It's Not the Ears, but How We Hear

“Teaching takes patience.” I thought this thought. I even thought this thought was thoughtful. But what I thought I thought was not what I thought I should thought. Think. Not what I thought I should think.

Wait.

“Teaching takes patience.” This is a truism. I think it is true... ish. What I have been finding with my own teaching has been slightly different. I'm not actually patient. I mean, I am. But that patience is not the result of some inherent virtue that I have. Although it is a virtue...

Dammit.

“Teaching takes patience.” Yes. Yes it does. But where does this patience come from? That's the important bit. Some people might be patient because they have a high sense of mission. Their clear sense of purpose allows them to slog through to the greater good. I am not really one of those people. I suppose that makes me terrible, but I don't care. Haters gon' hate. Instead, some people are patient because they enjoy the job, like me.

But the more I think about it, the odder and odder that statement becomes. “I enjoy teaching.” It's a bit like saying “I enjoy getting flogged by an 800 pound gorilla.” Especially when it comes to music. How many parents out there have literally told their kid to stop playing for five goddamn minutes because jeezus, that violin sounds like a toddler in a fist fight with a fennec fox.

Not in so many words, I mean. Just, like. “Hey, I think you should probably stop for today, you have math homework to do,” except you didn't really care about the math homework, it was just a convenient excuse at the moment. Don't lie. You know you've done it.

I'm not even the kid's parent, and I not only hear that kid play for thirty minutes, I also hear pretty much the same thing in thirty minute increments for 4-5 hours a day. And yet I say, “Oh yeah, I enjoy teaching.” At face value that seems like the height of insanity. This is not something a normal person says.

But what I have come to realize is, I am not patient as an inherent virtue. I am patient as a result of a mind-set. It's a kind of mental misdirection. When I hear a mistake, the something I sometimes say to the student is “Yeah! That sounded awesome! It wasn't right, but sure sounded cool.” This is especially true for missed pitches, or weird sound effects the cello can make if you're not careful (or if you're supremely careful to make that sound on purpose).

Usually, the student hears this and is at first amused. They laugh, because that's not what teachers are supposed to say. Teachers are supposed to say, “Oh my god that was awful, you're awful, everything about your life will be awful until you do that again and do it right. … [student messes up again] … Oh. My. GAAAAAAWD.” So, you know, it's funny and, I must imagine, somewhat relieving to hear that while they didn't play what they set out to play, they at least made me say something weird.

Then I play it back at them, and that's when they realize I'm not just blowing smoke out my ass. What they had done was honestly, truly cool. And sometimes, the “mistake” they made sounds better than whatever is written in the part. I mean, not on its own, necessarily. Usually I take what they did and recompose what we're playing to include and expand upon the “mistake.” Have you heard that insufferable Suzuki vl.1 French Folk Song played in an Arabic scale? It's kind of neat.

I don't do that all the time. I only do that when it's actually cool, otherwise it will lose all its value. But what the student doesn't realize is, I'm actually doing that a lot in my head. Nothing they ever play is anything I don't want to hear, because while they're busy trying to figure out how reconstruct sound from a bunch of squiggles and dots, I'm hearing techniques Kaija Saariaho uses in her pieces for solo cello; I'm hearing musical indeterminacy the likes of which would make The New York School blush; I'm hearing Ives as melodies from different practice rooms overlap; or Ligeti as the orchestra warms up.

That's how I can be patient. When I'm teaching, I'm not hearing a student screwing up. I'm hearing music. It may not be the music on the page, but that doesn't matter. That is totally, utterly, impossibly inconsequential. The student may or may not ever play that page correctly, and all we can do is make some changes and try again. If they do, great, if not whatever.

So they didn't play what was on the page. But what they did play... What a sound!

The Art of Lazy

Is it possible to start with a digression? Sure, whatever. Lets do this.

