Two Months!

Last Tuesday I had this thought: Yikes! The studio recital is in two months. Two months! Suddenly, my casualness about our ample time frame seemed foolhardy.

This reminds me of a student some years ago, who spent the entire first semester of the school year with the attitude that he had “All Fall” to learn his college audition pieces. “All Fall” seemed like a generous amount of time indeed. But as the weeks piled up and very little was getting down, “All Fall” dwindled down to nothing.

I’m afraid I have been lured into my own magical thinking lately. It’s been so hot, so clearly summer and it feels like the school year has just begun. A November recital sounded very far off. Comfortably so. But alas! Two months! Yikes!

This is when the rubber meets the road in the life of a piano teacher, for this is when I must pick out possible recital repertoire for students, which means I must put on the hat of Artistic and Music Director of the piano studio. After all, I want the studio recital to be a program that is varied and interesting and engaging, not only for the kids, but also for the audience as well. This means that there should be a variety of slower and faster pieces, shorter and longer pieces, heartbreakingly beautiful pieces and impressive and exciting pieces. Having said that, there is no question that the studio has a repertoire list of about 50 treasured pieces that come in and out of rotation. Many students play a good portion of these pieces and look forward to tackling one that they have heard often in studio class. It wouldn’t be a Ten thousand stars studio recital without a Little One playing “Green Frogs” or “Zachariah Zebra," but we don’t want to hear “Lady Allyson’s Minuet” or “Knight Rupert” too often. You can see that this process might involve a great deal of thought and consideration.

Of course, with older kids, they are already working on big pieces that will serve as their recital numbers, but for the mid-level kids and the Little Ones, it is time to start having what I call “The Recital Conversation.”

It goes like this:

Me: “OK, kid, so what are you thinking about the recital? Fast? Slow? Major? Minor?”

I always learn a lot about students from this conversation. Kids that I thought would never want to play anything lyrical will surprise me by saying they want something “chill.” (Good luck figuring out what “chill” means.) There are a lot of requests for “Fast and Fancy,” which bottoms out my tolerance for yet another Toccata. A Little One last Monday said, “You know what I really love about piano, Miss Amy? Staccatos and fifths.” Another student told me quite thoughtfully that she wanted something “mysterious and elegant.” I’m still stumped on that one.

It feels like this is the season to revisit lessons learned, and too often forgotten. “All Fall” is nothing but magical thinking when considering about the days and weeks ahead. Practices are built on daily, consistent work, putting in time not just when the urgent strikes (Two months! Yikes!), but day in and day out. I know this.

And many days I practice this, routinely working through not-immediate teaching tasks as part of my workday. I read through new music and order teaching collections. I keep a notebook of teaching ideas, technique exercises, improvisational or compositional cues. I organize materials and make lists of tasks or writing prompts. I draft out weekly studio emails and sort through videos and photos for the website. Often I don’t get swept up in “All Fall” thinking, because I’m just doing the practice, Getting Things Done as the David Allen book is so brilliantly titled.

But as my panicked Two Months! Yikes! moment last week revealed, clearly I have let things slip a bit around here. It seems that about the time when I think I’m totally on top of things, I relax my discipline. I tell myself I won’t do a teaching job today (or tomorrow, or maybe this week), because Hey! Things are going really well. They are going well. Indeed, so well, I should not stop the streak of good habits. Or as the writer Julia Cameron put it, “Don’t quit 5 minutes before the miracle.”  

Friends, there are so many miracles I have missed.

Which reminds me of another great truth, recently forgotten, that you can only deepen a practice when you think you don’t need it. In other words, only when things are going well do you have a chance to reach real depths of work or insight. Habits that are practiced only when we “need” them are simply survival techniques. Helpful, but not life changing. Certainly not “chill” or “mysterious and elegant,” which, now that I think about it, sounds quite like something I’d like in my life (not to mention my next recital piece) as well.

All of this brings me to yet one more half-forgotten lesson regarding the art of practicing: I Did Some.

Once a long time ago in a land far away, a young child named Kathryn came into her lesson with a sheepish look on her face. She set down her practice notebook on her desk and refused to meet my eyes. I knew enough about sheepish looks to suspect that there would be some issue with her practice boxes, but in fact her practice boxes were all filled in. However, they contained strange symbols, asterisks and checkmarks and stars. Above the boxes, Kathryn had written:

If there is a X, I totally did it. If there is an *, I did some.

Fast forward to Fall 2023, New Mexico, life in the post (??) pandemic, crazy mad, full-to-overflowing world.

I did some. Yep, that’s what I did this week, this month, today. I did some. I did some practicing, a lot of teaching, some laps in the pool. I did some yoga and some evening walks. I fought off a cold. I had breakfast with my mom and lunch with a friend. I picked out some “chill, staccato” recital pieces. I did some laundry, some watering, some sweeping. I did some.

It is too easy to get caught up in all-or-nothing thinking, but as I have told myself time and time again, life is made up of baby steps, small practices, tiny rituals and mostly unrecognized shifts. We do some, and practice boxes fill up one after another. I know this. I have forgotten it.

Last weekend we held our monthly studio performance classes. After the youngest kids had performed their pieces for their peers, we sat in a circle and talked about how things had gone. “Well, I was scared,” one kid admitted, “because this was my first time to play in a performance class.” “I was scared too,” another one said, “and I have played in lots of performance classes.” “Being scared is normal and OK,” I told them, “but what might make us feel less scared?” One Little One raised her hand, “If there were less people watching.” Hearing that, another kid jumped in, “Well there’s going to be LOTS of people watching at the recital. I mean LOTS.”

Two months! Yikes! All Fall is here. The temperatures have finally noticeably dropped, and while the days are still hot, the nights and mornings are deliciously cool. On Saturday I bought a dozen tiny pumpkins to scatter around the house. We have made our first pot of soup and the first apple-cranberry breakfast crumble for the season. Last week we spent two days and nights in Taos, escaping the relentless schedules and daily demands of our life back home. The Taos fall getaway used to be an annual tradition, but one that—mysteriously!—had fallen away due to busy calendars and other conflicts. It was good to be back in northern New Mexico. We drove up alongside the Rio Grande through canyons lined with chamisas turning brilliant gold and cottonwoods and aspens with their bright yellow leaves shivering in the sunlight. Back home yesterday I dug out a sweater from the back of my closet, another clear sign autumn is here. This morning driving back from the pool, the full moon was as big and orange as a pumpkin. I could almost touch it.

Chill. And elegant.