Those words coming out of my mouth sound more real than anything I’ve felt in awhile.

“…you don’t care if I get the right notes?”

“No, don’t even look at the page anymore.” I took the sheet away. “You already know what the melody is doing. Now slap the keys as if your slapping the melody into the piano.”

I show him. Ba-BAM! BAM! He starts laughing and looks at me like I’m crazy.

“Yeah. It’s crazy. Now copy. Do it with me.”

I count off a measure and we both generate this awful cacophony of sound. The rhythms he’s playing are now precise and released. He can feel what’s happening now, he’s no longer calculating.

“Awesome. Stand up now, we’re going to stomp the crap out of this melody.”

I’ve been teaching this same boy for almost 3 years now, and only recently did I suddenly figure out why I was having problems. His practicing had taken a backseat to other pursuits and I was had some of my own personal issues to sort out. The lessons had developed a shade of unfocused half-enthusiasm, and I’d be lying if I said you can fake inspiration through that. Students pick up on that and give themselves a license to be uninspired and slack off.

Tired of my own natural compulsion to analyze everything to death, I’ve been heavily riding the uncertainty in life, trying new activities that I’m afraid of, putting myself out there and generally operating like a warrior about to lose his life, and through weeks of this I had suddenly stumbled on the solution the lessons:

Get the kid to draw out ideas within themselves in a no-bullshit, visceral way.

We stood. “Now, we’re gonna stomp and use your our voices to create the basic content of these few measures.”

“…do you want just the left hand or the right hand?”

“Forget about either. Mash them together into one thing. You know this piece, you’ve heard it played, now I want you to generate the entire thing just using your body.”

So we did. A bunch of times. After the real content of those few measures had clearly been burned into his psyche, I told him to sit down and start slapping the keys again, only this time by adding his left hand. He played four measures of rhythmically precise and totally wrong notes, something he couldn’t do before. Much to his amazement, he told me that it was stuck in his head.

“Yeah. See, that’s what needs to happen. You’re warm now. Learn this page, both hands. Get just the rhythms. See you next week.”

“This is great. I’ve played piano for years under the assumption that one has to “practice the instrument” and get comfortable with the manual dexterity of fingers and “muscle memory” required of learning pieces. Through better and deeper training I have rejected this approach as it is artificial and blocks the real creative insights one can have in a musical realm. My practicing has since been way focused on getting my fingers and hands to respond to my imagination, and the work becomes not a matter of rote practice, but of getting my body to cooperate with the material that is already within my imagination. An HUGE emphasis on rhythm is necessary, as that is the seat of musical intuition – the notes themselves will make themselves apparent once the body can reverberate with the rhythms in your imagination.

To link with this post: its not about the fingers, its about perception. What are you perceiving? Everything should come from there.”

There are many overweight, out-of-shape people that play piano. Well, even. But they achieve the task in spite of the limitations they otherwise place on themselves by not maintaining a daily and thorough awareness of their bodies. The human animal is an organism, not just a brain. To conceptually divorce the actions of something so subtle as playing piano from an entire body awareness is a mistake.

First principles – Gravity Rules All

What does this mean? It means that every time your finger lifts itself off the keybed, and then drops and sounds a note, you are using your intrinsic human awareness of gravity. Of course you are. But guess what? Music itself obeys the same physical properties of your physical action. What is amazing about music is this universality, that brilliant connection we all seem to have when we hear something incredible. It is nature, in the same way that when a group of hikers catch a glimpse of some enormous boulder falling down a mountain, careening off a couple rocks, and then making one long last heavy plummet into the earth,  you can sort of imagine how that would feel to watch. The visual acknowledgment of the undeniable power of that kind of event would send a ripple of chuckling through the group:

“Who..whoa…haha. Holy shit.”

“Yeah, exactly. Holy shit.”

Music has the same power, and to harness it requires that sensitivity and awareness of gravity. That sensitivity is fed by NOT developing finger strength but by listening to an internal rhythm and letting your fingers fall into each key. This minute sensitivity is fed by an awareness of your arms and elbows, the way you let them just hang in their sockets, nothing tense. That sensitivity is fed by your shoulders and torso, your ability to stay balanced on your sitting bones and feet. The sensitivity necessary for an awareness of your torso and shoulders is maintained by allowing the free and smooth-as-butter transfer between your body mass as-situated-on-your-seat and your body mass as it is exchanged to your feet on the floor.

Seat-floor Exchange

Seat-floor exchange is the MOST important issue here – your ability to take your entire mass that is balanced on your seat to transfer it to your feet into a standing position. Without tensing or anything like that. Just literally letting your mass move off the chair – from the two prongs of your sitting bones to your feet – into a standing position.

What the hell does all this have to do with playing piano? When you take dictation from a brain that is graciously providing you with a musical idea, the goal in playing piano is to translate this raw intuition into something real that can be felt. You can’t do this without a body, and your body can’t do this without deliberately making the effort to integrate a personal awareness of nature and movement into your life and practice.

