What becomes of the vitality that is so natural in childhood? This, of course, is the great question, and the answers to it can be poignant.
Sometimes musical vitality blossoms into vivid expressivity as a person grows up. Sometimes it is taken for granted, or its exuberance is dismissed as babyish. Sometimes it gradually withers away from neglect. Sometimes it is flattened by the insensitive remarks of a teacher, parent, or peer. In any event, vitality seems surprisingly perishable, despite its naturalness, and it requires nurturing in order to thrive.
I ponder the issue of vitality every time I find myself adjudicating local piano auditions; typically the students range in age from six or so up through high school. At the end of the day I look back and think, “Whose playing really reached me, made me feel something and respond?” And most of the time the answer is the six-year-olds. They have an innocent zest for playing itself, their sound is often strong and straightforward, they delight in what their bodies can do, and they are individualists. I remember one little guy who was so pumped about playing “Round the Wigwam”—his favorite piece—that he started whomping out those raucous open-fifth drumbeats in the left hand before he’d even finished sitting down on the bench. What eagerness! Clearly, he loved to play it, loved to share it and show off, and every molecule of him was part of that powerful musical energy and intent. His connection was honest and real; it radiated without self-consciousness. That’s vitality.
By the time the teenagers arrive, however, things are quite different, and the difference is troubling. The various high-schoolers tend to sound uncannily alike. A fifteen-year-old girl starts to play Für Elise: her tone is thin and watery, her rhythm is limp, and while the localized gestures of her hands and wrists have clearly been schooled a certain way, the rest of her body seems rather slack and inert. Yes, there is careful shaping of phrases, consistent observation of the marked dynamics—all of which has the air of being carefully taught (to please the judge!)—but none of it seems to relate to her personally. The performance is wistful and apologetic, lacking conviction.
Of course, undeniable societal pressures and developmental issues can cause a fifteen-year-old to be more self-conscious than a six-year-old. All things considered, I’m sure it’s a lot more fun to be six! Adolescents tend to be conformist, self-conscious about their bodies, and excruciatingly aware of public scrutiny (real or imagined). But the musical difference seems to go beyond that. If this shyness is only an adolescent phase, why doesn’t the phase pass? I ask this because in many cases the musical plateau for life is reached during the teen years; this is when many people get stuck, stop improving, lose interest, and quit; and thus the book closes on their musical adventures.
When adolescents play without much conviction, they may be aware that despite years of lessons, their fundamental ability has not grown much recently. All they know for sure is that they’ve learned a new set of pieces each year. Even though the pieces now contain more overt technical demands, such as rapid scales and arpeggios, their playing may not have acquired new skills to meet these demands. When this is the case, they exude less sureness and enjoyment at the instrument than they used to, sensing (rightly) that the pieces are somewhat over their heads, and feeling a bit like impostors. One bright teenager told me that she had quit lessons because practicing had become so frustrating; not only was it repetitious, but it didn’t seem to help all that much, especially when she compared it to the way her efforts reaped predictable rewards in school and other endeavors. I had to admit this seemed a perfectly sensible reason to stop.
So perhaps the fifteen-year-old who appears to have lost vitality is simply not terribly proud of her playing—she too may sense that something basic is lacking. Frequently, though, no one comments directly on what’s lacking, since judges and teachers often make a point of being only kind and encouraging and are understandably careful not to offend other teachers. But in a strange way that reticence almost makes the situation worse, since she may end up thinking dejectedly, Well, that was obviously mediocre. If no one’s saying anything, I guess that’s all I’m capable of; I knew all along I wasn’t very good at this!
Yet at the age of three she probably jumped, bounced, and made up songs with the best of them; and when piano lessons started she tackled her first pieces with spirit. But now she will likely quit music before long—and who can blame her?
On one occasion, I was asked to judge a group of eight fourteen-year-olds, all playing the same official contest piece. The piece’s title was something like “South Sea Island,” and it used rippling arpeggios and colorful pedaling to create sensuous sound-images of ocean waves and exotic aromas. The piece wasn’t very difficult to play, and was clearly designed to give young players an exhilarating sense of how effectively the piano can be used to paint a lush aural picture. But it was hard for me to choose a winner, because to my dismay the contestants all played the piece almost identically: strict counting, mathematically consistent arpeggios, calculated and precise pedaling and dynamics—just the correctness a judge would supposedly want. But not one ocean wave did I hear or see, no sea breezes did I sense. I asked myself, Can it possibly be that out of a group of eight teenagers, not one has an active imagination? I knew that couldn’t be so, but evidently their imaginations (quite lively at fourteen, no doubt) had no connection with playing the piano or music lessons. My worry, of course, is that by the time these kids get to college, very little in their approach to music will have changed. Many will still associate the piano so strongly with this repressed way of playing that to reprogram themselves becomes quite a difficult task.
