Chopping Wood
Since the beginning of time, most kids who learn to play the piano do so in a prescribed and formulated manner. Piano lessons typically take place once a week and, in between lessons, students are expected to practice their assignments every day on their own. This formal division between student and teacher, lesson time and practice time is so sacrosanct it is almost biblical.
This was not my experience. It may have been the 1970s, but mine was the kind of old-fashioned childhood that meant after dinner our family would gather, not around the television in the den, but around the piano in the living room. With my mother at our little Yamaha upright, we would sing songs from Sesame Street,Sunday School songs, children’s folk tunes. As we sang, my father, various younger siblings and I would hold hands and dance. Afterwards, Dad would put on a record—the likes of John Denver; Simon and Garfunkel; or Peter, Paul and Mary—and the dancing and singing at the top of our lungs would continue until we were exhausted, or until Momma made us go to bed.
It was in the midst of this musical mayhem that I must have declared that I wanted to play the piano. I don’t remember the details, but Momma tells me that shortly after my fourth birthday, she began introducing me to the basic musical concepts of notes and rhythms, finger techniques and hand positions. Rather than a set-aside weekly lesson, Momma sat with me every day as I practiced, defying all the normal expectations of traditional piano lessons and establishing a fixed pattern of working together at the piano that would continue for years. Day after day, week after week, she held the space for me while I practiced, thereby imprinting deeply upon me the discipline that continues in my life even today.
Every morning before anyone else in the house was awake, Momma would stand at my bedroom door, “Up like a bunny, Amy. Time to practice.” “I am not a bunny,” I would whine, climbing off the top bunk. As I slogged through my scales, half-asleep, she would sit next to me on the piano bench, curling her hair or eating cereal, firm in her conviction that practicing should be as ordinary and routine as brushing one’s teeth or bathing. She wrote the date we began each little piece in my cheery red John Thompson music primer in her neat, no-nonsense script. My mistakes were corrected immediately; I was not allowed to get off-task. Only later would I learn the art of wasting time, the practice of exploring freely at the piano, but this would be behind my mother’s back. "Play something real or don't play at all," Momma would yell from the kitchen where she was packing lunches or feeding a baby. In her eyes, practice time was both productive and sacred.
In our family there already existed a pattern of mothers teaching their daughters to play the piano, as predictable a family characteristic as the brilliant green eyes my grandmothers all shared. Around the turn of the twentieth century, my great-grandmother Beth learned to play the piano out on the Kansas prairie, traveling to the next town to take lessons and becoming skilled enough to play hymns at church during Sunday School. Grandma Beth taught her daughter Carol, at least in the beginning, before Grandma Carol moved on to another local teacher. Grandma, in turn, taught my mother, who then taught me. Whether or not Momma was qualified to continue this musical lineage is hardly the point. She was my mother. I was her daughter. This was how our family worked.
Once when I was about nine, Grandma Carol and Grandma Beth came to visit. I had a new book of piano duets. Momma and I had been practicing through them diligently, and I was eager to show off. So after dinner, the four of us gathered in the living room where Momma and I performed one duet after another. My grandmothers sat on the couch, portraits of Midwestern dignity and restraint, smiling and applauding proudly. There is no record of this event, except the one indelibly etched in my memory, a bittersweet reminder that the family tradition of mothers teaching daughters will end with me. I have no daughters, and even if I did, our audience of grandmothers is long gone.
These were formidable women, all of them, fiercely stubborn and loyal to the people they loved. Grandma Carol raised two daughters alone after her husband—my grandfather—was thrown from a horse. His brain stem crushed, he spent the remaining three decades of his life connected to a feeding tube and lying in a hospital bed at home. As a child visiting my grandmother, I would tiptoe into the back bedroom and watch him breathe, this grandfather I would never know.
But my stoic grandmothers wasted no time dwelling on the difficulties that might have fallen upon them. I never saw my grandmothers without their hair done. They always had fresh towels and clean sheets and never left dishes in the sink overnight. They never needed two pots of coffee in the morning to counter the effects of a late dinner and a bottle of wine. These women didn’t drink wine. Good grief, they didn’t even drink coffee.
I don’t know if in their worlds basic musical training was simply part of the Midwestern version of finishing school for women, as ordinary and commonplace as the sensible brown shoes they all wore or the red and green Jell-O salads topped with marshmallows they concocted, the china they painted or the sewing they did late at night after the children were asleep. By the time I knew my grandmothers they had long stopped playing the piano. My own mother hasn’t touched a keyboard in twenty years.
