New YouTube series - Bach in 5 Minutes!

Video editing has always intimidated me but I've been determined, especially after putting up my Patreon page, to start working on doing more of them. Here's the first hopefully of many. A Bach friend of mine recently recommended I take a break from Book II of Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier to learn Book I. I was hesitant at first but after reading through it I realized that for the most part, it's a breath of fresh air compared to the second book. So I thought, why not try to learn them as quickly as possible? I most likely will regret those words but I do always like a good challenge. So I'm going to try to spend as little as possible time learning as many as I can, relying on my typical pattern-hunting and analysis method, then spending around 5 minutes walking through each one, one at a time, and then recording a "first performance" of them. My goals for the project are:  

• Learn the Preludes and Fugues in Book I quickly
• Help folks see what I mean by learning music via pattern hunting and analysis
• Show how fun, musical, and rewarding it can be to learn music in this way

We'll see what happens! Enjoy!! 

Tweet

Looking to puzzles to learn how to piece together music

Have you ever tried to put a jigsaw puzzle together with the pieces turned upside down? My guess is your answer is something along the lines of, “No, why on Earth would I do that?”

Good response. Why would anyone even think to do that?

Perhaps it’s to make a really important point?

Many musicians, especially young musicians, read music in a way that’s similar to trying to put a puzzle together upside down. It doesn’t matter if they’re sight-reading or if they’ve been working at a piece for weeks, many view the music in a way that in my opinion severely limits the ease at which they can process the music and inhibits their ability to interpret it in a musical way.

Let’s go back to looking at puzzles. If you happen to have a puzzle lying around, pull it out and give my challenge a try. Turn all the pieces over so all the backs of the pieces are what you’re looking at it and see how you fare. What do you have at your disposal to figure out which pieces go together? All you have to go on is whether the piece is an edge piece of an inner piece what type of connectors the pieces have – let’s say they’re usually innies and outies, or female and male. (I won’t go into the details of which are which. If you’re reading this blog I’m pretty sure you can figure it out.) That’s really not a lot to go on so in order to put together the puzzle we end up having to resort to a lot of trial and error. And if you’re not good at finding a method to keep track of what combinations you’ve already tried this process can be very time consuming, uninspiring, frustrating, and downright painful.

Not much fun, right?

All right, so let’s flip those pieces back over and try again.

Ahhhh…now we have more to go on! We’ve got the shapes of the puzzle pieces, the colors and patterns, and knowledge of what the puzzle’s picture as a whole will be. With all these extra clues we get more strategies to use too. You can put the edge together first, using color, pattern, and shape to help; you can focus on trying to find pieces that create specific items in the picture; you can put together pieces that all have a similar graphic pattern or color.

Strategies bring successes…

Success brings a completed puzzle…

A completed puzzle brings a sense of accomplishment…

Now we’re having fun and wanting to do another someday.

How we process notes on a page of music is similar to how we process puzzle pieces. If we see all those notes as individual notes that are differentiated only by specific letter names it’s like looking at those puzzle pieces turned upside down. The end result is that it’s much more difficult to see how the pieces relate to one another and work together to create a larger picture, or part of a picture.

If instead we look for patterns in our music, if we consistently look for interesting clues, we’ll find that music learning is not only easier, but also more musical because those same patterns and clues can naturally lead us into the world of musical interpretation. Each time I look at a puzzle piece, whether it’s an actual puzzle or to a piece of music, I see new clues, new patterns, or new colors. With each new discovery comes a burst of excitement and inspiration. And as pieces start to fit together my understanding of what I’m creating becomes clearer, making me even more motivated to complete the puzzle and to share the bigger picture with others. It’s fun. It’s interesting. It’s creative. It’s one of the many reasons why I love learning music.

Now I have to take a moment to admit that sometimes puzzling can be a struggle, usually because of the puzzle itself. I will never forget the day my dear husband, early in our marriage, brought one home that made me quickly want to embrace gardening instead. It was a puzzle of hundreds, maybe thousands of penguins standing on an iceberg in a snowstorm. It was basically like trying to do one of those upside-down puzzles although at least I did have more than one color to go on – I had two: black and white. If I wasn’t such a stubborn person I would have given up early in the game but instead I decided to approach it like I do music. I tackled it in small chunks of time and started looking for as many clues as I could. I quickly came to realize that the puzzle wasn’t just black and white; it actually had many shades of both of those colors. As soon as I realized that, it became much easier to finish it. That’s not to say it was as fun as other puzzles I’ve done but still, it got done and in and I learned something in the process. That’s what mattered. Thankfully most of the puzzles and music I learn are not penguins standing on icebergs but are instead endlessly exciting and interesting. 

On an ending note, a plug for my favorite puzzle-making company of all time - Liberty Puzzles.

Examples of their whimsy pieces

Made out of thick laser-cut plywood in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, their puzzles are the most exquisite, delightful puzzles you will ever put together. They are also unique in that their piece shapes are not like the ones in your grandmother’s puzzles. In fact with Liberty Puzzles it’s pretty rare to be able to distinguish edge pieces from inner pieces – they are all completely unique. To add to the fun they include what are known as whimsy pieces which are pieces in the shape of something – a person, bird, dragon…it makes putting together these puzzles a different kind of challenge but one that is well worth it!

The most recent Liberty puzzle I completed. So much cool detail! 

With that little infomercial over, (not paid for by the company but out of my deep respect for them) happy puzzling, everyone! Whether it’s a jigsaw puzzle or a musical one, remember to keep looking and use your eyeballs and your brain. The big picture is sure to come together more easily that way!

Tweet

From the kitchen to the stage: the importance of trusting oneself

Today I realized that great cooks and musicians have something in a common - they have learned to let go and to trust their senses.  They have learned that interpreting great dishes or musical compositions goes beyond technique and mere re-creation into a realm that incorporates their own experiences, whims, and moods,  blending them seamlessly with where their audiences are, even if their audiences don't even know themselves where they are or where they want to be taken.

These ideas have been floating around in my head for a while now but they seem to have all collided while I was watching a movie from a few years back called "Today's Special."  It's a fun, romantic, heart-warming foodie movie about a young sous-chef that has worked for years in a restaurant in New York City.  When a promotion doesn't come his way and he confronts the executive chef for an explanation, he receives an honest but painful evaluation - he doesn't have the passion, vision, daring, and creativity that it takes to be the soul behind a restaurant.

