Anyone who reads this blog knows that my posts have gotten less frequent. This partly reflects my personality (I prefer novelty to routine), but it also reflects the fact that M’s practices have gotten a lot better in the last several weeks. In fact, we’ve had enough good days now that I can say with some confidence that M has basically bought in to the whole idea of practicing the guitar.
Indeed, in the past few weeks, she has done two things that suggest that she is finally on board with the guitar program. First, one morning before breakfast, she spontaneously picked up her guitar and started playing a song for group class that was on her music stand from the night before. Second, when I gave her her guitar before group class last Saturday, she started playing her working piece. She has never done this before.
And it only took more than two years of conflict and misery to get here!
Because misery is inherently more dramatic than happiness, I’ve been less inclined to write about practice. Also, I got absorbed for a few weeks in a home-remodeling project (I had to rebuild my basement stairs), and since I’m not very good at multi-tasking, blogging went by the wayside. I’m back now, though, and will try to post more regularly.
In terms of the Suzuki repertoire, M is now working on Paganini’s Andante (the fifth song in book 2). She has learned the notes pretty quickly, and she can now play most of the song. Her studio teacher even decided to make it a little extra-challenging by adding grace notes (a hammer-on/pull-off) in one section.
M’s biggest challenge remains playing songs that she knows with the correct form. We’ve had two really awful practices in the past few weeks where she simply failed to pay attention to what she was playing and botched a song’s form over and over.
The first awful practice was about two weeks ago, on a Friday. I asked M to play A Toye, a song she knows pretty well. She played the form wrong. I pointed it out (she hadn’t noticed). I asked her to try again; she got it wrong again. After a few such repetitions, I said something like:
Honey, I don’t know how to help you with this. The problem is that you are not listening to what you are playing until after your fingers start moving, so instead of being in charge of what you are playing, you’re just going on autopilot. To fix this, you have to change how you use your mind. And I can’t do that for you. I can’t get inside of your head. Only you can change your thinking. So I’m going to go in the other room for a while, and I want you to see if you can figure out how to use your mind to make sure that you are playing the song correctly. You know that you can play the song; you’ve done so many times. No part of this song is hard for you. But you have to pay attention to what you are doing. Let me know when you think you have figured out how to play it. I think you should focus on hearing the song in your head, listening to your playing, and watching what you are doing. But you need to figure it out. Let me know when you are confident that you can play the song with the right form.
I went into the kitchen for five or ten minutes, and M struggled with the song. Then she told me she was ready and asked me to come back.
She botched the form, and she started wailing. I tried to be sympathetic but firm. I said that I could understand why she was upset, but I still insisted that she play the song with the proper form. I made some suggestions, such as listening to it again, but she rejected them. I again said that I didn’t know how to help her, and she was going to have to figure out how to pay attention to what she was doing. I offered to sit in the room with her if that would be helpful. She accepted the offer.
I sat there, more or less without talking, while she kept trying, and mostly failing, to play the song with the correct form. She would play a part correctly, then play the wrong part, and a few notes in (when she realized her mistake), she would start wailing again.
This went on, from start to finish, for an hour and a half to two hours. Eventually, she did manage to play it with the proper form and only a few missed notes, and I could tell that she was really paying attention to her playing. I congratulated her. I pointed out that I could tell from watching her she was listening to and paying attention to her playing. I said that I knew she could do it.
And if you had asked me before yesterday about the effect of that marathon practice, I would have told you that it seemed to mark a turning point: For about two weeks after that practice, she was consistently playing her newish pieces (A Toye and Carcassi’s Andante) with the proper form with far more accuracy and regularity than she had shown previously. Now, I would have admitted that the timing may have been a coincidence — for all I know, she was just ready to start concentrating better, and the practice had no effect on her level of concentration. But the timing was undeniable: immediately after that practice, she seemed to be paying much better attention to her playing.
Yesterday, however, we had another terrible practice in which M, once again, went on autopilot, botched a song’s form, and broke down in tears each time she realized (too late) that she was doing it. This time, the song was different — her problems were with Carcassi’s Andante, not with A Toye.
She has been playing Carcassi’s Andante with the correct form regularly for weeks, so it was a surprise to me when she got it wrong yesterday. In fact, I picked the song for our practice because I wanted to give her something easy to do (she has dance class on Tuesday, so we can only do a short practice). But our practice, which ended up lasting about 40 minutes (20 minutes more than I planned), was basically a repeat of the practice with A Toye a few weeks ago, complete with wailing and gnashing of teeth: she got the form wrong over and over again. I tried a few things to help her out: I set a metronome much slower than she was trying to play it, but the extra time created by the slow tempo didn’t help her. Then I turned the metronome off and told her to take all the time she wanted, without worrying about the steady beat, so she could make sure she was playing the right sections. That didn’t help either. Her mind was consistently behind her hands, no matter how slowly she was playing.
We had to quit before she succeeded in playing the song even once with the proper form, because it was her bedtime. When I told her we would have to finish the day’s practice the next day (today), she again began wailing. I expressed sympathy, said that she couldn’t change it, and sent her up for bed.
So that’s where we are today: I’m encouraged by M’s progress in general, and delighted by her ever-more-frequent signs of interest in guitar playing, but I continue to be baffled about how to improve her level of attention to what she is doing. Her problems are not technical, they are mental, and it is difficult to know how to make progress. Suzuki teachers would, I think, prescribe listening to the recordings more, but I don’t think that will help much: M has listened to these songs hundreds of times and knows how they go. She just isn’t applying that knowledge when she plays.
Stay tuned.
