I am convinced that playing staccato makes pianists nervous.

Unlike other instrumentalists, when pianists play staccato they lose contact with their instrument completely. Think about this. No wonder it makes us uncomfortable and anxious.

I am not sure that the antidote to this nervousness is to just play staccato so often that we get used to the idea. That might work to a certain degree, yes, but does feel a bit like a band-aid solution, for while it might get us friendly with playing staccato passages, it doesn't do much for the issue of becoming confident with leaving what I like to call the "air-space" of the piano. We might feel OK about the distance of one or two inches that most staccato playing requires, but to develop ease with the bigger drops and lifts out of the immediate air-space that lovely physical playing requires, well, that's another issue entirely.

I guess I've seen too many "helicopter" players. Pianists that, no matter what they were playing, hovered over the keys, barely ever losing contact with the surface. This is a perfect example where the physical action informs the mind, because such hovering not only looks, but actually is, rather nervous and insecure, and sends a corresponding anxious signal to our brains. (Quite on the opposite end of the spectrum is those extremely flamboyant pianists whose gestures are so big as to seem ridiculous. I was recently at a concert of such a pianist, whose playing I quite admire, but I couldn't really buy into the need to throw his hands OVER his head three times in the first five minutes. This was more than dramatic, it was unsightly.)

So today's 5-Finger Positions address the skills of lifting and dropping into the keyboard, and creating physical gestures that bubble up out of both musical phrases and natural, organic technique. I keep these positions simple, since the goal is the gesture, not the pattern. Obviously, these can be done in both major and minor positions, but the focus is on the shape and movement between octaves, not really the notes themselves.

Ascending:

34. Do Re Mi Fa Sol

Play hands alone the pattern one time in three ascending octaves.

Watch for beautiful "arc" between each octave which occurs from the lift out of the first pattern and the drop in to the second and so on.

35. Do Mi Sol

(Same instructions as above)

Descending:

36. Sol Fa Mi Re Do

37. Sol Mi Do

Young students like these an awful lot, and they lead to all sorts of ease moving around the keyboard. This also sets us up nicely for those kind of rote pieces that have lots of moves up and down the piano. I have been told more than once that I play the piano like a dancer, that whatever my playing may lack in certain areas, it is beautiful to watch. It is true that I have sometimes cared more about how playing looks and feels than how it sounds, which may be screwed up on lots of levels, but working with these positions allows me to teach "dance" moves on the keyboard, making me at the very least, a content teacher.

Today I bought four roses: two climbers and two small bushes. They were 75% off at my local Jackalope because they were "mystery" roses, which means someone lost the tags that should identity variety and color. Since the whole art of growing roses is a mystery to me, I don't see the "mystery" roses as particularly risky or threatening so I gleefully bought them. Such a purchase is a gesture of hope, not only that the winter storm we had this week is only a fluke and not a return to cold weather, but also toward another whole year of gardening. I am ready--beyond ready--to reclaim the garden for another season of outdoor living, turning our front courtyard and back garden into "bonus rooms" to our house. In fact, I have resorted to bribery to keep myself from hauling outside all the geraniums and catci that have been wintering indoors in my sunroom. My favorite weekend every spring is the one when I can clear out the dozens of plants that fill the corners of my house for a long six months every year, making our tiny living space that much more crowded. I have decided Easter weekend is the chosen date this year for this happy event, although every day I practically have to tie my hands behind my back to prevent myself from carrying outside even one little plant. Maybe it won't matter, I try to persuade myself. Maybe this is the year we won't get a late spring frost. I know this is futile wishing, because it is simply too early to risk even the heartiest succulents. But hourly I have this internal conversation with myself, counting the days till Easter. In the meantime, I am trying to quiet my distructive gardening urges by reading books by other gardeners. Lately, I have been consuming Onward and Upward in the Garden, by Katherine White, who was the wife of Charlotte's Web's own E.B. White. Ms. White, as I feel sure she was called, wrote about gardening for The New Yorker, and her astute observations about everything from gardening catalogues to flower arranging make her a fine companion to my first cup of coffee in the morning. Up to this point, she is even suppressing my urge to do something in the garden that I will most likely regret later.

