Without question our studio motto is: Not About The Notes (#NATN). Against that little voice inside me, which often screams, “fix-correct-repair,” I remind myself to step back and let students take ownership of the music. And, I try to remember to do this throughout the learning process not just when we are polishing something for performance. Some of us like to see the big picture (the forest) and work back to the details (the trees). Others like to have all those trees in place before we can even think about a forest. Honestly, I don’t find it matters so long as the ultimate goal of practice is always letting the music speak. 

Online teaching and the necessity for sending regular recordings to combat lag and glitching has yielded some real NATN benefits to my students. It has forced them to be proactive; to coach themselves and fix the things they don’t like rather than waiting to see what I say at a lesson. It has forced me to step back and trust them more. 

Video and audio recording makes us all listen in new ways which help both performance and practice. It becomes obvious when things are all about the notes instead of NATN. It’s also interesting to me how differently I hear a recording that is audio only vs. with video. I was thinking about it and realized that I don’t always look at a student when they are playing a piece in person either. It must be a technique I’ve acquired over the years that came about so naturally that I don’t even know I do it. 

The best part is my students are posing really insightful NATN questions during our lessons. Can we work on this passage first? I know it’s not right and I hear the music should go this way but I can’t figure out why it is so heavy and hard to play. I love this! I praise them up one side and down the other for it too. Many times it’s just a fingering issue. Sometimes it’s a technical thing or too many strong beats that are hanging up a passage. 

Last week, a high school student and I practiced thinking geographically and finding other creative ways to set some pesky chord patterns into memory. Yesterday, an adult student sent me an audio recording and said she was proud of herself for playing and not “typing the music.” It was absolutely lovely and she even kept the musical mood and character when she had a small slip- something which she would never have allowed herself to do before. She is a perfectionist and always wants to correct absolutely everything. This time she allowed the misstep to fall aside and was proud of the musical experience she created rather than letting the percentage of correct notes and rhythms define her success. 

In writing and in music there will always be errors no matter how well you proof or prepare. We are humans not robots. In one of my recent videos, we found we had a typo, and a spot where a do-over had not been cut. We had to take it down and re-edit. At least 4 people had looked at that video before it went live. The thing was, we all knew what it was supposed to say and so we didn’t see what was actually there. Also autocorrect substituted Improve for Improv. Sigh… And, I use the word sigh because this blog is G rated.

As illustrated by the video edit situation, I often get so deeply involved in a piece of music or a project that I don’t perceive my mistakes because I know what I meant to say or do. My undergraduate teacher used to say I needed to hear what was actually coming out of the piano not just to the ideal in my head. When I was working on my Master’s Degree, my professor told me about a missing Eb in one of my pieces for about 4 lessons in a row. Each week I would go to the practice room and try to find it to no avail. He got a little testy at the next lesson and I threw my hands up and yelled, “What Eb? Where?” We both laughed hysterically. 

Of course, most of us hate listening to ourselves or at least we do until we realize how much more progress we’re making. It’s a bit like weighing yourself or setting and sticking to a budget- hard to face up to what you don’t want to see. But, how else can you fix what’s broken and keep what’s good?  In most cases, my students fix problems because they don’t want them spoiling the music. Well, that and they don’t want hard evidence of lazy practicing laying about. 

That whole forest and trees thing? A few weeks back a high school student and I started some new repertoire. We spent the first part of her online lesson doing some comparisons between; 1) the use of trill-like figurations in Gillocks’ Forest Murmurs, which she was finishing up, vs. Daquin’s Cuckoo, and 2) the musical pictures and stories of the Cuckoo vs. Debussy’s Dr Gradus. I sent links to great art and music from both the French Baroque and Impressionistic Eras. It was totally cool to be able to help her inject a little forest, some trees, and a little NATN into her concepts of the pieces right from the beginning- and do it remotely. 

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