I do know, however, that this practice of teaching their daughters what they knew was as natural to these women as breathing. No one was worried about crossing that invisible psychological parent-child barrier; none of them gave any thought to pedagogy or even great music making. They were simply mothers, teachers and pianists doing what they do.
This morning as I sit down at the piano I glance outside the window. Clinging to the inside of the windowpane is a snail. Gently, I pull the little guy off and set him on the outside windowsill. Barely seven o’clock, it is still dark, the sun just beginning to creep over the Sandia mountains to my east. Mornings are still my favorite time to practice, my favorite way to enter another day, easing myself awake both physically and mentally.
I play through George Shearing’s arrangement of “Over the Rainbow.” Lately I have trained myself to start, not with every musician’s warm-up routine of scales and arpeggios, but instead by playing through some piece cold. Playing, not practicing. There’s a difference, of course, a distinction that I have spent a lifetime trying to clarify for myself. Playing implies a sort of performance, a mentality of moving through mistakes, keeping one’s attention on the whole instead of the details. Practicing, on the other hand, is all about the details. It means stopping and fixing wrong notes and sloppy pedaling, rehearsing dynamic shaping, breaking down tricky passages one hand, one phrase, even one rhythmic gesture at a time. Practicing is the worship of minutiae.
But my daily playing of some piece of music from my memorized repertoire is about something else entirely. It is a kind of test, a challenge to myself to prove once again that I really do play this instrument and that I can, without drama or fuss, sit down and perform something on command. My students and I call this practice “ColdPlay,” repurposing for our own amusement the name of the popular British rock band. ColdPlay tries to replicate an actual performing situation where a pianist is expected to walk across a room or a stage and begin playing. This is a new practice habit, one I adopted recently after yet another social situation in which I was unable to confidently play something upon demand. That particular evening my husband and I had just arrived at a cocktail party and had barely taken off our coats when the request came. “Hey Amy! We just got a new piano. Won’t you play for us?” Suddenly it was like I had never before seen a piano, like I didn’t spend almost every waking hour in front of those black and white keys. The room of my mind where I hold all my musical information and skills was locked tight, the key nowhere to be found. It was hardly the first time this had happened, but I was no less embarrassed for the familiarity of the situation. “I’m off duty,” I tried to blow off my sudden lack of nerve. “But I would love a glass of wine.”
It isn’t as if I don’t always have music memorized, ready to play. I do. It is just that for most of my life I have found that outside the held space of my practice time, I couldn’t reliably access my own repertoire. I was never one of those kids that could sit down at a party and entertain my friends. I couldn’t walk up to a piano in a hotel lobby and dash off something impressive. I couldn’t fill an unexpected empty space during a church service with one of the many lyrical and reflective pieces I have memorized over the years. Give me some advanced warning and ten minutes alone on an instrument and all would be fine. But audiences don’t want to hear our daily constitutionals, our musical jumping jacks and pushups. They want to hear music. And so, now every day I begin practicing by playing music.
After the Shearing, I jump into my regiment of technical exercises. Today it is Hanon, but another day it might be scales, or chord progressions, or arpeggios on dominant 7th chords. Charles-Louis Hanon was a 19th century pianist and pedagogue, most known for his volume of technical drills entitled The Virtuoso Pianist in 60 Exercises. The brilliance of Hanon lies in the radical simplicity of each exercise. Each one is built on a one-measure pattern of notes. This pattern is then repeated up one step, or key, on the piano, and then again, and then again, working up through two octaves note by note. At the top, the pattern is inverted, or turned upside down and inside out, and step by step it descends back to where it began. Each exercise contains only a skeleton of notes, the barest bones of music, and yet, every last one is a microcosm containing endless possibilities and variations. My volume of Hanon is so old and worn that the cover is torn off, the pages falling out. For me, Hanon is a familiar and comforting place to begin my technical work at the piano, yes, but it is also a sort of musical and mental structural alignment, a chance once again to yoke together my fingers, intentions and attention for another day.