This news comes as a blow of course, and launches Samir, the main character, into a fairly predictable journey of introspection.  He ends up reluctantly helping out his father in the family's Indian restaurant that has been struggling to survive.  Having abandoned Indian cooking since he was a boy, Samir does everything to keep the restaurant alive except plan and prepare the dishes himself - he hires a taxi driver he had serendipitously met instead.  This taxi driver, Akbar, is a big of a magical character.  During the resurrection of the restaurant, he teaches Samir some very important lessons about cooking which I also want to translate for musicians for the remainder of this blog post.  In one scene Akbar turns the kitchen over to Samir, encouraging him to try his own hand at combining traditional Indian spices in order to create a "perfect" masala.  Samir looked bewildered and disturbed since there were no measuring implements or recipes anywhere in sight.  With Akbar's encouragement and repeated philosophy that one just needs to use one's head, heart, and stomach, Samir gives it a try - a dash of this, a gentle pouring of that, and so on.  In the end, is it "right?"  Akbar doesn't seem to savor the results but he approaches the moment as any good teacher should.  He admits that it doesn't seem quite right while at the same time affirming that what Samir has done was good anyway.  The lesson was not about "right" or "perfect," it was about letting go, listening, smelling, feeling, and creating.

I am convinced that even beginning students should be given plenty of opportunities to let go and to experience music making and learning in a way that involves more of their senses.  I believe that we teach musicians to rely too much on reading every note on the page, note-by-note-by-note.  We don't teach how to read music as a language.  Similarly we teach students to read every indication on the page and to follow them without necessarily knowing why they are there.  As a result, students don't feel that they have the tools they need to make music on their own.  If someone handed them a piece of music without any fingering, pedal marks, bowings, etc...my guess it they would feel just as bewildered and disturbed as Samir was in the movie without recipes or measuring implements.

As I have mentioned on my blog and on my Facebook page, I don't consider myself a teacher even though I spend most of my waking moments thinking about the process or learning.  At the moment I have one adult student who I consider my guinea pig for all of my philosophies and strange notions and oddly enough, at her lesson this morning, long before I watched this movie, we had a series of very similar moments to the movie scene I described above.  In the past few weeks at our lessons I have increased the amount of times I intentionally pull the music away from my student and ask her to narrate to me what's going on the music and what her understanding of the music means to her.  Today we did even more of that.  I had her re-create several passages to the best of her ability based on her narrative, without the music anywhere in sight.  She kept asking to see the music but for the most part I kept saying, "Say what you know and we'll go from there."  I certainly didn't expect "perfection" but what I did want to encourage was thoughtfulness and complete engagement and she accomplished what I was after brilliantly.   This type of work terrified, and probably really annoyed her, but as the music has gotten more and more complicated and she has still managed to work out how to accomplish what I'm asking for, she has gotten more and more confident.  She has also started making more decision of her own regarding musicality, pedaling, and the like because she understands the tools and the techniques.  For me it is thrilling to see how much she can process with just a little help and guidance from me and it leaves me speechless when I see how surprised she is by her own ability to comprehend music as a language after only one year of lessons.  She does not need to keep looking at all those notes and scribbles on the page.  She can see it as a language and use her head, heart, and not necessarily her stomach, but her ears to guide her music-making.  At today's lesson she had several moments where she seemed genuinely shocked by how easy it was to play the music by letting go and thinking of the music as a language.   But this takes trust and I believe we need to practice trusting ourselves at our instruments.

Which leads me to the title of the movie and one of my favorite things about it.  As many restaurants do, the Indian restaurant in the movie has a sign that hangs in the window to list the daily special.  One day when Samir comes to work he sees that Akbar has listed this instead of an actual dish...

Trust me

Exactly.  Trust me - trust you.  It takes courage but trust me, there is incredible growth and creativity that comes from letting go and trusting all your senses - not just your eyeballs.  Speak the language of music, not just notes.  It's worth it.

Trust me.

You will hear more, feel more, love more...and so will your audience.

Trust me.

Tweet

Making sense of Strauss through botany

Yes, you read that correctly.  In the course of this one blog post I am going to attempt to use a brief study in botany to unravel an issue I am having in the accompaniment to a song by Richard Strauss.

Ready?

My problem started with a rehearsal I had with a student vocalist.  I was sightreading Strauss' song, Gefunden.  Everything was going along swimmingly and I was thoroughly enjoying the tranquillity of the piece when we reached the last four measures of the song.  All of a sudden I felt incredibly disoriented.  I stopped the singer, looked at her part to make sure she was singing her line correctly, looked at my part to make sure I was playing the right notes, and then said, "Something isn't right.  I think there must be a mistake in the music."  The singer told me she had sung it over the summer and didn't remember anyone mentioning any misprints in the score so we decided to proceed as if all was well, with me declaring at the end of rehearsal that I would look into the misprint possibility.

 Last night I decided to face the music and see what I could make of the situation.  Pulling out the score and opening my laptop to YouTube I found a reputable recording and took a listen.  According to Hans Hotter and Geoffrey Parsons, musicians I figured I could trust, my score was, alas, correct.  Ugh.  Why? Why? Why?

Never wanting to grow enemies with something, especially in music, I decided to do what I do when I find myself starting to glower at the piano or the music.  I became determined to figure out what on earth Strauss was thinking when he wrote the part I didn't like.  (Notice the past tense there...this post is going to have a happy ending!)

The first thing I did was I looked up the translation of the song, reading first through the entire poem, and then focusing on the text in my thorn-in-my-side spot.  Here is a link in case you're curious.  It's a lovely poem by Goethe...the protagonist walks in the woods, encounters a flower which he bends down to pick, has a little conversation with same flower who asks him not to pick her, he digs it up instead and replants it near a house where it grows and blooms.  Lovely, right?  So what are the words when the crunchy, dissonant part occurs?  Here they are:

Now it keeps growing
and goes on blooming. 

OK.  Well, that didn't explain anything to me.  I still didn't get what Strauss is doing because I can't see any hint of negativity or angst in those words so I decided to try something else - looking at some theory.