All of this, of course, is much better explained in person. To give you an idea of how I conduct my lessons, this is the kind of stuff I would slowly introduce as the student becomes more familiar with even a single piece. Once you can stumble poorly through a piece, then the kind of work described in this post starts to become immensely useful, as the students’ familiarity with the piece can be used to develop a deeper sense of the rhythmic personality of the piece.

Then the thing can play itself, and it becomes “easy” in the sense that you aren’t the one doing the playing.

A somewhat talented guy

In the Beach Boys song, God Only Knows, Brian Wilson takes a single melodic and rhythmic idea, and constructs most of the arrangement through its variations. The arrangement is full of the same idea, only harmonized differently over different chords, and melodically reversed, twisted upside-down, etc., but the thing remains pure and expressive of a single IDEA or thing. I tried doing this with a piece I wrote…taking the single and purest idea of the piece, and wringing out the damn thing in as many variations as I could. I found that by tackling the little idea and absolutely demolishing all its possibilities, it left me with a full universe of other ideas to play with.

Lesson – Identify early on a very specific and small idea that resonates…and then wring the bastard out. That’s why God Only Knows is so brilliant…its speaks to the inherent underlying organization of creativity and the mind. It’s an organized piece centered around one brilliant little motif that touched Brian Wilson, and whether he knew it or not, he was trying to figure out what exactly that idea was and could do.

I teach a 12 year old boy very consistently in midtown Manhattan, one of the lucky few who can can sing and play and is also very much a natural musician. His rhythmic instincts are extremely good and he gets a lot of enjoyment out of developing them during the lessons. I’ve been working with him for about two years now.

He’s played live several times – at his school, at his brothers’ Bar Mitzvah, as well as his own Bar Mitzvah (crowds of several hundred people) in the city, and even had the good fortune to play with a band of professional accompanying NYC musicians. Sweet.

In preparation for playing his own Bar Mitzvah, we arranged to have him sing a short, two minute song, and have his brother accompany him on guitar. I spent most of the time working with “Jay” and helping him learn the chords, then having him slowly get comfortable working bits of the melody in the song while he played the chords. After I was confident in his ability to bust out the song well, I brought in his brother “Ben” and spent the rest of my energy setting up an arrangement and getting his brother to feel good and comfortable with his own parts. His parts consisted of strumming quarter notes through most of the song, with a small 10 second melodic solo in the middle of the song. (my roommate guitarist had taught him a couple lessons to get him up to speed)

Ben did not have an intuition for rhythmic phrasing. He started playing the song for the first time with his brother, and his sense of keeping a beat with his brother Jay was immediately off. For now I was more concerned that the boys at least learn how to struggle through the entire song, rather than have me just stop them, so I ignored the issues with Ben’s playing at first. I had Jay count off the song the first several times through, (“1…2…3…4…”) and get him used to setting and keeping a tempo. After several runs of the song, I switched over and had Ben count off the song, knowing this might be difficult.

It was, and because I had put him in charge of demonstrating tempo, it had made him immediately aware of what was lacking. There was a total disconnect, he would count off one tempo, start playing, and it became something else entirely. This realization of his was good, because now I knew I could work with a core, fundamental issue, and possibly fix a bunch of other issues in the process.

“Okay okay, stop a second. You notice that? How the tempo you spoke and counted off initially didn’t match what you were playing?”

“…Yeah.”

“Okay, did you ever play any sports?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you pretty good at them? Or okay or whatever?”

“Yeah, I’m okay.”

“Alright, stand up.” I reached into my bag for the blue racquetball. “We’re going to throw this around for a bit.”

Athletic people, or anybody who has played a sport, has an advantage in learning music. Music requires a cooperating body to function through rhythmic phrasing. Playing catch is a GREAT way for some people to become aware of a deep and penetrating rhythm over time.

As soon as we started, Ben immediately got more relaxed, and he could sense the movement of the ball at a more graceful and intuitive level. Then I made it more complicated.

“Now I want us to start and keep the tempo of this song, with the ball. Every time the ball hits my hands, that’s a quarter note, and every time I throw it back and it hits your hands, that’s another quarter note, and so on. This ball is in charge, it’s the thing that keeps this tempo going, got it?”

“Got it.”

We started, and his body started to get wooden again. I stopped him.

“Check this out, all we’re doing is playing catch, which is something you’re natural at. You’re getting wooden and freezing up a bit, can you feel that physically? We haven’t changed anything from before, only now the timing is a bit clearer. We’re still just playing catch though.”

This seemed to make sense, he became more fluid and aware of how to integrate an external rhythm into his body. I had him count off the song, and then starting throwing the ball within the tempo he set (while still counting). He got better at it as he started catching himself mismatching the things he was saying and each tossing landing in his hand. He was getting progressively more aware. First steps were solid.

After 10 minutes of this, I had him sit down with his guitar again. When I asked him to apply his newly integrated rhythmic awareness between beat and physical movement to playing guitar, he understood and started playing. BIG difference. He started off rocky, but caught himself immediately as he realized how unnatural it is to actually play without a fluid sense of beat. Helping him understand that throwing a ball in quarter note beats, and strumming a guitar in quarter note beats, is essentially the same thing (yes, I know playing the chords is harder, that work can be established AFTER though). If you feel natural with one (he did) then that same naturalness can very well exist in strumming a guitar.