Ironically, this squelching of the imagination was done for my sake, or for whoever happened to be the judge that day, even though robotic correctness is the last thing most judges want to see or hear. During the early years of study, correctness is often the focus, pleasing the judge is important, and in some cases little more is asked of the student. Sometimes signs of originality and spirit, such as experimentation and improvisation, are sternly suppressed by teachers, as countless adults have told me from their own frustrated memories. The theory seems to be that everyone ought to master the “basics” first; and later, the good stuff—personal connection to the notes, spontaneous feeling, imagination—can be added, like icing on a cake. (This is another commonly held notion that has been expounded to me repeatedly, even by people with no personal experience of music study.) But that’s not a very good plan. When the day finally arrives that we’ve mastered enough basics, will the spark of vitality still be there?
Some years ago I attended an interdisciplinary conference called “The Biology of Music Making,” which focused on the mind-body connection from different perspectives. During the presentations I became aware of a key semantic problem having to do with the slippery word skill. References to “musical skills” apparently had quite different meanings to different speakers, yet we acted as if there were no discrepancy, as if the term were consistent in meaning. No attempt was made to define the word or to find other words, and the confusion grew. Our understanding of what we mean by skill is important since it leads inevitably to a larger issue: what are we trying to accomplish in the study of music?
Some presenters at the conference were clearly referring to operational or what I would call outer skills—specific functional abilities such as intonation, finger dexterity, ear training, memorization, counting, and so on. In this context, the goal of music education is a general level of competence, acquisition of such skills as reading music, playing the right notes, carrying one’s part in the choir, keeping time, following a conductor. The strategic question for educators, then, was how best to attain such competencies, which by and large can be readily evaluated.
Yet some presentations centered on another dimension entirely—integrative, intuitive connections to music, or “inner” skills. We heard case histories of musical improvisation used as a dramatically effective therapeutic technique for severe emotional disturbances. We heard inspiring heartfelt performances by untrained children from various cultures throughout the world. We learned about the fulfilling role of musical expression in the inner life of the dyslexic, the mentally challenged, and the child prodigy. The audience reaction gave clear testimony that these reports were thrilling and moving to everyone, and of great importance. Yet these transcendent, noncategorizable abilities are largely unrelated to schooling, or to the development of the usual testable, measurable skills of competence.
Inner and outer skills are not the same, nor does one automatically foster the other. The music education profession might do well to ponder this issue and to decide with more clarity what its goals are. High-school clarinetists march up and down the football field, for example, executing a complex routine with perfect regimented cadence. Their performance skills have been exhaustively drilled, yet they discover the next year in college music classes that other basics are undeveloped—they may have trouble singing on pitch, harmonizing, or even counting securely on their own. Inner skills, such as personal expressivity and creativity, are often dormant as well. Basically, these students have yet to connect with music.
One remedy would be to take a close look at the language used in judging student contests. I remember when I first started judging years ago, I was given a form to fill out for each student, with a grid that listed the basic elements: articulation, dynamics, pedaling, stylistic interpretation, rhythm, and even (occasionally) personal grooming. Not surprisingly, I would often hear performances seemingly tailored to that list: well-groomed, meticulous, dutiful, and—in my opinion—lifeless. I can see, however, the potential value of a checklist; it can help students to get specific feedback, and it can remind judges to be thorough. Yet according to the traditional checklist, even the most uninvolved player can easily score “Excellent” or “Superior” on most of the individual items. This is the problem with checklists and reductionist thinking. Nowhere on the grid could I find the juiciest, most indispensable traits, such as energy, individuality, communication, zest, imagination, sensitivity, healthy physical connection with the instrument, rhythmic vitality. These “inner skills” are essential for musicians at any stage, and they are well within the reach of even the elementary student.
Why not list them, or at least a few of them, on the judging form? Then we’d be framing clearly what’s most valuable, for performance and for the students’ own fulfillment. Students and teachers might then have a new focus, new goals, and a revamped idea of “what the judges want.” For some teachers, of course, these priorities would not be new at all, and those teachers would undoubtedly be delighted to see them listed so prominently.