Now before anyone stops reading this post out of fear and distaste for theory, let me assure you, this is not going to get terribly messy.  I am not a music theory nerd and I didn't do that well at it in school but I've always tried to apply it to my understanding of the pieces I'm working on.  My journey with theory, I'm sure, will never end and I'm always trying to learn more through direct application.  With that said, let's look at the score.

I'm great at looking at keys so let's do that and see if it gets us anywhere.  The song is in F major and for the most part it's straight-forward harmonically, although he does move into A-flat major several times.  But then we get to the first measure on the bottom line, which is pictured above.  Here, the piano, with no warning at all, goes into D-flat major while this time, the voice stays in F major.  F and D-flat major are not the closest of keys and if you look at that first measure you'll see that while the singer is singing a D the piano is playing A-flats, G-flats, E-flats, and C's.  Oh my - lots of dissonance!  Even at the end of that measure, the singer moves down to a C but there's also a D-flat just a half-step up from that in the piano part.  The second measure is not quite as crunchy but I feel pretty confused about where Strauss is going harmonically until the second half of the measure when the piano part abruptly shifts yet again, but this time back to F major to join what the voice has been doing all along.

At this point in my investigation I was intrigued.  I felt like I was definitely onto something.  I looked back at the text again, read the entire poem several times, and tried to picture what was going on.  It was then that the proverbial lightbulb went off over my head.

In this story, a flower, roots and all, gets dug up, carried away, and transplanted to a different location.  I'm not a great gardener but I have tried my hands at it enough to know that moving plants from one place to another has its risks.  Transplant shock is a real possibility which can cause a plant to die.  Perhaps that is what is happening in these two measures at the end of Gefunden.  The piano part is like the plant being suddenly plopped in a completely different place, dealing with new soil, light, and exposure to the elements.  There is a sense of conflict and discomfort.  By the middle of the second measure, however, it has thankfully adjusted and finds itself growing and thriving once again.

Perhaps I'm being far-fetched but in my mind, who cares?  What matters is that now I have an explanation, at least for myself, of why the accompaniment is the way it is.  And now I am eager to try it out with the singer and to see what I can do to make it all work together in the artistic way Strauss probably intended.

Success!  I told you this would have a happy ending, as virtually all my musical investigations do.

I'll leave you in the hands of Hotter and Parsons...enjoy!





Tweet

Taking time for timers in the practice room

All right.  I just set me nifty new timer for 30 minutes.  Let's see if I can get this post written in that time!

The other day I was checking out The Practice Shoppe's website to see what nifty little tools and toys they sell to help in the practice room and I came across a series of cube timers that intrigued me.  I thought it was interesting that each timer had 4 set durations you could use, with each cube having a different combination of times.  I ended up purchasing one that has increments of 5, 10, 20, and 30 minutes to see how it works and to get myself thinking in timer mode.  You see, I have rarely, if ever, relied on timers when I practice, perhaps because I am stubborn but also because I'm pretty self motivated - I don't usually need extra encouragement to practice a passage for an effective period of time.  In fact I often have to pull the plug on myself because I'm having so much fun...truly!

That last point, that I sometimes have a difficult time stopping myself, got me thinking...maybe timers can be used for that purpose too.  Maybe there's more to them than just being a tool for musicians (or their parents) to use as some sort of torture device...

"Bwahahaha...I am going to set the timer now for 10 minutes.  You must practice these two measures until the timer has gone off or else!!!  BEGIN!"

I've seen some people using timers in this manner.  I suppose it serves a purpose but I've also seen it create somewhat of a Pavlovian response where the minute the timer is started the musician finds him/herself slouching and going through the motions of repeating the passage in question while staring painfully in the direction of the timer the entire time.  "Please, please, please go off now."  I don't know how much deliberate learning is going on in moments like this.  It makes me wonder if there's another way which leads me back to a point I made a bit earlier.

Maybe we can use timers as a way to make sure we don't get too carried away with our exploration of a tricky passage.  Imagine that!  If we can set the timer as a cue to start a thrilling, intriguing round of musical exploration our time would be so much better spent.  It would encourage us to find a way to be in the moment, to play with our instrument, to experiment, to problem solve.  We would no longer be staring at the timer with a look of ceaseless pleading. If we've gone into that mindful place the timer going off doesn't feel like being released from a prison cell, it's more of a reminder that it is time to move on and spread our curiosity elsewhere.

I am intrigued about this possibility of using the timer in this way because I think it could help us move away from the type of practicing that can be frustrating and to move towards practicing that is instead a continual exploration and journey of improvement.  When we use the timers the torturous way, if we haven't accomplished what we were supposed to accomplish by the time the alarm goes off, we can often feel like we've failed.  In using this other approach it would be harder to go into judgement land at the end of the time.  We know that we've put in some good work and maybe have had fun in the process - that's bound to be more satisfying.

As I say in my book, Inspired Practice, "Discouragement is the enemy of effective practicing." Let's see if we can use timers to head us in a more encouraging direction.

Do you have any clever uses for timers in the practice room?  How do you feel about using them?  I'm curious to hear your thoughts so feel free to leave a comment below.

Oh my...my timer just went off!  Guess it's time to sign off.

Happy practicing!


Tweet

Berry picking in the practice room

It seems I am incapable of doing any activity without relating it to practicing, even in the summer, when my mind could and maybe should be thinking about beaches, lemonade, reading a good novel, or just resting.

A few weeks ago I woke up greeted by a spectacularly beautiful morning.  I could feel the gentle breeze through the window, and although I suspected the sun would make an appearance sometime in the day, clouds were still keeping her in bed. I could have done my usual, readied myself for the day and headed off to work but I was struck instead with an undeniable desire for fresh berries. I quickly got ready, ate some breakfast, and headed off to our local u-pick berry farm.  I am so thankful I listened to that little voice inside that was tantalizing me with the thought of fresh, sweet berries, because I walked away from that outing with a lot more than a bucket of berries - I walked away with the realization that I had also learned a lot about the process of learning and practicing.

