Month: February 2011

Nothing but open G and French Folk Song

Our main assignment this week is to work on playing louder. Although our teacher asked us to work on this with three review songs, in today’s practice we only got to one: French Folk Song. And even though we practiced for about an hour, we didn’t practice anything else.

We began as M’s studio teacher suggested, using a mute under the strings (rolled up non-skid padding) to force the issue of loudness — with the mute, to be heard at all, you have to play forcefully.

While I agree that M needs to play louder — to press down on the strings, rather than just brushing over them — I’m worried about creating tension in her right hand. For one thing, right-hand tension has already been an issue for her in the past. For another, I happened to have just finished reading Glenn Kurtz’s charming memoir Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music, in which a crucial event is Kurtz’s discovery when he arrives at the New England Conservatory to study guitar that this very technique created habits he had to unlearn. Kurtz writes (p. 58):

[W]en I was a child, I’d taken technique classes to build strength. . . . We put a dustcloth under the strings just behind the sound hole to mute the instrument. . . . The cloth mute made the strings less pliable. Increasing resistance, we were taught, strengthened our fingers.

Strong fingers were good, and mine were among the strongest. . . . Now, at the Conservatory, [my teacher] showed me how my strength worked against itself.

“You’re bullying the strings,” he said at a lesson a few weeks later. “Use the least possible force, the least effort.”

Alone in a practice room I returned to basic technique to see more clearly how I had always played. What I saw horrified me. With each fingerstroke I tensed my forearm or shoulders or neck or palm or wrist. Training for strength, it seemed, was a terrible way to teach technique. It had taught me to work too hard. The tension in my arms was just a substitute for a cloth mute, an unconscious attempt to reproduce the resistance my fingers had been taught to expect. Worse still, the mute had prevented the strings from vibrating, teaching me to play the strings without playing notes. I’d learned to focus on the finger, not on the sound.

So I had three goals for M today:

  1. to play louder,
  2. without extra tension, and
  3. while listening to herself.

I had her spend a lot of time just playing open Gs. I noticed her hand rotating from side to side — i.e., instead of placing her fingers straight down, she was rotating so that i and m were placed far apart — so we played “fix me”: I did what she had been doing and (after much work) got her to see when I was doing it.

When we got to French Folk Song, she played it with no dynamic contrast. She was aware of this after the fact, but had a hard time doing anything about it. And she typically started the song (or an individual section) with good downward pressure, but quickly reverted to brushing the strings, and it didn’t seem like she ever noticed the change. I asked her to play just the B section several times with her eyes closed and listen to whether  her tone changed, but she couldn’t reliably tell me anything about her sound.

We did do one modestly successful awareness exercise. Each section ends with a dotted half note, and that note’s duration provides time to think about what’s coming. Two sections (C and D) should start quiet and crescendo, and M was not playing this way. So I asked her to let treat each dotted half note as if it had a fermata, and let it ring until she could no longer hear it. Only when it stopped ringing should she start the next section, and she should start quiet if she’s on the C or D sections. With this instruction, she did manage to play the crescendos at least one time through.

On the behavior front, this wasn’t our best lesson — she was very fidgety and didn’t take direction as well as I’d like. I got to the point of saying that if we couldn’t achieve what I wanted to achieve in the time I had set aside for practice, she wasn’t going to be able to go to a play that we had planned to go to. In a way, this is a natural consequence — if you have a job to do and can’t do it in the allotted time, that screws up your schedule and you may have to change plans — but it functioned more like a threat. I don’t like making threats, but I’m still not skillful enough to always refrain from them.

Wrong, wrong, wrong

M was in a song-and-dance show for her school tonight, and her grandma took us out for dinner afterwards, so we had next to no time for a lesson. In anticipation of this situation, we practiced extra-long yesterday. But I still wanted to get in some off-the-instrument practice as well as a single song on the guitar.

So while waiting for dinner, I had M write the note names on a drawing of the first 7 frets of the guitar. Here it is:

Then on the short ride home, we listened to and sang the Führman Tanz, and I quizzed her on the notes.

