself, 'Well, I guess that’s the last of his wanting to play "Batman."' Yet a few minutes later, he would be at the piano again.

Eventually, he got the first and last parts down pat. I explained to him that the middle section was way more complicated rhythmically, but he was determined to get it all and, by golly, he did.

It occurs to me now that the principles behind Lloyd’s learning of "Batman" are the same ones that it’s taken me decades of piano teaching to define. The student listens to a piece and gets excited about it; he learns it bit by bit, with lots of help from a teacher who can break the process into small chunks.

When students come to lessons excited about wanting to play pieces that are miles beyond their current ability, those of us using Mastering The Piano say, “Great! You can learn it, taking as much time as you need, nibbling a few measures each week.” We know that children who are self-motivated can climb mountains and accomplish miracles.

The Lesson and the Gift

Dealing with a major illness has a way of consuming your life – physically and emotionally. With the relentless schedule of doctor’s appointments, medical tests and treatments, plus the tremendous frustration of physical limitations and overall discomfort, it’s easy to feel sorry for yourself, to spend too many hours in bed or just to give up. I found myself heading that way. Then one day while I was hooked up to a dialysis machine, one of my young students came to visit me. With wide eyes and obvious concern, she said, “You always know how to make me feel better, and I know you can do it for yourself.”

Her comment triggered one of those “Ah-ha!” moments, forcing me to look for something positive about my situation. It was a tough assignment. But that 9-year-old kid made me realize that from these otherwise unpleasant experiences, I learned a life-enhancing lesson and received a priceless gift. It’s been a long time coming, but fortunately, life’s a persistent teacher.

The lesson is to accept help from others gratefully and graciously and even to ask for it when needed. This isn’t easy for an independent person. I’ve prided myself on my ability to do things by myself and make it on my own – to be tough. So much for pride and self-sufficiency! They rapidly dissipated when suddenly I had to rely on family and friends for the simple requirements of daily living. As it turns out, allowing others to help me made them feel better, too. I know how satisfying it is to do something for someone else. Now, I know that to refuse help is to deny others that satisfaction.

The incredible gift that has come out of this is human connection. As word spread about my illness, the number of letters, emails, phone calls and visits I received was overwhelming. It’s been years since I’ve seen or heard from many who contacted me. All of them told me how I’d touched their lives in special ways. To hear and read such tributes is one of the most precious gifts a person can receive. It’s like being at your own memorial service while you’re alive to enjoy it! My father always said, “Send the flowers to people when they can smell them.” I am going to try to send “flowers of appreciation” much more often than I do.

Cracked Notes and Aussies

In crude terms, playing a piece of music on the piano requires the fingers to play the right notes in the right rhythm with the right dynamics. Sometimes the music goes very fast, so getting the fingers into position is tricky. Hitting two keys at once, called “cracked notes,” is a perpetual challenge for pianists. The fear of having cracked notes can make a performer so careful that all spontaneity and joy evaporate.

As a young student in England, I moaned to my teacher about the challenging leaps in a Bach Partita. His response was a scornful snort. Much as I would have liked a useful strategy from him, it wasn't forthcoming. Years later, I developed my own strategy as the result of meeting an Australian tennis champion.

On a trip to Australia in 1978, I took tennis lessons with a Davis Cup champion, Geoff Pollard. He said ten words that improved my tennis game and my piano performance: "Wait until you can read the writing on the ball."

Most people, explained the pro, have poor judgement about the distance of the tennis ball as it speeds towards them. They swing too early and miss. Instructed not to swing my racket until I could read the writing on the ball, I was confident. The writing is pretty big. The pro then lobbed a ball at me. Suddenly I realized that it was spinning around very fast and would be almost on my nose before being legible. In the last instant, I read the words and swung. To my complete astonishment, I hit the ball squarely with my racket and lobbed it back to the pro.

I've adapted this successful strategy for hitting a tennis ball accurately into one for hitting a key accurately: "Wait until you are over the centre of the key." The pianist is now really looking at, and focusing on, the position of the fingers.