I chose to start with picking blackberries even though the owner had informed me that the bushes have been picked virtually clean the previous day. (Yes, I am stubborn...ask my parents or my husband!)  I found one of the rows he had recommended, stepped up to the bush and started looking. I couldn't see much of anything, only a tiny wimpy berry here and there - not particularly what I had in mind.   At that point I could have given up and walked away, trying my luck with blueberries instead but like I said, I'm stubborn.  I squatted on the ground and gingerly lifted a thorny branch - nothing.  I tried looking under another one -  still nothing but a few under-ripe ones.   For some reason I then had the notion to simply look up into the bush.  Jackpot!  (This is when I could use sound effects on the blog!) I was greeted by the sight of berries that looked like they were trying to keep themselves secret indefinitely.  Clink, clink, clink...into my bucket they went and armed with my new tactic, which I expanded to include standing on my toes to find berries at the tops of the bushes, I was set for the rest of morning.

Another thing I've learned through berry picking is how important it can be to let go and try things out in an effort to learn what it is I like.  Being the city girl that I am was, I thought that blackberries were blackberries, blueberries were blueberries.  But that's not exactly the way it is!  There are tons of different types, each with their own texture, color, size, and most importantly, taste.  For the past few years I have picked blueberries at this farm from the same bushes that reside in one specific area and have ignored everywhere else. (In addition to being stubborn I am also a creature of habit.)   In a recent visit, however, one of the owners was encouraging me to try a different spot, on a different hill (gasp!).  This was a scary prospect for me.  How would I know which bushes to pick from?  How would I know if they were ripe?  My friend set me free with these words - "Just taste some from different bushes and see which ones you like the best!"  

Ohhhhhhhh...(Do you hear the click of the lightbulb going on?) 

I suddenly realized I didn't have to blindly pick berries hoping that they would be something that I'd like or that would be ripe enough.  I could experiment, I could sample, and in the process learn a lot about not only berries but also myself.  In fact, that's what I should have been doing all along!  And that's what we can and should do in the practice room as well.  We shouldn't expect ourselves to magically know what musical choices will suit us or our audiences best without playing around.  We can use our practice room as our berry farm where we can experiment, taste, savor, or even spit out musical ideas.  The magic is in the adventure!

So go on!  Get yourself to your local berry farm and get picking!  Then go practice.  You're bound to find something sweet in both places.  

Tweet

Digging deeper to facilitate learning thorny passages

© PLen - Fotolia.com

I feel I need to start with a warning - my husband, upon hearing my excitement about the contents of this post, declared to me, "You know you're a big nerd, right?"  If you're a music nerd like I am, feel free to continue reading.  But if you're not, you may want to reconsider.  I have a feeling my husband won't be adding this post to his reading list.

The piece in question for this little musical investigation is the last movement of Mozart's F major piano sonata, K. 332.  In the development section there is a passage that is thoroughly entertaining - a whirlwind of sixteenths and winding, chromatic eighths that I had a sneaking suspicion might be a bit tricky to memorize because of the tiny differences between each of the repetitions.  

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with passages like this; I can get overwhelmed with all the details but at the same time I take great interest in tackling a challenge such as this one as if it were a puzzle or a game.  I thought it might be interesting for some to see my process.  Keep in mind no two minds are alike so what I see in this passage may not resonate with or make sense to anyone else.  I do believe, however, that it's the process that is most important.  It gets us one step closer to being in the mind of the composer and that can be a very exciting place to be.  

One of the first things I noticed is that in measures 98 and 110 the figuration in the left hand on the first beat is a triad in the first inversion.  If you look at the excerpt above, all figurations that are in the first position are marked with a green line.   All of the other figurations that are similar throughout this passage are in root position and marked with a red line .  It is a discrepancy like this that can often irritate me, making me want to scream at the composer saying something like, "Why must you do that to me?!"  Actually, I do end up asking that question, only a bit more politely, which then leads me to asking other questions that help me make some sense of what the composer was doing.  In this case, I noticed that in the preceding two measures in both cases, the left hand's eighth-note chromatic figuration also starts on the same note - the third of the root position triad.  My next question is, "So what would it have been like if Mozart had chosen to start those initial figurations on the root of each triad, just as he has the right hand in the next beat?"  First of all, if he had done that, the right hand and the left hand at the beginning of measures 98 and 110, would be playing the same note - "D" in measure 98 and "F" in measure 110.  I played it that way a couple of times and to be honest, it's pretty thin and uninteresting, at least to my ear.  Now I get it!  Now I don't feel like throwing the music across the room.  

This prior experimentation led to another observation and question.  In measures 96 and 108 the left hand starts on the 3rd while the right hand starts on the root.  In measures 100 and 104 the left hand starts on the root while the right hands starts on the 3rd.  After experimenting a bit with the alternative, making the left hand consistently starting on the 3rd and the right hand on the root and vice versa, I realized that alternating it creates much more interest for the ear.  The voices take on much more of a conversational nature.  Again, Mozart seems to have known what he was doing.  Fancy that!

With two annoyances transformed into "aha" moments, there was only one irritation left to soothe.  I noticed that the figurations in the right hand in measures 107 and 111 are the same yet the ones in 99 and 103 are both different in the middle.  You have to look carefully to detect the difference but it's there.  Did he really have to do that?  Couldn't he have used the exact same figuration for both?  I believe so.  And it sounds ok.  Time to dig deeper again.  I noticed that both of these figurations, unlike the other two, are in harmonic minor so there's that interesting augmented second to play around with.  By changing the figuration Mozart seems to be playing around with this fact.  In measure 99 he places the augmented second at the end of the figuration which to my ear helps propel the ear forward to the downbeat of measure 100.  In measure 103 the second is right before the second beat which serves to emphasize the middle of the measure, not propelling us forward as much as he did in the previous instance.  Hmmm...interesting!  

At this point I want to re-emphasize that I have no idea why Mozart did what he did.  I don't know if he even knew.  But going through this little dialogue with him, experimenting with what could have been versus what is actually there and coming to the conclusion that what I need to play is really pretty cool makes it a lot easier for me to face the passage over and over again.  

So the next time you find yourself growling at a composer, I encourage you to grab a trowel and try this exercise.  Digging deeper can get you much more than just a handful of worms.   


Happy digging!


PS - Feel free to leave your own thoughts in the comment section.  And if you want to just let me know that you too are a music nerd, I'd love to know that I'm not alone!



Tweet

Learning music, riding bikes, and eating Oreos

I love layers.

I love them in cakes, cookies, and lasagna;
in literature, when there are multiple layers of meaning;
in geology, where you can find history buried in each layer;
in mysteries, when each layer helps bring the crime-solvers one step closer to the truth;
and last but not least, I love layers when it comes to learning.

