Month: February 2011

Be careful what you ask for

After yesterday’s unsatisfactory practice, I thought hard about how to do things differently today. At M’s last few private lessons, her studio teacher has been emphasizing tone production, so I decided to try to make that the focus of our practice today.

Also, today I read some more pages in The Inner Game of Music before I returned it to the library. (My copy’s on its way from Amazon.) And I was reminded of the importance of awareness and self-evaluation.

So to begin today’s lesson, we did two listening exercises:

  1. First, I asked M to listen as she played a scale, and to play the next note only when she could no longer hear the first note ringing.
  2. Next, I asked M to get right up next to my guitar and to listen as I played a note, raising her hand only when the note stopped ringing.

She paid good attention while playing her own scales, but I noticed a new problem: She was keeping tension in her plucking finger after she played the note. I nonverbally drew her attention to the problem by placing my finger on her plucking finger after she played and while she was waiting for the next note, and after a few notes, she started to relax her plucking finger. (She did it in an exaggerated way, but I think it was enough that she figured out and tried to address the problem.)

My other idea when I noticed this tension was to watch the small portion of Pumping Nylon that’s about basic strokes, but I couldn’t get the DVD to play. It’s been a while since we’ve seen it, and it’s probably about time we look at it again as a refresher.

Next, we worked on assessing tone quality on the melody of the first few bars of Meadow Minuet. First, I played, and I asked her to identify which note I played with the best tone and which I played with the worst tone. I realized quickly that I needed to break it down to just 4 measures (6 notes) at a time, because (not surprisingly) she couldn’t keep more notes in her had to compare them.

Then I asked her to play 4 measures and to identify the best and worst notes. And I noticed something odd: She was doing weird, counterproductive things with her left hand (e.g., flattening out her index finger all the way and pressing down too hard with it), as if she were deliberately trying to sound bad.

And she was: She took from her assignment the idea that a note had to be bad, and that she had to be able to identify that note. So, quite sensibly, she thought to herself, “Let me play this note really badly, and then I’ll play a different one well.” She explained this to me when I mentioned that I saw here doing something unusual (and counterproductive) but intentional-seeming with her left hand and asked her why.

So I learned that my first instruction — identify the best and worst notes — was flawed. So instead, I asked her to strive to make every note sound as beautiful as possible, and then if one note was the best, to identify it, and to identify the worst note if there was one.

Also, I realized that I had to be more specific about the tonal vocabulary. When I asked her what her best note sounded like, I was getting answers like, “Pretty good,” and “Nice.” These answers don’t really tell me anything — in fact, they don’t even enable me to tell whether she is just calling a random note her “best,” or whether she in fact really listened to what she was playing. So I gave her a more specific vocabulary: thin, fat, weak, round, bell-like, buzzy, snappy, even.

And on one run-through of a small portion of Meadow Minuet, we had some success: she identified her high E as snappy, which was exactly right. And the rest of the notes were all pretty good. (Her tone was actually pretty good on some other repetitions, which reflects — I think — that she was listening to herself, but she was only expressed an accurate judgment of her playing one time.)

So she didn’t get a lot done on the instrument, but she paid much better attention than yesterday to the things that she did do.

Notes aren’t enough

Pretty weak lesson today, not surprisingly: M went to a birthday party after school and jumped around in bouncy castles for 2 hours, which would sap anyone’s energy.

So she was tired and distracted during our lesson. We worked on:

  • the A scale;
  • French Folk Song; and
  • Tanz 2 (J.C. Bach).

The two songs were really rusty, and she played Tanz 2 so carelessly it was depressing. I think we need to break these review songs down into smaller pieces and have her play those small pieces with care. I certainly don’t want more of what I got today, which was M playing as if playing the right note, regardless of how she played a note, was all that she should do.

But fatigue surely dragged M down today, so I’m thinking happy thoughts and telling myself that today was an aberration.

The Tan Man: A Song

At dinner, M made up a song that went like this:

The tan man, the tan man, asks the people their favorite color. And they say “tan,” and he is very popular.

The next day the tan man, the tan man, asks the people their favorite color. But they say “pink,” and now his business is not so good.

So the tan man changes his color and becomes pink. And the tan man is very popular again.

I asked her to sing it again after dinner so I could record it. Unfortunately, she forgot to mention a key element of the original narrative thread (i.e., that the Tan Man changed his color to pink). But on the plus side, she added a flying house! Here’s her second rendition:

Tips from Suzuki Association videos

In today’s lesson, I incorporated two items from the Suzuki Association videos that are being offered this month.

First, I shared this slogan with M at dinner:

Average performers practice a piece until they can get it right. But excellent performers practice a piece until they cannot get it wrong.

Later, each time we she finished a review pieces, I asked (after asking her what musical things she noticed that she did well) : “Do you know that song so well you cannot get it wrong?”

Second, I used a tambourine as a nonverbal cue/post-song reward for review songs. With each song, I asked her to focus on one thing — either keeping her right hand properly oriented to the plane of the guitar (i.e., not falling down), or keeping her eyes on her left hand. I told her that as she played, if I noticed her not doing the one thing, I’d tap the tambourine. And if she played through the song and I tapped it no more than once (I deliberately didn’t require perfection), she would get to shake the tambourine herself like a crazy person. (A Suzuki teacher recommended doing this with a desk-hotel-style bell, but a tambourine was the closest I could come). This was a very effective tool.

Overall, we did:

  • The first 16 bars of Meadow Minuet. M needed me to play some of the new passages for her, but she got the notes quickly and was more cooperative than yesterday. I did have to slow her down — she was playing the notes pretty carelessly, without paying much attention to her tone.
  • Three review songs, picked from our review-song bag:
    • Brother John. On this, I had her pay attention to her right hand and her tone. She did well, though the notes are very rough.
    • Lightly Row. On this, I had her look at the left hand. She played this very nicely, with sensitive crescendos.
    • Perpetual Motion. I also had her look at her left hand, and she did remember some crescendos. She didn’t get the form entirely right, though.
  • Conducting: She conducted me on Lightly Row and Aunt Rhody. She’s much more solid rhythmically, though she is saying the note names by memory, not by imagining what she would play. Apparently the latter is what her group teacher wants her to do. But she memorizes pretty quickly, and I doubt she can put aside the memorized notes to think about what she would be playing as a way to name the notes.
  • Note geography: As I was retuning her guitar, she went through 12 of Andrea Cannon’s flashcards and identified the notes found on the first 5 frets of strings 1 and 2 and the first 2 frets of string 3.