E-DAY

Tomorrow is E-Day for my students. And so is Friday, as one of my adults, the son of Michael who owns the Minotaur (Steinway B) and a life-long friend of mine, takes his Grade 1 at ABRSM HQ in Portland Place.

It has felt like a long haul this term – and last – preparing students for their exams, yet suddenly the Big Day is almost upon us, and I feel quietly confident. As I said to Harrison the other week, “My students do not fail exams”. “There’s always a first time, Fran”, Harrison replied glumly. I pointed out, in no uncertain terms, that there was no way he would fail his Grade 1. He is playing beautifully; added to that, his technical work is 100% secure, together with his sight-reading and aural skills. Between us, we decided that my failing Grade 5 at the age of 10, following a broken collarbone (my teacher insisted on entering me for the exam, despite the fact I’d had 6 weeks off the piano due to the injury: I fell off my bike), was the only exam failure that would happen in Fran’s Piano Studio. At a mock exam last week, I scored Harrison one mark off a Distinction. Maybe I am bigging him up too much, but he’s a student who has really flourished under my tutelage, after enduring two years of very dull lessons at school.

I am full of admiration for any adult amateur, who has the chutzpah and true grit to do a music exam, or perform in a concert. As we get older, we become more aware of failure and grow to fear it. We spend too much time before the exam or the performance going over all the negative “What ifs?” and worrying that we will appear foolish if we mess it up. I experience these feelings too, despite giving the impression, when I perform, of not being nervous. Such confidence is hard won, but my teacher’s support and encouragement has helped enormously, as well as Barry Green’s brilliant book ‘The Inner Game of Music’, which offers strategies to overcome performance anxiety. Good preparation is crucial too: if you know a piece inside out, you draw confidence from that intimate knowledge, and there’s a very good chance that you will play well.

As a child, taking music exams and performing in competitions was a necessary chore, and occasionally excruciatingly awful. My first teacher would enter me for an exam, on average, once a year. I would go to Birmingham Music School to take the exam, with my mother, who would be in a paroxysm of anxiety on my behalf, while I do not recalling being particularly nervous: it was just something I had to do. My teacher did not accompany me, nor come to the exam centre to cheer her students on. Nor did she offer any advice about performance anxiety or how to conduct oneself on The Day.  When I moved south and switched teachers, Sue, my teacher in Rickmansworth, would sometimes pop into the exam centre (the home of a local professional pianist) to see how we were. Usually, she would find a nervous row of us sitting outside the studio, clutching our music in sweaty, cottony hands. The layout of the house was such that you could hear exactly what was going on in the hallowed room; this did little to improve one’s state of mind. Once inside, you were confronted with a huge black shiny Steinway, and nothing else. I can picture it now – and I can almost hear myself playing the grand, opening measures of Beethoven’s Sonata Opus 10, No. 1.

The exam centre in Surbiton, which I use for my students, is a private house, and the piano is a parlour upright in the family sitting room. The steward is a friendly, cheery man who goes out of his way to make everyone feel comfortable. These days, the exams seem a tad less formal than when I took mine, and the introduction of the Prep Test for early learners is an excellent innovation, as it gives a taster of a proper music exam and prepares students for what is to come next. Other exam boards offer Leisure Play, which is less rigorous than the graded exams in that one is not required to complete technical work and is particularly good for adult students who don’t want to learn scales. There is also Performance Assessment, which gives more advanced students an opportunity to have their playing properly critiqued.

I do not force my students to take exams, but most of them want to. In these politically correct times, where at Sports Day “everyone’s a winner”, it strikes me that a lot of competition has been removed from our schools (certainly in the state schools). Yet, most kids love a challenge, and if there is an element of competition, all the better.