© Jason Stitt - Fotolia.com

A few weeks ago an opportunity presented itself that put my layering tactics to the test on a completely different stage - on the street outside our house.  A typical "mean mommy" move of mine, I had taken the training wheels off our daughter's bike and was insisting that we figure this whole bike-riding thing out together.  It was one of those experiences when I realized yet again just how hard it can be to learn something.  When she was younger it was crawling...then walking...then learning how to use the bathroom...and now riding a bike.  I was literally speechless as she sat on her newly transformed bike, shaking nervously as I struggled to hold everything steady.  I froze.  I had no idea how to proceed.  

At first we tried what I remembered seeing in movies - the "run-down-the-street-holding-onto-the-bike-and-then-letting-go-and-watching-her-fly" method.  That method proved to me that what works on a movie set doesn't necessarily work in real life.  My arm practically fell off trying to keep her upright and because I'm very out of shape I thought I was going to pass out.  Huffing and puffing after my feeble and terrifying attempts, I passed our daughter off to my husband who had a bit more success at not putting his own life at risk.  After a few runs our daughter was still leaning to one side the entire time she was riding.  

Aaargh!  What next?

That's when I thought of layering.  With the musicians I coach I am frequently reminding them of how challenging it is to learn a new piece of music.  We've got pitches, rhythm, vibrato, fingering,  and dynamics.  Add to that breathing and words if we're singers...it's a lot to keep organized and in place, especially at first.  Trying to combine them all at the same time inevitably leads to frustration, mistakes, and faulty rhythm and pulse.  It's kind of like trying to ride a bike for the first time by just doing it.  So what do I do when it comes to music?  I take apart the layers and address them one by one.  It's like taking apart an Oreo and eating the filling first and then eating the cookies one by one.  (I know I'm not the only one that does that!)  It makes the eating of the cookie a more enjoyable process because I can savor the differences in texture and flavor.  Same goes with learning music.  If I can separate the layers and take one at a time it is so much easier for me to process each facet of the music.  Putting it all back together once every piece is defined is a piece of cake after that (pun completely intended).

Back to our bike-riding dilemma.

As with learning music, riding a bike has a lot of different components to it.  There's balance to

learn, pedaling, turning, stopping, starting...it's no wonder my daughter, for whom physical challenges like this don't come easy, was having a difficult time.  She was completely overwhelmed and paralyzed by all that she had to do.

Time to pull apart the layers!

First she learned balance by starting on a little incline and having her learn to coast downhill with her feet in the air.

Second, she learned how to put her feet on the pedals after getting her balance.

Third, she learned how to pedal after she got going.

It was interesting to see how much easier the learning process seemed to be once we started using this technique.  It was still a lot of work for her but because we were breaking the process down she did not seem to be as overwhelmed with fear - her brain had more time to process what she was doing, she was able to give herself feedback on how attempts went, and several times she ended up finding her own solutions.  Her success has been more satisfying than eating one of those Oreos!  

So the next time I find myself struggling with learning something new I'm going to think about this lesson in layering.  Maybe I'll need to grab a bag of Oreos to serve as a reminder...

Got milk, anyone?

Tweet

Think again! Destroying judgemental mental tapes while performing

© max5128 - Fotolia.com

"I can't believe you missed that!"

"What kind of musician do you think you are?"

"You don't deserve to be up here!"

"I can't believe they're paying money to hear you!"

"You should have practiced that part more!"

Sound at all familiar?  I think most musicians have had tapes like these run through their head at some point during a performance.  In my experience they can completely destroy a performance, not only for myself but also for the audience.  These tapes can pull everyone out of the music.  They make the focus on ourselves even though in those moments that's the last thing we want.

So what can we do when we make that inevitable first mistake in a performance and one of those tapes starts playing?  

In an earlier post I wrote about dealing with performance anxiety I mentioned creating an alternative, non judgemental tape to quickly turn on as soon as one of the negative ones pops up.  Mine, for instance is, "SING!"  (Yes, it needs to be capitalized.) I repeat this word over and over again until I start singing the music in my head while I'm playing.  If I'm accompanying someone, I sing their line; if I'm playing solo I sing the melody.  What I have discovered is that when I do this there's no way my mind can come up with anything else - it's too busy with the act of singing.  Whether it takes me a few measures or a few pages - heck, even a whole movement to work,  it never fails to pull me away from focusing on myself and immersed back into the music.  

In my practice session today I discovered a variation of this technique that can be nurtured in the practice room and carried onto the stage when it's time to perform.  When I am learning a new piece of music I work in small chunks, identifying from the get-go what patterns there are in the music.  The patterns can be related to harmonies, melodic movement, repeated motives...I try to make sense out of the notes on the page so that they belong together and are no longer individual notes on the page.  This makes the process of learning the notes much quicker, infuses musicality into my practicing, and gives me something to think about the entire time I'm practicing so that I don't get sucked into the land of the practice doldrums.  It prevents me from doing that mindless, rote practicing that I engaged in for so much of my life and that requires way too many repetitions to make any progress in a realistic timeframe.  It's also in those mindless practice sessions that those judgemental mental tapes can be born and developed to a harmful degree.  Our minds have to have something to do, right?  

Right.  But why not give our brains something more productive to think about.  Starting in the practice room, why not feed our brains information that we can use even when we are performing?  Distractions are inevitable when we're on stage but when I have these mental tapes I created in the practice room playing that narrate what's going on in the music it's less likely.  

If you're curious about this process I go through to learn new music, here is a video of today's practice session.  I tried to narrate my thought process as much as possible - hopefully you can pick up on some of that.

Video streaming by Ustream

Next time you find your mind not treating yourself with respect, think again!  

Tweet

Musical Investigations: Episode 4 - Muczynski's "Time Pieces"

In this musical investigation I look at just two measures from Muczynski's first movement of his "Time Pieces," for clarinet and piano.  I knew right off the bat that I would be spending quite a bit of time with these 31 notes and it's proving to be true.  But I'm getting there.  

Here's the passage in question:

I've learned a few things about Mr. Muczynski.  I've learned that his name is fun to say, that his music is always very rhythmically exciting, and the thing that begins our current investigation, that he must have loved octatonic scales which are scales that alternate between whole steps and half steps.