This morning’s technical regimen includes a set of Hanon variations in the key of E-flat major. We speak of being in the “key of E-flat major” or the “key of C-sharp minor,” as if we are referencing a particular language, Chinese or Greek. To a pianist, B major feels entirely different than B-flat minor. B major lies easily under the hand, the five black notes of the key conforming naturally to the shape of our hand: the long fingers sit on the higher black notes, the shorter thumb assigned to play the white notes beneath. B-flat minor is awkward by comparison, requiring twists of the wrist to negotiate even the most basic passage, guttural Yiddish as opposed to the fluidity of French. But composers don’t avoid certain keys just because pianists find them difficult. And so, pianists practice scales. We review the chords that make up the language of each key. We play arpeggios, or broken chords, up and down the keyboard, circling through our musical cartwheels over and over again.
When time is short, I abandon Hanon and instead, I draw out thorny passages from my pile of current repertoire and tear them apart technically, creating my own kind of exercise. I play each hand, one at a time. I break down phrases or musical sentences in rhythms of long and short notes. I get out the metronome and work through a passage with a comfortable, easy tempo, like a runner stretching his hamstrings before a series of sprints. Technical practice is like the ten miles a sprinter runs for every 100-yard dash. It is the laps a swimmer puts in every morning or the free throws a basketball player practices by the hour. Scale and arpeggio practice serves as both skill development and maintenance, certainly, but it is really about finding the edges of myself and my instrument again for another day and sweeping out the cobwebs that have inevitably collected in the corners overnight. Oh yes, here I am again and this is what these eighty-eight keys feel like today.
My musical calisthenics behind me, it’s all about repertoire. I have a chamber concert in two weeks, which means a day of practicing the piano parts for a Schubert violin sonata, a Haydn piano trio, and the fiendishly difficult Rachmaninov cello sonata. This morning I start with the first movement of the Haydn by practicing the left hand alone, making sure I am not fudging the leaps and falling into the cracks in between thereby hitting two keys instead of one, or what pianists call “splitting” keys. I practice the extended right hand octave section, listening that the top note of each octave rings out more clearly than the bottom note. I put on a recording by the Beaux Arts Trio. Hearing another musician’s interpretation always opens up new ideas about how I might approach a piece, even if I disagree with the choices a pianist has made. “Listen to two recordings of your Chopin (or Grieg or Joplin) and make a comment in your practice notebook,” is an assignment I frequently give my students. I don’t care what they think about what they’ve heard, but I want them to think something. The first step in finding one’s musical voice is to develop opinions about what one hears. Listening to a lot of recordings, good or bad, sharpens not only our ears, but our tastes and preferences as well.
Recently, I had given this very assignment to Henry, a talented high school student. He came to his lesson having listened not to just two recordings, but five, certain I was going to praise his effort. I did, until I discovered he did this instead of the work he should have done at the piano during the week. He didn’t learn the new section of his Chopin Nocturne. He didn’t bother to practice scales. He ignored completely his assignment to memorize his Kuhlau Sonatina.
In my case, I am much more likely to blow off the listening I know I should do than my Hanon. Sometimes I feel sheepish about admitting this, afraid that someone will come and take my credentials away from me because I have to bribe myself to do my listening work. If I do put on music, my choice is most often anything but piano music. Leonard Cohen, Randy Newman, Ella Fitzgerald, string quartets, Gorecki’s Third Symphony, anything but the keyboard repertoire I live and breathe all day long. The truth is if I am not teaching or playing the piano myself, usually all I want is silence, a chance to scrub my ears clean of the sounds that otherwise clutter my thoughts. Listen to the Rachmaninov! I scribbled in my practice notebook yesterday. I never have to remind myself to practice scales.
What I forget, of course, is that listening just another word for practicing. It is, in fact, what musicians are really doing above and beyond anything else when we practice either alone or collectively: We listen. We listen to our sound, our articulations, our rhythms and notes, and adjust accordingly. We are listening, ultimately, to more than just the music at hand. We are listening to each other, to the dynamics and interplay between us. We are listening to ourselves, to the small inner voice that nudges at us saying, I wonder….is this the best you can do? Is this who you really are?
Turning off the recording, I flip to the last page of the movement and begin working backwards, section by section. My choice today to start at the end of the movement is somewhat arbitrary. Sometimes I start at the beginning or somewhere in the middle. The idea is to avoid the rut of always starting at the top and falling into the trap of knowing the first half of the piece better than the last. Starting in random places also turns my expectations of the music inside out and establishes new and different connections in the brain as opposed to merely rehearsing the same well-worn pathways. It’s much like taking a new route to a familiar location. Suddenly we see the world with fresh eyes when approached from a different direction. “I never knew that ice cream shop (that harmony, that melodic sequence) was there,” we think. “What a great little garden (chord, bass line)!”
