Another Recital and Related Thoughts

I played the Piano at a small recital organised in my teacher's home last month. This was my second recital this year. I played two pieces - Theme and Variations by Theodore Kullak and Rocking Horse Ride (Opus 98, No. 5) by Alexander Gretchaninov. Kullak's piece presents a theme followed by five variations of that theme. The hand positions are fixed and the tempo increases in the fourth and fifth variations. 'Rocking Horse Ride' is taken from Gretchaninov's 'Children's Book'. It tells about a rocking horse that starts off slowly enough but soon accelerates and almost rocks too far. But all is well in the end.

The single most important difference from my previous recital was my increased confidence. This was not entirely surprising given that I had prepared myself better this time around. It helped that I had been out of work for a couple of weeks before D-Day. And I forced myself to take a quick nap in the afternoon before the event. It was a refreshing contrast from the previous before-recital afternoon when I was tightly wound up and excited.

All of it paid off in the end. I did not mess up any notes but I did feel that I could have done better on the dynamics.

On a related note I was told that my music practice had noticeably improved ever since I left my job. This was a bit surprising especially since I had not drastically lengthened my practice sessions. I think reduced stress levels made most of the difference. In retrospect I can see that work had been so draining that I had become used to being perpetually wound up and did not notice how it was degrading the quality of my life.

I don't seem to be the alone in being stressed out. I learned from my teacher that there was a time when recitals were far more frequent. According to her pupils these days (that includes me) take much longer to get ready for a recital. She stressed how barely half a generation ago pupils - who were also at school, had a job or were otherwise busy - were somehow able to find time to do justice to music. With every passing year pupils seem to have less and less time to practice, or indeed to focus on anything much outside work.

I have decided to actively combat stress the next time I start working a job. This would mean working regular hours, leaving work behind on stepping out of the office, learning to turn off my phone after hours and during weekends. I don't know how I'll achieve all these but I certainly am not going to let work deprive me of life again.

Recital

I played the Piano at a small recital organised in my teacher's home last Sunday. My piece was a Sonatina in C Major (Opus 34, No. 1) written by Johann Anton André. The piece has two movements, a song like moderato followed by a lively Rondo. The event came at the end of slightly more than a year of lessons. Last year at a similar event I was a novice sitting with the audience marveling at the performances. This year it was my turn to get behind the keys.

Unfortunately for me two of my friends were in attendance in spite of my best efforts to prevent them from coming. When my turn came I found myself quite nervous to even approach the "stage", in this case the piano in the middle of the living room. This came as a surprise. I was a public speaker in college and in spite of my many faults have never had a case of stage fright. Playing a well rehearsed piece for 25 odd people should have been easy, but wasn't because I was very anxious about missing a note or phrase.

As it turned out I ended up making mistakes in a couple of places in the first movement. I did not die on the spot; on the contrary I began to relax after completing the first few lines. The second movement went fairly well even if I say so myself.

I don't recall much about the audience reaction. I do recall that my friends did not boo but then they were not experienced enough to have recognised my mistakes :) Tasty refreshments were served afterward but my body was awash in adrenalin for me to work up much of an appetite.

In retrospect the recital was a good experience. It made me realise the need for any student of music to periodically perform in a (semi-)public setting. I would like to be a part of more such events in the future. These need not even be on the same scale as my recital. A group of four or five would suffice. Perhaps these events can be arranged along the lines of the very useful "losers club" meetings I have attended. I can think of several advantages of such gatherings. Besides bolstering their confidence attendees also get valuable feedback. The "mini-recital" format would force all to focus on coming up with measurable output (play a piece) as opposed to talking about it ("I practiced for a total of 15 hours last month"). I am talking to a couple of musically inclined friends to see if we can come up with something worthwhile. Let me see how it works out.

Integration Theory of Learning Music (aka what Music Lessons did for me)

I attended my first ever Piano recital at the Alliance Francaise de Bangalore sometime early in May 2003. On that warm Bangalore evening the young and talented Ms. Berenice de Gama Rose gave her farewell recital to a small but appreciative audience. Ms. Rose was leaving her position as a teacher of (Piano) Music at the Bangalore School of music to take up her Masters in Business Administration elsewhere. The music that filled my ears on that day evoked several emotions and started a train of thought in my mind. Later I attempted to categorize what I felt and thought that day. Here is a summary.

1. Awe. The skill with which the Performer played that beautiful Piano was outstanding - and it seemed all the more so to a worse-than-novice in music like me.
2. A feeling that can be best described as "impossibility". While I *logically* understood that what I had witnessed was the natural consequence of the six plus hours(!) of practice put in by the performer each day for several years, to my mind it would always be impossible for *me* to ever do anything even remotely similar.
3. Depression. Without much more explanation, let me just say that this usually follows points #1 and #2.
4. "Giving up". After I recovered from #3, I gave up the whole line of thought and crawled back to my Dilbertain existence.

A few weeks later I started Piano lessons in Bangalore and later when my work took me to Dallas found an exceptionally good teacher here (more on this in a later post). After more than a year of taking lessons and after a (very very simple, bordering on trivial) recital of my own, I reconsidered that evening in Bangalore. In the light of my own lessons, I now have a different look at things.

All music lessons start (or are supposed to) with the basics. As the student progresses on this track, the teacher introduces a fairly simple stand alone piece to work on. When I saw my first such (an arrangement of Placide Clappeau's 'O Holy Night') I could instantly *see* that I could do it - with a little bit of effort. This was a perception different from a *logical understanding* - i.e., perceiving that I could do a task as opposed to understanding that anyone can do it by putting in suitable effort. The focus is on the doing - rather than on the quantum of effort. This is made possible because the quantum of effort involved is *small*.

My recital came and went in December 2004, and early this year, I got my next advanced piece (an Arrangement one of J.S. Bach's Musettes). Here was a piece which was complex than my Christmas piece and yet I was confident that I could do it - in another month or so, after due practice. What is important is that if I had been told that I could do it when I started the lessons or earlier, I would have balked at it and possibly have had thoughts listed in observations #1 through #4.

A similar incident occurred earlier this month. I picked up 4A though 5B of Carl Fischer's 'Music Pathways - Repertoire' series of books. My teacher kindly agreed to play examples from each book so that I could hear first hand what they would sound like when played correctly. Boy! The pieces were beautiful. And I was astounded to realize that these were within my grasp - given adequate work of course.

This is the beauty of taking lessons, reading simple pieces of music and practicing with simple goals in mind. What lessons did for me was to help focus on the task at hand and prevent my mind from being overwhelmed by looking only at the finest, the masterpieces. And this realization I call my 'Integration theory of Learning Music'.

The theory states that if Joe aspiring-Pianist (or Manoj aspiring-Pianist, if you will) wants to be able to delight himself by playing Bach one day, he needs to start with the basics and take small steps at a time. And if Joe a-P does not have the will to stick to a schedule on his own, he should find a good teacher and pay him/her to force Joe to take those steps. For when you start at level 0 and are shown level 1, you know you can do it. And at the end of level 1, level 2 is only a few hours/days/weeks or practice away. And so on. The tiny dx(Lesson/Step/Quantum) when integrated over time will yield the quantity that makes playing Bach, Mozart and Beethoven possible.