How do you learn to find the centre of the key quickly enough to produce excellent accuracy, rhythm and dynamics in a dizzyingly fast piece? The practice solution is to separate the speed of getting the hand into position from the speed of depressing the key. I call this technique "practicing fast very slow." There are five steps.

Step 1. Play the key that occurs before you need to change hand position, using the appropriate amount of strength required for the dynamic you want, then STOP.
Step 2. Look for the key (or chord) that will be played next.
Step 3. Move the entire hand AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE to the new key but DO NOT PLAY IT.
Step 4. Look to see that the correct finger is over the center of the key to be played.
Step 5. Play the key with the appropriate dynamic level.

When you're comfortable and can play the notes correctly because you've practiced moving your hand quickly, speed up the tempo of the piece until it's at performance level. This strategy is very effective for reducing cracked notes to a minimum in any performance.

It also improves your tennis game.

The Pay-off of Being "In the Moment"

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down at the piano for my last practice sessions before heading to tropical St. Maarten. Even the lure of a week on sun-warmed beaches wasn't enough to quell nagging thoughts that I'd lose momentum in my practicing. Any skill that requires eye-hand coordination plus mental sharpness needs daily reinforcement to be at its best. There's that old saw about Rachmaninoff (or pick any pianist of note) who said, “If I miss one day’s practice, I notice; if I miss two days' practice, my wife notices; if I miss three days' practice, everyone notices.”

In practicing, the challenge is to pay attention to each note and not day-dream about, say, an upcoming sunny holiday. I've been very influenced by Jon Kabat-Zinn’s statement that if you aren't present here, when you get there, you won't be present either. The same challenge faces everyone who meditates: when trying to focus on one thing, the mind breaks off and introduces other thoughts. We can be two people – one who does the task, and one who watches the doing. In practicing and performing, keeping these parts together is the goal. So-called memory lapses occur when the split happens. In my experience, it isn't that notes are forgotten but that concentration falters.

I'm happy to report that I didn’t think an edifying thought the entire week in St. Maarten. I enjoyed watching the water, sun and sand, I enjoyed the pleasure of my friends, and I recklessly enjoyed the wonderful French food. It was pretty easy to stay focused in those moments! By week's end, my walk had changed from an energetic, get-from-here-to-there-as-quickly-as-possible gait, to a relaxed, loose-limbed saunter.

Now, I'm back in the saddle again, and I love it. After loosening up my fingers, I'm noticing that the practice I did before leaving has taken me to new, deeper levels. I'm feeling so refreshed and happy that my love of playing the piano is even more intense and rewarding, moment by moment.

Collaboration's time has come!

Jugglers were among the first to openly embrace sharing and growing. The spoken rule for jugglers is, "You teach me a trick, and I'll teach you one, and then we'll both know two!"

The idea of collaboration began for me with Dr. Suzuki, who encouraged all teachers to share teaching tips and stragegies through regular meetings of two or more teachers. Until then, the piano teachers I had known were secretive about their methods. The entire system was so competitive that the feeling seemed to be, "If I tell you my secrets, then you will know mine plus your own, and then your students will be better than mine," with the implied subtext, "and I wouldn't be able to stand that!"

It has been a joy to see how greater openness has filtered down to the students. Instead of having rival studios in which one dare not speak to another teacher's student, fellow students become best friends and root for each other to do well in competitions, even when they are going head-to-head in the same one.

We all win.

Re-framing: one of my most valuable tools as a teacher

It happens in piano teaching more often than one would expect: a child tries an activity for the first time, cannot do it perfectly and becomes frustrated and angry faster than the speed of light. One can tell almost immediately that this has happened by the sounds of the hands slamming down on the keyboard. Separating the child’s brain from the fingers (figuratively, of course) seems to be a powerful aid to relieving the frustration.