We had a problem. M can play this song well (though she doesn’t to have a secure sense of its form; she misses repeats). And she knows the note names. Yet when I asked her what note the B section starts on, she insisted — incorrectly — that it starts on D (it starts on A). She correctly recited the notes of the A section, which does in fact start on D. I asked her to figure out what note the B section started on by doing the left-hand fingering as the song played, but she didn’t do it. In fact, when I said “It’s not D; try figuring out what it is,” she just dug in her heels.

“Okay,” I thought, “I know how to convince her. She agrees that the A section ends on “A-F#-A-F#,” so when we get to that first A (which she admits is A), I’ll sing it on every beat that follows, and she’ll be unable to deny that the B section starts on A — she’ll hear that the note I’m singing is the same as the first note of the B section.”

Wrong times two: I was wrong about how she’d react, and she continued to be wrong about the music. She was so committed to her position that she actually said, “See, it starts on D,” just after she heard me singing A and she heard the B section begin on the note I was singing.

Boy howdy did this push my buttons. I tried to stay in “bemused” territory, but I found M’s stubborn refusal to learn maddening. So I told her so. Basically, I said that I was at a loss: I didn’t care that she was wrong in the first place — everyone’s wrong sometimes — but I was annoyed by, and didn’t know what to do about, her unwillingness to correct, or even see, her mistake. I said that there was no point in arguing, since she was insisting on her position without trying to find out whether it was right, but that we would have to see later, on the instrument, whether she was right. I also said that I was trying to figure out how to react when this type of situation occurs.

When she played the song at home, she imediately recognized her mistake and said, “You win the argument.”

Or course, who cares whether I won that particular argument? I don’t, and I’m pretty sure I told her that. What note  this particular song section starts on is meaningless.

But whether M can be open-minded enough to learn, or whether she is so stubbornly defensive that she’ll insist on a point without investigating its truth and in the face of contrary evidence — that’s something that actually matters. And I wish I could react more skillfully when M insists that wrong is right.

An hour isn’t that much time

It’s hard for me to believe how quickly an hour goes. We had a good practice today, but it felt rushed.

We began by choosing, together, what optional items to practice. Then we spent a few minutes on note reading off the instrument.

We then worked on With Steady Hands, which was the hardest part of our practice. I asked M to say the name of each section as she started to play it. This was difficult for her, and she spent a fair amount of time just being frustrated and not playing. Eventually, however, after much encouragement, she did a great job one time through the second section (A1/A2/B1/B2, repeated). And that was enough.

For Meadow Minuet, we did something new. Yesterday, I wrote up a Noteflight score of just the guitar part. I played it back on the computer, and as we listened, we focused on the bass notes, which are the open E, A, and D strings. I asked her to say, when the bass notes played, “lowest,” “middle,” or “highest.”  We did this several times through, and she got better each time. Then I had her play along with the score. She got most of the notes right. Finally, I asked her to identify which bass note was the hardest for her, and she correctly identified the D. That note occurs the least, and I led her to see that it occurs in predictable spots.

Otherwise we did:

  • The D scale (up the neck, saying note names)
  • May Song (with the metronome)
  • Tanz 2 (J.C. Bach — rusty!)
  • Perpetual Motion

At the start of every lesson for the past 3 days, M has put Read This First on the list, but we never have time to get to it. Tomorrow I think I’ll do it first, since it’s one of the things M is enthusiastic about.

Poor time and energy management

Before our lesson, M said words to warm my heart: “I want to do a long lesson today.” But I squandered some of that goodwill by managing our time poorly and not being as enthusiastic as I should have been.

My main mistake was misestimating how long it would take to listen to and absorb the final 8 measures (the D section) of Meadow Minuet. It’s got a rhythmically tricky two measures (a dotted half tied to a half note, with a pickup note at the end of measure 2 — the only pickup note in the piece), and the accompaniment is a little busy, making the student’s part hard to hear. So we spent longer on listening to this than I thought. I kept trying to get M to hear the 5 beats of the dotted half + half note by having her count while we listened, but it was rough going. Eventually she got it when I sang and she counted.

(To make it easier to learn Meadow Minuet, I created a Noteflight score of just the student part. I think I’ll try having M play along with it very slowly.)

And playing this section was just as hard — this last section involves big position shifts that M has not done before. So tackling this may have been too ambitious.

Apart from that, we did:

  • Are You Sleeping, Brother John?
  • Go Tell Aunt Rhody
  • Song of the Wind
  • M sang note names and conducted me playing Twinkle.

