Sorry it’s been awhile, but the semester’s recitals are over, so let the writing resume!  Let’s talk about accuracy:

Let’s face it, accurate playing is important.  And let’s be honest, when we tell students “the audience didn’t notice,” we’re lying.  Big time.  Audiences DO notice!  They might not recognize that a particular note . . . → Read More: Nothing but Net]]>

Sorry it’s been awhile, but the semester’s recitals are over, so let the writing resume!  Let’s talk about accuracy:

Let’s face it, accurate playing is important.  And let’s be honest, when we tell students “the audience didn’t notice,” we’re lying.  Big time.  Audiences DO notice!  They might not recognize that a particular note was incorrect, but they can sense that something was a bit off.  A wrong note has a psychological effect on the performer, too. When a performer misses notes, it eats away at their confidence, and that’s definitely something an audience can detect.

Accuracy is both mental and physical. The brain has to tell the hands what to do, and the hands have to be able to pull it off.  When working for greater accuracy, you have to be focused both mentally and physically. Here are a couple of quick exercises you can do with your students (or yourself) to improve your accuracy:

1) Aim For a Small Target

Piano keys are huge, especially the white ones.  They’re 7/8″ wide and almost 6 inches long!  If you want to be accurate, you need to do better than just hit the right key, you need to hit it in the right spot.  Something I’ve noticed in many students is that they tend to always play the ends of the keys.  Even when black keys are involved, they’ll pull their hands away from the fallboard at every opportunity.  This results in more motion, which means more room for error.  If you want to be more accurate, you need to be more efficient, so make sure you’re playing each key in a spot that makes sense.

2) Pretend the Keys Have Braille on Them

Time to let my Matthay training show through:  when you play the piano, the tactile feedback you get from the keys is important.  If you were walking down a dark hallway at night and couldn’t see, what would you do?  You’d feel the wall as you go.  Even if it’s a perfectly straight hallway in your house that you’ve walked a hundred times, you’d still hang on to the wall.  Why?  Because without the wall touching our hand, we feel lost.

It’s the same at the piano.  If you’re not feeling the keys, you’ll feel lost.  If you do feel the keys, and I mean really feel them, then you’ll always feel secure.  Unfortunately, this is easier said than done, so here’s a quick exercise you can do at the keyboard:  pick a passage you have trouble with, practice it slowly, and pretend you’re reading Braille written on the keys.  Let the tips of your fingers feel the texture of the keys below them.

You’ll be amazed how much we take sight for granted and ignore our sense of touch when playing the piano.  Try this – sit down and play a D Major scale with your eyes closed.  If it feels strange, it’s because you’re relying too much on your sense of sight.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if you’re using your eyes instead of your fingertips to find the keys, you’re missing out on a valuable ally in the fight against inaccuracy.

3) Add-a-Note

I love playing Add-a-Note.  When a passage sounds or feels sloppy, spend 5 minutes playing Add-a-Note, and you’ll be a thousand times better.  Here’s how it works:  Let’s say you’re practicing a C7 arpeggio, ascending, RH.  Play the C.  Good.  Now Add-a-Note:

CE

When you stop on the E, make sure it’s a High Quality E.  Good hand shape, nice relaxed arm and shoulder, feel some flexibility in the wrist.  That’s it – a High Quality E.  Practice the CE several times until you can reliably play the E with Real Quality.  Your finger makes contact with the key in just the right spot (see #1!), you feel the key beneath your finger (see #2!) and get just the right sound.  Excellent.  Now…Add-a-Note:

CEG

Same procedure applies.

CEGBb

Same procedure applies, but this is a bit trickier because we have to use our stupid fourth finger on a black key.  (Those darn things are narrower!)  Don’t worry, you can do it!  Spend some quality time to achieve that High Quality Bb.  Got it?  Good.  Now Add-a-Note!

CEGBbC…

And so on and so forth.  Practicing like this is going to feel painfully slow.  But trust me, once you do it, you’re going to be AWESOME.  I’m serious.  Spend 10 minutes of a 30 minute lesson doing this with a student on a scale they’re having trouble with.  People will think you’re a crazy, inefficient, pedantic, obsessive-compulsive ogre of a teacher.  And they’ll be right.  But your student will NEVER MISS, and all the naysayers will be jealous of how fantastic your student sounds.

