Reflecting on Nearly 3 Decades of Teaching: What Has Worked

As I approach another one of those birthdays that starts with the number 5, I'm shocked to realize just how long I've been teaching piano. I opened my piano studio in 1987, almost 3 decades ago. I took about 3 years off during graduate school and when my daughter was a baby, but still, it's been a long run! I'm happy that I can still say that I love it, and I don't plan to quit any time soon.

Fall always feels like a new beginning to me. School starts fresh, a new crop of students usually appears, and Advent begins the church year. It's a good time to reflect about what has worked and what hasn't. In another post, I'll consider what I might have done differently in all of these years of teaching, but today, I'll start with the positives. Here are some things (in no particular order) that I consider to have been successes. 

1.  Not using only one method book. Students come in all shapes, sizes, and learning styles. I've considered it an essential part of my job to stay abreast of new method series and carefully match one to a student. Sometimes, I choose not to use a method at all. In all of these years, I think I'd have gone bat-crazy if I had taught from the same books with every student!

2.  Attending conferences and symposia. Whether it was a state or national MTNA conference, a symposia at a nearby college, or workshops at a local store, attending these gatherings sparks my creativity and helps me stay current on literature and teaching ideas. 

3.  Writing and enforcing a solid studio policy that protects my time and income. It's not overly strict, but I do enforce it. It took several years of teaching before I became comfortable asserting myself in a friendly way, but the journey to that point is well worth it. I'm grateful for a good piano pedagogy teacher in college who taught me to present and think of myself as a professional and to establish professional policies. 

4.  Being willing to dismiss students from the studio. I've done it rarely, but I've done it. Families who don't pay, constantly bounce checks, are frequently absent without notice, and of course, students who never practice are all subject to dismissal. I write a short letter, hold a parent conference, and institute a probation period during which I expect things to change for the better. If they don't, I politely show them the door. Again, it took a long time to work up the courage to do this, but the relief is huge once you've done it a few times and you know you can do it again if needed. Friends, don't suffer through bad situations. 

5.  Always having an interview with prospective students and their parents. I don't make a big deal out of the fact that I'm deciding whether or not to accept them, but I am. During the interview, if I sense that we aren't going to be a good fit, I don't hesitate to broach my concerns candidly and to lay down some boundaries. For instance, if I'm interviewing a student heavily involved in sports, I make it a point to say, "I won't be willing (or able, due to my busy teaching schedule) to make up lessons missed for sports practices or games. You'll need to decide if you can really make a commitment to lessons." 

6. Giving myself raises from time to time. I keep the increase per lesson small, but I do this pretty regularly. Again, the first couple of times, I worried about the response, but it's never been an issue.

7. Having a dedicated room in my house that is my home office/studio or else teaching outside of the house. For about 4 years of my teaching career so far, I've had to teach in our family's living room, but I've been fortunate to be able to have dedicated space most of the time. It's definitely the way to go.

8. Putting the interests and well-being of individual students above the temptation to chase after achievements. Competitions, exams, and festivals have their purposes, but just as test scores are not the measure of school teachers and students, those musical events are not the measure of piano teachers or students. The older I get, the more I believe it. I'm not a Suzuki teacher, but I love these words of Shinichi Suzuki: “Teaching music is not my main purpose. I want to make good citizens. If children hear fine music from the day of their birth and learn to play it, they develop sensitivity, discipline and endurance. They get a beautiful heart.”

Embracing Technology in Piano Study

Apple iPad Mini Piano by iadwords

Technology has been slow in coming to the traditional piano studio. Most teachers over 40, like myself, didn't use anything more techy than a digital metronome and a cassette tape recorder in our own study. However, if we want to stay relevant in the decades to come, that means embracing technology such as apps, digital recording and composing tools, and digital collaboration via social media or other means. This is not just true for those who want to teach popular styles. Respected music schools and conservatories around the world are increasingly using technology in their courses, and young, tech-savvy music majors will soon transform the landscape. I want to continue to be a tree in that landscape for at least a couple more decades, so I'm working to evolve my teaching practices one baby step at a time!

A few years ago, I resisted technology in piano teaching because my impression was that the technology had become the primary goal rather than learning. While this is still sometimes true, better educational applications and practices have come along to improve on that situation.

I think, as piano teachers, we must consider two truths:

1. Students feel limited within traditional piano study when they know from their other learning experiences that so much more is possible with the judicious use of technology. Piano teachers who have not been inside a grade school classroom since they graduated from one may not realize that technology has created a new standard of service that is expected in 2016.

2. Students are going to access the internet, social media, and other forms of technology for piano study whether we are involved or not. We lose the opportunity to guide that discovery when we reject technological tools.

