Meadow Minuet, with accompaniment

Monday: M had her private lesson today. As we walked to the car, she said, “Yay, we don’t have to practice today.” Sigh.

At her lesson, M played Meadow Minuet all the way through with her teacher playing the accompaniment. Man, that’s a busy accompaniment! I had a hard time hearing M’s part. But M soldiered through, playing a number of repetitions and improving each time. [Later, I will post some audio.]

Musically, her teacher taught M to introduce a ritard plus a fermata, and then a return a tempo, in the middle of the D section, leading up to the C# on the 9th fret of string 1. M did a nice job.

Her teacher suggested we work on the closed A scale to get ready for book 2. (We have already worked on this scale in the past.)

On the non-guitar-related front, I have decided to more actively develop both M’s voice and my own in the following ways:

  • For M, I recently bought Voice Lessons to Go for Kids. We listened to the CD this weekend, on the way to the beach, and the whole family (me, M, and S) sang along. My first impression: the instructional content is solid, but the presentation is pretty dry. M was game for it the first time I played it, but since then, she has said she doesn’t want to listen to the CD.
  • For me, I recently bought Harmony Singing By Ear by Susan Anders. I am loving this! The instructor proceeds in sensible steps, her presentation is clear, the production is good, and the songs are lovely. I’ve listened and sang along a few times with M in the car, and I could hear her sometimes singing along from the back seat. I can’t think of a better way to introduce basic chord-building theory than using these CDs. I will probably review them more thoroughly later. You need a reasonably good ear and ability to match pitches to use the CDs, but you don’t otherwise need a lot of singing ability.

Redefining “short”

Friday: Despite a long day, M and I had another nice lesson. We worked on the C and D sections of Meadow Minuet.

M had her last day of YMCA camp today. A while after I picked her up, she reported, “I cried today. We were in the woods and I got lost and started crying.” Yikes! I’d cry too if I were six years old and lost in the woods. She must not have been lost long, though, because the staff didn’t mention it to me.

After picking M up, I took her to martial-arts class. We then went out for dinner and ice cream. I knew that all this activity would leave little time for a lesson, so I told M that we would need to do some practice-related activity while we waited at the restaurant for her mother. She was agreeable, and though she did a lot of staring around the room, she actually cooperated pretty well in writing out the C and D sections of Meadow Minuet on these two index cards:

I helped some, but she figured out and wrote most of the notes herself. (She added a repeat sign at the end “to make it pretty.” Then she drew an exclamation point above the repeat sign to show that it was just for decoration, because the song does not have any repeats.)

This was a nice start to our lesson, because it reinforced the fact that the entire section—not just the first half—has bass notes in it. She has developed an odd habit of playing the first four bars with bass notes and the last five without, and I wanted to work on fixing this today.

We got home at about 7:30, which didn’t leave a lot of time for practice, particularly since she (quite reasonably) wanted to change into cooler clothes. But we also arrived home to find that M’s djembe was on the porch, so I was able to dangle this out as a reward: If she cooperated and we finished on time, I’d let her open the box and try out the djembe.

We practiced for about a half an hour, focusing first on the D section of Meadow Minuet and then on the C and D sections together. I asked M a lot of questions after each repetition about how she thought she did; often she just guessed, but she also sometimes answered accurately, showing that she was listening to herself. The primary technical point we worked on was holding down the melody notes long enough. She’s in the habit of leaving a note early whenever the next note involves a shift. She was resistant to me at first when I tried to correct the behavior by holding down her left-hand finger when she tried to pull it off too early, but after I demonstrated the difference between picking up early and holding down long enough, she seemed to try to hold the notes down and play more legato.  Here’s an audio file of today’s last two repetitions of the Meadow Minuet C and D sections, with discussion afterwards.

She finished by playing Lightly Row twice. The first time, she sort of phoned it in (didn’t play with all the dynamics and rushed the tempo from the middle to the end, seemingly to get it over with). But the second time, she played with much more attention.

My greatest triumph today, however, was realizing that I’ve successfully redefined what a “short” lesson is. When I told her that we were done after close to 30 minutes, she responded with delight and surprise: “We’re done? With our whole entire lesson? Tee-hee-hee!”

Adding some rhythm to the mix

Thursday: I’ve been thinking about rhythm ever since Colorado, for a few reasons. First, I enjoyed Jeremy Dittus’s Dalcroze presentation in Colorado and became interested in the Dalcroze method of music education, in which rhythm and dance are paramount. Second, in M’s group class in Colorado, her teacher (Kevin Hart) broke up the class with a clapping exercise, which engaged both the kids and the parents. Third, M has been playing 3/4 songs in 4/4 time lately.