I love octatonic scales - truly.   But not this particular use of them.  Why?  Because Mr. Muczynski decided to not have the hands playing the same intervals at the same time - when the right hand is playing a half step the left hand is playing a whole step.  And when the right hand is playing a whole step, the left hand is playing a half step.  Oh ugh.  That is not nice!  But it does provide a wonderful mental challenge which I gladly accept.

So how to proceed?

1. Find a good fingering and mark it in.  I knew that I wanted to reduce the number times I needed to shift my hands in order to keep things more simple and to avoid finger-tangling episodes.  I also found a way to finger them so that I would be using my thumbs in both hands at the same time as much as possible.  This gives me a sense of security and helps my brain to regroup whenever I land on those thumbs.  I made sure to mark in all the fingerings so that in the beginning stages I would be repeating the exact same fingering.  Not all people like doing this and would rather keep the music more clean but I prefer this method.  I figure I can always erase some of the more obvious ones as soon as the passage is well-learned and memorized.
2. Mark in the material that immediately follows the scales.  Of course this passage falls right on a page-turn which is an invitation for a weak moment so I took a second to write in the notes that fall on the downbeat of the next measure so that I could work that in from the beginning of learning this passage.  
3. Learn each hand separately so that I can play it in my sleep.  This didn't take terribly long because like I said before, I love octatonic scales and am pretty familiar with them.  But I always like to give myself a moment of success before I tackle something challenging, in this case putting the hands together.  
4. Slowly put the hands together.  I have to admit this was slow going and I do believe my brain started to physically hurt.  Realizing that this might not work very well on its own I moved on to...
5. Come up with a strategy to help my brain have something to grab onto.   After struggling to come up with something I finally realized that if I locked onto the right hand and onto which interval I was playing at a given moment I could pretty easily tell my left hand to simply do the other interval.  Seems crazy, perhaps, and keep in mind I had to do this super slow, but pretty quickly my brain and my hands started to latch onto the technique.  It allowed me to focus my eyes on only one line of notes which left some room in my brain to process the I should be doing in the other hand.  Quieting my eyes almost always quiets my brain.

After these steps I was well on my way but I still had to build up speed, comfort, and accuracy.  That leads to today's practice section which I videotaped.  Using many of the practice techniques that I use in fast passages, here is what I did in about 6 minutes of practicing:

• rhythms (I don't like to do dotted rhythms, personally - I chose these because there are always two notes in the pattern on which I can really sit on and affirm that I know what I'm doing.)
• add-a-note, starting first with the individual measures and then linking them all together
• backwards - this is a relatively new technique for me.  I like the challenge in it and I do think it helps, for whatever reason.
• hands crossed - in this exercise I play the left hand up an octave so that it's higher than the right hand.  It's a great way to really hear that left hand that so easily can hide behind the right in terms of security, clarity, and sound.  

So there you have it!  Musical mystery solved.  Hopefully a few days of practicing these two measures 6 minutes will work.  

Tweet

Balancing the tortoise with the hare while practicing

I often talk about practicing slowly because I believe it's an important part of efficient and deliberate practice and because I think it's something many of us have a difficult time doing.  Much of the time, when I ask someone to play something slowly for me in order to fix a problem the music is played at either the same tempo it was taken before or it is played one or two notches slower on the metronome.  Rarely, if ever, is the tempo one that I consider effective, that allows for the mind to feed the right information to the rest of the body.  It frequently takes several attempts to get the music as slow as I want it in order for any fixes to take hold and usually getting there takes a lot of not-so-gentle prodding.

In addition to using slow practice to help fix problem spots I also use it in the early stages of learning a new piece of music since my goal is to rarely, if ever, play wrong notes.  While I am learning the correct notes, choosing good fingerings, looking for patterns in the music, and doing basic analysis to enable me to start making musical decisions, I keep the tempo at a tortoise's pace, being very sensitive to where my brain is in the whole process.  The minute my brain begins to disengage, leaving my hands to rely on muscle memory alone, I stop and pull the tempo back again until my mind can constantly be in sync with the rest of my body.  Having approached learning like this consistently for years, music learning goes much more quickly for me now with the added benefit of the end result being more secure.  The time I have to spend at tortoise speed is reduced, allowing me to make like the hare and play up to tempo sooner than I had in the past when I mainly relied on mindless repetition.

There are some things I keep in mind when engaging in slow practice that I think are important:

• Before doing a passage slowly I play it first close to my desired final tempo to get a sense of the gestures and muscles that will be involved.   When I do this I minimize the chances that I'll have to relearn the passage as I increase the tempo.

• I try not to linger in slow land for too long.  The time it takes for the tempo to naturally and comfortably get faster just by slowly repeating something over and over again is simply too long.  As a busy woman, I can't afford to wait for that to happen.

• I rarely build up speed using the metronome for the same reason.  Instead, I take an interval training approach in which I play a small clip slowly several times in a row first.  After playing it correctly repeatedly I then bump up the tempo significantly to see where I am.  If I make a mistake I check to see if there's a problem that needs to be solved.  If there is I try to address it and repeat the interval training sequence.  If there isn't a problem, I simply repeat the slow-fast exercise.  

• I make sure that I don't shut off musical thinking.  Slow practice is an ideal time to really listen to the music and to try out lots of different musical options.

I guess you could say that in my practicing, I am a bit of a tortoise and a hare.  In my world those two actually get along marvelously. 

To help demonstrate some of what I'm talking about, I recorded myself working on a small snippet of the last movement of Gerald Finzi's "Five Bagatelles" for clarinet and piano, a really great piece in case you don't know it.  I went through the movement a few days ago to learn notes, mark in fingerings, and to indicate which passages I thought would need extra practice - this is one of them.  This is my first go at really working on it and I approached it in my tortoise-hare manner, going back and forth in small snippets until I was able to link everything up comfortably, almost up to tempo.  

So in my race who wins?  The tortoise or the hare?

You guessed it.

Both!

PS - Yes, I do realize that's technically a bunny, not a hare in the photo above.  I had a difficult time finding an image of a hare that was in a good position to sit atop that particular scale.  

Tweet

Ditch the small beats!

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I can't tell you how many times I tell this to the young musicians I work with -  

"Ditch the small beats!"