I practice the Haydn slowly, way under performance tempo. This cautious speed allows my attention to be on the shape and phrasing of the melodic lines instead of whether or not I can safely manage the frenetic tempo. I play through the string parts, one at a time. Most often with collaborative music, pianists have the parts of all the instruments in our scores, giving us a wealth of information about what the other musicians should be doing. In comparison, the parts for the violinist and cellist contain only their musical lines. This has huge implications for how different types of musicians think. Pianists have the entire map in great detail. We can see trees, and mountains, and oh! there’s a river. Other instrumentals have only the most basic directions leading them from one place to another with little to no information about their fellow musicians’ journeys.
I experiment with accompaniment passages, places where I am supporting the violin or cello lines and try voicing the harmonies in various ways: first bringing out the top note of the chords, then leaning towards the bottom, and finally weighting each note equally. I make no decision about how I might play it in performance, but the work is valuable nevertheless, expanding my color palette of sound and texture and stretching my ability to be creative and spontaneous. This exploratory practice is about simply showing up and doing the work of being a musician, not about the end goal, whatever that might be. After all, repertoire changes, but the discipline of practice doesn’t, the theme forever reverberating through the variations of our work. One day follows another; we chop our wood.
Almost two hours have passed. The sun streams in through the windows, hitting the gleaming black surface of the piano and scattering prisms of colored light across the walls. What was just a little while ago only a dark gray mass in the distance, devoid of detail or distinction, the mountain range has slowly clicked into focus, the trees and rocks and ridges taking shape. Outside, a speckled mourning dove drinks from the birdbath; gold finches chatter at the feeders while two hummingbirds zip nervously across the courtyard. I notice that a woodpecker has taken over the hummingbird feeder, leisurely drinking the sugared water. The late-summer sunflowers and cosmos in the garden bleach pale in the harsh desert light; there are exactly a dozen bright yellow leaves on the mulberry tree across the street, a prelude of the autumn colors soon to paint the state a shimmering golden hue.
Restless, I get up from the piano bench and start the dishwasher. I water the plants in the sunroom. I walk out to the courtyard and fill the birdfeeders. I pour myself a cup of coffee.
Wandering back to the piano, I open the Schubert. The last movement is a tongue twister for the right hand. I work each of the melodic themes in the different sections slowly, stopping frequently on tricky turns and corners to ensure that my fingers land squarely on the keys, like a ballerina learning to balance on toe shoes. I get out the metronome and practice the movement at various tempos. Some tempos are just more natural than others, but the practice of working with different speeds increases musical flexibility regardless. Uncomfortably slow tempos in particular are revealing because they magnify every awkward gesture and highlight places where I might be tempted to use speed and momentum to cover up my technical holes. Switching the metronome off, I rework it again, inserting fermatas or exaggerated held notes into the curly-cued phrases in spots where I discover myself tripping and stumbling, as if massaging a cranky knot out of a muscle.
I resist the urge to play through the movement. Maybe tomorrow. It’s all too easy to mistake “playing” for “practicing.” But sometimes I get so engrossed in tearing a piece apart, I don’t put it back together in any holistic manner until the first rehearsal. This isn’t smart either, for sometimes the individual sections seem to work fine, but the whole is ragged, the seams showing. As part of the preparation process, the practice of playing can provide a lot of information about how things are going: Oh, can’t manage the transition between the exposition and the development. Wow, that octave passage sounds really rough. I’m going to need to pull back right before that accelerando towards the end if I am going to pace it well.
However, taking a piece out for a spin too soon is like repeatedly pulling up a plant to check to see if it is growing roots. Whatever the discipline—meditation or yoga, writing or gardening—practice, by its very nature, requires trust in the unknown, the invisible. Minute by minute, hour after hour, we reach blindly towards something we cannot see.
The sun moves across the sky. Out of the corner of my eye I catch sight of the snail, once again crawling across the inside of the windowpane. I pull him off and set him outside. This could be an exercise in endurance, or stubbornness. I wonder who will blink first. I return to the Schubert.