It might seem that the traditional criterion of “interpretation” would cover all those vital qualities, but in my view it doesn’t quite suffice. Any judge can deem an interpretation to be stylistically correct or incorrect without commenting on whether there’s actually any life in it. Similarly, the rhythm may be scored as correct but still lack that most enlivening musical quality of all: rhythmic vitality. How will classical music survive if it’s not performed with immediacy and verve?
In the area of assessment, we should again avoid either-or thinking. A new checklist would still provide plenty of room for standard criteria such as pedaling, accuracy, and articulation. And I’m certainly not advocating lower standards of execution; no one likes to hear sloppy playing. But the organizers of music competitions—teachers, judges, and parents—have the power to set the tone of local events for everyone involved. The results could be refreshing.
Like it or not, we live in a world of media images, and those images both reflect and create our cultural attitudes, at least to a degree. Thus I was disturbed to see a large billboard advertising a California sports-equipment store with the following images: in the foreground, the quintessence of cool—a boy crouching daringly on an air-borne skateboard with helmet, knee-guards, Day-Glo wristbands, all the gear needed for risky “extreme” sports; in the background, for contrast, epitomizing the uncool and boring: a bespectacled boy seated studiously at the piano. Ouch! According to this iconography, vitality and piano lessons are obviously worlds apart.
It certainly seems unfair. But doesn’t it behoove us to pay attention and to ponder whether the picture might have a kernel of accuracy?
One cultural starting point for our investigation might be an adult social gathering, like a dinner party. I’ve found that if I happen to mention in the course of party conversation that I teach piano, the reactions around me are often fascinating. I’ll see ironically amused or frankly pained expressions on some faces, and (perhaps after the second glass of wine) poignant individual stories may be unveiled. “Oh, I had lessons once,” someone will say, “but—” and the sentence might end in several ways: “I was never good enough,” “I fell apart in the recital and never got over it,” “It stopped being fun and I never touch the piano any more,” “I quit and never should have, so I’ve told my kids I’m not going to let them quit.” These are the frequently recurring themes, and the underlying sense of loss runs deep, despite the pose of amused detachment.
“Oh, I had lessons once, ”
someone will say, “but—”
Leeriness of lessons shows up in our humor. Popular radio monologist Garrison Keillor spins a yarn of mid-America reminiscence in which he drives up the street where his childhood piano teacher once lived. The appreciative chuckles begin to build in the studio audience—they know quite well where this is going. Sure enough, he goes on to describe the feelings that set in as soon as he turns the corner onto that street: pounding heart and shallow, panicky breathing—guilt and fear. The audience guffaws heartily; everyone can relate.
Many times parents of musical toddlers have expressed to me their suspicion of lessons, often based on their own childhood experiences. They cherish the freedom with which their child sings himself to sleep and beats out rhythms on every saucepan—but, they ask, will lessons take the joy out of all that and make him musically bored and self-conscious? This is a poignant, perceptive question indeed.
In heartbreaking fashion, an anonymous writer has chronicled the loss of artistic vitality through lessons. This memoir was published not in a music journal but in a grass-roots literary magazine. The magazine regularly prints readers’ contributions on an announced topic, and in this case the general topic was prisons. As a music teacher I was stunned by the entry:
Drawing, writing, and dancing were once a part of me. I felt no fear when I picked up a crayon. I didn’t retreat when music asked me to dance.
Then I found myself in dance classes, art classes, violin lessons. Soon there were expectations to fulfill; the effort became joyless. My mind might trick me into revealing I wasn’t smart enough. My body could trap me into betraying that I was not a dancer, not a musician, not an artist—that I was nothing. My drawings, poems, the pull of my bow across the violin strings, all seemed inadequate. The violin was a special instrument of torture, not self-expression.
It was time to retreat. I refused battles I was not sure of winning. My drawings became mechanical; in the modern dance and ballet classes I imitated the movements without being in my body. I tried only when I knew I could do something well, and went through the motions in everything else. No one saw what I was doing, including me. Around the best part of myself I constructed bars so strong I still can’t break free.
What this prison needs is a riot—a knife held to the throat of the jailer that is me.1
A grim account, sobering to any teacher in the arts (even though the writer doesn’t seem to be blaming any teacher for the retreat). Could we possibly be having that effect on someone, and not be aware of it? From what people tell me, the answer is definitely yes, even when teachers have been pleasant and encouraging.