When we start learning a piece it is important for us to figure out the rhythm.  As many of you who read my blog know, I am a big advocate for careful, thoughtful analysis of music that we're learning and that includes understanding the math behind all of the rhythms in any given piece.  (In my post, "Baking cakes - conquering rhythm" I compared it to getting all the right measurements when baking a cake.)  But after doing this detailed work, I believe we run the risk of becoming hyper-aware of the subdivisions that run throughout - "One-e-and-a Two-e-and-a Three-e-and-a-Four-e-and-a..." might be embedded in our head when we're performing or even worse, but something I see on a regular basis, "da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da."  For me this is akin to the adage, "Can't see the forest through the trees." Thinking in so much detail might be fine at first, and by "at first" I mean until our brain understands the rhythm, but after that I believe it's crucial for technical and musical reasons to trust the detailed work and move past those subdivisions into feeling the main beats (quarter notes in 4/4), half measures (half notes in 4/4), or whole measures (whole notes in 4/4.)  In other words, for a piece that's in 4/4, I feel the music not in 16 but rather in 4, 2, or even better in some cases, in 1. When I don't do this, here is what I typically experience and why feeling the bigger beats helps the situation:

• Lack of phrasing and musicality:  I have a difficult time feeling the natural phrasing and flow of the music because I am so focused on e-a-c-h--a-n-d--e-v-e-r-y--n-o-t-e.  I like to call this the "seeing the trees for the forest" syndrome versus "seeing the forest for the trees."  Feeling the bigger beats helps me to feel and hear how groups of notes belong to one another.  It's like stepping back from one of Seurat's examples of a pointillism and seeing the whole picture rather than just the dots that make up the whole.
• Troubles with ensemble: If I'm playing with someone else it is more difficult to get our parts to line up since we're working at such a microscopic level.  Perhaps it seems counterintuitive, but for some reason if all the players agree on a larger beat to feel as a group, it becomes much easier for all the notes in between to fall into place.
• No sense of rhythmic flexibility:  When I think the smaller subdivisions, the rhythms are just rhythms - they don't have any musical or expressive motivation behind them.  Now I may get some criticism for this, but I believe that many of us take rhythms too literally.  As I said earlier I do think it's important to mathematically understand what a rhythmic notation represents.  However, I also believe that in most pieces of music, we can and possibly should leave some room for flexibility for the sake of musicality.  For instance, I might choose to linger just a fraction of a hair longer on an eighth note before diving into sixteenths.  Or I might play with a triplet figure just slightly, especially if it's among a lot of duple rhythms, to emphasize the different character that triplet figures tend to have.  When we think in the smaller subdivisions, having this flexibility is impossible.  
• No sense of where I am in the measure:  If I'm counting "One-e-and-a Two-e-and-a Three-e-and-a-Four-e-and-a..." at least I am somewhat aware of which beats are where in the measure and how the music lines up with the stronger beats but when I'm counting "da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da" I generally don't have any sense of gravity - of where to touch the ground in the music to give that natural cyclical feeling that meter can give.  When I think the bigger beats I tend to feel more like a conductor with their choreographed conducting patterns.  I have a better idea of where I am at any given point and that feels infinitely better than feeling lost in a forest of equally important (or unimportant) beats.   
• No ease of playing:  When I'm playing a fast, technically challenging piece, thinking the smaller beats feels somewhat akin to wearing weights on my legs when going out for a run - you can only run so fast with those things on!  Switching gears and feeling the bigger beats enables me to play much faster, more easily which can really be a lot of fun and endorphin inducing - I definitely can't complain about that.  I think the reason why this works has to do with all of my previous points put together - it takes me out of the microscopic world that I often find myself in when I'm in the practice room analyzing everything to death, and plops me in the middle of lovely forest of musical phrases.  

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Not all the students I work with get this concept but when they do it's pretty amazing!  Recently I was rehearsing with a hard-working, conscientious saxophone major that was getting ready for an important jury.  On his program was a very challenging work, Ibert's Concertino da Camera.  The rhythm throughout is incredible, even a bit jazzy at times.  But much of it is fast, especially when he's playing.  In rehearsals we were having a terrible time getting our parts to fit comfortably - he kept rushing and cutting off ties all over the place which put both of us on edge.  At one point I looked at his foot and saw that he was energetically tapping out quarter notes so I immediately stopped and suggested that we start again but feeling only one beat per measure rather than two.  He gave it a go and I will never forget his reaction.  We got through a really difficult passage with no problem and he was so shocked he had to stop.  He looked at me, a bit perplexed but excited nevertheless, and said, "Wait - I can play it!"  This guy had been practicing the piece endlessly, slaving away at all the tiny details, practicing with the metronome (set to the subdivisions) but to no avail - he couldn't find a way to just fly with it.  All it took in the end was one simply adjustment and he was good to go!  

So next time you find yourself struggling with any of the challenges I listed above, remember - 

Ditch the small beats! 

And trust me, even though it might feel different at first and take some getting used to, the view of the forest from more of a distance is really much more satisfying.

Last but not least, here's a video describing my process and hopefully demonstrating what a different it can make to try this:

Tweet

Tweet

Bowing to the mighty metronome?

The other night on twitter I tweeted a thought that has been popping up in my life on a pretty regular basis lately:

Metronomes are not a substitute for counting out loud.

As is common on twitter, many of my fabulous musical colleagues there jumped in to add their thoughts about the mighty metronome and to expand upon the theme, branching out to tweeting about dealing with rhythm issues both personally and with students.  It was a really fascinating, fast discussion and one that led to the group of us wanting to record our thoughts for inclusion in a group blog-post.  With that said, here is my little spiel about metronomes.  

To start off, I want to protect myself from a barrage of comments, tweets, and e-mails by saying that I do like metronomes.  My metronome is, in fact, my friend...most of the time.  

But...

I do feel as though the metronome is often used with the hope that it alone will cure all rhythmic and technical difficulties.  So often kids I play for come in with bad rhythm.  When I call them on it the inevitable response is, "But I practiced with my metronome!"  

I see metronomes as really good crutches but not as a permanent fix.  Here's why...

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Crutches don't fix anything.  They are a tool - they support one while healing from a broken bone or a sprained ankle.  But what usually happens before we even get to the crutches?   A doctor is seen, x-rays taken and carefully examined. Sometimes the bones are carefully reset or pinned together and a cast or bandages are strategically wound around the injured appendage.  Now the crutches can effectively come into play for what they are - tools to help us get around while our body is healing.

