Coldplay, Again
We are in pre-recital mode around here. That means a lot of ColdPlay.
ColdPlay, you may remember, is our name for performance runs without warmup. Literally, cold. Or in some cases, frozen.
Research shows that there is great value in such pop quizzes, that mini-test situations help solidify learning regardless of how successful the attempts seem to go. In other words, we learn by figuring out what we know and what we don’t know. ColdPlay or musical/memory pop quizzes can take a variety of forms, but all are intended to better mimic an actual performance situation. After all, audience don’t want to listen to our daily calisthenics. No one pays a ticket to hear scales or repetitions with the metronome. And so, when a performance deadline looms before us, we learn to start practice sessions with a performance run of our recital pieces. Students get in the habit of ColdPlaying a specific spot or section every time they walk by the piano. In lessons, we test memory markers, starting at different places in their pieces. Sometimes these situations can be painfully revealing, but all good.
And lately, all very cold around here, because we’ve just endured the first cold snap of the season without heat in the house. A gas leak when the furnace was started up led to the gas company taking our meter, which translated into no heat, no oven/stove, no hot water. For five days, Matt and I tried to convince ourselves of the health benefits of cold plunges. Mostly, we are not convinced.
But it certainly drove home the idea of ColdPlay, both literally and metaphorically. Or perhaps it’s the season for deep sudden plunges into new rituals and practices. After a whirlwind few months of performance deadlines and back-to-back musical projects, I found myself last week with a welcomed break in practice pressure. “Good,” I thought to myself as I contemplated the backlog of emails and errands, house chores and garden tasks, “I can dig myself out this week.”
I was buried deeper than I thought. Add a handful of extras—two last-minute appointments with the ophthalmologist, flu and Covid vaccinations, and (see above) a gas leak with a revolving door of plumbers and city inspectors—and my days were quickly robbed of any sense of normalcy. “I was just able to crawl up and down my daily life, nothing more,” wrote novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner. Exactly. “Crawling” was not the restful break in routine I had intended at all.
What I had anticipated was reaching a point of equilibrium and then returning to the piano bench, clear-headed and fully sorted out, but that was wishful thinking. There would be no balance achieved here, no empty inbox, no blank slate on which to start again. Sigh. Instead, turns out life is messy, there are leaks everywhere, we are never fully warmed-up and ready to go.
Maybe ColdPlay isn’t just a clever testing strategy, meant merely to illuminate our weaknesses and cracks. Maybe ColdPlay is life lived well. We plunge in and stop waiting until our desks have cleared. We let go of the idea that things will be better “as soon as…” and start owning the complicated days we have. We dive deep at the passions and loves and curiosities that beckon, and trust that our practices will sustain us.
Easier said than done, perhaps. Meanwhile, gas line and hot water restored, I catch up on laundry and cooking. I squeeze in a private yoga session with a favorite teacher. In every nook and corner of the house, I cram the geraniums and succulents that had summered outdoors. One afternoon, I take a long walk with a friend. As we wander up and down the streets of our neighborhood, we circle our lives, talking. The season of cold weather is ahead of us. Time to play.