So today, I started looking at two books on the subject

  • Joy Yelin’s Movement That Fits: Dalcroze Eurhythmics and the Suzuki Method. I bought it from Amazon and only had a chance to skim it, but it looks like an excellent resource. Yelin has taken songs in the Suzuki repertoire (e.g., May Song, Twinkle) and come up with related Dalcroze-inspired rhythmic exercises. She also has a good introduction about the Dalcroze method in general.
  • Alan Dworsky and Betsy Sansby’s Slap Happy: How to Play World-Beat Rhythms With Just Your Body and a Buddy. I got this book and CD from the library, but I’ll probably buy it. Dworsky and Sansby have a lot of books about world percussion, including some djembe books. In this book, they teach how to play various rhythms using just different types of body percussion (thigh slaps, chest thumps, snaps, claps, etc.). The CD makes it pretty easy to follow along, and the book is geared toward doing the rhythms in pairs (e.g., you can do patty-cake or slap a buddy’s hand on some beats). It’s a great package.

To ease into practice, I told Maura that for the first half of our practice, we would do things in Slap Happy. She was a little hesitant when things were difficult (it’s not so simple to coordinate your hands and feet, even in a pretty simple rhythm pattern), but we had fun for about 15 minutes. I plan to keep doing it.

We started our regular practice after dinner, and it went great. M brought in two fairy books to use — she wanted to earn the fairies for repetitions. Basically, this means that when she does a repetition (or a few), I say, “Great! You’ve earned the fairy with the red wings!” (Or I ask her to pick which fairy she earned.)

Substance-wise, we didn’t get past the second half of Meadow Minuet, which we’ve been practicing. She did well on the C section, but she got the D section in her head with bass notes in the first half but not in the second, so she stops playing the bass notes halfway through. To get her to pay attention to the bass notes and play them was a real challenge, and we worked our way around to it through a combination of trading off parts, slowing down a lot, and singing and talking. By the time we finished, though, she managed to play, at a slow tempo but in time, the bass notes that she had been dropping entirely when we started. So that was progress.

I do think that M’s foundation work is starting to pay off. We got through portions of the song much more quickly than we would have just a few months ago, it’s largely because I don’t have to spend a lot of time trying to adjust her technique, and her technique is so solid that it really supports her playing.

Opening day at the Colorado Suzuki Institute

Monday: M wakes up cruelly early — 5:30 am Colorado time. (I know, for some families this is not unusual. But we’re blessed with a good sleeper.) I let her watch some Nickelodeon while I check email, etc.

After an expensive but satisfying breakfast at the hotel buffet (make your own waffles!), we check out the surroundings. It’s a nice walk from our hotel, through the woods, up to the “village” of Beaver Creek — a complex of hotels and stores that sell everything from absurd Western-themed artwork, to furs, to jewelry, to $6 gelato (delicious!).

M and I stop by the institute to check in and pick up our tote bag and schedule. M is excited to learn that she got into the bass “enrichment” activity, her top choice. Registration goes smoothly.

The kinks come later, and there were four:

  1. My map of class locations wasn’t accurate.
  2. A promised tour of classroom locations, scheduled for 2:15, inexplicably did not happen. This left me on my own to find the classrooms and to figure out the mistake on my map (enabling me, later, to help another parent whose map included the same error).
  3. During the institute welcoming talk, someone had the terrible idea of holding an impromptu auction for a CD by the Preucil family to raise funds for scholarships. The spent ten minutes trying to get audience members to bid on something no one really wanted, after we had been sitting for over a half an hour later. Note to organizers: do not hold unannounced auctions for worthless items when a large portion of your audience is in elementary school. Just when I was about to hand up a note saying, “Cut this crap out,” the cut the crap out.
  4. The guitar “play in” took place in an incredibly crowded meeting room in one of the hotels, and the leader (a good teacher and nice man, despite what I’m about to say) played way too many advanced songs for the group. The younger kids, including mine, were forced to sit through song after song that they did not know and could not even play a simple accompaniment to. The teacher said up front that the guitars don’t do a traditional play-in (where you start with advanced pieces and just work your way down, adding kids as you go). They should.

The other thing I noticed has nothing to do with the institute per se: there are a shocking number of kids here whose technique is so bad you can scarcely call them guitarists, yet they are butchering their way through songs in Book 2 and Book 3.

I probably shouldn’t be surprised; it’s the same thing I saw at the Minnesota Suzuki graduations. But I am surprised. I would think that people willing to spend the time and money to come here would also be people committed enough to the Suzuki method to have developed minimally competent technique. I was wrong.