As classical musicians, we do tend to conserve traditions, hence the fitting name for our professional schools, “conservatories.” We have the privilege of passing on a core of knowledge from person to person across the generations, knowledge that can’t be found in any book or recording. We consider this our sacred mission, to be stewards of that precious tradition. During my college years, I was awed and excited to learn that my teacher (Mittman) had studied in Warsaw with Aleksander Michalowski, who in turn had been a student of Karol Mikuli, who studied with—Chopin! The art and craft were coming straight to me through that pipeline of apprenticeship, with only three human beings between me and Chopin.
But as in families, not everything that gets passed down is good, and it may not be wise to swallow tradition whole. As we shall see in the next chapter, traditional notions about practicing have—all by themselves—discouraged many students over the years, even when teachers have been quite supportive. When it comes to advanced teaching, though, one clearly unhelpful convention is that of the imperious, omniscient, temperamental maestro driving his students mercilessly, ridiculing their paltry efforts, and flinging the score against the wall in disgust, all out of devotion to high art. This stereotype may have become a Hollywood cliché, but it still contains a dose of truth.
In her 1880 memoir, Music-Study in Germany, the young American Amy Fay compiled her delightfully frank letters to the folks back home. In them, she recounted vividly her own experiences studying piano with Franz Liszt and other European luminaries of the nineteenth century. Here she describes the tempestuous first master-lesson she had with Karl Taussig, the revered Berlin pianist-pedagogue:
He was as amiable to me as he ever can be to anybody, but he is the most trying and exasperating master you can possibly imagine. It is his principle to rough you and snub you as much as he can, even when there is no occasion for it, and you can think yourself fortunate if he does not hold you up to the ridicule of the whole class. You can imagine what an ordeal my first lesson was to me. I brought him a long and difficult Scherzo, by Chopin, that I had practiced carefully for a month, and knew well. Fancy how easy it was for me to play, when he stood over me and kept calling out all through it in German, “Terrible! Shocking!
Dreadful! O Gott! O Gott!” I was really playing it well, too, and I kept on in spite of him, but my nerves were all rasped and excited to the highest point, and when I got through and he gave me my music, and said “Not at all bad” (very complimentary for him), I rushed out of the room and burst out crying. He followed me immediately, and coolly said, “What are you crying for, child? Your playing was not at all bad.” I told him that it was “impossible for me to help it when he talked in such a way,” but he did not seem to be aware that he had said anything.2
That sort of patronizing obliviousness on the part of famous teachers is still known to exist today, albeit in rather modified form. But even when it is subtle, disrespectful treatment can easily cause students to lose heart and (as a natural consequence) lose vitality.
Interestingly, Fay has quite a different impression of Franz Liszt himself, whom she found to be an artist and human being of surpassing greatness:
Nothing could exceed Liszt’s amiability, or the trouble he gave himself, and instead of frightening me, he inspired me. Never was there such a delightful teacher! and he is the first sympathetic one I’ve had. You feel so free with him, and he develops the very spirit of music in you. He doesn’t keep nagging at you all the time, but he leaves you your own conception. Now and then he will make a criticism, or play a passage, and with a few words give you enough to think of all the rest of your life. There is a delicate point to everything he says, as subtle as he is himself.3
Nurturing and humane, Liszt was clearly an exceptional teacher for his time.
Later pedagogues voiced more “modern” ideas about teaching, but hints of a fundamentally condescending attitude could still be found. An interesting figure in this regard is Tobias Matthay, a revered piano teacher in England during the early part of the twentieth century, considered an oracle of sorts by his devoted disciples. Matthay’s innovative methods combined technique, musicality, and natural physical functioning into a successful package, and the trademark of his approach was a notable warmth of tone and phrasing.