Even classically-oriented piano students live in the 21st century. They expect to use resources online and to have collaborative experiences that are facilitated by social media, even while also benefiting from the expertise of a highly-respected private teacher. Read this article to see how classically-rooted pedagogy is incorporating technology at schools and conservatories around the country: Conservatory Tech Makes Sweet Music. I still hear traditional piano teachers reject the idea of having students watch YouTube videos because there are so many poor ones out there. That's laughable when it also offers pages like this one from New England Conservatory. Instead of dismissing it, we need to give students a road map to navigate it, as we need to do for all of the online resources available for pianists. There are some really good examples of online instruction out there and some really, really bad ones. Our students are going to visit those sites with or without us.

Beware The Technology Generation Gap

While I assert that we should embrace technology, I'll also assert that we need to use it judiciously. One of the things I learned as a long-term sub in a middle school English classroom is that using technology for learning is no longer novel and exciting for the kids, but is as normal as a dictionary was for me at that age. While we piano teachers are dipping our toes cautiously into YouTube, my 7th and 8th grade students are using 3D printers and making "smart" clothing in their computer class. So, when a piano teacher uses a digital tool as a sort of bait to make learning more "fun," students are going to roll their eyes. They are highly perceptive (and frustrated) when teachers use tech tools merely for technology's sake. In fact, that may be the new definition of "generation gap." I asked my 13-year-old daughter what she saw as the pros and cons of using technology in her classes. Her number one con: "Sometimes, teachers will get too attached to it and rely on it way more than they should. It can become an extra that is just more busy work." Adam Schoenbart writes about potential pitfalls of tech tools in the classroom in his online article 5 Mistakes I Made With Educational Technology, and my daughter's frustration is one of his points. However, he also asserts that technology is the new normal. The lesson is always to consider the learning outcome you hope to create by using that particular technology.

Embrace The Opportunity For Student Discovery
 
If some obscure subject like circumzenithal arcs piques my daughter's interest, she can look it up online and, in the space of a few days, practically become an expert on the subject. She has the opportunity to communicate via email or within online forums with bona fide experts, perhaps college professors or working scientists. If I wanted to do the same at her age, my parents had to drive me to the library. It isn't at all likely that I could have had a conversation with the author of the book I read. My school teacher and my textbook were my narrow world, but kids today don't have to depend on anyone else to explore their interests. As the internet becomes a more prominent feature of human life, teachers and schools naturally lose the role of being the gatekeepers of knowledge. While I have resisted the death of the "sage on the stage" model of teaching (expertise still matters), the truth is that no single teacher can compete with the internet. We must be the navigators in a vast, wild sea. We need to see the internet as an advantage in piano instruction, not a threat, and find ways to encourage students to use technological tools to discover things that go far beyond what we teachers know ourselves.

Embrace The Opportunity For Collaboration

My daughter told me that one of the best benefits of using technology at school was that it "allows you to connect to what other teachers and students are doing." As my very old-fashioned dad frequently reminds me (he still uses a typewriter), "two heads are always better than one." Collaboration is good. If you read blogs and watch webinars on the internet to improve your own teaching, you are using technology to learn from many teachers. We need to facilitate the same kind of learning opportunities for our students rather than corralling them into one stable with one trainer. Again, I have to throw out the caveat that while I think collaboration is good, I also believe that expertise is important. Collaboration with peers is not a substitute from learning from experts.

So, as a 51-year-old, classically-trained teacher, what should I do? I can start by considering how technology might enhance my student's learning experience. We should always start with the desired learning outcome, not the technology itself. But, the technology available right now is absolutely mind-blowing, and failing to embrace it is like a doctor failing to consider the newest medical technology. There are more fantastic apps and programs out there than I can stay current on. When I can't figure out how to use them, I can enlist my students or students' parents for help.

Second, I can look for opportunities to allow students to collaborate in any way possible using technology. This might involve using MuseScore to share student compositions, or allow them to work collaboratively on compositions. It might mean creating a mini masterclass using Instagram. They want this community. (Update from 2019:  I have a high school student who wrote a vocal arrangement for a girls' trio on musescore. She emailed me the link, I helped her edit it over a school break. We were 200 miles apart!)

Third, I can use technology as a means to bring in experts besides myself to broaden the knowledge base my students have access to. This might include creating a webquest for students to complete at home, a quizlet for learning musical terms, collaborating with another studio, or watching really fine teachers teach students online.

Explore what music schools around the country are doing in their degree programs. Make friends with your local school music teachers. They've been using technology for a long time. Follow some mus. ed. blogs and resist the urge to click away out of intimidation/fear when the article gets techy. Ask questions. And keep reading here because I'll be elaborating on those ideas above!

