Imagine
November 7, 2011 § 1 Comment
Image by ☺Laura☺ via Flickr
Sometimes a song knocks on the door and insists you open it. This week it was John Lennon’s “Imagine“.
Our local music store (Portland Music) has sheet music in the basement and instruments upstairs. They have an amazing bunch of digital pianos these days and usually someone is trying them all out while I’m shopping for sheet music.
I’m all for people playing the piano or the keyboard or whatever all day, every day, in public, in the music store, on street corners, in bars, hospitals, Nordstrom’s, everywhere. But the music coming from the digitals upstairs makes it hard to concentrate on the music I have to read downstairs (when you’re looking for music for students you shuffle through it quickly by reading it and then maybe sit down and play what’s left to see if it plays like you heard it in your head. I have trouble hearing music on the page if music is playing).
I don’t think I have ever heard real music being played upstairs. Just lots of students rattling through things, neophytes poking at the demo buttons, glissandi, “Fur Elise” by the bucketful. Either blah or annoying, depending on my mood.
But not this weekend. This time it was real music.
Someone was playing “Imagine”, beautifully. I set my sheaf of Late Elementary pieces down and just listened. And I thought how, if I ever get around to learning any popular music of any sort, “Imagine” would be a great place to start.
Then, the next day, what should appear in my inbox but a flyer from Scott Houston, the redoubtable Teach Yourself “Piano in a Flash” star of public TV and the internet. I love Scott. He is my favorite Pied Piper of piano playing. What was he announcing but a DVD to teach you to play “Imagine” , starting easy and progressing up to the full version.
Before I had time to whip out my credit card and order it, the phone rang. It was a prospective student, an adult. He said it was time. He needed to do something he’s been putting off forever: play the piano.
“What would you like to play?” I asked, and he answered,
“Imagine”.
Music Training Enhances Children’s Verbal Intelligence
October 14, 2011 Comments Off on Music Training Enhances Children’s Verbal Intelligence
I don't know what this is all about but it looks like what is going on in our local school.
My local elementary school has music class for 40 minutes every 2 weeks, and for that whole 40 minutes the students get to watch the teacher do something. They don’t have time for that messy, complicated, glorious stuff like actually learning to play and sing and dance. The Powers running the school feel that there is barely enough time in the school day to work on passing the state tests in reading and writing and arithmetic and so it can’t be frittered away on music.
Here’s yet another piece of research showing why this is a dumb way to try to make kids smart. After only 20 days of exposure to an interactive music training program preschoolers showed improvements in verbal intelligence .”Our findings demonstrate a causal relationship between music training and improvements in language and executive function”.
I’m a practicing musician and I have developed a high level of verbal intelligence, so I’m not fooled by the academic language in this quote. I know it says studying music makes kids smarter. And smart is as smart does, so the bit about executive function is also important. If you’re not familiar with the term “executive function”, it has to do with carrying out your ideas and plans. Executing your intentions. It has nothing to do with the Fortune 500 per se, but I bet those CEO’s have it in spades.
Want to exercise your verbal intelligence? Here’s some nice clichés to use when you are talking about schools eliminating music so they can concentrate on their “core subjects”:
Throw the baby out with the bath water.
Cut off your nose to spite your face.
Rob Peter to pay Paul.
Dig yourself into a hole.
A few sandwiches short of a picnic.
I’m sure you can think of some more. Send ’em in.
“Let living room pianos invite unwashed hands”
September 30, 2011 § 1 Comment
The new poetry post (with extra box for music)
My new poetry post in front of the house has been standing empty for about a month while I considered what would be the right poem to inaugurate the little box with a glass front and a hinged lid. Should it be a poem about poetry? Should it be about music? Should it be something silly or something deep? Should I look to old favorites like Shelley and Keats or get one of my poet-friends to contribute?
Today I finally took the plunge and printed up the first poem, by Sarah Lindsay: Zucchini Shofar
I wish I could figure out how to make the poem display on this page, but if you click on the link you’ll get it.
I have loved this poem for several years and every time I read it, including just now, during the Days of Awe, standing in front of my house and reading it through the glass of the poetry box, I am smitten with the feeling that I wrote it myself, or could have, or would have, had I been a poet and been at that wedding and heard the sounding zucchini and all those nieces and nephews playing their instruments or if I had ever thought of making the plumbing in a half-built house resound with a trumpeting raspberry or ever realized that the ephemeral art I practice has everything in common with butter that melts into homemade cornbread.
