1,000 Days of Music - Day 18: Encouraged

Today I have mastered a piece I learned in fourth grade. In the Suzuki Book 2, it’s titled Minuet in G Major, BWV 822 by J.S. Bach. I remember it (from more than forty years ago) as Bourée from the book From Bach to Bartok by Denes Agay, but my memory may not be accurate. In any case, I was surprised to be able to learn it so quickly. Maybe my brain simply resurrected it from its archives. I tried with C.P.E. Bach’s Solfeggietto in C minor, but I couldn’t get very far. I would need the music, and it is not part of the Suzuki piano repertoire.

In any case, my sub goal of learning Book 2 by mid-October seems more than reachable. I’ve already begun to master four out of fourteen pieces. If I choose to focus on Book 2, I might be able to complete it by the end of the summer. That would be a wonderful thing, as I will need all the extra time I can get for Books 5, 6, and 7. Next week, I may be discouraged and demoralized, but for now I am soaring on the wings of optimism.

1,000 Days of Music - Day 17: The Power of Practice

One of the best things about setting a goal to learn the entire Suzuki piano repertoire in a thousand days is that it forces me to practice daily. Not only do I practice daily, I have an objective on which to focus.

Ordinarily, I base my daily practice on rotating out repertoire. I learn a piece, polish it, and then let it rest while I learn something new. It’s the circle of life—birth, maturity, death, decay, rebirth. It’s the reason that thirty years later I can only play a few bars from the pieces I learned as a high school senior. 

Suzuki students maintain their repertoire by constantly reviewing it, and I must do the same. I am a better musician now than I was seventeen days ago. This goal has given me a target at which I can aim. Practice is magical. Focused practice is miraculous.

1,000 Days of Music - Day 16: Showing Up

A famous quote attributed to Woody Allen is, “Eighty percent of success is just showing up.” Nora Roberts is known for emphasizing the importance of sitting one’s behind in the chair to write. I like to say that the muse favors those who show up at the keyboard on a daily basis...whether it’s a piano keyboard or a computer keyboard. One must be consistent in expressing one’s art in order to cultivate inspiration.
Today, I am pulled in what feels like ten different directions, but I managed to show up. I put in an appearance without judgment, no less.  Behold the result.

1,000 Days of Music - Day 15: Letting Go

I’m letting go of the need to be perfect, the need to put on appearances, and the need to compensate for a lack of confidence. By focusing on my priorities and the essence of my objectives, I can let go of the extraneous. The most important objectives for me as a music teacher is that I share my love and passion for music and that I project my confidence in my students. If they share my passion for music and feel confident in themselves as musicians, the rest will take care of itself. If only I can let go.

1,000 Days of Music - Day 14: Measure by Measure

 Like a lot of people, just looking over my to do list makes me want to hyperventilate. I am cultivating patience and non-judgment, not because I have those qualities, but because I don’t. I can be impatient, judgmental, and stubborn, to boot. Just ask my family. Living inside my head is a frantic endeavor. This is precisely why I need to dig deep for patience and acceptance. 

Today, I put six things on my to do list, and when I hit publish, I will have accomplished them all. I  have left many important tasks undone, but I have taken care of the priorities. 

If you play the video, you’ll see that I added two measures to the Bach invention I’m relearning. Maybe in a week I can add it to my repertoire. Maybe it will take longer. I’m not judging myself for how slowly I’m acquiring this music. I’m simply taking on my goal measure by measure.

1,000 Days of Music - Day 13: Superhero

The problem I always have with setting a challenge goal is doubting whether I can achieve it...and still get the dishes and the laundry done. What will I have to sacrifice? Who will have to suffer? Will my children feel that I abandoned them for the sake of my dream? Will I be able to get enough sleep and exercise and healthy food?

I don’t have an answer to these questions—not on Day 13. I do know that while it may be impossible to handle a herculean task list every day, I might be able to be satisfied with doing less. I may not a superhero, but that chopping off the bottom half of my to do list just might be my superpower.

1,000 Days of Music - Day 12: How the Sausages Are Made

Advisory Warning: Don’t play the video clips unless you have a high tolerance for listening to slow practice with the metronome.

This is one way pianists achieve mastery—at least it's one of the ways I do. Crank up the metronome and play the music at a painfully slow tempo, four to six measures at a time. Each successive time I run through the music, I increase the tempo slightly. This gets the music into the brain and the fingers. It also increases confidence. If I play slow, I’m ready to go. Playing the music beautifully faster and faster is encouraging. Soon I can play the music quickly and well. It may sound tedious to anyone listening, but it’s one of the ways I cultivate my skill.