Matthay’s theoretical books on piano teaching are stimulating, opinionated, and also—in my view—somewhat self-contradictory. His viewpoints often seem impressively far ahead of their time; for example, he claimed in his book Musical Interpretation (1913) that “accurately speaking, we cannot ‘teach’ anyone anything—in the sense of our being able directly to lodge any knowledge of ours in another mind.”4 This presages the thought of psychologist Carl Rogers, who wrote nearly fifty years later, “Anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential, and does not influence behavior significantly”5
In entertainingly graphic terms, Matthay expressed how futile lessons can be when a student remains passive, like “a laboratory funnel with its mouth widely gaping, ready to receive any chemicals (pleasant or otherwise) which the operating chemist may see fit to pour in.” The student should be encouraged to think independently; otherwise, at the instrument he becomes “an automatic strumming machine.” Teaching that tells the student exactly what to do and how to do it is not teaching at all, says Matthay, but “cramming,” and of this he most strongly disapproves. But just a few pages later he advises:
Instead of acting as a bad orchestral conductor, you must act like a good conductor at rehearsal, you must explain to your pupil the most intimate details of structure and feeling, so that he may be musically able to see and feel rightly and therefore play rightly.
Matthay continues:
The difference between a good and bad orchestral conductor depends on the same laws: the bad conductor treats his men like machines . . . whereas the really great conductor tries to make his men into intelligent artists . . . tries to make them see the music.6
Thus while Matthay criticizes teachers who cram or force-feed information, he still seems to believe that students know very little, couldn’t possibly have their own valid artistic impulses, and need to be made into something by the godlike teacher. This contradiction lives on (subtly) in certain teachers who advocate “independent thinking” leading to student “discovery,” but always with the unspoken assumption that what the student discovers will be a preordained, teacher-approved truth.
As a society, we’re quite accustomed to the top-down hierarchy of traditional lessons—“teacher knows best”—even though this model can be less than satisfactory. Renowned violin pedagogue Dorothy DeLay, whose successful nontraditional and nurturing psychological approach helped attract the greatest talents in the world to her studio, describes her own early discouragement as a student:
I used to have teachers who tried to teach me by example, and what they would do is say, “No, no, do it like this”; and I would think, Well that is different from what I am doing, but I can think of a hundred ways it is different. I wonder which one they are talking about. I would try something and the teacher would say, “No, no, do it like this,” so I would try it again, change it, do something else, and that wouldn’t be what was wanted either, and I would go home very upset. I never could figure out which aspect of what they had done was what they meant. It was the most frustrating experience I have ever had.7
An incident from my own experience mirrors DeLay’s account. I was studying in Europe and brought the meditative slow movement of a Beethoven sonata to a lesson with my very traditional and esteemed maestro. He seemed especially energized and zealous that day, and eagerly set out to mold my rendition of the sparsely written first measure to the highest artistic purity. So he had me play the same simple phrase over and over, suggesting minuscule adjustments in the shaping, pacing, and tone quality of it, conducting me, singing along, never quite satisfied, until at repetition forty-seven he burst out in wild shouts of joy and exultation that I had finally gotten it! The heavens had opened—except that I had no idea what made that repetition different from all the others. All I knew was that he loved it, because (presumably) that’s just how he would play it himself. Sitting there baffled, I felt my self-confidence oozing away: if this was such a breakthrough, why wasn’t that obvious to me? Wasn’t I gifted enough to sense genuine artistry in a phrase? And what exactly had been so wrong with my first forty-six attempts?
I felt my self-confidence oozing away—
if this was such a breakthrough,
why wasn’t that obvious to me?
Such experiences, if we survive them psychologically, can become a great inspiration to find new paradigms of teaching.
Much music teaching seems more concerned with controlling the student than with encouraging the student’s own impulses. Constant controlling dampens vitality. Among the most influential music educators of the twentieth century was Shinichi Suzuki, founder of the innovative and internationally popular Suzuki Method. Primarily for string instruments, it is a total-immersion, “mother-tongue” approach that makes significant use of repetition and rote absorption. This in itself is highly effective, largely because it wisely allows young beginners to watch, listen, and imitate without always worrying about abstractions like note-reading and mathematical counting. Learning under the Suzuki Method also resembles the learning of spoken languages, with an immediacy reminiscent of Dalcroze Eurhythmics. A considerable amount of playing is done in groups, and Suzuki classes perform most impressively (for the proud parents) in a very short time.
