‘Tis the season for studio performances. But before you stress about coordinating all the details, we have streamlined all the steps to make this winter’s recital a blast!
The virtuoso fiddler Richard Greene once gave a workshop at a national strings conference and pointed out that in his opinion it was very important for music teachers to perform. It keeps us in touch with why we love music, puts teaching in perspective, gives us more to offer students, gives students more respect for their teacher, and attracts more students who want to play like you.
Weddings, parties, orchestras and bands, gigs with small ensembles at restaurants, or fully arranged concerts, are all good outlets, requiring varying amounts of publicity and preparation.
It’s great if you have a colleague or a group to play with regularly, because you can be seen as a known quantity, an entity to hire. But even on your own, there are opportunities to pursue–sometimes a student or a student’s spouse wants you to play for their birthday party or wedding. Knowing you, they trust you to arrange for others to play with, depending on the budget.
Weddings are sometimes trickiest to administer, because usually (hopefully) they are a one-time affair, (more…)
How we think about musical mistakes has a huge impact on how we practice, how we learn, how we perform.
One student told me that when she makes a mistake, it’s like falling off a bicycle. Another said it’s like finding herself down the wrong path in the woods. Still another says it’s like tripping on a tree root while hiking. Or like hitting the wrong floor button in an elevator.
Or is it like dropping tomato sauce on a white sleeve, or dropping the wrong ingredient in a recipe? Maybe it’s like saying the wrong word in the middle of a speech, or like missing a fly you’re trying to swat.
Each of these possible ways to think of musical mistakes implies a completely different response. It may well be that each of your students thinks of mistakes a very different way and therefore responds differently to them.
Do you want a student to feel derailed by a mistake and have to start over, hoping to get it right the next time? Or should they catch themselves after tripping and keep hiking?
Is a musical mistake sometimes equivalent to having taken the wrong trail, and if so, do we start over, or go back 20 feet, or do we go back to a meaningful fork in the trail and choose the right path?
If we hit the wrong button on the elevator, are we humiliated, get out and wait for another elevator, or do we hit the correct button without thinking twice? Is making a mistake like a stain we can’t clean, or a wrong ingredient that ruins the flavor of a recipe–or is it a mispronounced word that is forgotten as the flow of ideas moves forward?
Some students seem so worried about hitting the wrong note or making a bad sound that they sound like they are tiptoeing through the music, afraid of being mugged by a mistake. Since there are always going to be mistakes, (more…)
What is the atmosphere of your recitals? Is it a constructive experience for students?
When I was 5, I played in my first recital. The academy of music where I took piano lessons required several recitals a year from every student. One or two of them were more informal, in the huge attic of the very large house that served as the academy’s home, and then there was the end-of-year recital, which seemed enormous to a kid. It was held at a church, with lots of players and a big audience, and a scary walk to the piano–but there were printed programs with our names and pieces in them, and we got to be called up individually to receive our annual pins, showing how many years we’d been studying.
My own students do their own kind of “recitals” which I will explain, but I’ve also been to recitals as a parent of kids taking music lessons–some recitals have been well put together, and some not so well done.
Let’s look at a few kinds of recitals and what seemed to make them work or not work–for me, anyway. Hopefully this will jog your thoughts and perhaps you might think of ideas for freshening up your own studio recitals in some way. As always, we all appreciate comments added to these posts, which shed some light on your thoughts and experiences in putting on recitals.
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Would you say playing (or singing) music is more mental or more physical? Student (and teacher) perceptions of this can color how we practice and play an instrument (including the vocal chords).
Do we mentally make fingers do what they need to do, or physically drill them so they do the work for us? How we balance the ebb and flow between mental and physical tells a lot about how we and our students practice and learn.
[Before we discuss this, I want to invite you to review teacher comments by Sherie, Chris, and an extensive response from Toby, all on Payments & Cancellation Policies; from Betty on How to Get Connected; and a controversy presented by Jeff commenting on Finding Students For You, with explanations by two online companies represented by Brian and Steve.]
Below are some student examples, and maybe a surprise conclusion, which I hope provide food for thought. I don’t have scientific answers about the balance of mental and physical in playing music, but by thinking about this, we certainly can benefit in terms of practical ideas for learning and teaching.
I’ve heard that many people take a beta-blocker or other drugs to fix stagefright (see the blog article about stagefright for some more musically based ideas), and I know there are gadgets out there to keep a bow on track, play the next note of a tune every time you tap on a drum, show a piano student which keys to press remotely from an online connection, practically play a guitar for you, and so on.
I think it’s time for some more advanced products to help people learn to play musical instruments:
Magnetic Tune Teacher–electromagnets on the playing surface of the instrument are activated based on a programmed piece of music, and magnets in the student’s fingers are drawn to the right place at the right time for the right amount of time, thus teaching their fingers to play the music. Slight drawback is the minor surgery required to insert the finger magnets.
Tune Pills–building on advanced memory research pinpointing the sites and structures in the brain which retain musical patterns, these pills make it a snap for the victim, I mean the student, to learn musical patterns overnight. Just take the proper pill (e.g. “broken thirds going up for three steps, then proceeding down 6 major scale notes”, or “minor scale up 4 steps, dropping a sixth and then back to original note”) and the student will find it simple to learn that particular passage the next morning. Alternatives to these pills are also available but are much more expensive, including hypnosis, and practicing.
Musical Tuneup Juice–no, this isn’t about tuning the instrument, it’s about (more…)
When you play music, how do you think about the beat? Musicians often think of the beat note as the beginning of something, probably because of written music. After all, the beat note begins every measure, and beamed notes usually connect the beat note with those that follow.
But is that how we hear it? Is that how we play it? Maybe most revealing, is that how we sing it? Not really. But I suspect that whichever way we think about this can make a big difference in how we play, practice, and teach music.
Think of the sentence, “The cat climbed up to the top of the tree.” If you wrote the rhythm of this sentence in music, it would look like this:
No matter how beautiful the notes, it’s timing that’s at the heart of the music, so it’s no wonder many players tap their toes. Notes played badly but with good timing still present a recognizable piece of music, whereas notes played beautifully but with careless or unanchored timing can be confusing to listen to, or even unidentifiable. (See my blog of 10/10.)
How do we make certain of good timing?
There are many angles to that question but for the moment, I’d just like to comment on how musicians reinforce the beat with physical movements, such as tapping feet.
I’ve often noticed that those who play with the clearest sense of timing move physically in some way, as they play. Those who have trouble with timing almost invariably sit or stand nearly motionless. It seems that even a little motion in time to the music can bring a player down to earth, away from constant worries about how to do everything, and into the realm of feeling the music.
Probably the most important way to reinforce timing is by (more…)