Pentatonic Power

Last Friday, I provided the program for our local Music Teachers' Association. My title was "Unlocking Your Students' Creative Potential:  A Report From The 88 Creative Keys Conference."  If you read here, you know that I attended this conference in Denver last summer, and have been inspired to incorporate many more creative elements in my teaching. It makes sense to me to think of teaching music as teaching a language. Just as we learn to read and interpret, we learn to express our own thoughts with it. As I explore how to teach my students to do this (and how to do it myself), I am finding that the pentatonic scale may be the most powerful tool at my disposal. Don't know what the pentatonic scale is?  Keep reading!

In this video Bobby McFerrin plays the crowd, quite literally, using the pentatonic scale. You'll laugh out loud at how he sets up expectations and, using no words at all, gets the crowd to sing exactly what he wants. He says this works everywhere he goes as long as he sticks to the pentatonic.


If you have a couple of hours, you can watch the whole panel discussion that took place at the World Science Festival in 2009:  Notes & Neurons:  In Search of the Common Chorus.  (I haven't watched it myself yet - it's a long video.)

In my presentation, I asked for a show of hands to this question, "Who has heard of the pentatonic scale?" Only about 20% of an audience of piano teachers raised their hand. Everybody in the room had a music degree, but most of them looked puzzled. The person who confidently gave a definition was the one whose dad is an accomplished jazz player. Go figure. I should point out that pentatonic scales are not the same as pentascales. The words are similar, but "pentascale" refers to the first five notes of the regular 8-note major or minor scales. The pentaTONIC scale is something different. I think the lack of knowledge about the pentatonic scale among piano teachers is a big problem. Here's why.

The pentatonic scale is probably the most widely-used scale in the world. It is used in the folk music of almost every culture from Appalachia to Germany to Greece to Africa to the Far East. There are even those who suggest that the pentatonic scale is a universal human phenomenon, that we are biologically predisposed to it. It's ubiquitous in jazz and pop music. Composers who were inspired by folk music (Bartok, Dvorak, etc.) used it widely. You'll hear it in Chopin (think Black Key Etude) and Debussy (think Pagodes from Estampes). You'll hear it in playground chants  - nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah sung to the scale pitches 5-3-6-5-3. You know how it goes!  

Let's put this in context - lots of pianists with music degrees are unfamiliar with the most widely-used scale in the world.

This fact is amusing since the pentatonic scale is visibly evident on the piano. It corresponds to the black keys!

How does this happen? Is it because we're too sophisticated for folk music idioms? Chopin and Debussy weren't. I think it's more likely due to the fact that our piano degree programs are so focused on teaching literature. The music ed. majors are ahead of the pianists in recognizing the power of the pentatonic because Orff and Kodaly methods draw heavily on pentatonic material. Those of us who teach piano to children can take a cue from our music ed. friends and start making use of the power of the pentatonic scale to teach our students how to speak the musical language for themselves.

While there are several versions of the pentatonic scale, the most common form is very easy. Take any major scale and leave out the 4th and 7th degrees - that's a major pentatonic scale. So, C Major pentatonic is C, D, E, G, and A.  The Gb major pentatonic scale is just the black keys on the piano. Elementary school kids learn it with ease. This scale demystifies melodic improvisation instantly because all of the notes will fit in reasonably well with any diatonic chord progression within that key. In fact, one of my favorite slogans from the 88 Creative Keys conference is Bradley's famous advice about improvising a solo line: "When in doubt, pent out." Of course, if you are improvising in a classical style, there are voice-leading concerns, but as a precursor to more sophisticated improvisation in either a classical or jazz style, learning to "pent out" over diatonic chord progressions is a good way to develop your ear and your internal musical vocabulary. It's an ideal way to help young piano students (and anyone new to improvisation) grow comfortable speaking in the musical language.

Check out Pentatonic Power Part 2 for some very practical suggestions for incorporating pentatonic activities into your piano lessons.

What Will My Teaching Philosophy Be In Regard To Improvisation?

The 88 Creative Keys Educator's conference only lasted 3 days, but my head is still there. Yesterday, I went to the grocery store. I just needed a couple of items, but I also came home with a beach ball, dry erase crayons, some cute little rubbery animals, and a magnetic fishing pole. This is what happens when you spend 3 days with a creative teacher like Leila Viss. Suddenly, everything looks like something you could use while teaching piano! Stay tuned in the days to come as I figure out how I'm going to use these things.

Since the conference, I've been doing a lot of thinking about the philosophy behind 88 Creative Keys. If your conception of Bradley and Leila's message is that it's all about jazz or ipad apps, you're missing the point. Bradley Sowash is one of the best at communicating how to play jazz, but his ultimate message isn't "teach your students jazz," or pop, or any other specific style. It's teach your students to make their own music, whatever style that might be, and the skills to make your own music are primary musicianship skills, not secondary. 