So what does it take to successfully heal in the area of pulse and rhythm?  What work do I have to do before I can grab my metronome and have it actually help rather than hinder or distract from the real problem?  

• I take a look to see if I really understand mathematically what's supposed to be happening.  It can be so tempting to guess, to try and magically fit all those black notes into a given beat.  All it takes is about 2 minutes to do the math and considering the fact that such comprehension is permanent and secure, I'm willing to spend the time.  I should also add that I am not shy about marking beats in the score or writing out subdivisions about the problem rhythm in order to see how everything lines up.  

• Once I know how everything is supposed to be lined up I then take a step back and make sure that I know which notes fall on which beats because no two beats in a measure are alike.  Downbeats feel very differently then second beats, upbeats feel differently then downbeats...they each have their unique purpose and most composers pay attention to this and set their music in a very purposeful way.  If they don't, chances are they're either not a great composer or more often than not, they are trying to make a statement by breaking the norm.  Most metronomes do not help with this issue, although there are some these days that can be set to have different toned beeps, with a higher pitch indicating where the downbeats of each measure are.  Problem with this is that when I'm dealing with music that has constant meter changes it is impossible to set the metronome to account for these changes without having to stop and reset every measure or two.

• The next step is to conduct while singing the music.  And no, my singing isn't very good.  Often I don't even sing on pitch.  My main focus is just getting the rhythm lined up with my conducting.

• Once I can conduct and sing I then move onto playing the music while counting out loud.  For these last two steps it is crucial that I choose a tempo that allows me to do the exercises without altering the tempo and without stopping.  Singers and anyone needing to blow into an instrument will not be able to do this last step very easily although singers can adapt it by singing the counts rather than singing the words.  

After doing this type of rhythmic examination and re-setting only then do I feel ready to add the metronome.  In all honesty, since using the above steps religiously for the past few years, I have not felt the need to use one as much.  The way I see it is that I have essentially turned myself into my own metronome.  If I can conduct, if I can count out loud while playing, the rhythm and the pulse are clearly a part of me.  Even issues of rushing and slowing down have significantly decreased.  

Are these exercises easy to do?  No, they aren't.  And it has taken persistence and a bit of swallowing my pride at first.  But now that I feel like a completely new musician, I gladly take on the challenge when I need to.  I also believe that solving my rhythm and pulse issues has made me a much better collaborator and accompanist.  When I play with another musician, they know that they have in me a conductor that will provide a steady, predictable, secure force that they can ride on.  Not worrying about rhythm has also freed me from a lot of insecurity and doubt, enabling me to focus on expressing the music.  It has made music-making even more gratifying and glorifying. 

To return to my tweet that started all this musing, here's another way of looking at it:

Metronomes can be helpful tools, but only after going to the doctor first and getting everything set just right.  Then, and only then, can the musical breaks really be fixed.   

So as long as you're willing to do the work, go ahead, set aside those metronomes, and build the metronome within you.  You won't regret it!

Click here to see a post that compiles the multiple posts that my twitter friends and I wrote about metronomes into one. There are a lot of great and varied ideas there!  And if you have anything to add, please don't hesitate to do that in the comments section!  

Tweet

Musical Investigations: Episode 3 - Langer's Konzertante Musik Nr. 4: Allegretto amoroso

I keep naively thinking that I'm done having to learn pieces that drive me nuts.  Silly me. 

So here's the latest.  I'm playing for a recital coming up that features the oboe d'amore, soprano, and piano.  Yep, the oboe d'amore.  I don't believe I had ever seen one before our first rehearsal last week and in all honesty all I knew about the instrument was that it had a really cool name.  Needless to say, I don't think there's a whole lot of music written for this particular instrument so I was quite curious to take a look at the music.  Well, so now I have the music.  And I've looked at it.  Played some of it.  Looked at it some more.  Scratched my head a bit.  Walked away to eat some cookies.  Returned to the music.  

Get the picture?  I had a difficult time moving past "Go" at first.

But no point wallowing in self pity - what needs to be learned needs to be learned. 

One of the pieces in question is the Konzertante Musik Nr. 4 for oboe d'amore and cembalo, or piano, by Hans-Klaus Langer.  In the first movement, marked "Allegretto amoroso" there's one page that doesn't seem too bad at first sight but it's still managed to make me kind of grumpy.  Here's the page in question:

The tempo is quite fast, with the quarter note (or crotchet to some) at 104 beats per minute on the metronome.  

In my usual fashion I decided to sit down and find as many patterns as I could find to help me out.  It very quickly became apparent that patterns where everywhere.  In fact, there weren't many notes that I couldn't squeeze into a pattern that repeated somewhere else.  After playing around, here is what I came up with:

(My apologies for the not-so-easy-to-read quality of this color scan...I was having difficulties with managing the larger file size.)

The first thing I discovered was that the first line repeats itself identically up a fourth.  That means all I had to do was memorize it and then use my ear to slowly transpose it.  Now I'm not good at explaining the why of this, but the other really interesting thing about these first two statements is that because of the way it's written, the right hand's orientation to the white and black keys almost remains the same, regardless of which statement I'm playing.  For instance, the first chords of each line are white key chords, the following chords have black keys in the top and bottom voices with white notes in the middle, and so on.  There are a few tiny exceptions to this pattern but for the sake of sanity I'm going to focus on feeling of familiarity in my right hand in conjunction with my ear to get me through the passage gracefully.  If I miss a few accidentals now and then, oh well.  

There are some other great patterns in there.  I particularly like the one I labeled in green.  The top voice in those clips are always made up of a whole step followed by a half step.  When I was practicing this at first I played that first one in measure two then went to the next one in measure 3 and without looking at the music, played it by ear.  Then I moved on to the one in measure 4 and so on throughout the entire page.  There are 10 of them in the right hand within 17 measures.  If worse comes to worse I could just play that pattern willy nilly and probably be just fine.  

Sacrilegious?  Oh, perhaps.  But I've said it before and I'll say it again.  Sometimes the music beyond the notes are just as important, if not more important than the notes that are actually on the page.

Hopefully these patterns will help lead me there.


Click here if you'd like to see some more of my musical investigations.


Tweet