I talk to the child about his or her wonderful brain that has a clear picture of what needs to happen. At this time, though, the fingers have never attempted this action before. The brain is sending messages to the fingers but, since they are inexperienced at the activity, the fingers don’t always understand what they are being asked to do. This is why we need to ask them over and over until they really know what is required. It means, then, that the child’s brain needs to be kind to the fingers because the fingers are doing the best they can and the brain needs to help until, again figuratively speaking, the fingers turn around and say to the brain, OK, we know how to do that now.

The children respond wonderfully to this strategy, feel great about themselves and display real patience and compassion for their fingers. That is why re-framing is one of my most valuable tools as a teacher.

What Makes Me Happy

All the regular items that fall under the makes-me-happy list apply, of course. But I realized today, after a nearly week-long Christmas hiatus from practicing (geez, I hate it when I don’t practice for a week!) that when I wrote in my daily journal (morning pages in The Artist’s Way speak) and began to dream about how I wanted to create a special performance of the Rachmaninoff Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, I felt totally energized and alive.

The sages say that in order to be happy, a person needs three things: 1. someone to love, 2. something to do and 3. something to look forward to. It is the third item that caused me to feel so soul-poppingly awake. The invitation to play the Rach-Pag Variations, as they are familiarly known, is for October 2007. Slightly more than ten months seems like a long way off but there are other commitments to be met before then and there are new aspects of this performance that really have me all a-twit.

The details of how I go about preparing this performance I hope to share in an on-going diary. The feeling I am relishing today is the sudden laser focus and excitement that the prospect of the performance is giving my life. Now even jogging takes on new meaning: I want to be physically fit. I want to have the release of energy and positive glow about life that jogging seems to give me.

I want to create the most powerful experience for the audience that I possibly can. I want to share the magic of Rachmaninoff’s ballet score that tells the legend of the great violinist Paganini selling his soul to the Devil in order to be able to play better than anyone else. Practicing needs to be the most specific and intensely attended-to that I have ever done. I want to know the sound of every note and to be totally connected with those sounds, each one of which has meaning and place in the score. In addition to the research on the story, the historical context of the legend, Rachmaninoff and ballet will all of which be incorporated into the performance. Therefore, the other parts of my life need to be unfolding in a logical and well-organized manner each day.

Boy, am I lucky. Imagine having the opportunity to play this great piece of music with a fine orchestra.

The Power of Music to Create Community

Last night my heart soared and I felt completely connected with the capacity audience at Sydenham Street United Church, temporary home for concerts of the Kingston Symphony Orchestra. Why did I have this encompassing and joyous feeling? Because the conductor invited the audience to sing a few Christmas carols.

I love the traditional carols, but that's not the reason the feeling was so powerful. It was because all of us were singing together, creating a community from our shared voices.

When I was a small child during the Second World War, at the movies there was always a short subject, as they were called then, of a few songs. The lyrics were displayed on the screen, and we were invited to sing along and “follow the bouncing ball." At school we sang every day for thirty minutes out of the book called “the Canadian Song Book." How I loved those songs like “Flow Gently Sweet Afton” and looked forward to singing them.

Singing around the campfire on the beach in the summer evenings was traditional. Someone always had a ukulele, and “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” was invariably part of the song list.

Much later I attended a small church in a village in BC, where the temporary minister, who loved the old hymns, would come early to services and sing them, inviting everyone to join him. Attendance more than doubled within a few weeks.

We're fortunate to have many fine choral groups in Kingston. I guess I'll have to join one of them.

The Miracle of Friendship

There is a painting of a wooden barn with a round stone silo. The light is glancing from a place low in the sky. It is probably around 5 pm on a long summer’s day. Looking at this painting by my friend Carrel takes me to the years I spent in Wisconsin and in particular to the farm owned by Carrel and her husband. The painting will be delivered to my house tomorrow and I am going to hang it in the hallway where I will see it every time I enter the house or walk from my bedroom to the kitchen.