Leila wrote the book (literally) on using ipad apps in your studio, but she shared much more than ipad apps. We spent equal time exploring physical manipulatives and other ideas for creative teaching. In fact, most of the apps we used were more for utility than novelty - this is something I want to write more about as I have resisted some technology for the wrong reasons, and I think many other teachers do as well. Leila's message is keep your teaching fresh and creative, take advantage of helpful technology, and engage your students with elements from their own world, which is a vastly different world than the one most of us grew up in. (That link goes to Wendy Stevens' blog ComposeCreate.com where she interviews Pete Jutras, editor of Clavier Companion, about how piano teaching is changing. It's worth reading if you haven't.)

So, I'm convinced that creativity and improvisation in particular should be an essential part of piano instruction. Now, how am I going to put that to work in my studio? Before I make concrete plans, I'm considering some questions I think will help me develop my teaching philosophy where improvisation is concerned. I'm not offering answers...yet. One of my favorite high school teachers taught me that you can't solve a problem until you define the problem. So, for now, I just have questions. While I'm not giving answers yet, I'm really interested in yours. Please comment!

1.  What caused pianists to abandon the craft of improvisation even though organists did not? We know that improvisation was common among keyboard players up until the late 19th century. So what factors contributed to its decline among pianists?

2. Should current piano pedagogy be governed by those factors?

3. What kind of improvisation did classical pianists do back in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries? What kind of improvisation do classical pianists currently do? What sort of improvisation could they do, and who would listen?

4. If I believe that improvisation skills are desirable, how do I make them an essential part of my piano pedagogy, not just a filler activity at the end of a lesson? As an extension of that, how should we structure our piano festivals and evaluations and method books to reflect our values?

5.  What kinds of demands for creative musical skills do my students encounter in their musical lives apart from me, at church or school for instance? How can I help them with these needs? What print or online resources are available?

6.  How important is off-the-page creative music making for my students' personal well-being, and is this something my teaching should address?

7. Can I and should I embrace improvising in all sorts of styles? How can I influence my students' development of good taste while not stifling their creativity when that creativity emerges in a style that I don't know much about (jazz) or might not like (current pop)? What defines "good taste," and is it dependent on genre? Can pop be useful? Whose opinion influences my answers to these questions?

8. Can I be comfortable giving and listening to assignments that are more about a messy process than a nice, clean product?

9.  How can I teach improv in such as way as to give students some immediate gratification while also encouraging the discipline of drills and exercises that will help them learn to think harmonically on the fly?

10. How much lesson time am I willing to devote to creative music making as opposed to performance and interpretation?

I could probably think of more, but these questions are enough to drive my blog for a year! I hope they've gotten you thinking, and I hope you'll share those thoughts in the comments.

Rests Are Essential

Photo by wiccked.

School is out, and my studio is closed until June! I'm sleeping in, taking it easy, and making no apologies for it! I wrote this post about five years ago, and I believe it even more today, so I'm sharing it again.

Rests are good - quarter rests, half rests, whole rests, even eighth rests if that's the best you can do.

Several years ago, what I most wanted was to find a commercial space to rent so that I could set up a little piano academy, offering early childhood music classes in the morning and piano lessons in the afternoon. Thank goodness I realized that in order to afford my expenses, I would have to enroll many more students than I really wanted to have. I would have to teach into the evenings, maybe before school, and certainly on Saturdays. All of that work would have meant more child care expenses. I wouldn't have been able to ease up on teaching during the summer since leases and utility bills don't take holidays. Ultimately, I might have become burned out on work that I truly love.

I think we all, students and teachers alike, need to honor our natural rhythms. This year, I encouraged my students to schedule 4-6 lessons during our 10 weeks of summer. Most are doing just that, and it's working well for us. It's enough that they don't forget everything, but allows for some relaxation. Sometimes they haven't practiced much, but we use the lesson time to practice together. We are all more creative. I can hear myself being a better teacher when I'm not teaching non-stop. Yes, my income took a dive. But, for me at least, it's worth it to budget ahead for summer and scrimp a little in order to slow down and recharge.

Life has a rhythm. There is day, and there is night. There are seasons for growing, and seasons for (gasp) not growing but gathering energy to support future growth. Living things are cyclic - plants die back in the winter and shoot up in the spring. Bears hibernate. Why do we humans believe that we are not subject to the same forces of nature? It's too bad that our culture expects us to behave as though we are machines.

A musical composition needs rests. It needs slow movements to offset the fast ones. An effective performance needs changes in tempo and mood. To craft our lives well, we need to allow some balance between fast and slow, sound and silence. Musicians ought to be the first to understand that, but (and I'm speaking for myself) sometimes I think we may be the most driven ones of all.

Food for thought:


Wayne Muller's book has strongly affected my goals for crafting a life (and schedule) that makes sense.

Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives

Here's an article that I think makes a good case for taking breaks while practicing your instrument, or scheduling a few minutes of a break into your teaching day:

Relax! You'll Be More Productivev

I hope you're having a restful summer!