And finally, my favorite Jack Nicklaus story.  (I like it so much I’ve probably told it on this blog before, but it bears repeating, so here goes.  Don’t worry, it’s short.)

Jack Nicklaus (famous golfer) was once asked how he was able to putt so well.  His putting style looked a bit strange, but somehow, the ball always found the bottom of the cup.  His advice was one sentence:

“I’ve never missed a putt in my mind.”

It works on the piano, too.  Happy practicing!

The piece is “Shifty-Eyed Blues” by Phillip Keveren.  It’s a great early-intermediate . . . → Read More: Engraving]]> Music engraving is an interest of mine.  I’ve always been amazed at how the quality of engraving affects the readability of a piece of music.  I recently discovered a piece that I like very much, but which I feel is poorly engraved.

The piece is “Shifty-Eyed Blues” by Phillip Keveren.  It’s a great early-intermediate jazz piece that works well in recital.  It’s reasonably easy to learn and provides a number of opportunities for reinforcing certain concepts.  The change in register of the melody helps with arm mobility; the slight change in rhythm of the bass line from “on the beat” to “off the beat” can really help students learn the difference in the two rhythms, and the sound and feel of the piece is very natural.

Before we go any further, have a look at the piece in its original form:

Sample Page from Sheetmusicplus.com

I have two issues with the engraving.  First, the distance between the treble and bass staves is too large.  There’s just too much white space in between.  Normally when an engraver does this, it’s because there are a lot of ledger lines or other markings that need to be placed between the staves.  Not so in this case (trust me, there’s nothing later in the piece that requires it, and even if it did, that’s not a reason to keep all that space in the first page.)

My other issue is that each system has three measures.  Obviously, the piece is in 4-measure phrases.  This means it would be far easier to read the piece in four measure groups instead of three measure groups.  Later on, this creates a problem where a phrase is divided over a page-turn, requiring the student to stop mid-phrase to turn the page.  Yikes!  This creates a problem in reading – we want to teach our students to see groups of things and look ahead.  The engraving of this particular piece does not help that pedagogical goal.

Here’s how I would engrave the first 8 measures:

(click for full-size)

Personally, I think this is far easier to read.  It doesn’t look cluttered or busy at all, but the added benefit of having the staves closer together and the system breaks matching the phrasing is very helpful.  (Nearly all modern methods format their music like this – as music becomes more advanced, 4-measure systems become impractical, but in earlier levels, it’s extremely helpful.)

An added bonus of engraving like this – it makes the music seem less “Big-Note Easy”, making it more palatable to older students.  One of the major markets for music like this is the 10-14 year-old age group – students who are still at a late-elementary or early-intermediate level technically, but who have more sophisticated interests and ears.  “Shifty-Eyed Blues” is exactly the kind of piece that appeals to them, but if it looks like “beginner music,” it may turn students off.  Furthermore, I don’t think it’s more difficult for younger students.  I’ve had 8 year-olds learn music that’s engraved a bit tighter, and they have no trouble at all.  (An example of good engraving at that level are much of William Gillock’s and Robert Vandall’s collections.  Their engraving always perfectly matches the pedagogical and age level of the target student.

Why do publishers do this?  I don’t really know, but I suspect it has something to do with printing.  I’ve heard that books are cheaper to print when the number of pages they contain is a multiple of 16.  (This is why most books you get have 16 pages.)  Basically, most music today is printed in signatures, which is a large sheet of paper that contains multiple pages.  The large sheet is then folded and cut to create the book.  Any blank space not used is wasted.  Here’s a quick explanation of what I’m talking about:

http://www.marrak.com/newsletter/sweet16.html

Composers are often asked to provide enough material to make a 16-page book.  If it ends up being less or more, then pieces are edited down or the engraving is changed to make the pieces fit, much in the same way college students set their word processors to 1.5 line spacing and 14 point Bookman font to stretch that 8 page paper into the required 10.

But while I’m sensitive to the need for publishers to be financially responsible, the pedagogue in me hates seeing a great piece like “Shifty-Eyed Blues” stretched so thin, especially when a possible solution would’ve been to add another excellent piece to the collection!