L’Shanah Tova!
How to choose a piano teacher
September 19, 2011 § 2 Comments
Corn
A couple years ago my friend Cydney called to ask me a difficult question. It was a question about piano teaching and kids, the sort of thing I can talk about until my tongue falls out of my head, but this question stumped me.
You see, Cydney is a scientist. She’s a very logical and rational person who thinks there is straight path from here to anywhere. So, when her kids got to grade school, she figured it would be easy to find them a piano teacher. She’s used to reading resumes of PhD’s and post docs, so many years at this lab, so many publications authored, so many patents received, etc.
But how was she to evaluate a piano teacher? Piano teachers don’t do research, we usually don’t publish, we usually don’t have advanced degrees, we aren’t part of a network that a scientist can tap into.
When Cydney started looking at piano teachers, she was overwhelmed. It was all so murky and indirect. There was no agreed-upon criteria for rating piano teachers. Did you rate them highly because their students win contests? Do you rate them on the basis of where their (usually undergraduate) degrees are from? Who they studied with? What grades they got in Counterpoint 310? What kind of piano they had? Where they lived? How old they were? Some used only one method with every student. Some had stringent practice requirements. Some demanded recitals and group lessons. Some struck her as wishy-washy and vague.
She called me from Washington, D.C. in a panic: How ever could she pick a piano teacher for her kids?
Unfortunately Washington is several time-zones and a few thousand miles away from here, or we could have cut the conversation short and put her terribly cute kids on my schedule every Tuesday afternoon. End of problem. I know I could teach her kids, even though one of them is a little autistic and the other has a big problem sitting still for more than a nano-second.
I know how to teach kids like that and I know what Cydney is after: a good musical experience, basic skills, a sound foundation that won’t hold them back, someone who can take them as far and as fast as they want to go, lots of success, happy kids going into the lesson and happy kids coming out.
But how could she find someone like me in Washington D.C.?
I really didn’t have a decent answer for her at first. How do you pick a piano teacher? How do you tell your friend how to pick a piano teacher? I know how I picked a drum teacher for my kids, but I have lots of experience with music teachers. I knew my kids, I knew lots of teachers, I picked the one that I figured had the best shot at getting them playing and keeping them playing. But how did I make that choice?
In biology there is a phrase: a feeling for the organism. Barbara McClintock, whose work on corn genetics and gene regulation brought her a Nobel prize, used it as the title for her autobiography. It was her feeling for corn in its wonderful variety and her deep study of its genetic behavior that convinced her that genes were being turned off and on and modified even though such ideas were against current genetic dogma. She was reviled and ignored for 30 years but persevered anyway.
A person who has a feeling for the organism has an intuitive grasp of how that organism behaves, what makes it tick, how it will respond. If you are looking for someone to work on root rot fungi or orangutans or corn, you look for the person who has a feeling for that particular organism and a fascination with all its mysteries.
If you want to hire someone to work on corn genetics, you look for a person who eats, breathes, sleeps, dreams and talks corn genetics. You don’t hire the lima bean guy with the 3-mile long resume and impeccable credentials, unless he admits to a life-long yearning to get out of beans and into corn.
But you also don’t hire the corn lady with the long resume if she thinks she already understands everything about corn and genetics. If Barbara McClintock had thought that way, she would have ignored her data that showed corn was violating the genetic rules. She would have ignored what seemed to be wrong results rather than being intrigued by wonderful, unexplained behavior. Instead of making profound discoveries about genetics she would have been a hack scientist with a nice CV and a retirement fund.
Cydney knows about these people. She knows the difference between the bean guy whose eyes light up when you mention corn to him and the corn lady who can’t wait to get out of the office and get on with her real life. And, like me, she is a life-long fan of Barbara McClintock.
So she got it when I called back a few days later and said, “You need someone who has a feeling for the organism. Look for someone who is just nuts about teaching music to kids. Not someone who is looking for contest winners or perfect behavior or moms with 20 hours a week to spend supervising practice, although those people can be just fine. What you need first of all is someone with a feeling for those organisms which are your kids. Go for the person who looks even more interested when you tell them about the autism and ADHD. Pick the person who is curious and loves a challenge. And pick the one who thinks teaching music to your kids sounds like a blast”.
