Home-lesson recaps – Page 7

Another good (mostly) predinner practice

Today was a snow day for the family, so we were able to do most of our practice before dinner. We did:

Note reading two ways: the see-say note page (note names) @ 40 bpm, and the 50-measure hurdles with fruit rhythms
G scale on the G string (saying note names; saying step constructions; and knocking)
Lightly Row and Go Tell Aunt Rhody as a right-hand “workout” exercise
The Fuhrman Tanz
The D section of Meadow Minuet (melody only)

Today we started with note reading off the instrument, and M had fun with it. It’s nice to be able to ease into the lesson by sitting together on the couch and reading together.

After some of the practice items, I gave M blank playing cards that I got a while ago, and I gave her some time to write on them. She decided to write the names of the songs plus a “secret code” that only she and I know. The code was an arbitrary string of numbers, like so:

I think everything else went pretty well, but sadly, I’m writing this the next day, which means I can’t remember all the details. Must blog every day!

Practicing before dinner

We had a pretty free Sunday, so I made sure we practiced before dinner. It made for a more-relaxed practice and (I think) a more attentive M. We did:

M sang and conducted Lightly Row
G scale on the G string (saying note names, whole and half-steps, and fret numbers)
Perpetual Motion on the G string
All the Twinkle variations, with a focus on a strong and steady right hand
Song of the Wind with the metronome
The Fuhrman Tanz

Everything went pretty well, but most notable (for me) was M’s work on the Twinkles. I decided to follow a violin teacher’s suggestion from one of the SAA videos. He recommends starting a practice session with a 3- to 5- minute “workout” focused on your technical issue, beginning with the Twinkles and working forward. So I told M to really concentrate on keeping her right hand steady and getting good downward pressure. And she responded better than I expected — I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her in such a state of sustained concentration for that long.

Slow down, you move too fast

We got home late, so we couldn’t practice until after dinner. While I got it ready, I did “fruit rhythm” music reading with M, which went well. She needed help with syncopated rhythms and sixteenth notes, but overall, she read the 50-measure exercise from her group teacher very reliably.

In our lesson, we only worked on two songs, May Song and the Führmann Tanz.

We picked up where we left off with May Song: M played it through several times focusing on getting good right-hand tone. She only made one real note mistake, and that was the result of not looking at the neck as she moved from natural position to tosto.

But the Führmann Tanz was in bad shape — she couldn’t even sing it, she missed the first repeat, and she mangled the notes in the B section.

So I had her practice the B section repeatedly, without stopping, until I counted 5 repetitions with good tone and no note mistakes. She probably played it a total of 9 times to get 5 good ones. I would have liked to do more, but we didn’t have time.

One aspect of our lesson was not successful: I noticed that she was starting the B section by playing “i-i” instead of “i-m.” I stopped her immediately and asked her if she knew what right-hand problem was my reason for stopping her. Unsurprisingly, the first time, she didn’t know. But it was surprising to me that even after I told her to pay careful attention to her right hand as she started the song, she made the same mistake four or five times in a row, and each time, she couldn’t tell me what about her right hand was incorrect.

But before I told her the problem, she fixed it, and she began the section by alternating i-m. Periodically as she played her alternating was not perfect, but overall it was pretty good.

As I was writing this, a review idea occurred to me: Perhaps we could sing every song each lesson. I can’t understand how anyone plays every song each lesson, unless those songs are at a level of development that is still remote for us. I don’t feel like we’re rushing through the repertoire, yet I keep finding that her review songs are less solid than I expect.

A one-pointed one-song lesson

We picked up today where we left off yesterday: with the left-hand problems she was having in May Song. And like yesterday, we started practice before dinner.

After I explained the idea behind targeted practice, we did some targeted practice of the section that had been a problem (G-B-D-G, which she had been playing G-B-D-D#).

It only took a few series of 10 repetitions to get this down, and it was simple enough that she could also focus on getting loud, fat tone from her right hand (or, as she put it, “shooting a rocket ship down to earth” — pressing down with her finger) — the “one point” assigned to us this week by her studio teacher. On top of that, M was doing well with “ready – aim – shoot,” taking her time getting set up.