I always scratch my head when I hear people complain about scientists doing research and then concluding “the obvious.” It's like these people don't know what science is. You don't know something is obvious until it has been confirmed, yo. How many times have scientists made startling discoveries that upended what we thought was obvious? I don't know the actual number, but I'm pretty sure it is “lots.”

Digression over! Speaking of the obvious, I have been wondering over some received wisdom. It goes like this: “Practice everyday. Are you practicing? No. Is it a day? Yes. Then why aren't you practicing?”

Why aren't I practicing? Maybe because, possibly, practicing every day isn't the best way to do learn something. Do I know it isn't the best way to learn an instrument? No. Is mayonnaise an instrument? That depends on how much you practice with it. Horseradish, however, is most certainly not an instrument. Get that wanna be poser outta here.

Bear with me. I may not know that practicing everyday is not the best way to use your time, but I have a suspicion. And I would like it tested. Here is how my suspicion goes.

First! Let us say you are training for a marathon. What do? You start by running not a lot, you start by running a little. And then? And then you rest. And then you run a little again, and then you rest, and then you run a little more, and then you rest, and then... No 'and then!'

I mean, there's more 'and then.' You 'and then' until you've run a marathon. But the key here is, you regularly rest your muscles as part of the training. If you don't rest your muscles, you can do some serious harm. You rest or you run until you're forced to rest. Given a choice, I would rather just rest, thank you very much.

*two hours later*

SECOND! Have you ever been working on a problem and got stuck? The answer is yes. We all have come across problems we've got stuck on. You know what usually happens? You work on the problem until you get a nose bleed. Then you give up and go do something productive like play Farmville. Then you go to sleep. Then you wake up the next day and BAM! All of a sudden you wonder why you were having trouble with your problem. It's so obvious! How did I not see that before?!

Turns out, this happens a lot in music practice, too. A particular passage, for whatever reason, just seems intractable. Then you go to sleep, wake up the next morning refreshed, and you find the passage has become tracted. Good job brain! But I've noticed that giving yourself distance from even pieces you “know” helps.

Weird.

Third! This doesn't have to do with learning so much as balance. There's more to life than music. In fact, I wonder if our musicianing is in fact hampered if you don't have a life outside of it. I once read that Stravinsky, Poulenc, and some other musical cats got into a giant drunken pillow fight at a soiree. Arnold Schoenberg played tennis. Mendelssohn traveled. A lot. Mozart partied all the damn time. And yet, somehow, they all managed to produce masterpieces, this despite wasting their time doing so many non-musical things. How 'bout that.

In any case, I'm not making any definite conclusions. I'm just sayin'. There's a physical aspect to music, and we know that physical rest is important, especially for injury prevention (Leon Fleisher is out there somewhere, finding himself nodding in agreement, to what he does not know, but he knows it is important). There's also a mental aspect to music, and we know that rest is often a crucial part of problem solving (what, you think Newton was sciencing under the apple tree? No way. He was napping). And we know that having a social life is important for basically everything (this is more for those people who are in music school practicing 20 hours a day: seriously, go home and have a drink).

So it strikes me as not only possible, but very likely that we, as musicians, do not need to practice music everyday, and that we shouldn't feel guilty if we miss a day or two. In fact, if you do miss a day, you probably did yourself a favor. But I don't know that. I'm just pondering on something obvious that may not be as obvious as it's cracked up to be.

Beyond Good and Bad Musicians

At a pub with a friend. Irish folk band playing Irish folk music. Music is out of tune, the singer's tone is a warbler, the bass is out of sync with the drums, and everything about the music is objectively terrible.

Friend says, “Oh god, they are terrible.”

I says, “What are you talking about? They're awesome!”

At an open mic. Some beginners are playing beginner music. The music is out of tune, the singer's singing is swinging, the bass is trying to follow the drums but this is problematic because there aren't any drums, and everything about the music is objectively terrible.

Afterward, beginner says to me, “Oh god, I was terrible.”

I says, “What are you talking about? You were awesome!”