Improvisation: Nurturing The Ear That Sees And The Eye That Hears

When I was a young piano student, my teachers never asked me to improvise. There were no gold stars awarded for “doodling” – no certificates, recital trophies, or pins.  So, I never did it. 

And that’s a shame.

Bach “doodled” until he became so good at it that he could test out new organs by improvising fugues on them. Beethoven “doodled” until he became so adept at audiation that he could compose the 9^th Symphony after losing his hearing. 

Improvising is not mere doodling, and the ability to become good at it is not limited to the great masters or some sub-group of musicians who were “born that way.” It’s a learned skill. Bradley Sowash and Leila Viss are championing this belief with their Eye Ear Revolution. 

In the last couple of weeks of my piano term, with my students in the "just maintaining" stages of their recital pieces, we took some time to improvise. After some experimentation in the lesson, I assigned them a few ideas to play around with and waited to see what they’d bring back. When the sweet girl in the video played for me the next week, I was really surprised. She is, as her mother likes to say, a child who loves protocol. She wants to work through her assignments starting with item 1, then item 2, and so on, and finds it difficult to deviate from a plan.  When I expressed my surprise at how comfortable she was with improvising (this video was filmed in one take), I was surprised again to hear that for the last several years, she has regularly spent time with her older sister just sitting and improvising together.

So, I’ve been her piano teacher all that time, and didn’t know…

You may recognize the LH from Forrest Kinney's Pattern Play, Book One.  

What is my student accomplishing when she improvises?  Dr. Robert Pace, who was one of the 20th century's most esteemed piano pedagogues and a strong advocate of comprehensive musicianship, calls it “thinking in motion” and “creative problem solving.”  In an essay that you can read online here, he refutes the idea that improvisation is just a recreational activity, but instead defines it as “an interplay of the cognitive, affective and psycho-motor domains.”

When my student sits at home just “doodling” with her sister, she’s learning to anticipate what key will sound best before she ever reaches a finger toward it. As a result, not only will she be able to create her own music, but when she’s reading notation, she can do more than merely take dictation from the composer – she can enter into the creative space with him by recognizing where the music is headed before she even sees it written down.  Pace calls this “the ear that sees and the eye that hears.”  She’s discovering that repetition of motives and phrases give structure and balance to her music. She’s learning the value of a well-placed silence. She’s getting caught up in the flow of the moment and learning when it's time to drive ahead and when it's time to control the pace and slow down. She's learning to trust her instincts. She’s developing a sense of confidence in the validity of her own creative expression.

I find it very interesting to realize that, had I given my student a notated version of what she improvised and asked her to learn it, it would have taken her weeks. Improvisation helps develop motor coordination that doesn’t have to depend on translating the score first.

Pace, like Sowash and Viss, believes that “everyone--from the slowest learner to the most gifted--can create some music at the keyboard. Two things are required of the teacher--continuous opportunities and proper encouragement.”  Because I need to learn better how to improvise myself (as much as I believe in it, I’m really a beginner at doing it!), and because I want to provide the opportunities and encouragement my students need to become well-rounded musicians, I’m very excited to share that I’m going this summer to the 88 Creative Keys Teaching Creativity Conference on July 9-11! In fact, Bradley and Leila have given me a great vote of confidence by awarding me the first deputy scholarship for the conference. I'm very honored! I hope 88 Creative Keys is on your list of considerations for your own summer enrichment. I'd love to meet you there!

Improvisation Master Class: Letting Judgment Go

Photo source

Laura's Note:  Today, I'm pleased to welcome Doug Hanvey to The Piano Studio as a guest blogger. Doug is a pianist, piano teacher, improvisor, composer, and author who blogs about piano teaching at Portland Piano Lab. I've already  had the opportunity to put some of these suggestions to use in my studio, with successful results! Thanks for sharing these tips with us, Doug!

If you're a classically-trained piano teacher who is new to teaching improvisation, you may benefit by becoming aware of and letting go of the fears and judgments you have around playing music that sounds unpolished or "mistake-filled." If the previous sentence resonates with you, it's probably because you've been programmed for musical perfection. Are you ready to let go of some of that programming?

Improvising demands that we let go into the musical moment. This is actually no different than when we are performing a composed piece. The best performances of composed music, after all, happen when we are so caught up in the musical moment that we are in the state that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called "flow."

All classical pianists have experienced flow as well as a lack of it when self-consciousness or self-judgment pop in for a visit.

Before considering how to better teach improv, perhaps we should first become aware of anything that disrupts the flow of our own musical creativity. If we are burdened by fears and judgments that keep us from falling into the creative musical moment, it will be harder for our students to trust their own sense of flow. Try the following:

 

Explore Your Judgments About Improvising

Ask yourself:  How do I negatively judge my own improvising skills? Do these judgments interfere with the process of improvising? (If you find a stressful judgment like "I'm no good at improv – why do I think I can teach it to my students?" ask yourself if you can absolutely know that this thought is true. I like to use Byron Katie's four questions for dissolving stressful or limiting judgments.)