Howard Gardner, the respected educational theorist, admires Japanese culture for its caring commitment to the young and to the arts; Japan is a society in which “tremendous attention is paid to the development of musical skill.” He considers the teaching solidly successful—“Suzuki students travel amazingly far on the basis of shrewd teaching”—but immediately goes on to say that Mr. Suzuki himself thought of the training mostly as “character and discipline” rather than solely music. Gardner concludes, “Perhaps not surprisingly, most of his students cease playing at or before adolescence.”8
This doesn’t seem quite right—a method with a high percentage of skilled dropouts, yet it is deemed a success? How far did the students really “travel”? Perhaps they trained outer skills at the expense of the abiding inner ones. Teachers who have taken on former Suzuki students have told me that in some cases, especially if the student had stayed too long in the method, further progress becomes difficult. The students are used to passive absorption from mother, teacher, and the group, and they are used to easy public approbation. They are often unable to identify or solve an individual inner problem, or they lack the patience to grapple with a difficulty. Also, they have always played music exactly like the rest of their group, so the idea of a personal, spontaneous interpretation is alien and risky to them. In fact, advanced Suzuki classes sometimes listen over and over to a single professional recording of a work and are taught to mimic that rendition in every nuance.
Yet, ironically, spontaneous self-expression is the essence of Western music, and it also happens to be something which young children are already very good at by nature.
The good news is that so many kids really love to go to their Suzuki lessons. The (required) collaboration with one parent, the cheerful group socializing, the security and familiarity of the musical repetitions, all contribute to their enjoyment. And Suzuki performances by the very young can indeed be impressive in their accuracy, ensemble, and group charm. But sometimes the look in the young performers’ faces is eerily blank and uninvolved, even while the group rides the crest of a well-rehearsed “expressive” crescendo.
Because most music lessons consist of an encounter between just two people, interpersonal psychology is bound to play a major role. A central reason the relationships between individual teachers and students can become skewed, off-balance, and teacher-dominated, is that the music studio is often the setting for a classic example of co-dependence: a lack of boundaries and of healthy psychological autonomy. Of the two people in the room, which one cares most whether the student performs perfectly? In some cases, to be honest, it’s the teacher who cares more. Perhaps her sense of self-worth is based on her teaching reputation, which in turn is based on how consistently her students please the judges and win contests. Perhaps she is on a college faculty, and her chances for tenure and promotion will depend largely on how well her students perform in exams. Perhaps she was a thwarted performer herself and thus has a strong emotional need to live through her students’ successes. In all these scenarios, for the wrong reasons, there is far too much at stake for the teacher. Her student’s free, vital spirit may very well not survive such shackles.
Co-dependence in music lessons can take other forms. Eloise Ristad, author of A Soprano on Her Head, offers a different scenario of how lessons can become strangely “addictive”:
Music lessons—or lessons in anything—can be dangerous to us, for the weekly guilt can become addictive. We can come to believe that we deserve scorn, and that we really can profit from being told repeatedly how to do it, from being given “right” answers. Gradually we lose our childlike enthusiasm for music or tennis or roller-skating or tightrope walking and substitute an intense yearning to do it “right” for the teacher. The pat on the back becomes more important than the music or the skating. One part of us becomes ever more committed to earning the pat on the back, while another subversive part—that we try to ignore—kicks and screams and resists the teacher’s authority. This is the part that gives us all kinds of excuses for not practicing.9
The teacher-student dynamic can thus become complicated and constrained. How else does this affect musical vitality? It’s interesting to see what happens in a lesson when a teacher deliberately tries to transfer vitality to a student. Basically, the transfer doesn’t work, because true vitality can only come from within.
Imagine a scene that occurs frequently in the studio: a student performs an advanced piece, let’s say a Chopin ballade. Each phrase and passage has been diligently worked out, under the teacher’s careful guidance, and the performance has become quite fluent. But now the teacher realizes that something vital is lacking—ardor, commitment, drama—and chances are the student realizes it too. So the teacher decides: today I’m really going to light a fire under this student, try to bring this interpretation to life. First, a verbal exhortation: “It all seems so tame; can’t you express the passion more?” Student looks ashamed and thinks, I guess not, that’s why I feel so inadequate. Teacher says, “Start again,” and this time, in his zeal to energize the student, the teacher sings along, conducts, gesticulates, groans, flings himself around the room in expressive abandon (and probably has some good fun cutting loose like that), trying to mold the notes into his passionate ideal. But the student feels awkward and retreats a bit more, thinking, I’m embarrassed, or You’re nuts, or I feel so out of control I’m messing up all my technique, or I could never do that, or I wish I could be uninhibited like you, but it’s just not in me. Whatever the thoughts are, both parties perceive the obvious gap in musical vitality between them—and the student ends up further disheartened.
True vitality
can only come from within.
