The June Playlist

Several summers ago, I was teaching Peter the intricacies of chord scales. Specifically, we were working on identifying diminished harmonies. 

Peter was a smart kid. There was no problem with him recognizing the harmony in question. What he couldn’t remember was the correct label for a diminished chord. Every week he had a new variation: “Depleted.” “Reduced.” Or my favorite: “Dehydrated.”

That year, amused by Peter’s creative vocabulary, I decided that if summer was a chord, it would be a diminished chord. Certainly, this summer is all of the above: depleting, reducing, dehydrating, diminishing. The temperatures hang out in the mid-90s. The Rio Grande is completely dry; even the cacti are shriveling. We suffer from crazy winds almost every afternoon and evening which means that the fire danger is high and scary. Our fat and fluffy friend Trollope is beyond himself. Please make this stop, I can hear him saying as he sprawls out listlessly under the ceiling fan. Like a migraine sufferer, Truffle has taken to hiding in dark places—under quilts, on a pile of towels in the top of a hall closet, down in the dark basement —just to escape the relentless light. 

Most mornings I get up at 5:00am to try to grab a few hours before the heat descends upon us. Throughout the day, I ice my espresso and my tea; eat tons of watermelon and sorbet; take cold showers. I swim laps. Still, I am depleted, reduced, dehydrated and diminished. “There is no way I can be witty and pretty and bright,” I warn Matt at dinner. 

Welcome to summer in the desert, with all its charms.

The June 2026 Playlist of Summertime Practices:

Gardening: The verb of the month is “watering.” I water in the mornings; I water in the evenings. I collect water from the shower and the kitchen sink and throw it on any plant in my path. Even with all my good intentions around creating a drought-friendly garden, there is still so much watering that must be done. 

And after months of having potted plants thriving outside, last week these same cacti and succulents started showing signs of sunburn. I had thought I had given them enough exposure that they could withstand the harsh mid-day sun in June, but no. I spent an anxious week monitoring sunlight in every corner of my garden and moving plants around every hour in my attempt to lessen the heat and light damage. Every year I forget that there will be a period of weeks in our New Mexico summers where nothing can tolerate our fierce sunshine. Not me, not the heartiest cactus or succulent, nothing.   

Which is a good reminder about the importance of flexibility in practice. The minute I think I have figured out the perfect practice, the practice changes. We must change or burn, hydrate or shrivel, grow or reduce. Our practice boxes shift with the season.

Writing (from Lather. Rinse. Repeat. October 2023.):

I fear my entire life these days could be summarized in three words: Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Of course, this could be said of any musician, or certainly any person of practice. Like Buddhist monks creating their mandalas out of sand, every day we show up to our instruments, or our meditation cushions, or our yoga mats. We work through scales, rehearse thorny passages, read through new repertoire. We sit and watch our breath, trying to quiet our monkey minds. We make our way from downward facing dog to plank to savasana. And then the next day, we do it again. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. 

Which is all another way of thinking about practice boxes, really. 

Practice Boxes are the method of practice accountability in my studio. In students’ practice notebooks, we take down detailed lists of assignments and practice steps, make notes about fixing wrong notes or rhythms, scribble reminders about listening for exaggerated dynamics in the slow movement or clean pedaling in the coda. But above all, we draw practice boxes.

In a typical week, I require five practice days, or five practice boxes. If we know we are going to miss the next lesson for some reason, students expect ten practice boxes (This inevitably makes the Little Ones whine and groan, “Ten boxes! Miss Amy, it’s too many!” No matter how many times I try to explain calendar mathematics, they are convinced I am cheating them somehow.). And sometimes during longer holidays or vacations, we negotiate the number of boxes. But generally, week in week out, five. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

… Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if everyone had practice boxes, a sort of daily accountability coach or spiritual teacher prodding us into our best selves. Because here’s the thing: I think if we search ourselves, we all know what should go in our practice boxes. I need to account for laps swam, or minutes on the yoga mat or meditation cushion. I need a gentle push to make sure I’m putting in daily writing time, or remembering to check in with those I love but don’t regularly see. I need a system for tracking house and garden chores, sure, but also for making sure I fill my diet with fruits, vegetables and plants, and not too much gluten or chocolate. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Teaching (from The Joys of Summertime June 2023):

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

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. 