 

Explore Your Emotional Reactions to Improvising

Feel into your raw emotional experience as you improvise. (A good way to check in with your emotions is by bringing awareness to the body.) Is there anxiety? Outright fear? Whatever emotion you find, open a space for it and allow it to be. This is more powerful and liberating than judging an emotion or repressing it.

The more we bring awareness to our judgments and fears, the less power they have over us. Our personal experience of spontaneous musical creativity will be enriched and our confidence and willingness to be musically imperfect – essential for true musical flow – will increase.

 

Practical Tips for Teaching Improvisation

When you begin to teach improvisation in piano lessons, you may notice yourself critiquing your students in unconstructive ways. After all, while a given improvisation may be musically better or worse, it can't be changed or corrected like a composed piece. There are no mistakes in improv!

To help new student improvisers avoid self-consciousness it is better to err on the side of too much praise. While you don't want to offer empty platitudes, giving specific positive feedback about what you liked can empower students and give them a deeper understanding of the magic of improvisation.

To help students develop as improvisers without a verbally corrective approach, demonstrate instead. (The greatest jazz improvisers learn by listening to and mimicking the previous greats.) Tell your student that you will improvise for a minute or two while they listen intently. Then they will continue, and so on, back and forth. To make this even more effective, learn at least a few principles of improvisation that even beginners can use to sound "better" and develop more musical confidence. Here are three principles that are an essential element of effective improvising (and for that matter, composed music too):

Repetition: The use of repetition can be as simple as repeating single notes, or a two or three note melodic or rhythmic pattern.

Phrasing: Just as singers sing a phrase and then breathe, improvising pianists can learn to play a phrase and then "breathe."

Singing: A player's improvising skills can take a quantum leap when they tune in to the "inner improviser" and begin singing while playing – just as many of the great jazz improvisers do (some under the breath, a few quite perceptibly!). The ear and voice guide what the fingers play. Then the music truly begins to come from within.

By challenging yourself to go beyond your own fears and judgments, and by applying a few essential principles of improvisation, you can take your teaching of improvisation to the next level, while enjoying it more!

Doug Hanvey's Piano Lab Blog, hosted on his Portland Piano Lab website, provides tips for teachers on improvisation and other aspects of piano pedagogy.

Playing For Joy

Soaring

I wrote a post last Tuesday that was a manifesto against spending any more lesson time teaching students to perform from memory. (Mind you, I'm not totally against memorizing music - just against the idea that a memorized performance is the only legitimately good performance, and against inflicting what I believe is unnecessary stress on students who find memorization stressful.) I'm sure plenty of people totally disagree with me, but the only feedback I've received has been positive. In that post, I listed what I thought were the most important skills I needed to teach my students. After a week of ruminating and after taking several of them to play for Guild auditions just yesterday, I realize that my post didn't focus enough on an important point. Why should we learn all of those skills? The answer is so simple, but we discredit it:

We learn to play music so that we can have the joy of playing beautiful music.

While I may say that this is true, my teaching priorities say something else.

On the weekend before our last lesson prior to Guild auditions, my student "John" played his hardest piece as the offertory at his church. He showed me the video his mom took with her smart phone. I was astounded to see what looked like a completely different child than the one I usually met in lessons. He was totally relaxed and played his sonatina with complete freedom. A minor stumble was no concern, and he quickly recovered with no ill effect on the performance. His dynamics and phrasing were both beautiful. In contrast, at lessons, John is very hard on himself, groans at mistakes, becomes tense, and often has a harsh, strident tone.  Who in the world was that kid at church?

"Were you nervous at all?" I asked.  "You sure don't look it!"

"Oh, no. They weren't listening to judge me. They're all my friends."

Face-palm.

At Guild auditions, John played his music well, but not with the freedom and obvious joy at making music that he had at church. He stumbled significantly over one of his scales. Afterwards, he was in tears (over a scale!), even though the examiner had not penalized him for the stumble and had given him very encouraging comments.

I tell myself that I participate in Guild to help my students learn to do things like play well in church. Do you get the irony? I'm getting it. Loud and clear. John can already play well at church, maybe with a more mature attitude about it than I have myself, but the minute the listener becomes a judge or even a teacher rather than a friend enjoying the moment along with him, or worshiping along with him, then he is no longer playing with joy and freedom, and his performance suffers for it.  Forrest Kinney writes in "A Radical Shift in Pedagogy:"

If these students are to continue to make music beyond their lessons and throughout their lives, they will not be doing so to please a teacher, a parent, or “a listener.” Those who have a lifelong love affair with a musical instrument are making music to please their own soul. When that is not the primary motive, even the loudest applause and the greatest accomplishments feel rather empty in the end.