We played the first three songs  a few times, sometimes with the metronome.

Unfortunately, we did not do two things that were on my “daily” list:

  • A scale; and
  • With Steady Hands

Tomorrow, I need to spend less time on Meadow Minuet. And I need to remember to find things to praise and to end on a positive note. Given how tired M was, she was a real trooper today.

    Practice log leads (for today) to holy grail

    Today I tried something different. I made up a weekly practice log that lists all the things we need to practice during the week. I set my own arbitrary parameters — e.g., we will practice two review songs a day and will practice all of them in the course of the week. (You can see a blank log on Scribd.com.)

    Within those parameters, though, I let M pick what to do. And each time we completed something, I gave her a blank playing card whose back she can color (I will write the names of practice activities on the front so we can use the cards in future lessons).

    After our lesson, which took a little over an hour (note: she didn’t have hands on the instrument all that time), I was telling my wife about the new chart and that the lesson went well. In the background, M chimed in:

    I liked doing it.

    So for today at least, I found the holy grail: a productive practice that M enjoyed.

    We did:

    • Targeted, repeated listening of Meadow Minuet to learn the notes and the structure.
      • For structure, we counted groups of eight measures and said A, B, C, or D at the beginning of each group of eight measures.
      • For notes, we sang the melody.
    • Practiced the C section of Meadow Minuet once I knew M could sing it. I played the bass notes.
    • With Steady Hands — played through once or twice, but because M still has trouble knowing when she’s at the end, we played alternating sections: B1 (me), B2 (her), A1 (me), A2 (her), B1 (me), B2 (her), A1 (me), A2 (her). This way, she was responsible for knowing when the piece ended. It seemed to help.
    • French Folk Song — played through once, but then focused on two 4-bar sections, B and E. We played themrepeatedly  with the metronome and gradually increased it to 176 bpm. M still played with ease at this tempo.
    • Allegretto — played through a couple of times.
    • M conducted me playing Lightly Row and Aunt Rhody while she sang the note names. Flawless.
    • G scale — played a few times.

    When we went over the practice log before starting, M added a practice item to our choices by writing on the page: “Make up song.” Then she wrote a song name with arbitrary German letters. Today’s completed log, with M’s annotations:
    Suzuki guitar book 1 practice log – first draft, filled out

    Too much struggle

    Not a great lesson today. I probably tried to change things too much, too fast.

    I watched a video by Edward Kreitman today about listening. In the video, he emphasized that a student should have an internal mental image of a song before she begins to play it. He noted that if a student runs out of notes when singing a song, she’ll run out of notes when playing.

    So I decided to check M’s inner image of Meadow Minuet by asking her to sing it. She could only reliably sing the A section (the first 8 bars), even though she can play the B section (the next 8 bars). So I decided that we would not practice it today, which did not please her.

    Also, she wanted to start by practicing in Read This First, and I refused this request too so we could focus on her review pieces and the Guitar Olympics material. This did not please her.

    Also, she was extremely fidgety when we started by doing note reading on the couch, and so we were in conflict over that (a fidgety body leads to a fidgety mind, so I insist on a certain degree of stillness).

    We ended up doing:

    • Note reading off the instrument with the metronome. This was improved. She can’t read E/F/G very well, so we worked on those three notes.
    • With Steady Hands.
      • She does have a pretty solid mental image of this song, but she can’t keep track of what she’s doing reliably, so she doesn’t (for instance) know when to end because she doesn’t know where she is.
    • Conducting Go Tell Aunt Rhody and Lightly Row, with note names. She did better than yesterday.
    • Playing Perpetual Motion on the G string after first playing the G scale. She kept playing C# instead of D. She was able to identify the problem note, though we didn’t solve it.

    I wish I could figure out how to make our lessons more cooperative and less of a struggle.

    And I feel like it ought to be possible, because I’ve managed to indoctrinate M into seeing herself as a guitar player. Proof: today she made a birthday card for a friend, and next to her signature, she drew a little guitar.

    Performance anxiety in a private lesson

    Today M had group class and her private lesson. The group teacher focused a lot on left-hand technique and mindfulness, asking the kids to “prepare in the air” as they played a D scale. He also demonstrated, by way of a contest with a student, the importance of keeping the left-hand fingers close to the neck: He and the student raced to play a note, one starting with a finger close to the neck, the other with a finger splayed out. Whoever had the finger closer to the neck won the race.