All things considered, it’s still a nice collection and worth owning.  Buy it:

Purchase Shifty-Eyed Blues at Sheetmusicplus.com

But if any editors or engravers are out there listening – you’ve done Mr. Keveren a disservice.  The music, and our students, deserve better!

Now, forget all the clever epithets you’ve . . . → Read More: A Lesson from Ballet Class, Part 2 (Burger Pedagogy)]]> As the dancers were doing one of their repetitive tendu exercises one day, the instructor said “one of my teachers once told me that every time you repeat a movement, you put a penny in the bank – and in performance, you get to cash it in.”

Now, forget all the clever epithets you’ve heard about practicing.  Practice does not make perfect or permanent, no matter how perfect the practice may be.

Practice is about two things: observation and repetition.  When you’re practicing and you repeat something, you get to do two things – you have an opportunity to discover something, and you put a penny in the bank.

Which brings us, of course, to a story about McDonald’s.

When I was in high school, I worked at McDonald’s.  I flipped burgers.  I didn’t have any aspirations of being a restauranteur, I just wanted the extra money and I had a crush on a girl who worked there.  So I applied and got the job!  At the end of my first month, I was evaluated and the manager said I was slow.  Yikes!  I was moving as fast as I could, but I had a hard time keeping up.  I always showed up to work on time, though, so they kept me.  I ended up working there for two years.

At the end of two years, and I hope you don’t mind me tooting my own horn a bit, I was GOOD.  I was easily one of the fastest employees in the kitchen.  I could keep up a pace of about 18 hamburgers a minute by myself.  What’s interesting about this is that there was no special training, no Burger Pedagogy specialists helping me out, just two years of doing my job for 20 hours a week.  I cared about what I did – I wanted to be fast enough to keep up with my fellow employees and serve decent food, but I wasn’t particularly driven, interested, or inspired.

The moral of that story?  There’s something to be said for repetition.  When we practice for one, two, or six hours a day, it’s impossible to be driven, interested, or inspired for the entire time.  But we can still benefit – our hands get a feel for the keyboard, and if we’re mindful of a few basic technical principles, the motions become second nature and we feel “at home” at the piano, no longer fighting the instrument.

These days, it’s common to find teachers talking about “efficient” practice, saying that the quality of practice is more important than quantity of practice.  I disagree.  Quality is definitely important and necessary for progress, but I think quantity is of equal importance.  Two quick stories:

I once assigned a student one of my favorite pieces, “Both Ways” by Alexandre Tansman.  It was a little bit more difficult than his other pieces, but he really liked it, so I gave it to him.  One week later he comes in for his lesson, immediately goes to the piano and proceeds to play the Tansman piece, every note, at tempo, from memory.  I was astounded!  We worked a bit on polishing things up, but he honestly could’ve played it in a recital that day and been fine.  I asked him how he was able to learn it so well and he said “I practiced only this for an hour every day!”  That’s right, an 8 year old practicing an hour a day on one piece.  He didn’t need my help at all, one week of solid repetition was all it took.

In my student days, I’d frequently practice 6-7 hours a day.  One day I had a bit of a revelation.  I had started practicing one morning and it was going poorly.  I was all thumbs, couldn’t get anything done, and wasn’t making any progress.  I took a break for lunch and thought about calling it quits for the day, but I’m stubborn, so after lunch I went back to work.  No change…just as horrible as before, until another hour went by.  Then, I started making real progress.  Everything clicked, and I had a fantastic two hours.  I still remember those two hours to this day.  (Bach Toccata in c minor and Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze.)

The moral of that story?  Had I called it quits after lunch, those two hours would never have happened.  Sometimes you have to go through three hours of bad practice to get to the two hours of good practice.  I meet a lot of people who subscribe to the idea that if it’s not going well, it’s best to quit, avoid the frustration and start again fresh the next day.  I think that’s the wrong course of action.  The right thing to do is to keep going, and I think the following people would agree with me:

We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action. – Frank Tibolt

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time… The wait is simply too long.  – Leonard Bernstein

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.  – Michael Jordan

If you’re going through hell, keep going.  – Winston Churchill