1,000 Days of Music - Day 11: Flustered

I get flustered playing Burgmuller’s By the Limpid Stream. The music is supposed to flow in even triplets, which, in my nervousness and impatience, sound hurried and jerky. I get flustered in the mornings when I’m trying to cram in too many tasks before rushing out the door. I get flustered while shopping because half my brain is looking for the sleep I somehow neglected to get last night, and I get flustered exchanging the items I bought by mistake.
I am looking for something I seem to lack—poise, certainty, patience. The faster I try to go, the more deftly it escapes me. All the notes tumble together as if I’ve thrown them in the dryer...or they slip through my fingers, elusive and ethereal, leaving me feeling like all thumbs. I am flustered.
The opposite of flustered is calm, clear, composed. It is the height of irony for me that I only feel calm and composed when I’ve released the need to be that way.
“Good evening,” I say. “I’m running on fumes right now, but I’m pleased to present this performance for your listening enjoyment. Please pardon the errors. I play much better when I’m fully awake.” And it’s not half bad.

1,000 Days of Music - Day 10: Imperfect

So many of us long to be perfect. We capture our idealized lives in photographs and post them on social media. We dot our “i”s and cross our “t”s and hope for outward approval. We criticize and thereby withdraw permission for others to be imperfect. We slowly squash the creativity and courage in ourselves until we are like the robot-like people from Camazotz in Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time.”
I’m not saying we shouldn’t reach for excellence or aim for our personal best. In matters of life and death, perfection is essential. However, when we reach for perfection out of a need for external approval, we smother something essential to our life force. When it comes to perfection, acceptance, not imperfection, is the appropriate antonym here. When we accept our own imperfections, we liberate ourselves to live life freely and fully and in the completion of our highest potential.

1,000 Days of Music - Day 9: Discouraged

It usually takes about nine or ten days of working on a challenge goal for discouragement to set in. That’s how long it takes me during National Novel Writing Month. I start strong and confident, and some time during the second week, I’m plagued with doubt, convinced that I’ve conceived the worst idea for a story in the history of novel writing. The prose is stale, the characters are insipid, and the dialogue falls flat. I know I’m wasting my time when I could be baking pies to freeze for Thanksgiving dinner.
I know how to handle that now. I simply keep writing. So what if the story is dreadful and I’m wasting my time? The only thing that matters is my word count if I’m writing a 50,000 word novel in November.

It’s no different for this challenge goal. So enamored am I with the idea of learning the entire Suzuki piano repertoire in 1,000 days that I can’t imagine thinking that it’s a stupid idea...until competing priorities loom large. This blog is different, though. Who am I, technologically inept as I am, to clutter up the blogosphere with my music and my words? The Internet has seen worse, I’m sure, and the blog provides accountability, even if no one ever reads it.
With apologies to Robert Schumann, here are two performances of Melody. I haven’t really practiced it on the piano since fourth grade, and I’ve never had a recorder lesson.

1,000 Days of Piano - Day 8: Learning and Teaching

Learning is supposed to be fun, filled with imagination and discovery. Teaching is supposed to be rewarding, helping young minds and heart bloom and grow. Shining your light creates a joyful radiance that illuminates an exponential number of dark corners.

The truth? Learning can be full of angst. The student could hit a plateau of boredom on which everything feels flat and stale. Or the student could be facing a vertical cliff that seems impossible to climb. Everything is fine when the learning is easy, but the moment things get tricky, the student wants to give up in despair. “I’ll never get this right! I’ll never get good at this!” 

The truth? Teaching can be a wasteland of frustration. Students want to go directly to mastery, without putting in the hard work of doing something they aren’t really good at yet. Children can be like babies who want to roll over and walk, without crawling or cruising or falling down. Teachers know the futility of such desires. Yet they are often at a loss for how encourage children to embrace the messiness of the learning process—at least I am.

The best teachers create a learning atmosphere that is like the room in which a child takes her first steps. Grownups cheer when a toddler stumbles into a open space between a sofa and a chair, and they applaud when he stumbles. The teachers who shine their light of encouragement on mistakes and mastery alike have the most joyful students. 

1,000 Days of Piano - Day 7: Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof

I’ve undertaken a challenge goal to learn the entire Suzuki piano repertoire in 1,000 days at the beginning of summer vacation. It’s easy enough now—I have time off from work. What happens when I start my summer job? What happens in the fall when I’m facing a full complement of piano students and substitute teaching jobs? What strategies can I use to work full-time and complete my challenge goal?

The truth is, I don’t know. I’ll have to figure out each day as it comes. The Bible says, “Tomorrow will take care of itself.” I must simply accept the unknown as part of the great adventure. 

1,000 of Piano - Day 6: The Power of Small

Sometimes it seems as though I don’t have all the time I would like to practice. Usually, I feel as though I don’t have all the time I would like to do a great many things. One of the goals of this blog is to create innovative ways to spend more time at the piano. I have discovered that when time is short, a little practice is better than none. It is possible to pack a lot of power into a little bit of practice. Focus is key, but I find it just as important to be content with slow progress. That is the power of small.

1,000 Days of Piano - Day 5: Folk Dance Lessons

I practiced the Romanian Folk Dance #2 from Book 7 extremely slowly ten times and slowly ten times. It made a noticeable difference, especially in my head where I’m keeping track of the chords. Slow practice involves more than chords. With imagination, I can travel to Romania with this piece. I may have no Romanian in my DNA, but this music does. So I play with it, have fun with it, revel in the delicious chords to the steady tick-tick of 72 per minute per eighth note. It feels like a folk dancing lesson.