I was pretty proud of myself for making the connection between corn genetics and Barbara McClintock and piano teachers. It was a great moment when I taught a biologist how to navigate the murky world of humans and education. After all, we are the most interesting and complex organism on the planet.
Cydney picked a dynamite teacher for her kids. It took some work to find the right person. But the kids are playing up a storm and everyone is pleased. Only trouble is, I’m not real sure how to answer this question if someone who isn’t a biologist asks it. Any ideas out there?
Whatever Are Piano Lessons For?
August 23, 2011 § 2 Comments
This question was posed to me by a parent many years ago and I have been trying to answer it ever since. Is it just my imagination, or does studying music actually improve your life? Do you get smarter, live longer, will you be better adjusted or happier if you play the piano?
This fall, families everywhere will be wondering whether to stretch the calendar and the budget to include piano lessons. Many parents recognize the need for arts study to counterbalance the academic emphasis in most schools. But when it is time to get in the car and write the checks, it is easy to wonder whether it is worth it all.
Don’t get me wrong, music for me is first, last and always its own reward. But I have noticed that pianists tend to be quite bright. Do they start out that way or does piano study somehow help things along?
Our friends The Scientists have recently set aside their investigations into pathology to study how we learn and how to improve it. The next time I have to justify piano lessons, I will have some real answers instead of just opinions. I will be posting a whole slew of articles on the benefits of music study. Here’s one to start off the fall piano lesson season:
How Music Training Primes Nervous System and Boosts Learning A review of many research papers on the effects of music study reveals music study improves listening, speech processing, attention, memory, vocabulary, reading. So anecdotal evidence that piano students do better in school is supported by some real data. Children with dyslexia, in particular, benefit from music study because it strengthens brain function in areas that in which they are weak.
Big Blue Bench
August 14, 2011 § 1 Comment
Several years ago I thought a street-side bench would transform the life and traffic on Dosch Road. If it were beautiful enough, people would go out of their way to visit it, sit awhile, maybe chat. Dog walkers would rest their dogs. Kids would sit and eat popsicles. Tourist buses would climb the hill to gawk. Indy bands would show up to make their promo photos.
My friend Leslie Ariel, of Big Idea Studios, signed on. Public art that the public can sit on, walk through, play on or crawl over is what she’s all about. She designed what she says it is a twisted, 3-D treble clef. Perfect for a piano teacher. I think it looks like a folded cello. Other people think it looks like a sea mammal. What do you think it looks like?
It took the two of us most of one weekend to pour and finish the concrete. I take no credit for any of it-I just did the grunt work. Concrete is heavy and grunt is a literal transcription of what I did. Leslie did even more grunting plus all the meticulous finishing. She was out late into the evening, working by lamplight to get it just so before the concrete set up. I was inside, meticulously finishing a sandwich.
Leslie loves blue and the bench needed blue. But we didn’t know how to do it. The integral concrete stains would have just vaguely colored it. We didn’t want vague, we wanted True Blue. Since the two of us have 6 kids altogether, we found some other things to do for a few years and the bench languished, gray and unused.
Until this summer. Thanks to the folks at Ecohaus I got some beautiful blue concrete stain and finished off the bench as a surprise for Leslie. Now it really looks like sculpture. It is the best thing on Dosch Road.
And guess what? People are starting to sit on it. Dogs have been, well, dogging it. Traffic has slowed to a crawl.
Practicing
August 7, 2011 § 1 Comment
One way to get the kids to practice
Boy, I hope not. I would hate to see music turn into misery. The point of music study is to move beyond all that.
In many families, piano lesson peace is as elusive as peace in the Middle East. Teachers insist on a certain amount of practice and demand well-prepared lessons each week. When there are syllabus exams looming or recitals scheduled, pressure mounts. Student performance is critical to a teacher’s professional standing and self-respect. The only way to get kids to do more work at home is to get parents more involved. Kids get harassed about practicing at home, and again at their lessons. Parents feel caught between the teacher and the kids.
I wasn’t very good at teaching my own kids. They needed to learn this stuff from someone else. And I didn’t want some teacher’s demands adding more conflict to our family. We have had plenty of that, thank you very much. Why pay for it when you can get it for free?
Every family is different. It’s possible for parents to encourage, insist, and help with piano practice. But not all parents want or can do this. Not all children accept parental help gracefully. Parental help is the last thing many children want.
Peace. Music. Learning. Isn’t that enough?