Every year, conservatories around the world graduate thousands of performers who are highly trained, competent, and knowledgeable, but whose performances lack one thing: vitality. Every year countless amateurs discontinue the music lessons they thought they would love, feeling dead-ended and believing they don’t have enough talent or musical vitality after all. These are profound losses, to be sure—not only for the individuals involved, but for our culture at large. Classical music runs the increasing risk of seeming too esoteric and not much fun.
I believe there are various remedies, ways to preserve and cultivate that innate vitality that makes music such a gift in our lives. These remedies share a theme: trusting ourselves more, enjoying and respecting what we already have inside.
We can encourage inner skills more consciously and consistently through body movement, improvisation, experimentation, group experiences—and we can integrate inner and outer skills. These possibilities will be discussed in later chapters. But the most crucial ingredient by far for success in music is also the most down-to-earth and practical: what happens in the practice room.
Practicing consists of moment-to-moment decisions, which are not at all self-evident. “What should I do next?” is always a worthy question. Whatever we choose to do will have the effect of either encouraging or diminishing our musical vitality, and all these experiences will add up. Practicing is problem-solving, and being a good problem-solver is exhilarating in itself. Personally, I used to avoid practicing, thinking of it as tedious drudgery that didn’ t always reward my efforts; now I love it, and I will try to make clear why that is so.
Amy Fay struggled with practice too, during her study with Kullak many generations ago, and clearly fretted about how its frustrations were sapping her vitality:
I have been learning Beethoven’s G major Concerto lately, and it is the most horribly difficult thing I’ve ever attempted. I have practiced the first movement a whole month, and I can’t play it any more than I can fly . . . It requires the greatest rapidity and facility of execution, and I get perfectly desperate over it. Kullak took advantage of the occasion to expand upon all the things an artist must be able to do, until my heart died within me. “What do you know of double thirds?” said he. I had to admit that I knew nothing of double thirds, and he rushed down the piano like lightning from top to bottom in a scale in double thirds, just as if it were a common scale.
In one respect Kullak is a more discouraging teacher than Tausig, for Tausig only played occasionally before you, where it was absolutely necessary, and contented himself with scolding and blaming. Kullak, on the contrary, doesn’t scold much, but as he plays continually before and with you, with him you see how the thing ought to be done, and the perception of your own deficiencies stands out before you mercilessly. My constant thought is, “When will my passages pearl? When will my touch be perfectly equal? When will my trill be brilliant and sustained?” etc. etc. All this gives a heavy heart, and so disinclines me to write that you must excuse my frequent silences.10
Amy Fay’s fixation on faraway goals seems to have caused her real discouragement in the here and now. But practicing needn’t be stultifying or frustrating, and there are many ways to reach a goal. When we keep our focus but give up our anxiety about results, success tends to find us in its own way and in its own time—often rather unexpectedly, effortlessly, and much sooner than we would have guessed.
Just like the daredevil on the skateboard, the good practicer tastes the vitality of adventure and the dramatic rewards of risk-taking. When we investigate challenges bravely in the practice room, instead of plodding along like dutiful goody-goodies, we sense the same excitement of discovery that scientists and philosophers know. After all, mastering new things is one of life’s sweetest joys.
And when we give up the futile notion that we are supposed to be always in control, and embrace instead the ever-changing nature of reality, we feel liberated. Musical performance can be tricky. Will our inconsistent attempts discourage us, or will the ups and downs end up yielding a fuller understanding? If we play a passage perfectly today, we may stumble tomorrow—this is quite normal, since in the arena of performance nothing is permanent. But the reasons for the stumble can be figured out if we stay curious and don’t take it personally. In most cases the stumble is a sign that some detail of the music, although learned to a degree, just needs to be integrated more fully.
The good practicer tastes the
vitality of adventure and the
dramatic rewards of risk-taking.
Ultimately, by giving up the ego-driven illusion of control we actually gain a deeper, more serene sort of control, because more thorough learning will take place. This is the central insight about fruitful practicing, paradoxical as it may seem at first. Whether we clutch at control or release it willingly has a direct effect on our happiness and vitality—and this principle has implications well beyond the realm of music.
According to Buddhist teachings, impermanence itself can be a source of joy. As author Steve Hagen explains it, “Everything we look at, including ourselves and every aspect of our lives, is nothing but change. Vitality consists of this very birth and death. This impermanence, this constant arising and fading away, are the very things that make our lives vibrant, wonderful, and alive.”11