1,000 Days of Piano - Day 4: Despacito

No, I’m not going to play Despacito on the piano. Despacito is the Spanish word for slowly, which is the tempo to play any piece while first learning it. Playing pieces really slowly is a powerful practice. Tomorrow I’m going to conduct an experiment and practice this piece ridiculously slowly, just to see what comes if it. Meanwhile, I’m practically sight reading this—think of it as a “before” portrait in a “before and after” series.

1,000 Days of Piano - Day 3: Post Script

Just in case anyone other than myself ever reads this blog, I did not intend to imply that Écossaise is so easy that even a three year old could play it. It has quite a few moving parts that can be tricky for a late beginner. Fear is sneaky and can create a negative, distorted lens through which we view our challenges. That was the point.

1,000 Days of Piano - Day 3: Taming the Tiger

I am not posting videos of my playing because I think they are impressive, performance ready, or even good enough to share. I am posting these videos as a way of taking the tiger in the room.
Fear of performing is real. It triggers a physiological response that is the same as if there were a snarling tiger in the room with me. Sweaty palms, trembling knees, thumping heart—these are all the body’s response to perceived danger. Blood rushes from the brain to the core to support vital organs in case of a serious injury.
Musical performances, however, are usually not dangerous...unless you count the danger of making a fool of yourself in front of an audience. No amount of preparation can calm that fear. Practice makes you a more skilled musician, not necessarily a braver one. For that I use a handy tool that I call desensitization. The more I perform, the more accustomed I become to performing, and the easier it is to calm my fears.
Feel free to push play and listen to me playing Écossaise from Book 2 and the Theme from Mozart’s Sonata in A Major from Book 7...without my daughter singing Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl in the background.

1,000 Days of Piano - Day 3: Courage

Practicing is easy, but performing is harder.
I don’t know which is worse to choose to record for this post, the easy piece or the more difficult one. Frankly, it’s embarrassing to practice and perform an easy piece—a piece a child could play. It should be easy, right? I once watched a video of a three year old playing this piece. Still, it takes energy to bring sparkle and polish even to the easiest pieces.
I understand why it’s difficult to begin and continue with adult students—especially those who desperately wish they’d learned as a child. It’s like learning how to ride a bike at 40.
So maybe I should post eight measures of a Mozart Sonata. That’s more impressive, right? Only if I get it right. There’s a lot more to think about in eight bars of an advanced piece. It requires more time, and the dishes want washing.
So on Day 3, I’m already punting tough decisions into the future. Maybe the most courageous choice of all is to send my Inner Critic on vacation and flip a coin.

1,000 Days of Piano - Day 2: Down Memory Lane

One of the unexpected pleasures of teaching piano and reviewing the repertoire is that I get to play pieces I learned as a child. I played this Sonatina in fifth grade. The Chopin Waltz I remember from seventh grade and The Cuckoo from high school. Even just hearing some pieces takes me back to clear blue June evenings deepening from turquoise to indigo, sitting in the recital hall in my best dress during the Spring Concert. I don’t expect to enjoy all practice sessions as much as this one, but I’ll take the pleasures when I can get them.

1,000 Days of Piano - Day 1

I just spent an hour plowing through select pieces from the Suzuki piano repertoire. If I’m going to learn how to teach the music, first I must learn the music itself. I didn’t play much that was familiar to me from my childhood of taking piano lessons. It was lots of reading—slow reading. I felt as though I was at a buffet full of very rich food, and all I could do was nibble.
I ended up with more Bartok than I’m accustomed to playing, using my piano as a portal to Hungary and Romania.

It’s more than a musical journey through time and place. In the end, on this first day, it will have taken me nearly two hours to practice and post a video of my playing. I could more easily race across a zip line. And I’m supposed to do this daily for a thousand days? It will be a giant exercise in non-judgment.

Starting Over

Starting over is a siren song that calls us to our better selves. We get makeovers because—starting from today—we want to look better, more fashionable, taller, thinner, younger. We make New Year’s resolutions and Lenten resolutions hoping finally to get into better shape, get more organized, get more fiscally responsible. Underneath all this virtue and self-improvement, however, lurks the old self, the short, dumpy, dowdy, disorganized self we think needs so much improvement.
I’m slowly realizing that starting over doesn’t have to carry so much expectation. I may be starting over, but I’m still me. Whether I appear to myself to be capable and confident or frazzled and frumpy has everything to do with the lenses I’m looking through and the mirrors I’m choosing to reflect what I see and nothing to do with who I really am.
So I’m starting over with this blog. I’m keeping the sporadic, eclectic posts I’ve published over the years. Perhaps I lacked the discipline and focus required to maintain a readable, magnetic narrative. Maybe I still do. I’m starting over anyway. I’m unable to resist the lure of new beginnings.