suzukidad – Page 11

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.

You’re trying to encourage me!

At lunch, I was telling M that I thought that if she practiced the note-reading exercise for her group class’s Guitar Olympics, she could do the best in the class. With an accusatory tone and a grim face, she said:

YOU! You’re trying to encourage me!

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.

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:

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.
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:

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