So, fingers crossed for tomorrow – and Friday. We’ve done all the work: clapped, sung, spotted the difference, identified staccato, conquered sight-reading, rattled through scales and broken chords. And while my kids stroll nonchalantly into the exam room, I will be waiting nervously

Describing music – let the students speak

Inspired by the lovely Musical Adjectives Project, to which I have already added my own contribution, I asked my students to come up with some words  (at least 5) to describe a piece they are working on. Interestingly, they seemed to enjoy this homework more than the musical quizzes I tend to set for the holidays, and I have had some very imaginative responses. I promised my students I would compile a complete list, so that they can see what others have said about their music. Asking them what they thought of this exercise, several students agreed with me that it made them think of their music in a different way. Ben put it most succinctly, clearly understanding the point of the exercise: “I thought of the words and tried to imagine the sounds in my head before I played the piece”.

Dance of the Scaly Lizards – Pauline Hall, from ‘Piano Time 2′. A piece based on a 2-octave C major scale: Bouncy, jolly, lively, happy, enthusiastic, merry, playful, cheerful, enjoyable, delightful, perky (Marianne)

Wilder Reiter (‘Wild Rider’) – Robert Schumann (Grade 3, list B, current syllabus): Elegant, pleasant, soothing, uplifting, entertaining (Bella)

Kummer (‘Grief’) – Alexander Gedike (Grade 1, list B, 2009-2010): Sad, quiet, gentle, serious, dark (Tom)

Menuet in F – Leopold Mozart (Grade 1, list A, current syllabus): Peaceful, gentle, sophisticated, calming, delicate (Saskia)

Canon in D – Pachelbel (piano reduction): Grand, mournful, tranquil, sombre, woeful, echo-ey, proud, luxurious (Ben)

Trio from Symphony No. 5 – Schubert (Grade 2, list B, current syllabus): Light, dancing, playful, happy, partying (Eli)

The Sandman – Brahms (Grade 2, list B, current syllabus): Soft, relaxing, romantic, gentle, coaxing (Lucy)

In the Hall of the Mountain King – Greig (reduced version): Menacing, borderline maniacal, pagan, folkloric, ritualistic (Andy – adult student)

And my own contribution, for a piece I have been working on most of this week:

Vingt Regards sur l’enfant Jesus: IV Regard de la Vierge - Messiaen: Naive, tender, gentle, rocking, lulling, painful, poignant, portentous

Many thanks to Gail Fischler of the Piano Addict blog for flagging up this project, and for adding one of my wordclouds to project’s homepage.

Read my earlier post on this subject here

Create your own Word Cloud at Wordle.com

The End of the Year

My teaching term finished at 4.45pm today as I saw the last student, Tom, out of my warm, cosy home into the cold, dark, snowy evening. I pressed a giant chocolate coin from M&S into his gloved hand, and cheerily wished him and his mother a Happy Christmas, while also reminding him to practice over the holiday. Officially, my teaching term (which runs for 12 weeks) ended last week, but I had to cancel some lessons and carry them over from last week.

Now, I am afforded an opportunity to review the term just ended and look forward to the spring term. As always, it has been a busy term: there has been much music made, new pieces learnt, old ones revised and finessed. I’ve sat through hours of scales and other technical work, done a fair amount of pre-exam hand-holding (mostly of anxious parents rather than students), and talked endlessly about “telling the story” and “painting pictures” in music. The hugely successful Christmas concert marked the culmination of the term and was a wonderful tribute to my students’ hard work this term – and mine too! Three students took the Prep Test, a pre-Grade 1 “taster” exam, five are working towards Grade 1, including two of my adult students, and three are working on the Grade 2 syllabus. I am enjoying teaching the exam syllabuses, as the current crop of pieces are varied and interesting: why weren’t the exam lists this interesting when I was taking my music exams, way back when….?

Particular highlights include: Eli playing my adaptation of Pachelbel’s ‘Canon in D’, a piece he chose himself, and which he played with real panache and surprising depth for an 8 year old; Claire, a student who has really blossomed this term, playing ‘Walking In The Air’ at the Christmas concert; Harrison’s improvised ‘Vampire Blues’ (“but please don’t do that in your exam!” I warned), Bella’s lovely, measured reading of Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C; Tom’s ‘Chinese Crackers’, one of his Prep Test pieces which utilises the piano’s harmonics in a clever way; and Marianne’s ‘Snowdrifts’, a piece which seems particularly appropriate given the current weather!

