How can students practice more effectively and enjoyably?

After decades of teaching I have found that students practice too quickly and somewhat stressfully, wanting to ‘conquer’ the piece as quickly as possible. They don’t realize that practicing this way greatly prolongs the learning process, adding to the frustration and bringing with it a host of doubts like “I don’t have the talent or ability” or “I just don’t have the time” or “I don’t think this is for me.”

When students simply slow down and enjoy the sound of the notes as they are played, practicing hands separately when needed, and relax their expectations, they learn pieces much faster. Learning the piano, or anything really, is a process that has its own rules and time line. You can’t bypass any of the stages. The sooner a student accepts this, the faster their development. 

What have you learned lately from one of your students?

One of my adult students brought in some Gershwin preludes that I was not familiar with. They are wonderful little pieces, fairly accessible to an intermediate pianist, although not without challenges. There aren’t a lot of 20th century pieces that appeal to many of my students. They tend to go for the older composers – Bach, Beethoven, Mozart – so having these pieces to offer them has been a find for me and I’m grateful to my student for bringing them to my attention.

Who were your biggest musical influences?

My biggest influences have been the players, in any genre, who were very clean. When you listen to them it feels they are conscious of every note being played, whatever the speed. In the classical piano world Glen Gould comes to mind. He played as if in a state of intoxication, exuding feeling throughout the entire piece. It is infectious listening to him. I have just discovered a new pianist, Vikingur Olafsson, from Iceland. He has a beautiful, clean sound and plays with extraordinary feeling.

In the jazz world, both Bill Evans and Art Tatum played like that, although they were extremely different in terms of style. There is a conviction in their playing that exudes an unmistakable beauty. In the rock world, Elton John and Billy Joel are two pianists who fit the mold, each in their own unique way. Clean playing with no superfluous notes or embellishments. That’s the kind of playing I love.

How has your approach to teaching evolved over time?

I think the biggest change for me, after decades of teaching, is not trying to enforce any particular teaching formula or system, but approaching each student differently – because each student is different. They each have their own proclivities, talents, challenges, tolerance levels, likes and dislikes. I enjoy the differences and enjoy the challenge of finding the best approach to instructing them. Some like improv, some not. Some like perfecting a piece, others not. Finding the right path for each student is a challenge I appreciate. 

What’s more important, playing the right notes or playing with the right timing? Every professional musician will tell you it’s the timing.

When you dance or march, you feel the flow and beat of the music that supports you as you move. Music has a pulse, just as your heart does. The cycle of expansion and contraction that moves blood through your body is mirrored in the measures of a musical composition. The intake and exhalation of air through your lungs is reimagined in the meter and phrasing of poetry and song.

When the guitarist misses a note, someone might notice. When the drummer misses a beat, everyone on the dance floor stumbles.

Most of us can sing with steady timing and don’t need to think much about it. But when we sit down at the piano or take an instrument in our hands, the technical demands of playing can wreak havoc with our sense of time, especially when learning new music from the page. In a rush to master new material, we focus almost all of our attention on the pitches without taking time to first read through the rhythms and flow of the music.

Even when we are able to clap or vocalize the rhythms of new music on the page, we can find ourselves stumbling in fits and starts when playing the same passages. This problem is compounded for pianists who need to learn one set of rhythms in the left hand and another in the right. Not to mention drummers, who need to coordinate their feet as well as their hands!

That’s when you need to bring in the help of a good friend. Your metronome.

The metronome is the brainchild of inventor Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel, who discovered in 1814 that a pendulum could be weighted on both sides of its pivot and produce an audible beat, making it an ideal practice tool for musicians aiming to practice against a perfectly steady pulse whose speed could be adjusted in small increments.

The original metronome was a mechanical device and is widely available, though digital metronomes and smartphone apps have largely supplanted the old standby.

Whatever device you use, here are some tips about making friends with your metronome:

• Start at a very slow tempo, no more than 40 or 50 beats per minute, and choose a very limited amount of musical material to practice. Just one or two measures will be enough at first.
• Count aloud with your metronome in the time signature of your piece before you start playing. For example, if you are playing a piece in 4/4 time, count at least four beats (one measure) along with the metronome before you start to play. Be certain that you are counting at the same speed as your metronome, even if you need to count two or three full measures before you play.
• Restart when you are out of sync. When you find yourself playing ahead of or behind the metronome’s beat, stop immediately. Then count a measure out aloud again before playing.
• Always start counting on the first beat of a full measure (“downbeat”), even if you are learning a piece that starts on a different beat or the “and” of a beat.
• When you want to speed up your tempo, advance the metronome by no more than five clicks. If you find the new tempo is too fast to play accurately, go back to your original setting and add just one click. Try again. When you’re comfortable at the new tempo, try advancing by five clicks again. Repeat going forward and back as necessary.
• Alternate practicing with and without the metronome. You’re trying to become more consistent, not turn into a machine!

Ask your teacher for more advice about becoming friends with your metronome.

With pandemic restrictions eased, MCMS is back to offering a growing variety of musical experiences for groups.

Should we add new classes, workshops, jam sessions, song circles, or other programs?

What are the best days of the week and times of day?

Please help us design our programs to meet your needs by answering a few brief questions.

It’s a big decision: You are picking up a musical instrument for the first time, one you have never played before. Perhaps you have never played any instrument before but have decided it’s finally time to try.
You’re excited and enthusiastic, as well you should be. You are going to play the kinds of songs and compositions you’ve heard and loved for many years.

Naturally, you also feel some trepidation. Am I talented enough? Am I too old? Will it take forever before I sound good enough to play for others?