Recently, we have celebrated spring break, both in the public schools in our city and in my studio. I spent the much of the week throwing myself into domesticity, as I so often do whenever there is a pause in my work schedule. I planted my new mystery rose bushes, and spent many happy outside hours doing those early spring gardening chores. Inside, I cleaned a bit, sorted through winter clothes in the first attempt at turning over our closets for the season, organized files and piles. We refinanced our house, finished the last of the tax details for the year, and shredded twelve months worth of random papers. It felt good, this sifting and sorting, filing and fussing around the house. Undoubtedly, it will make it easier to work in the weeks to come because I am simply more organized, but more than that, this kind of cleaning seems to open up space in my brain and my life, rearranging tired old patterns and behaviors, and dusting off abandoned but valuable ideas and habits. It's a good thing, this spring cleaning of the soul; I feel sorted out and polished up, and almost---almost--ready to tackle the next daunting, full-to-the-brim, six weeks.

In between bursts of spring weather and cleaning was a trip to Lubbock for lessons with my coach, Bill Westney . This time I traveled with a musical colleague, Jerome , and my always-up-for-anything-kind-of-friend, Lora . ("Lubbock Funfest Spring Break 2009," as Lora took to calling it.) Twelve hours in the car, four hours of lessons, one pair of snake-skin cowboy boots purchased, a visit to the grave of Billy the Kid, and a cooler of Blue Bell ice cream smuggled over the border will be the lasting memories from Funfest 2009. The following week, Matt and I did an overnight in Santa Fe that produced a great black wrappy thing bought in a boutique, but was mostly colored by the stomach flu I fought all week. I played a New Mexico Symphony concerto competition with a symphony-playing colleague (she--we--won!) and finished up a recording project with a singer. I read a lot, fell asleep every night to old Quincy episodes, saw friends for drinks, coffee and dinners. It was, in spite of the stomach flu, a great week.

In a front yard halfway between Lora's house and mine sits a funny bird statue. Last fall, during one of our early morning walks past the house, Lora decided that the bird looked cold, and needed a scarf to get through the winter. "I am going to scarf that bird," Lora announced, and proceeded to knit a bird-size scarf. The evening of January 1, after several glasses of wine, Lora and I snuck over to our nameless neighbors and "scarfed the bird." I thought the mischief was over, but as the scarf remained on the bird seeing (the neighbors apparently liked it), Lora began making further plans. These involved costumes and accessories fitting every major holiday. For Valentine's Day there would be a new bright red scarf with fringe. (The fringe part made me nervous, because I knew Lora can't fringe. That could only mean I would fringing the bird scarf, further implicating me in this crime.) On February 13, I finished Lora's knitting and fringed both ends; Lora bought glittery heart-shaped stakes to stick in the ground below the bird, and "Scarfing the Bird, Take Two" was accomplished, documented by our friend Katie, home from college. (We really ought to know better than to get underaged people involved in our criminal behavior.)

Since then, there has been a St. Patty's Day costume: a green scarf, and a headband decked with twirly shamrocks which sits jauntily on the poor statue's head, and large shamrocks on posts driven into the ground in front. The men who live there clearly don't care, and also don't appreciate the stealthiness in which we are managing the change of costumes. The morning of St. Patrick's Day we got the changeover down to about 15 seconds. There is a pink bow in the works for Easter (with rabbit ears and rubber ducks to float in the Zen pond nearby), a sombrero and poncho for Cinco de Mayo, something white and wedding-like for June, and so on down the calendar year.

It is always a good idea to have a back-up career ready to go, and perfecting my stealthy scarfing the bird routine is a good place to start in case the music thing doesn't work out. Meanwhile, I have my own mysteries right here in my little patch of the planet, what with the four new roses and all, and plenty of musical and pedagogical work to keep me out of trouble for a while, as I take a deep breath and plunge into the next marathon month.