My Circus. My Monkeys.

I am at the point of my semester, my year (my life?) where if I don’t write something down, it’s lost forever. There are so many details, or as I often think of them, so many circuses. All with a lot of elephants. And tigers. And acrobats doing fancy things. I envy the friend who, when he hears about a problem, likes to say, “Not my circus. Not my monkeys.” My problem is that the circuses are all mine. There are many of them. I created them. And the monkeys are out of control.

Hence the notebooks. The little scraps of paper. The lists everywhere.

Last week I was teaching Cody. He is eight. He loves teasing the cats, playing pieces on the piano really fast and finding snails in my garden, which he searches for while his older brother is taking a lesson. What he doesn’t love are compositions or improvisations. Playing without a script makes him nervous.

To ease him into the skill, we do a lot of improv in his lessons. We improvise sounds and gestures depicting frogs and snails and oceans and rainstorms. Cody likes this just fine, but when it’s time for him to play something he might have worked out on his own during the week, he freezes. His improvs last about two and a half seconds.

One day, I had an idea. If I required that he had to keep his improv going for a certain number of seconds—33 seconds or 17 seconds or 29 seconds—Cody would probably be OK. After all, he is an obedient kid who wants to please me (my favorite kind). Like a dog who needs a crate to feel safe, Cody just needs a container for his creativity. He needs to know where it starts and where the finish line is. So that day after assigning him a 27-second improvisation “Windchimes” using only black notes, I wrote in my teaching notebook: Cody 27-second composition.

And then this happened. The next week when it came time for Cody’s lesson I looked at my notes, saw “Cody 27-second composition” and thought, Wow! That’s brilliant. However did I think of that?

Which tells you something about my world. It’s all new. Every day.

I shudder to imagine all the monkeys that escape the cages of my work and life and routines all the time. Because just this last week these were the circuses I was trying to manage:

The end-of-the-year studio stuff. This means collecting deposits from current students towards next year, contacting students on my waiting list for initial interview lessons, getting the summer schedule ready to go. I had a May 1st deadline on all of the above, which is one way to celebrate May Day.

Also in the studio: we are weeks away from the spring recital, which means extra focused work in lessons, final performance classes and lots of waving my magic wand in hopes of having 28 kids peak at the exact same time—precisely at 5pm on May 18. In addition, my adult students had their second-ever studio class last week (I don’t want to freak them out, so I call it “Studio Class” not “Performance Class." Don’t tell them, but it’s the same thing.). This resulted in lots of requests for “emergency” piano lessons before their scheduled class. For the first-ever adult studio class a few months ago, we took the edge off with wine and nibbles. This time we were all business, and right to the big boys: Bach, Chopin and other pedagogical gems of the repertoire.

In the performing realm, which is another circus altogether, I played a trio concert with two colleagues mid-April. I played with the New Mexico Philharmonic the following weekend. This week was the final concert of the season of Movable Sol, the house concert series a friend and I produce. Two concerts. Four rehearsals. God only knows how many emails and conversations about wine glasses and chairs and piano tunings and publicity.

And that’s just three-rings of work madness.

In Better, Atul Gawande talks about the importance of keeping notes and observations about what we notice in the world around us as a way of making us better at what we do. Gawande is a physician, but the advice still resonates. “Count something,” he writes. “Regardless of what one ultimately does in medicine—or outside of medicine, for that matter—one should be a scientist in this world. In the simplest terms, this means one should count something.”

I don’t think he means beats, although as a musician that resonates too. I think he is telling us that we all have circuses, the monkeys are out of control, and our job is to pay attention, take notes and count.

So this week here are some things I have noticed in the studio:

A younger sibling of an older piano student will make the EXACT same mistakes on the same pieces even if years have elapsed in between the two students. I know this because siblings often use the same scores and I can see my ugly red marks indicating the mistakes of the older kid. Why is this? Do they retain some memory of hearing their sibling practice the mistake? Or do my red scribbles derail them from reading correctly? Or is it some strange genetic piano thing that causes all the children in the same family to play the rhythm in measure 12 of Hippopotamus Hoopla wrong and to miss every B-flat?

It seems that every single student, regardless of age or background, has a stronger facility with treble clef than bass clef. This is true even of the very youngest, most impressionable students who, under my instruction, learn them simultaneously and in a similar fashion, using the space notes as landmarks and lots of flashcard drills. So why?

Again, regardless of age or level, a student’s first reaction to the instruction, “Now find D minor position” (or C minor or F minor or any white key minor) is to immediately put their hands in D-flat. Usually D-flat major. It is as if they somehow absorb the concept that minors have a lower sound, and therefore they transpose the whole position down a half-step rather than just lower the third note of the position. I have seen 7-year-olds do this. I have seen 47-year-olds do this. I have seen 67-year-olds to do this. Not only is this tendency widespread, the habit persists for years, even in intermediate players, who might quickly catch their mistake, but make it nevertheless.

So, this happens every single time I am teaching the F major scale. The student has been working for some time on what I consider to be the first set of scales—C, G, D, A and E—and we are now moving into flat scales. We discuss the B-flat in the key signature and the fact that we must be mindful of the fourth finger of the right hand playing the B-flat. Students all nod. They watch me demonstrate and then, every single time, the student—no matter their age or intelligence—will wind up at the top of the F scale and then play an F-sharp. Every. Single. Time.

Here's something else I’ve noticed:

Paying attention and taking notes is a form of meditation. We count breaths. We count students and their mistakes and all the ways we fail them. We count beats in rehearsals. We count ideas and insights and marvel at all the wisdom we forget every day. We count tasks to do for this circus or for that one. We count days until the recital and numbers of programs needed for the audience. We gather up our lion tamers and our acrobats and hope the monkeys will show up on time. We count the seconds of our improvisations and then we realize:

 It’s all improvisation anyway.