Think back, if you can, to your first day of school. Did you ask those questions of yourself then? Probably not. More likely you wondered whether you’d make new friends or like your teacher or enjoy what was in your lunchbox. You took for granted that you’d learn new things and that you had the ability to do so. And you knew you’d be in school for many years, so what point would there have been predicting what the future held?

And that, in a nutshell, is the difference between childhood learning and adult learning. Whether contemplating a new musical instrument, a new language, or any new skill, adults ask themselves too many inappropriate questions. We do this because we have self-consciousness, self-awareness, and we have spent so many decades assessing ourselves and being assessed by others that we are habituated to the process.

Of course, self-awareness is a huge blessing. It’s what leads us to make decisions and judge the quality and efficacy of our efforts and motivates us to seek greater mastery.

But that same self-awareness can be a curse. It causes us to compare ourselves unfavorably with others, doubt our capacities, and even generalize deep moral failings from simple efforts of trial-and-error.

We often hear that life is the journey, not the destination. Putting that thought in educational terms, learning is a process, not a product. When we say “live and learn” or “you learn something new every day” we are remarking on the essential connection between living and learning; we are implying, correctly in my view, that when we stop learning we stop living.

The time may come, sooner or later, when you question your decision to take up a musical instrument. You may decide your hands are too small or you have insufficient innate talent or you are driving your partner or child or pet crazy with the sounds of your practicing.

Rational as these thoughts may seem, none of them will be true. So, when you start in on yourself that way, just remember your child mind would never have drawn those distinctions. And that the re-emergence of your child mind is what makes learning your new musical instrument so worthwhile, so enjoyable, and so necessary. Keep playing wrong notes and dropping beats and squeaking and squawking. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be learning. You’d just be repeating yourself. And who wants to be that person?

Please join us as performers of all ages will take the stage at the MCMS Fall 2023 Student Recital on Sunday, December 3, at 2:30 PM at the First Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo, 72 Kensington Road, San Anselmo.

You’ll hear soloists, duos, trios, and quartets playing in a wide range of styles and instrumental combinations, including rock bands, piano trios, and a quartet of cellos.

Whether you’re a family member, friend, or neighbor of one of the performers, or a community member with a love of music, you’ll enjoy a warm welcome and the gratitude of our performers, some of whom will be taking the stage for the very first time.

In Latin, scala means “ladder” and that original meaning applies to the musical scale.

The Encyclopedia Britannica says: “Scale, in music: any graduated sequence of notes, tones, or intervals dividing what is called an octave.”

A tone is any sound that can be recognized by its regularity of vibration. When you sing or play a musical instrument, you are disturbing the air around you and creating little wind storms made up of invisible waves. These waves go up and down at a regular speed. Our ears perceive the waves and transmit information about them to our brains, which interpret the information as a sound or tone, also called pitch.

The faster the waves, the higher the tone. Middle C on the piano, for example, vibrates at 261hz (waves per second). The low C string on a cello vibrates at 65hz, while the highest E on a violin moves at 5,274hz. Most people can hear tones as low as 20hz and as high as 20,000hz. (The abbreviation “hz” honors the man who first measured wave frequency, physicist Heinrich Hertz.)

When we want to make a record of these sounds by writing them down, we use symbols called notes. A note, as its name implies, is simply a written-out tone.

Just as we can divide and measure distance into inches and time into minutes, we can measure the distance between sounds. We call these distances intervals. And just as different cultures have devised different standards of measurement – think pounds vs. kilos or Fahrenheit vs. Celsius – different cultures have different ways of measuring the distances between tones.

Interestingly, all cultures seem to agree on one measurement – the interval whose higher tone has a sound-wave frequency of vibration twice that of its lower tone. For example, Western music uses the letter A to mean the tone vibrating at 440hz. When we hear the tone that vibrates at twice that speed, 880hz, or at half that speed, 220hz, our ears perceive all three to have the same quality of sound. Consequently, we use the letter A to mean any of these tones. This unique distance is called an octave.

But why do we use the word “octave” to describe this distance? “Octo” means eight in Latin – is that relevant here? Well, yes, because in Western music the most common way of creating tones between one A and the next A is to space six other tones in between them, which we call B, C, D, E, F, and G. When we add up the tones from A to A, the sum is eight: Seven unique tones plus the repeated one at the end equals eight. Octave means “eighth in a series” in the same way that fifth means “fifth in a series.”

OK, we’re getting very close to understanding a scale: It’s a series of musical tones which are separated into steps which take us from one musical point to another.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. On our musical ladder, the distance between each tone isn’t always the same.  The distance from B to C is only half as far as the distance from A to B. Same goes for E and F. We call those distances “half steps.” The others are whole steps.

The most common sequence of steps in Western music, is a C major scale, which works like this:

C goes up a whole step to D
D goes up a whole step to E
E goes up a half step to F
F goes up a whole step to G
G goes up a whole step to A
A goes up a whole step to B
B goes up a half step to the next C

The major scale is by far the most common scale in Western classical and popular music. But it’s not the only one! We can change the sequence of whole and half steps to make a minor scale. We can start a scale on any of the seven basic tones and make what are known as modal scales …. We can divide the whole steps into half steps and make a scale of twelve tones, known as the chromatic scale … we can select some but not all the twelve tones and make up special scales like the diminished scale … we can get rid of the half steps completely and use seven whole steps to make what’s known as a whole tone scale … or we can omit one or two of the seven basic tones and divide the octave with only five, six, or seven tones.

Whatever scale we make, the tone that starts and ends the scale becomes the tonal center of the music we sing or play and our ears perceive it as the most important tone.