One of my New Year's resolutions this year was to learn piano. I started with someone that I had found on craiglist. It started off well. However, I felt like I outgrew him rather quickly. All of the pieces that he picked were frenetic finger exercises and I often grew bored of the pieces. One of the first pieces that he had given me was a Back minuet. I liked the piece, and got the fingering down realtively quickly. However, the more I practiced it, the less like music it sounded. It kept sounding more and more plodding, forced, and "scale-like". I asked him a couple times and he always said that it sounded uneven and would make me practice with the metronome more.
In general, the lessons were extremely critical. I would play a measure or two and he would provide constant on-going criticism like "3rd finger on the D", "that wasn't staccato enough", "you didn't hold that note long enough", etc. No surprise - I eventually started to dread piano lessons. David has noticed an improvement in my playing, but I felt more like I was learning fingering exercises rather than learnign to play piano. I picked up some music from books that we had in the house and the thought of playing something other than what he was teaching was daunting to say the least. He wrote out all of my fingering, so how was I supposed to figure out which fingers to use?
There was one day in particular that he was hyper critical. I had arrived already quite proud of the progress I had made on a piece. Considering that I couldn't play any of it the week before and I had put it together in a week's time, I was excited to show off. He started in with the constant criticism and I started playing worse and worse. I felt terrible by the end of the lesson. I decided to give him a couple more weeks and see if that was just a fluke week for him. Really, though, after that lessons my heart just wasn't in it anymore.
I had been talking with a former co-worker, Joy Ellen Snellgrove, about piano teachers. I told her stories about my current teacher and she suggested that I contact her former teacher (she had moved to Boston) Robert Cowie (http://www.robertcowie.com/). She told me a bit about the technique that he uses, but it didn't really sink in until our first lesson. She described the approach as thus: You're learning a new piece. Most people teach that you should slow a piece down to a point that you can play it and then try to bring it up to speed. The problem with that is that you don't really understand the piece at the point in which you learn to play the notes. You really only learn "technical proficiency", but you don't really understand the piece much because you're playing a much slower version - and usually ignoring the musicality of the piece. Instead, start by just playing the down-beat notes. When you can do that, add in the notes at the quarter beat, etc.
So, I ran this around in my head and went to my first lesson. First of all, I have since realized how much bad programming I had been under from my old teacher. I was constantly saying "sorry" as I would mess up notes. I was hitting the keys very hard (he insisted that if you play a new piece forcefully, it will get in your muscle memory better). And overall, I was just very down on myself about my piano playing.
The new teacher has been trying to break that down. I've had several lectures about not being so hard on myself about my playing. Some general statements have been: "There are people dying in Iraq. They are suffering. You are not." At one point, I could not get my fingers to do something I wanted them to do. I was getting extremely frustrated and he actually burst out laughing at me.
Then, there's the teaching technique. We started with the Bach minuet that I said never sounded like music to me. We started off playing just the down-beat notes. Mentally, I was trying to play all the music in my head and just press the keys on the downbeats. He said it doesn't work that way. I had to play the notes as if they were the only notes written. With some repetition, I could hear what those notes were doing and it started sounding like music. Then we added just the quarter beat notes in the right hand. Once again, I had to start hearing the notes lead from one to the next. (I'm making this sound easy, but if you've never looked at a full page of music and tried to isolate out just a few notes, it's quite hard.) Eventually, I started adding in more of the notes. At each point, I played as if it was a completed piece.
At the end of the first week, David heard me practicing and said that it was the first time my practicing sounded like music rather than fingering exercises.
Now that I've had the introduction, he's started throwing more variations. Some of them are:
- Playing the bass clef in both the right and left hand
- Playing the treble clef in both the right and left hand
- Playing the bass clef with the right hand and the treble clef with the left hand
- Clumbing notes together as chord instead of runs of notes
- Playing everything a half-step up
- Playing only one hand a half-step up
That's all well and good for a piece that I already knew, but I really wanted to see how it would work with a piece I didn't know. I went to a music store and got a book of Harold Arlen songs and picked out a piece that didn't look to demanding: "This Time the Dream's On Me". It's very slow going, but the piece is coming together. We started off just playing down-beats. Even though you're playing a small fraction of the song, you still hear the progression of music. Then I added in quarter-note beats, etc. I can play just the melody and bass clef right now and if you didn't know that I was omitting the harmonies, you would think I was playing the whole thing. It's pretty amazing after just two lessons.
So the piano has really come to life for me. I no longer have the feeling that it will be at least 4 years of arduous torture before I'll be able to enjoy playing piano.