The Joys of Summertime

Summertime might be my very favorite time of year to teach piano lessons.

This might work against the spirit of “summering,” which years ago we discovered was a verb in New England. We had just moved to Boston from Fort Worth, where there was no cheerful summering, just the hope of surviving months of interminable heat. Nor did anyone “summer” in the Midwest where Matt and I grew up, because of the humidity and mosquitos. What we did was hide in our air-conditioned houses. But in New England, folks “summer,” in New Hampshire or on Nantucket. They keep summer cottages on lakes in Vermont. They arrange work schedules in June and July to allow for long weekends out of the city. Even God “summers,” and cancels church back home in Boston while the Almighty is at the Cape for the season.

I like everything about this idea. But alas, these days I live not in New England, but in New Mexico.

New Mexico summers are not without their charms, however. Just last night Matt and I were eating dinner in the courtyard and commenting about how lovely it was. The sun was setting and throwing pink colors across the sky. There was a bit of a breeze. The humidity lately has been hovering at about 13%. While the days are plenty hot, trust me, if you can arrange your life to be outside in the bookends of the day as much as possible, summering in New Mexico has its charms.

But I was talking about summer piano lessons, which also have their charms.  

After months of competing with homework and soccer practice, summer lessons present a world of possibilities. Kids are less tired from a long day at school; they don’t have the distractions of math tests and Spanish quizzes; there are no 6am alarms so they can meet the school bus. Sure, there are camps and vacations and swim lessons and baseball games, but give me a morning of lanyard-making. or an hour learning to back float over the stresses of a typical Tuesday in 6th grade any day.

Sweet summer days not only free up mental and emotional space in our lives, but in the music studio we are also liberated from our own self-imposed tyranny of performance classes and recitals. There are no school talent shows. There are no festivals in June or July requiring three memorized pieces from three different musical periods. I support all these things, by the way. Yet at the same time, nothing makes me happier then to be relieved of their pressures. Now I can just teach kids to play the piano, performance goals be damned.

(It reminds me a bit of what happened when the world shut down in March 2020. While like everyone, I had my own share of anxiety and concerns and fears, for the first time in adult memory, my schedule was completely cleared, no obligations or responsibilities whatsoever. It was simultaneously terrifying and amazing.)

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that summer lessons are often the time to tackle new skills at the piano. And diving into chord work is as good a place to start as any, I think. After all, the ability to play chords and to harmonize with our own melodies is one of the things that distinguished us from our fellow single-line musicians. Every good boy does not just play scales or arpeggios. Chord exercises are every bit as important to building technique.

Practicing scales and chord progressions has long been the default approach to teaching students a tactile knowledge of each major and minor key. This has long been my approach as well, assuming that with enough solid technique work, students will be intimately familiar with every nook and cranny of the key of G or the key of B-flat. This, I have come to realize, just isn’t true.

My dear teacher Jane Allen’s infamous Scale Exercise certainly helps this deficiency, because it forces us to slip and slide through every possible position and shape within each key. But still, a student can be woefully ignorant of what chords make up each key. The old I-IV-I-V-V7-I progression is great, but one can start to think that these are the only chords out there. While 75% western music might indeed consist of I, IV and V chords, enabling students in their belief that this is the entire harmonic world of music is just plain wrong.

Enter Diatonic Chord Scales. This is a fancy name for a simple exercise: play a chord on each note of an ascending and descending scale. For example, the key of C, it would look like this:

C major chord, d minor, e minor, F major, G major, a minor, b diminished and C major. 

First play each chord going up and down the scale in root position, while naming the chords (I’m telling you, friends, that naming the chords out loud is where the rubber meets the road.). Then after reviewing all keys in root position, move to 1st inversion, and then 2nd inversion. In my assignments, I opt for playing hands separately and mix up hands and inversions at random.

Here I must make a confession: this has been a painfully enlightening experience. While I thought students who could rip through four octaves of major and minor scales, chord progressions in every inversion, and sophisticated and advanced piano literature would have no problem with this simple exercise, I was wrong. Without deliberate and intentional work, students have a less instinctual feel for each key than I thought. A-flats would show up in the key of B-flat. The key of D suddenly had an abundance of D-sharps. Students seemed completely lost as they worked their way up each scale. Going down was even worse. They had the exact opposite reaction to this task as to the Scale Exercise they were learning at the same time, which provoked feelings of confidence, joy and happiness (“I don’t know why we are even doing this, Miss Amy,” they said. “This is easier than regular scales.”) Instead, the Diatonic Chord Scales inspired groaning and whining, my two favorite things. (“I don’t know why we are even doing this, Miss Amy. It’s so hard and it doesn’t help me at all.”) 

In vain, I tried to explain to students how I saw this. “You know those optical illusion paintings? The ones where if you stare long enough then suddenly a tiger jumps out and that is all you can see? Then if you blink, it becomes a mountain and the tiger is gone? Well, when I look at the piano and you say, ‘the Key of D-flat’ then the notes of the D-flat scale jump out at me almost as if they are another color or a tiger or something.” The kids looked at me like I was crazy. Clearly, we have our work cut out for us.

All this reminds me of the Billy Collins poem “Piano Lessons” where he talks about playing scales on the piano:

…C is an open book.

D is a vase with two handles.

G flat is a black boot.

E has the legs of a bird…

Unfortunately, my students see no birds or vases or boots in any key. They’d much rather be making lanyards.

Which reminds me of another really great Billy Collin poem, by the way.

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

-from The Trouble with Poetry: and Other Poems (2005)

You’re welcome. Happy Summering.