I visited Carrel at the farm in Wisconsin last week. She and I played Mozart duets for several hours each day. She is also, like me, a pianist and teacher, and having the opportunity to make music with her after such a long time away was slaking a thirst I was unaware I had. Carrel plays the piano every single day as a way of keeping her increasingly arthritic fingers supple. I was happy and astonished at how fluid the running passages were and how musical her playing continues to be in spite of the physical challenges of being 87.

As we were playing, and indeed all the time we were together, we laughed and laughed. When I told her that nobody makes me laugh the way she does, she said that no one laughs with her the way I do. I felt good.

Nuannaarpoq: The taking of extravagant pleasure in being alive

We have access to so many and varied sources of music. The most significant and valuable source for the developing human brain appears to be classical music. More and more articles are appearing about research that shows how the brains of infants are stimulated and enriched by hearing the highly patterned and structured sounds of the great classical composers.

Human beings are hard-wired, scientists now believe, to make music. There’s no culture without some form of music, no matter how primitive it may appear to be. Even as recently as today’s Globe and Mail (Nov. 29, 2006), a segment in the Social Studies column states that when a person hears a rhythm, an immediate and physical response occurs. The music triggers the release of chemicals into the bloodstream that are directly linked to pleasure (quoted from Tom Horan in the The Daily Telegraph).

When I read the Inuktitut word nuannaarpoq in an article by Yann Martel, (Globe and Mail, Nov. 26, 2006), I felt a shiver of recognition, the kind of reaction one has when something is articulated that you didn’t know you felt until you saw it written.

What a magnificent concept this word captures: the taking of extravagant pleasure in being alive. I do feel this way in general often nowadays and find that kind of pleasure in listening to or making music.

Music entertains, inspires and educates

Sir John Reith, the first head of the BBC, was asked if he was going to give the people what they wanted. No, he said, something better than that. We will inform, educate and entertain them.
Music does this for us already! Listening to music is a pleasure and is certainly entertaining. With instruction, we learn how to appreciate the magnificent works of our greatest composers. There are so many different kinds of music, each with its geniuses and outstanding pieces. Teachers who present them in informative and interesting ways, with an evident love of music, are blessings to children.
One of my favorite experiences is to listen to Clayton Scott bring opera and ballet to life. The experience is as easy and pleasurable as hearing an exciting story being read for the first time. With a guide such as Clayton, even very young children learn to listen and watch with great discernment to operas and ballet. For adults, the experience is enlightening and enlarging. To discover more about Clayton Scott’s performances, visit her website "http://www.claytonscottmusic.com".

My Lifetime Dream of Walking in the Footsteps of Mozart and Beethoven

The excitement, the thrill, the feeling in the core of my being when I stood in the room where Mozart was born, then in the room where Beethoven wrote the heartfelt Heiligenstadt Document, will stay with me forever.

My trip to Salzburg, Vienna and Prague during the summer of 2006 was a pilgrimage of love and respect. The more my life has been filled with the music of these two great masters, the more I have longed to see where they lived and worked, where they created their glorious music that has inspired and sustained millions of people for two hundred and fifty years and gives no sign of waning.

Over the course of the two weeks I journeyed in the company of my dear friends and colleagues, Rosemarie and Jean Blanc. We were excited to visit the Mozart Haus, where Amadeus entered the world. In that ancient house there were ceramic stoves the size of an old-fashioned wood stove, only prettier and decorated with flowery designs. There were no openings in the part of the stove that was in the room. In a corridor meant for the servants, each of the stoves had a doorway for removing the wood ash and stoking with fresh wood for burning. Unlike North American fireplaces or woodstoves, no dirty ashes could enter the living rooms to soil the pretty silk clothing so loved in Mozart’s time.

We saw the tiny violin that Mozart played when he was four years old as well as the piano that travelled with Mozart on his journeys. We stood in the gorgeous yellow room in Schonbrunn castle where the little Mozart climbed into the lap of the Empress Maria-Theresa, covered her face with kisses, and told her that he would marry her when he grew up. Fickle woman, when Mozart was grown and in need of a secure post, she wrote a letter trashing him to the prospective employer, saying that he wasn’t so wonderful and besides, he had a large and hungry family!