The other notable feature of the play-in: A parent let her 18-month old toddler wander across the room, through the guitarists, not once, but twice. After the second time, I went out in the hall to ride herd on the kid, thinking that her mother must not know what’s going on. The kid tries to go in the other door for a third circle, and I block her way. She starts whimpering, and reaching for the woman standing behind me, in the doorway. It’s the kid’s mother. She’s been standing there, watching her kid stroll through the group, doing nothing. I say, “Could you keep your daughter from walking through the group?” “Sure,” she says.

As luck would have it, her 7- or 8-year-old son ends up in M’s group class and master class. But that’s a story for another day.

As for practice today, I worked on Rocky Mountain Twinkle with M in the afternoon and she was very cooperative. And then, of course, the guitarists didn’t play it at the play-in. Because guitarists are different.

One moment of the play-in was tender for me. After most of the kids had set up, M turned out to be behind some other kids, so the leader (who taught M’s master class last year at a different institute) asked if she’d like to move and sit up front. “My dad put me here,” she said. Something about that melted me — that she respected me enough to think that if I put her somewhere, it was where she should sit. Naturally, I helped her move.

Finally, I was surprised that M didn’t try to play along when they got to With Steady Hands. She knows it. When I mentioned it later, she said she just didn’t feel like she knew it well enough. Which tells me her confidence still needs building.

Oops, forgot to practice

Sunday: Today is our travel day for the Colorado Suzuki Institute. And it’s also the first day since we began guitar lessons, over a year and a half ago, that I forget to do something I can call “practice.”

In my defense, it was a long day. Because S and I made the stupid decision to go out for dinner and a little shopping yesterday instead of packing, I was up until 3:30 am getting us packed and getting various CDs ready for the trip. (It’s a 2+-hour car ride from the Denver airport to Beaver Creek, where the institute is held, so we need listening material.)

Travel starts at 9:30 with a ride to the airport, where we wait for about 2 hours. We see lots of families with instruments en route to Denver, and we run into some folks we met at last year’s Suzuki Institute at Macphail. The mom’s husband had recommended the Colorado institute to me, so I’m a little surprised that the mom complains a little about the institute’s director, who is apparently somewhat rigid and frowns on scheduling changes.

We have a nice flight, during which M curls up for about a half-hour nap on my lap. It takes a little of the sting out of yesterday’s tantrum.

We arrive and, after struggling with Budget Rent-a-Car (they couldn’t be bothered to send someone promptly to show me how to adjust the seat in my ludicrously named Suzuki Kizashi sedan), make it to M’s teenage cousin’s house for a short visit on the way to Beaver Creek. M and her cousin take a quick dip in the pool, we play a short game, and then we hit the road for the 2-hour drive to Beaver Creek.

On the way, we mostly listen to an audio CD of Old Testament stories. Good CD; grisly stories! We stop for dinner on the way at a Noodles & Co. in Dillon, which is about 1/2 hour from Beaver Creek and a good way to break up the trip.

When we get back in the car, for the rest of the way, we listen to the CD I made of Book 1 songs plus Rocky Mountain Twinkle.

Beaver Creek is beautiful, and our condo at the Charter turned out to be a good choice. The decor is a little absurd (in our room, a lasso and a shotgun are mounted on the wall, and a gun holster is draped over a bedpost), but the rooms are big, the kitchen is functional, and our view is terrific (we’re on the third floor, with a balcony overlooking the outdoor pool). The only serious negative is the terrible electronics (some rooms actually have VCRs!) and, surprisingly, analog cable. Which makes watching the last quarter of the last game of the NBA finals somewhat unsatisfactory (the picture quality is poor). But we didn’t come here to watch TV.

S puts M to bed when we arrive, while I watch the basketball game. After M is asleep, I suddenly realize that we didn’t practice.

This is not, of course, the first day we’ve gone without putting hands on the instrument. We always bring M’s guitar on vacation, but sometimes we’ve had days when it hasn’t worked out to sit down and practice. On those days, we’ve done something in the car that I called practice — singing some songs, counting beats, quizzing about music theory or note geography, or some other combination of things related to the guitar.

Today, though, I forgot to use car time this way. Which means we’ve broken our streak of practicing every day. Now, we’ll just have to say that we practice every day that we can.

I am away, but not gone

Two things have created a blogging backlog: (1) a busy life, and (2) the fact that I’ve been recording our home lessons.

It’s ironic that recording our lessons has reduced my blog output — a big reason I started regularly recording them was to improve the quality of my posts.

The problem, though, is that because I know I have a recording of each lesson, I feel less urgency about blogging every day. In the past, blogging promptly was imperative, because otherwise I’d forget what we did. Now, I think to myself, “It’s okay if I don’t blog today, because even if I forget what happened, I can just listen to the recording!”

But that’s where we are. I hope to get caught up soon.

Jamming with Zoë Keating

Thursday: Our morning practice was short and pretty successful. I think we worked on Allegretto some more. (I need to take better notes! Any notes!)