As for my own music, I have put to bed, for the time being at least, Debussy’s Prelude ‘Voiles’, after performing it in my Christmas concert. Listening to the recording was a mixed experience: despite all the plaudits I received from friends, parents, students and family on the day, I feel there is plenty of room for improvement. A pause from this piece will help me reappraise it and think about what else I need to do with it. Meanwhile, I am making interesting inroads into Messiaen’s 4th Vingt Regard, a deeply arresting piece which requires a huge amount of emotional input (the notes themselves are not so difficult), and the Toccata from Bach’s 6th Partita, which is cerebral and satisfying (the scores are in my suitcase to read in France, together with my fold-out keyboard to enable me to mark up the rest of the Messiaen properly). The Chopin Ballade continues to haunt me – in a good way – but it is on the backburner while I try to get as much Diploma repertoire into my fingers: 2011 could be the year I take the exam, or not, depending on how I get on….

The Spring term will see three students sit their Grade 1 exam, and at the end of the term I will attend my teacher’s advanced piano course again, where I hope present more of my diploma repertoire. I will also rise to my teacher’s challenge, and play Chopin’s Etude Opus 10 No. 3 at the end of course concert.

For the time being, I am looking forward to a couple of weeks “off” (though not off the piano, of course), and a chance to catch up on some reading and listening.

Merry Christmas to all my readers, some loyal and regular, others casual and occasional. The Cross-Eyed Pianist will return after the holiday.

It’s wrong but it’s right!

“It sounds wrong, but it’s right” is something I say to my students quite regularly. And sometimes I say it to myself as well, when a ‘crunchy’ or unexpected harmony catches me out, and I have to go back and check that what I played was in fact correct.

Fairly early on in their lessons with me, my students learn about intervals, “the distance between one note and another” as it says helpfully in the tutor book I use. We play them and listen to them and describe them: a major second, a “pinched” sound, usually elicits a shriek of distaste at its dissonance; a third is pleasant, warm; a fourth, when played in different places on the keyboard, “sounds Chinese” (it sounds “medieval” to me); a fifth is a bare, open sound – it needs the middle note to form a satisfying chord; a sixth is easy on the ear; a seventh “hurts” almost as much as a second, though when converted into a dominant seventh chord, it is enjoyable, especially the sense of relief when the harmony goes “home”.

An unfamiliar, or especially crunchy harmony – and in the simple pieces (pre-grade, and Grades 1 to 2) my students are learning these are often very bare chords, formed of only two notes and are therefore far more noticeable – can bring a student up short, cause them to stop playing, go back and play that section again, thinking they have made a mistake. “It sounds wrong but it’s right” I say patiently, urging them to keep playing. Afterwards, we play “spot the interval”, and it becomes apparent that the problem was not an incorrect note, merely that the ear did not like the sound!

Saskia, who is working on ‘Tarantella’ from the Grade 1 repertoire, a rather charming, plaintive little A minor dance by Pauline Hall (she of the excellent Piano Time series), does not like the chords in the first section, which alternate between a straight A-minor tonic chord and a chord composed of A, D and E. “I can’t play it!” she grumbled at her lesson this afternoon, and then proceeded to play it perfectly, albeit somewhat tentatively. We have been trying to achieve the effect of a strummed guitar in the left hand, with soft chord changes, while the right hand melody dances moodily over the top. Going back to the score, I showed her why she did not like that A-D-E chord, and explained that it was a deliberate device on the part of the composer to create moments of tension, and delayed gratification, before the resolution comes on the next beat. “Music would be very boring if we didn’t have these crunchy harmonies and surprising moments,” I said.

It is this sense of delayed gratification that makes the Chopin Ballade I am working on (and indeed all his other music I play, or listen to), so fascinating, so suspenseful, and so utterly addictive. He forces player and listener to work hard, taking the ear on amazing harmonic journeys, to distant highways and byways, and so when it comes, the resolution, the “reward”, is all the more wonderful and satisfying. Sometimes it may sound ‘wrong’, but in Chopin’s extraordinary hands it is most definitely right.