    Then he had M and one other student demonstrate their left-hand technique for the class on a short portion of the scale. They each did different things with the pinky — his was straight but close to the neck, and hers was curved but further from the neck than it had been. The teacher said M’s technique was “healthier,” while the other kids was “safer.”

    Apart from this, M was not as lively as she usually is. She didn’t volunteer for something she knows how to do (Perpetual Motion on the G string), and when we did the note-reading page, she got way more notes wrong than I would have expected. I think two things were happening: (1) she was tuning out of class, and (2) she experienced some performance anxiety. (The note reading was done in teams, and individual team members read a line on the staff while the rest of the class listened and tried to identify mistakes.)

    At M’s private lesson, her teacher went over several of the Guitar Olympics events from group class, and M underperformed. She forgot to say the note names when she conducted Aunt Rhody; then she said the note names but lost the tempo. Then M made a hash of Perpetual Motion on the G string. Both of these are things she usually does much better at home, and M appeared nervous to me.

    On the plus side, M did a nice job on Meadow Minuet. Our assignment is to keep working on it as follows:

    • Learn the rest of the melody, with me on the bass.
    • Start learning the bass, with me playing the melody.
    • Perhaps start asking M to put them together. But I don’t want to rush that.

    As M and I were leaving, I told M that I think we should make up a practice plan for the week in advance, to make sure we get to everything. She’s got a lot to practice for the Guitar Olympics, and With Steady Hands is still not even close to solid. In fact, I felt bad when her teacher asked M to play it today — M missed all kinds of notes, which is kind of my fault, given that we didn’t practice it all week.

    I did manage to get some note-geography quiz practice out of M on the car ride to a party this evening, so that was a good use of the commute time.

    Continuous quality improvement

    Today we started our lesson by watching the portion of Pumping Nylon about plucking. I asked M to pay special attention to her tone as we began playing and illustrated varieties of tone and the vocabulary to describe it. The we did:

    • The first half of Meadow Minuet, with M playing the melody and me playing the bass.
    • The “open A” scale, with M letting each note ring until she could no longer hear it.
    • May Song with the metronome at 50, 80, and 70.
    • A “fix-me” game where I coached M to figure out why my right hand was getting out of position.

    Throughout, I asked M to evaluate her tone and her right-hand technique. More often than not, she accurately described her playing.

    But I noticed an old technical problem that resurfaced, and we got sidetracked on one behavior issue: how she was holding the guitar.

    The technical problem was her right-hand position. I noticed at the end of playing May song that her right hand was smack in the middle of the soundhole, even though it began at the edge. It turns out that she was moving her hand by rotating around the point where her arm sits on the lower bout, rather than moving her arm like a tonearm straight forward and back.

    She was unaware that she was doing this, so I walked her through identifying the problem by demonstrating the behavior and asking her (1) to identify the line along which my hand was traveling as it moved from the edge to the middle of the soundhole,  (2) to identify why my hand was moving that way (because I was moving by rotation), and (3) to identify how my hand should be moving (in a direction parallel to the line of my arm, not rotating around a point). She succeeded in doing all three.

    This was a reminder that technique needs continuous improvement. We spent a lot of time on this right-hand-movement problem last summer, and it kind of faded into the background. Now it’s back and again needs attention.

    The behavior problem was her treatment of the guitar when she wasn’t playing. My concern with this particular behavior is a little idiosyncratic, and I tried to keep that in mind as I dealt with it. Basically, it drives me nuts when kids are careless with musical instruments. And M  tends to kind of tip her guitar up and down when she’s not playing it — not a lot, but enough that I find it both worrisome (because the guitar might fall) and troubling (because it shows a lack of respect for the guitar — both the instrument and its study). In fact, the only time we ever left a studio lesson early was when, a few months after we started, she deliberately dropped her guitar in protest against the lesson. I asked her if she remembered this, but she didn’t.

    Tonight, I wasn’t terrifically skillful — M was resistant when I told her to hold the guitar in a formal rest position so it wouldn’t tip, and I was angry when she kept tipping it. But I stayed pretty calm, and she eventually complied. We’ll see how long it takes for her habits to change.