In the evening, I tried something different. I picked M up quite early to give us plenty of time to practice. But rather than asking her to practice when we got home, I figured I’d start practicing on my own and let her do whatever she wanted. I thought perhaps she’d decide to join me.

Didn’t happen. She drew happily by herself in the kitchen for 45 minutes while I did two things: (1) figured out some of the motifs in Zoë Keating’s Escape Artist so M with a mind to improvising to it, and (2) practiced the Canon and Oh How Lovely Is the Evening.

I had a harder time with the Canon than I expected, which gave me new respect and sympathy for M’s struggles with it.

M and I finally practiced together after dinner. Mostly we worked on a few sections of the Canon, which was much improved. M also played Oh How Lovely Is the Evening with no difficulty. We talked about coming up with a plan to work on her review songs, but didn’t actually do any. M was very cooperative.

Then we did some jamming to Escape Artist. M didn’t actually seem to be trying that hard to match her playing with the song — she didn’t really want to be bothered with what I figured out about the song’s notes. But M’s rhythm was good, and she seemed to be having fun, so that’s something.

Back story: Yesterday night I saw Keating perform and got copies of her CDs, one of which she inscribed to M. M and I listened to a few songs from the new CD on the way back from school, but M was more interested in hearing a story (Beethoven Lives Upstairs).

And we’re back in the mud

Wednesday: Well, our morning was not good. M was fidgety and uncooperative, and I got annoyed enough at something she did that I left the room briefly to avoid snapping at her. But I cut the lesson short after she played something (probably a section of the Canon) and then argued with me over whether she had played it right (she had made some obvious mistakes). I said I wasn’t going to argue with her and we’d just practice more in the evening, then I put her guitar away. She cried a little.

The evening went much better (after a rocky start during which M was uncooperative and I was snappish).

In light of the morning’s problem—M arguing with me over what she had done—I decided to use the audio recorder again. So I had M play sections of the Canon which I recorded, then we listened to them together.

She was a little whiny (complaining that the earphones hurt her ears and that a mild sunburn was bothering her), but mostly she cooperated. At one point, she played a section in 1st position that ought to be played in first position, but because only one note is an open string, everything but that note (and the surrounding ones) sounded normal. She laughed when she finished and said she did it deliberately, which was probably true. On the one hand, I like her confidence and playfulness. On the other hand, I was annoyed by the deliberate decision to make a mistake.

I supposed it’s a sensible defensive strategy: choose to fail, so that failure becomes success (you succeed at the failure you have chosen for yourself).

We also worked on a review song (Allegretto?), and it was sadly rusty. I have been neglecting review in favor of Read This First because M is more engaged with the sheet music. But we need to be doing more regular review.

Review is rusty

Tuesday

Morning: I notice that M’s nails are raggedy, so we begin with me filing and sanding them. As I do that, I ask M to read through the music for Rigadoon. To my surprise, she has a lot of difficulty. When I’m done with her nails, I ask her to play the first part of Rigadoon together with me. It’s rusty, and her right hand is moving around too much—instead of plucking with her finger, she’s using her whole hand. I narrow down what she’s doing, so she’s playing just the first two notes. She’s pretty squirrelly, and we don’t have much time, so we don’t get any further. Overall, a middling morning.

Evening: It went better, I think, but I failed to take good notes.

Something’s working

Monday: At breakfast, I mentioned that we’d skip our morning practice and just practice in the evening. I said something like, “I hope it goes well” or “I think it will go well.” After a pause, M said:

I’m starting to like it.

I put out my hand so she could slap me five. I refrained from tap dancing.

In the evening, we had  a good practice for about 1/2 an hour. I proposed to let M earn pennies, nickels, and dimes during her lesson since her teacher is collecting change for Japan. When M was dawdling about going to the practice room, I said, “If you get there right now, you can have a whole dime.”

She jumped up, scurried to our practice room, and was standing there holding her guitar, grinning and ready to bow when I walked in. A dime well spent! (Later, she asked her mom, “Did you see how fast I got ready to practice tonight? I was like—” and then she demonstrated.)

We did three things in our lesson:

  • Worked on the song in Read This First. We went over the first line of the sheet music without the instrument, identifying how she would play each note (finger/string/fret), then we played. We made it through the whole thing with very few problems.
    • She had some difficulty transitioning from the second to third line—a transition that involves moving from the 3rd to 4th string—so we worked extra on that.
    • We played it all through once. She declined when I asked if she wanted to play it as a round. I wasn’t crazy about this, but I asked, so I had to take her answer.
  • Asked M to tell me the notes to French Folk Song, then to conduct and say the note names while I played.
  • Asked M to play French Folk Song. Some small sections were rusty.

It was an excellent practice, and M was entirely cooperative. Yay!