Occasionally when there are a few rare minutes at the end of a lesson, I'll open up Book 1 of Forrest Kinney's Pattern Play series, and we'll play one of the improvisations. The kids love it. They get lost in it. They look at me with bright eyes the next week and say, "Can we do that improv stuff again?" I enjoy it too, but I have this awkward feeling when we finish one. I'm thinking to myself, "What do we do with that?" I'll say something to the student like,  "Um...okay! That was fun! Now, remember to practice your pieces for Festival. They've got to be memorized by next time!"

I'm starting to recognize that I've been harboring the idea that the joy of making music is not enough on its own - that lesson time is not valuable if we're not turning the page in the method book and achieving something. I've been operating all this time with the belief that music making needs to be for something else to be a legitimate activity. It helps you perform better at school, learn grace under pressure, set and achieve a goal, develop a good work ethic, etc. These are all true, but they're fringe benefits - not the primary benefit. I believe in the pursuit of excellence, and I don't want to suggest that music lessons are supposed to be nothing but mindless play time with no goals in mind. But, I also think that I need to be willing to state outright that one of our goals is sheer pleasure. I already tell students (and parents) that it's hard to enjoy something when you know you're playing poorly, so the best way to enjoy yourself is to do your practicing. I still need to do more to nurture playfulness and creativity. I'm in danger of reducing the study of music to an achievement program.

Where I live near Augusta, GA, we get excited about golf. There's this small tournament called The Masters that happens here every year. I'm not really a golf fan, but you can't live in this neck of the woods and not at least keep up with the big names. This year, a young guy named Justin Spieth won. He has a shocking perspective about the importance of golf. He says it's for recreation. The audacity! He gets this attitude from his parents. His dad Shawn's final advice before the tournament went like this:  "I wanted him to know what I thought was important.  I told him, ‘You know, you’re going to face some adversity out here ... and this is the Masters ... but it’s still just a game.’”

What is contained in that parental advice? The permission to lose, because in the scheme of things, it's just a game. The permission to win because winning doesn't carry the burden of having to maintain your king-of-the-hill status since it's just a game. The permission to take a risky shot because if you miss it, it's just a game. The parental assurance that your worth is not tied up in this. This is not your life; this is not your identity; this isn't about your teachers' or parents' worth or status - it's a game. What's contained in that parental advice? The freedom to try for your biggest dream and actually enjoy the journey to reach it.

So what happens when a kid plays for the love of the game, remembering that at the end of the day his parents (and presumably coaches) think of it as just a game? He works his tail off toward his own self-directed goal, feels he has nothing to lose by trying his hardest, and wins The Masters, easily, at age 21.

My student John worked hard on his music, then stood up in front of over 100 people and played a soaring, free, natural performance because in that moment, it was just for mutual joy and worship with his friends. A week later, he played the same piece for only one person and played an anxious, stiff performance because I told him that this one performance really mattered. I legitimized the second performance by giving him a certificate and a pin. I called the first performance "a dress rehearsal."  Yet, which one was the real thing?

We're missing the point.

Performing from Memory...or Not

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The events of my last several days have been staggering. In the space of about a week, I've learned of the deaths of several friends and friends of friends. These events plus the news of terrorism and the devastating Nepal earthquake have me doing some ruminating. I've been evaluating whether or not I'm really attending to the things that matter the most, or devoting time and energy to things that I do mostly out of conformity to tradition or a fear of being different. In short, I'm asking "where are my aspirational values not coinciding with my practiced values?"

Where my studio is concerned, I'm thinking about how much mental energy and lesson time I am devoting to helping my students memorize music for performances, particularly evaluations that require a lot of memory work. As a piano student in college, I memorized music for juries and recitals, but I have not been expected to play from memory even once since then.  After graduating in 1987, I have been active as a church musician, played for community theatre, played with a small amateur chamber group, and I've performed a couple of times with a local orchestra - not one performance from memory. Later, I went back to school for a masters in organ - and of the dozen or so organ recitals I've played, not one has been from memory. If the musicality of any of those performances suffered, I do not believe it was for lack of being memorized.

What skills have I most needed since graduation?

• Ability to read and respond to all of the details of notation -  at sight, during practice time, and in performance after practicing
• Ability to interpret and express the music's essence, not merely the notes
• Ability to quickly recognize harmonic structure and form
• Ability to improvise, whether embellishing existing music, covering mistakes, or inventing original music
• Ability to collaborate with other musicians
• Ability to read the score in my head - ear-training

I've still got a lot to learn myself, but these are the things I most want to teach my students. With all of these skills vying for our time in a 45-minute lesson which is embedded in the life of a very busy kid, I'm find it very hard to justify spending their time or mine on learning to perform from memory.

