The Spirit of Less

In this season of more, I find myself thinking a lot about less. Recoiling from the sheer too much-ness of the month, I wonder if the truly radical act would be to try dancing with the discipline of less in all its naked and revealing power. It might be something to ponder, if I could stop my mind from circling wildly around all the things I need to do.

Recently, Ann Patchett wrote an essay in the New York Times about her love/hate relationship with email. In the piece, she cited the Niall Williams' 2019 novel This is Happiness. The book tells the story of a small town in Ireland in the 1950’s that is being hooked up to the national electricity grid for the first time. While many of the townspeople are excited about this, ready to embrace the future and all its promised conveniences, some folks are wary, not sure they are ready to leave behind the world they know for a life they cannot fully imagine.

Williams’ prose is beautiful, the story gripping, the characters both believable and sympathetic; but what most fascinates me most is this idea that human beings might be motivated to stop and say, “Wait. Let’s think about this before we bring it into our lives.” It’s almost a foreign concept to suspect that progress isn’t always progress. That convenience has a price tag, and one of the costs is how much it might forcibly change the patterns and particulars of how we move through the world.

Imagine if we had considered that before putting an addictive device in every person’s pocket.

Now let me say that I am grateful for electricity. I am not interested in getting through a long dark winter by candlelight. I don’t want to chop wood to heat the house. I’m not looking to carry water from the well to fill my bathtub, whatever the spiritual benefits of those practices might be.

But it does make one stop and think a bit about our assumed choices. Perhaps we have more agency over what we allow into our habits and routines than we have believed. And in this overwhelming season of too much of everything—sugar, wine, chocolate, plastic, tinsel, glitter, parties, shopping lists, late nights, noise—it feels like a necessary spiritual exercise to practice a bit of austerity, discipline, restraint, less.

There’s theory, and then there’s practice. Specifics matter, I remind students. “I practiced the Mozart with the metronome first at 100 beats per minute, and then turned off the metronome and worked the rough sections hands alone before trying it again” is very different than “I played it a couple of times.” Specifics matter, I remind myself. In this crazy-making month of December what does less specifically look like in my day-to-day life?

My piano kids are all about less, as in less practicing or less sight-reading, which is not what I had in mind. However, it has prompted me into embracing the spirit of less in the studio as one tangible place to practice, in the form of fewer teaching gimmicks, toys, and devices. Scroogish, the kids would say about me.

While once I flirted with the idea that all my teaching problems would be solved if only I had the latest pedagogical gadget, now I know that if there is a teaching problem, the problem is all me. No gadget, no matter how shiny or slick, will make me a better teacher. I think it was Don Campbell, the author of The Mozart Effect, who said, “The longer I teach, the less material I use.” Wiser words have never been spoken, whoever it was that spoke them.

But less isn’t about nothing. It isn’t a lack of creativity or resourcefulness, it’s about intentional choice. I will never give up sending holiday letters to the people we love, but I haven’t bought wrapping paper in decades. Likewise, as I consider my practices and teaching habits, there are a few studio toys and tools I couldn’t do without:

Note Flashcards. Although all beginning piano students have their own set, I have one as well for the lessons when a student has conveniently forgotten theirs at home, or for reviewing notes after students have “passed” their flashcard assignment. To “graduate,” students must be able to identify 30 cards in under a minute. This is fast. Try it.

Magnetic Staff Board. I use magnetic boards not only to introduce note-reading concepts for beginning pianists, but then later to drill intervals and chord inversions.

Note Blocks. Each wooden block is labeled with a note in all its various forms (for example: A, Ab, A#, etc.) on opposing sides. These are fantastic for spelling everything from major and minor 5-finger positions to scales and chords. When asked to spell a D-major 5-Finger position, students of all ages instantly figure out why they can’t spell it D-E-Gb-G-A (in this case, the “F” block would go unused, and one can’t use both a G and a Gb from the same block. An immediate, but gentle, theory lesson.).

Interval Flashcards. Maybe these are redundant. If I were more clever with the magnetic board, I probably wouldn’t need them at all. But man alive, they are handy. I made them myself, which should count for something. I have a stack of 50 or more interval cards, with every possible combination of notes and intervals: a fifth as in E to B, a seconde as in F to G, an octave as in A to A. I even have cards with strange pairs of accidentals—like Eb to F# or G# to Db—to really test how quickly kids can identify intervals and find them on the piano. None of the cards are marked with a treble or bass clef, which means I can change them randomly and even turn them upside down for an entirely different set of notes. This makes the kids crazy. It is so worth the redundancy.

Small rubber or felt balls and hacky sacks. We use these to pass the beat or the rhythm in lessons and performance classes. Even the new little ones can all switch easily between “beat” and “rhythm” as we chant Christmas carol lyrics or the words to their new rote pieces. While the kids might hate the interval flashcards, even the oldest kids are quite happy when I say, “Go get a ball from the basket.” And I must say, the orange felt ball substituted for a pumpkin quite nicely during our many rounds of “Pass the Pumpkin” last fall.

Hand drums. Also used for rhythmic drills and games. I got one kid through an entire low-motivation year by promising every lesson that after we finished working through his assignments he could play the drums. Yep. That would be pure, unadulterated bribery. But he stayed with piano through his sophomore year of high school, and now as a college student always comes to visit me whenever he is home. I call that a win.

Finally, I can’t forget the cup of colored pens sitting on my desk that I use to write student assignments in their practice notebooks. Writing practice steps in bright colors does not mean, I can assure you, that kids read all my assignments. Just last week, a kid acted shocked when I asked for his etude. “What etude?” he said. “The one written in red,” I answered. He feigned an innocent look. “I have no idea how I missed that.” Yeah, right.

At the moment, my colored pen collection has seen better days. There is no yellow or orange. I think I’m down to one shade of purple. “Miss Amy,” Micah said to me last Wednesday, “you have GOT to get some new colored pens for Christmas.” He’s right.

In and out of the studio, here’s the struggle made particularly obvious this time of year: we can’t have it all. Every choice—every yes—has a price tag. We say yes to the evening lingering over candlelight and a glass of wine with the person we love, but must decline that party with work friends. We agree to that piece of chocolate, but no to that slice of pie. We fill in practice boxes, but trade time spent cooking, or cleaning, or raking leaves. The mantle is covered in garlands of cranberries strung with white lights, but there’s no room for a Christmas tree.

Maybe it isn’t the choices we make in the end—choosing the colored pens and paper scores over the iPads and metronome apps, or the note cards and magnetic boards over the note-reading computer games, or hosting twenty for Christmas Eve dinner instead of throwing a New Year’s Day brunch—it is making the decision with our eyes open, fully accepting that every choice has the potential to change us in big and little ways.

This is Happiness.