I sat in the cathedral where Mozart was baptized and heard the massive organ that he played occasionally. The sound filled the huge space and resonated in every cell of my body.

The Vienna opera house, which performs a different opera each day of the week, ten months a year, is vast and gorgeous yet somehow welcoming and people-friendly. The luxury of the building enhances one’s sense of how wonderful it is to be human, to know, to see, to hear the magnificence that our fellows are capable of creating and sharing. Sitting in the Emperor’s box, at the end of the comprehensive and informative tour, I suddenly knew just how I was meant to live! I love to imagine what it must have been like to sit in those luxurious, perfectly-placed seats, hearing Mozart’s glorious operas and watching him conduct in the pit!

In Heiligenstadt, now a suburb of Vienna, we visited the two medium-sized rooms in a pretty but not luxurious house where Beethoven wrote the document, now known as the Heilgenstadt Testament, in which he speaks for the first time about his hearing affliction to his brother Carl. We have had such a distorted picture or Beethoven as being uncouth, uncultured and socially unacceptable when in fact he was tortured by not being able to hear and afraid of being ostracized because he was deaf. It was terrible for him to be in society, incapable of hearing what was being said and equally incapable of telling anyone why. To hear him express his longing to be loved and accepted is anguishing. To stand in the rooms where he wrote this agonizing confession made me feel conscious of the deep expression of emotions that lives in every note of every piece of music he composed.

My feelings of awe and privilege have caused me to listen with greater joy and keenness to experience more fully the progression of every sound, knowing that each time I hear a piece again, I have the possibility of resonating more deeply with the power and beauty of Mozart’s and Beethoven’s music.

Are you excited about using the Metronome yet?

In addition to using the metronome to create real, measurable momentum while sight-reading, try it for really making a huge, wonderful difference to reviewing old repertoire!

Most of us hate reviewing. It always feels to me like ripping apart an old garment and remaking it, instead of having the excitement of cutting out a new dress and seeing a lovely, sexy gown take shape. Part of the challenge is wanting to go back to the old, once well-learned piece and play it as nimbly as when we last performed it. Sadly, this doesn't usually happen. We have let it go too long, and our fingers and memory aren't fluent enough to play it well. Tryring to force it to sound like the performance brings frustration and a feeling of needing to relearn the entire thing – and who wants to do that? Once my son, then almost a karate black-belt, did a vigorous work-out after a long hiatus. It took his muscles days to recover from the shock.

So, why not give yourself a break and ease your way back in? Treat it almost like a piece that you're going to sight-read. Put on the metronome at a very easy tempo, far below your performance speed, and give your fingers a chance to re-acquaint themselves with the piece. I was really excited to see that in a day or two, my fingers remembered the pieces very well, without strain or effort.

I hope you will give this a try and let me know how you make out. Happy music making!

Want to be a GREAT sightreader?

In the past few days I have had the most incredible epiphany regarding sightreading. I used to feel as though I was the worst sight-reader in the entire world and, you know what, I really was! If anyone so much as mentioned the word "sight-read," my mind went immediately into "tilt" and even if I could have played the thing, the fact that they said "sight-read" was enough to fry my brain-cells.

My first break-through came some years ago when I heard about "reading every note accurately" (as opposed to reading fast and grabbing what you could).

I then thought it was OK to read fairly comfortably, counting out loud, and permitting the tempo to go faster or slower, depending on how complicated the music was.

Now, the really great break-through!! Read REALLY slowly, counting out loud, WITH THE METRONOME! Somehow, if you really do go slowly enough, you have time and space to see in advance what you need to see next, and, here is the real kicker, it really sounds just like the piece is supposed to sound (even if rather slow).

I feel so empowered by these experiences!! I feel as if I want to read every piece of music ever written and I can't wait to read something new every day. As an added bonus, I feel as though I have half learned every one of the pieces I have read since this breakthrough. I hope you have as much fun with it as I did.