A Precariously Perfect Imbalance
Yesterday, Jake played a little intermediate piece for me in his lesson. Everything, it seemed, was wrong. It was difficult to know where to begin, and I had to fight the urge not to just start reciting a laundry list of things that need fixing. One thing at a time, I reminded myself. One thing at a time.
"You break it down and then you build it up," wrote Adam Gopnik about teacher and football coach Kirk Varnedoe. You break it down and then you build it up, I tell myself, when faced with Jake's messy playing and multiple problems. You break it down and then you build it up.
As I have done so many times before with so many students, slowly Jake and I began the thorny work to untangle problems. First, I corrected notes and rhythms and he played the piece again, a section at a time, until I was convinced it was secure. Then we talked about the balance between the melody and the accompaniment: "Left hand less, right hand more," I wrote in his practice notebook, as I have written in hundreds of notebooks. This phrase could be my epitaph, carved on my tomb to sum up a lifetime of work: Left hand less, right hand more. Jake knows this, and could do it easily, but in his impatience so often he forgets to listen. "Amy," he said to me, "you know, it isn't really 'balance' at all. It's really imbalance. I was playing 'balance' already." He was right, catching our funny semantics. Musicians say “balance” to describe what is really an imbalance between the melody and harmony. Jake played through the piece again, this time 'imbalancing' voices more musically. Finally, we addressed other details—dynamics, tempo changes—walking through the piece a final time.
It would, admittedly, be easier if I could simply make a list of things to fix and quickly move on to the next thing on our agenda. There's always too much to do in every lesson. If I want to teach holistically, then our lessons are divided between various categories of skills: technique, repertoire, ear training, theory, improvisation and creativity, rhythmic activities, sight-reading. We never get to everything, but eyes on the clock, I am always juggling, frantically trying to balance.
The idea of balance has been on my mind lately. After several years under the pandemic cloud when both the world and our personal lives struggled to find any sort of equilibrium, I find myself still knocked a bit sideways, my perspective skewed. A freelance musician’s work life often swings wildly between feast and famine, too many concerts and performances and rehearsals and lessons followed by long empty stretches. I cram hours of extra rehearsals in preparation for a series of weekend house concerts or a symphony concert, but when the performances are behind me, I suddenly have loads of extra space in my practice schedule. I teach 33 lessons every week all fall, and then have three weeks off for winter break. The whiplash between intensity and emptiness is disconcerting and welcomed at the same time.
This is the yin and yang of both good teaching and graceful living: the practice between working thoroughly and deeply in a few areas and sweeping widely and covering lots of concepts. The balance comes from the tension between the discipline of sequencing carefully and learning to relinquish details to the service of the whole. It can never be simply one thing or another. Almost daily, I remind myself that flexibility is a practice too. "Yoga teaches us to hold two opposing ideas at once," my teacher often says. "You have to learn to do two things at the same time that on the surface appear to be contradictory." Ironically, in order to find balance—or imbalance, as Jake would say—it means constantly negotiating between opposing forces and competing ideas, living inside a precariously perfect imbalance, our feet firmly on the ground.
Or if not firmly on the ground, at least tripping along with our eyes wide open. And there’s the rub: tt means paying attention. Around here that translates to a few minutes every morning at my desk scribbling notes about what needs to be done, what corners can be cut or simply skipped altogether, what is working, what isn’t. It means giving more time to the Brahms this month, and less to the Beethoven; more time to the garden, and less to housework. This morning it was Bach and an early morning swim. Tomorrow it will be Shostakovich and the laundry. Or Debussy and Chopin, Barber and Beethoven; weeding and yoga, writing and taxes. There are ten thousand ways to spend one’s hours. The hawk circles, circles, circles. What matters is holding the space, showing up again and again to the piano bench, the yoga mat, the flowerbed, the meditation cushion, the blank piece of paper. It’s all practice.