Let me be clear. I teach music. And when I teach music, I have to point out all of the missed notes, the wonky intonation, the miscounted beats, and all the rest of that nonsense. That's what my job is, kind of. It's just that somewhere along the way, we forget that all of that is nonsense, and we miss the point entirely.

In fact, we not only miss the point, we set ourselves on a one way track towards musical masochism.

“I'm not playing good, therefore I'm not good, and therefore I can't do other stuff good, too.”

I mean, when I put it like that, learning to play music suddenly sounds like an awful idea. “But wait!” you say, putting on your best Billy Mays impression. “I don't mean the person is bad! I mean the music is bad!”

Sure, but here's language being tricky again. If that's really what you mean, then why don't you say what you mean rather than hope people guess you mean what you mean. The music is awful. But we don't say, “Wow, this music is terrible.” We say, “Wow, they're bad,” or, “This composer is terrible,” or “What a shitty band!” We rarely talk about the music. We talk about the people making it.

The most common musical critique is not a musical criticism, but a moral one.

Step back a bit. If I'm paying some of my hard earned money to hear someone play music, I would rather the music be something well done than poorly performed. I get that. But that's not what I'm talking about, straw man. You and your head full of straw... no wonder you get so confused.

No, what I'm talking about is something more fundamental. Which is music, which was around for a really long time before money stepped into the picture. “How is it,” I think to myself, “that such a natural human expression as music, sung to babies, played at dances, in farm fields, in churches, on pirate boats... How is it that such musical expression has become an indictment of a person's character rather than a person's ability? Oh right, Plato.”

Actually, I don't think it's Plato's fault. I'm pretty sure he was just clearly expressing a sentiment that was widely intuited. That is to say, music alters behavior so music can be used to instill virtue or vice. To be doubly fair to Plato, I'm fairly certain he was also talking about what the music expresses rather than how well the music is expressed. It was all that “Darned kids, get off my lawn!” kind of stuff.

In short, there's no getting to the wherefores in a short blog post like this. But I can say it's taken a wrong turn somewhere along the line. I have had to assure not a few students that just because they are not playing good does not mean that they, too, as a person, are therefore not good. Few of them believe me. I know they don't believe me because after I reassure them, they nod their heads and then return to the music in wide-eyed terror or dismay.

So here's the problem, writ large for people who wear bifocals. Nobody starts good at anything. You have to learn. But the way we talk about “not playing well” is to instead say “you're bad at playing,” which if the human brain actually processed statements in their entirety wouldn't be so bad, but it usually just stops at “You're bad,” and then slinks off in shame.

If we follow that logic to its not at all distant conclusion, we must therefore acknowledge that not only are our children terrible, terrible, truly awful people for not knowing how to do much of anything well, but also that everybody is terrible because there's always something you're not going to be good at. In my case, I am not good at not ending sentences prepositions with.

Oops, I did it again.

Building Epiphanies

I finished my little summer break recently, and have started teaching again. For those who don't know, I teach private cello lessons. It's often kind challenging, and you have to be a little bit careful about well meaning but over bearing mothers who are making their kids do a thousand and one different extra-curricular activities, but... it's a lot of fun. At least, it is to me. I know other people who hate it, which makes me wonder why they're doing it. I mean, ok, money, but come on. The money isn't that good in private teaching. If you chose private teaching to make lots of money, well. You chose poorly.

Early on in my blogging, I wrote a couple of times about a book called "How People Learn." I thought it was a good book while reading it, but I'm convinced it's actually a great one. That's because I took some of the principles laid out in the book and used them in my lessons. The impact was immediate and profound. When you see a student's bow grip and bow stroke change dramatically for the better, and when even the student realizes they've hit on something good because they can feel and hear the difference, then you know you've got a winner.