And as she started to play May Song through the first time, I thought: “This is it! She’s playing stunningly!” Every note was right; her hands look great; her tone was fat; she remembered the dynamics and the position shift to tosto and back; her eyes were on her left hand; her tempo was even; it was a tour de force.

For the first half of the song. Shortly into the repeat, she crashed and burned — the wrong notes piled up on top of each other.

When she finished, I asked her to tell me about it. She assessed her playing accurately. We talked about how great the first half was. Then we talked about why the second half fell apart: because her eyes and her mind wandered.

When I asked her to try again, things got worse, not better. After a few attempts, I called a halt for dinner.

After dinner, we were more successful. She still didn’t play as well as she did earlier, but she managed to get through two repetitions with pretty good tone, no serious mistakes, and pretty steady concentration. Today’s lesson really showed me the value of review — she was able to polish this piece to a high level, and to work on a new technical issue (right-hand volume) because the piece itself was very secure.

We did one other fun thing: sang May Song with “fruit rhythms” (peach pit -pear -pear – pear – apple – peach, peach pit – pear – pear – peach – peach).

The lesson timing had the added bonus of creating motivation at the end of the lesson. Usually we practice up until it’s time to get ready for bed. But today, because we had practiced before dinner, after dinner I was able to say that if she focused well enough to play May Song well twice in a row, we could be done, and she would have about a half an hour to play or read stories before going up to get ready for bed. Performance goals with tangible rewards often elicit good work from her, and they did tonight.

Real progress on right hand

We again focused on open Gs and French Folk Song. M is showing real progress on her right-hand technique. She was able to play the open G more than ten times in a row with nice downward pressure, and she maintained this form when playing French Folk Song.

She has a problem transitioning from the D to the E sections, though, and consistently misses a note because she doesn’t move her right-hand finger to the proper string. So we isolated the problem and tried to work on it. The problem is mainly one of concentration and vision — she needs to look at her right hand when it’s time to move it. It’s hard to make progress on this sort of thing because she tends to stare into space rather than directing her eyes deliberately in relation to her playing.

We did about an hour of this, then went out to Chipotle. On the way there and in line, we did some rhythm sight reading, which she gets a kick out of.

Then back at home, she played May Song (her choice). She had a note accuracy problem here, too — her left pinky was reaching for the D# on the 2nd string/4th fret instead of the G on the 1st string/3rd fret. This provided an opportunity for problem analysis: She’s been playing lots of songs with similar left-hand movements, so those muscle memories have crowded out her muscle memory for this part of May Song. It was also an opportunity to talk about slowing things down when you need to solve a problem.

Not much progress on “ready – aim – shoot” — she’s still impatient, and she doesn’t have a habit of thinking about what comes next.

Maybe we need to practice counting to 20 before starting to play. Something.

Ready, fire, aim

I kept the focus on the basics again today — more open Gs and French Folk Song. I also tried two new things, one aimed at improving how she starts pieces, and the other to help her isolate the right-hand technique we’ve been working on.

Starting pieces

M’s focus consistently lags behind her behavior — that is, she starts playing before she’s paying attention to what she’s doing. This leads to a lot of wrong notes; it also means that she doesn’t always wait for her accompanist.

So I talked about two ways to shoot a bow and arrow (we’ve done it on the Wii):

Ready, aim, shoot; or
Ready, shoot, aim.

She does the second; I thought putting it this way might help her become more aware of it. And when practicing today, I consistently had her say “ready” (check posture and feet), “aim” (check hands), and wait for me to say “shoot.”

This was only partly successful. Often, it seems like her idea of checking her hands is to look at them and see, “Yes, I still have hands.” But it’s worth a try.

Right-hand technique

It’s a big job to get M to play louder yet without tension. She understands what to do (place – pressure – release, per the Pumping Nylon segment we’ve watched over and over), but it’s not her habit.

So when playing French Folk Song, she’d consistently play the first few notes with good finger pressure and then fall back to brushing the strings in one lazy motion, rather than placing, pressing, and releasing.

To help her focus on her right hand, I did something I haven’t done before: I got behind her and fretted the left-hand notes. She then did a much better job focusing on her right hand.

I got the idea from Ed Kreitman, who described helping his violin students learn pieces by taking over the bowing to allow them to focus only on the left-hand (which is responsible, as on the guitar, for establishing the notes).

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:

to play louder,
without extra tension, and
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.