Fast forward to June 2026: It is good that we can forget piano performance goals in the sweaty summer months because if the studio spent most of February learning the rules of curling, we are devoting much time these days to discussing the World Cup and soccer goals. “Miss Amy! Who is your favorite team?” I am asked this at least five times a day by enthusiastic pianists wearing soccer jerseys. 

Inevitably, I hedge a bit. I had not anticipated such an outpouring of energy and focus on this sporting event. “I’m still deciding. Who are you watching?”

This is where it gets interesting. Every kid supports the USA, but then their second and third favorites are all over the place. Congo. Argentina. Spain. UK. Croatia. Haiti.

That last one piqued my interest. “Why Haiti?” I asked the 11-year-old who offered this choice. “Tell me more.”

“Well,” began Jeffrey. “I’m going to tell you what my mom said. She said Haiti had lots of natural disasters and bad luck. Most of the time they can’t pull together a soccer team, but this year they did so we should support them.” 

And then there was the Supreme Court ruling just this week…sigh.

I’m sold. Sign me up, kid.

Listening/Practicing: About a dozen years ago, Matt Greer noticed a problem: Choral singers in Albuquerque had nothing to do in the summertime. Choirs were off for the summer, and singers were roaming the streets getting into all kinds of trouble. 

Thus, the Quintessence Summer Choral Festival was born.

It’s a thing. It’s THE thing in the lives of the two Greers living in this house every summer. It is a weeklong (really 10 days) event consisting of hours and hours of rehearsals, classes and concerts, and hosting dinners and drinks for visiting musicians and friends. In addition to the mass choir made up of some 150 singers, there is a Scholars Choir of high-school and college-aged kids with their own repertoire, rehearsals and requirements. Suffice to say, this month’s playlist of music to listen to, practice and rehearse is deep.

Amidst the festival madness that begins in a few weeks, Matt will plug away at his full-time church job; I will teach in the margins of this exhausting rehearsal schedule. And we share one car, by the way. 

Meanwhile, there is a marriage here that demands extra protection against the elements. Inevitably this event, with so many late nights, takes place during the hottest week of the summer, when no one in the Greer household is sleeping well. We know by now that we will be cranky and irritable and tired. At various times and in various situations that week, we will both be called upon to be the good cop or the bad one, and have to be skilled enough to switch roles on a dime. After all these years, Matt is well-schooled in reading the signs indicating that I need not another social engagement, but an early night. I will need to remember when I am tempted to offer an unsolicited opinion that this is not my circus, not my monkeys. These days I often think of the code phrase the writer Elizabeth Gilbert used to share with her partner: Let’s be very careful right now, okay? Which was a way of saying: “I need to remember that I love you a lot because right now I am not being my best self.” Did I mention that Matt and I share a car?

This year the Quintessence Choral Festival hoopla is multiplied by a power of 10. 

Here’s why: Last summer at the festival it was announced that in 2026 the Quintessence Festival Chorus would be doing the American premiere of Taylor Davis’ Requiem, a piece that was written for and recorded by our Voces8friends in the UK.

Taylor is an old friend of Matt’s. Years ago, a member of Matt’s St John’s choir and a dear friend of ours, Carolyn, commissioned Taylor to write a five-movement Magnificat, a piece that Voces8 later recorded and Matt conducted at a festival in London in June 2022. Carolyn, one of those patrons and angels in the musical world, had a hand in commissioning this summer’s Requiem as well. 

AND Matt has been invited to conduct this piece at Carnegie Hall next May. This is so cool on so many levels.

But here’s the deal: while all of this equals a lot of people and excitement, pomp and circumstance, publicity and hype, there is still a piece of music to that needs to be learned. A stunningly beautiful piece of music at that.

And so, there is work to be done. For Matt, this means score study and rehearsal plans. For me, this means time at the piano figuring out orchestral reductions and open-score voicings. There will be moments of beauty and magic, and times when we are all too human, fragile and vulnerable, our best selves hiding out in the shadows. Matt and I have been making music together for over three decades. And still every joint project feels newly created, freshly crafted, a miracle reimagined. 

This is the practice: Lather. Rinse. Repeat. That is where the real music lies. All the rest is just noise.