Joy Morin wrote a good blog post about the pros and cons of memorization where she distinguishes between using it as a tool for learning as opposed to memorization for the purpose of performing without the score. Memory work can certainly be a great tool for learning a piece to full mastery, but I can't convince myself anymore that performing from memory deserves the sacred cow status it has acquired.  The requirement always to perform without the score is actually a fairly recent development in the history of Western music. Prior to Franz Liszt, audiences would have been shocked  by it. Stephen Hough writes in "Liszt:  The Man Who Invented Stage Fright:"

Chopin would not have approved; he chastised a pupil once for playing a piece from memory, accusing him of arrogance. In the days when every pianist was also a composer, to play without a score would usually have meant that you were improvising. To play a Chopin ballade from memory might have seemed as if you were trying to pass off that masterpiece as your own.

Consider this:  there was no expectation to perform from memory placed on Bach, any of Bach's sons, Scarlatti, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, or Mendelssohn, or any performer at all prior to Liszt's first audacious, memorized performance in 1841. If any of them could be a fly on the wall in my studio, I suspect they would all be very puzzled by how much time we devote to checking on the accuracy of memorized pieces as opposed to the time we spend learning functional keyboard harmony and improvisation. I'd like to teach my students to do so much more than just "recite" music - to be able to form ideas and speak in the musical language on their own! But, that takes a lot of lesson time, and I still have a lot to learn about it myself. This means teaching "outside of the box" - at least according to today's box -  and learning some new teaching skills.

If memory is a tool for playing more beautifully, and the stress doesn't sabotage the performance, then I'm all for it. Some of my students memorize easily and prefer to play that way. But, I believe memorization should only be a tool to create beautiful music and a good performing experience - not the goal in and of itself. If if the stress of performing from memory sabotages the quality of the performance or your enjoyment of performing, why do it? I've heard a lot of people say that playing from memory is freeing, but that's only true for some people. I've performed recitals at the piano from memory and at the organ from the score, and I know that I can reach that sensation of feeling free either way - it's really just a matter of being fully prepared. More importantly, being able to reach that state with the score has been a far more useful skill in my everyday life as a working musician than has memorization.

Every student learns music differently, and some never make their peace with memorization but still play beautifully with the score.  It seems that our culture is saying to them, "Well, if you don't feel happy to be liberated from the score, YOU SHOULD, and your excellent, yet non-memorized performance is substandard."  I disagree. It all comes down to the final question - why do we make music in the first place?  The answer is simple - because we enjoy it and it enriches our lives. The pursuit of excellence is, in my opinion, another good reason to study music. But, to suggest that a performance can only be good when it has extra requirements pressed on it beyond actual musical excellence is troublesome to me.

I like doing evaluations, especially when they are flexible enough to meet the variety of needs of my individual students and let students progress at their own pace rather than a predetermined one. Our local MTA festival requires only two memorized pieces, which is usually easy enough for my students, although a few do struggle with the requirement. We also do Guild exams, and it's a great motivator at the end of our school year when sports, spring musicals, and school projects threaten to overtake piano. Some of my students choose to do the 10-piece program, while some choose with my wholehearted blessing to do only 4. Some don't  participate at all. Ironically, sometimes those students who choose to do the smaller program could excel at the useful skills of sight reading, scales, ear training, transposition, or improvisation categories, but Guild limits them to testing in only one of those categories unless they play more memorized repertoire. (Sigh.)

I no longer require memorization for recitals, and I see many teachers admitting on message boards that they don't either. This trend is not limited to those of us who teach school-aged children, but is catching on in the performance world as well.  Anthony Tommasini in The Guardian, quotes Peter Serkin:

''Memory is a strange thing,'' he added. ''It can happen by itself; it does not have to be the result of an arduous process of study. But many people do it to make a big point, or out of some kind of vanity. It's become orthodoxy, which is unhealthy and restrictive.'' 

If a student finds performing from memory stressful, I am ready to go on record as saying that I find the stress completely unnecessary. I doubt that many (if any) of my students will pursue careers as solo performers. They will play for their churches, play for community events, and maybe play with a band or ensemble for pleasure. They may even pick up some side income in the process. They can learn classical literature, jazz improvisation, sacred solo pieces, accompaniments for choirs and soloists, and even learn to create their own music without being required to memorize. In light of that, I just don't think that working on memorization is best use of our lesson time, their practice time, or of myself as a resource for my students.

So, this is a case where my aspirational values are not aligning with my practiced values.  There will be some changes in my studio next year. I'm still trying to decide exactly what those changes will look like, and I'm interested to know what you do in your studios. We may choose to do more duets at Festival because they don't require memory. I may send fewer students to Guild. I will definitely devote more time to sight reading and improvisation next year. Please join the conversation and comment, and feel free to disagree with me if you can phrase it with grace and good will. I'm really interested to hear what other teachers think.