All in all, they were some phenomenal lessons. When I did my post-teaching debriefing with myself (where I ask myself what I did well, what I did poorly, what was ok but could have done better, what I missed, etc.), I spent a lot of time thinking about what went right. Clearly, a lot of it came from the book, but there was something that happened that the book didn't cover very much. The students all had, within the lesson, epiphanous moments. Ah-ha moments. And I realized during my debriefing that those moments, while not consciously engineered, were not accidents either.

Either that, or we were terrifically, miraculously lucky.

Here's what I think happened.

The Will to Power
One of the biggest points "How People Learn" makes is, you don't teach the facts, you teach the principle. If you teach the principle, the facts will make sense and come naturally on their own. That's basically what the whole book is about, actually, and how to approach that fact of learning/teaching. I have puzzled over what the principles of movement are since I wrote about that particular pedagogical problem. Talking with numerous friends and a few teachers, here is what I have come up with.

1. Strength is highest in your core (torso), decreases as you move away from the core, and is lowest at the periphery (feet and hands). This is pretty easy to observe, actually. The muscles in your hand are far smaller than even the muscles in your forearm.
2. Strength is not the same as tension, and tension must be balanced: too loose, and you'll drop your bow; too tense, and you will hurt yourself.
3. Finally, movement starts from the muscles you activate and moves outward. If the movement starts from the wrist, the hand will move; from the forearm, the wrist and hand and fingers. etc.

The principle at work is thus quite simple: effective and relaxed movement starts from strength (the core) and radiates outward; but in order for that strength to be leveraged, it must be channeled. Too little tension, and the strength dissipates, too much and the strength is blocked. While not strictly part of the above principle, it should be noted that twisting (torque) is more effective than pushing (force), and that we should strive to gain mechanical advantage (give me a large enough lever and a fulcrum, and I can move the world) wherever we can.

Learning Bug in the Teaching Web
Once I had settled on the principle, I set about trying to teach it. But I didn't start with the principle, as the book tended to suggest. I instead hid the principle at the center of discussion, and led my students around the periphery, covering a wide variety of apparently unrelated problems. I did a number of the tricks in the book: Socratic method; teasing out assumptions; testing assumptions rather than simply correcting them; creating hypotheses and testing those. Those were all quite effective.

But then, slowly, gradually, I led my student towards the actual issue, the thing that tied everything together. When we got there, a most fascinating thing happened: an epiphany. And not just a random one, either! In teaching, we don't want to rely on chance... Natural epiphanies can be enlightening, but they are rather flighty birds, to be sure. No, this epiphany was instinctively (or accidentally) constructed. As soon as the principle became clear, the student went: "Oh. Oooooh!"

Thinking about what an epiphany is should make it quite obvious that this was the most natural reaction in the world. An epiphany is simply the sudden realization that a number of unrelated facts or problems are all related by an underlying idea. And that's exactly what we made. Epiphanies. The best part? Epiphanies are some of the most powerful aids to memory we can come across. It is very difficult to forget something that comes in the form of an epiphany. In its most extreme form, think of religious conversion. Now scale it back to earthly levels, and that's exactly what we've got.

Now go out and make some epiphanies happen!

Daily Recommendation
As usual, I have a couple of pieces in keeping with the theme. The first is a little piece by Claude Debussy called "Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum." The title alludes to what is perhaps the first musical text book in Europe, "Gradus ad Parnassum" by Johann Joseph Fux. The book is a series of exercises in counterpoint (the art of writing one melody against another), and was studied by a Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart, among many others.

The second is the 4th movement of Mozart's Symphony 41. It, too, allegedly uses a motive found in Fux's text, but uses it brilliantly in a 5 voice fugetta (little fugue) featuring four themes all more or less at the same time.

Claude Debussy: "Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum," from the Children's Corner Suite.
Amadeus Mozart: Symphony 41, K. 551* 4th movement.

*Mozart's works were written before number works with an opus number was common. His pieces were all catalogued by 19th century scholar Ludwig von Köchel. Hence the "K." Like K-mart. Except klassier.