I had him stand up again. Now we were going to work on his brief 10 second solo. The rhythms were more complicated, and he wasn’t sure where each of the notes laid on the quarter note spectrum.

“Okay, we’re going to toss the ball around again, only this time I want you to talk your solo while we throw the ball in tempo.”

“Talk…? What do you mean?”

“I mean like this…” *I started mock-singing the solo, but in a way more focused on the rhythm than quality of notes*. “Dude, I’ll do it with you, but we have to keep this ball going while it’s happening, got it?”

“Okay.”

“Okay, I’ll take the lead for the first couple times. I’m going to count off, and then we’ll start talking the solo. Follow me.”

It was rough the first few times, but he figured it out and he sounded much more confident. At that point, there was some minor phrasing/rhythmic clarity that we needed to sort out, but he got the point, and learning how to integrate his solo into his body, by working with the naturalness of tossing a ball back and forth.

I had them start the song from the top – it sounded much better and Ben had learned something basic and essential to playing music – LISTENING to how a rhythm unfolds and being aware of aligning your body to respond to that rhythm. How to play in tempo. The ball was a tool to help him become aware of his own body. The fact that he played sports made the analogy work extra well.

Anybody have any suggestions for the non-athlete or athletically challenged?

IMPOSSIBLE

It was a monstrosity. At that point in my life (around 17) I had gotten some good results with using my instincts and my limited jazz knowledge, and figured working out some classical music would be “easy” because “I had a good ear and could improvise.” Being young involves a lot of unjustified arrogance like that.

The issue of of playing two voices at once — what makes it as daunting as it is?

Is it hard because you can’t play it? Or because you can’t hear it?

The piano keys are tiny, and the physics of actually moving your fingers that fast…well…it’s not really as incredible and mind-boggling as you think. The professional has refined their motor-control exceptionally well compared to the amateur — that doesn’t mean they just move their fingers faster.

So, your fingers can do that too? Maybe, with enough of the right practice.

“Well, what kind of practice?”

You are a human being with a body, and capable of fluttering your fingers as rapidly as any other human being on the planet. What’s missing is the internalization of a musical idea as opposed to the assumed mechanistic process of “playing it enough times to work it into your muscles.”

“Dude…give me something…you’re telling me there is a significant difference between ‘internalizing’ something and ‘playing it enough times to make my body cooperate.’ Be more precise.”

The problem with the latter approach is not so much the “playing it enough times” part. The problem lies with the unclarified connection between the kind of musical idea (no matter how small) you are working with, and how to get your body to cooperate in a symbiotic fashion. Simply “playing it enough times” is putting the cart before the horse. MORE IMPORTANT than playing something a lot is the nature and nuance OF the body doing the playing, and if one doesn’t realize this, or lacks the training or understanding of this difference, you will face a set of physical limitations that aren’t in accordance with the level of talent you actually possess. You don’t suck, you just haven’t focused enough on body mechanics to let the body do the playing that is…in reality…easy. The bummer is, for most musicians, they’ll plateau at a level of competence that sits below what they could actually do, if only they knew how to work at this a little differently.

More on this soon…

Related posts:

Teaching a four-year old

Physical imposition = missing the point in playing music

A big experiment that has worked out brilliantly (and has subsequently worked out in lessons since this post…) is one involving a blue racquetball that I brought in to demonstrate rhythm to the four year old. It’s very tough to keep the constant attention and interest of a four year old during the lesson, so I minimize my talking a lot. At that age, anything resembling a thorough explanation will probably lull them to sleep. “Monkey see, monkey do” works great, as does physically getting them involved in the process.

First off though, I stole the genesis of this awesome newly-discovered approach from MusicMindGames and had used it in one of my first lessons with the same four year old. This was weeks ago. I took his notebook and drew a series of lines, kind of like this:

You take various words with different numbers of syllables, (blue…jello…pineapple…etc.) and the idea is to get the student to mentally deduce that the number of syllables in each word ought to match the number of lines drawn in each little segment of lines. It’s essentially reading rhythmic qualities, just not on a music staff. It’s pretty cool, and a good way to use some of his previous knowledge (the English language) to learn something different.

This exercise worked fine and got him familiar with numbers and their abstract relationship to drawings, but I didn’t feel like he had been able to make the full connection between the rhythmic representations on paper and an actual musical idea. He could deduce logic pretty well – three lines on paper equals saying three syllables in pine-a-pple – but I wanted to get the concept off the page and into the relevant universe.

I brought out the book we had used during the previously lesson and pointed at a drawing of one line:

“Blue, right?”

I pointed to the drawing with two lines, “Do you remember what this one was?”

“…Jello!” he says.

“Good! Do you remember what this one was?”

“….”

“It was ‘pineapple.’ ‘pineapple’ is three lines, remember?”

“Pineapple.”

“Yup.”

Happy he got it, but I was still not convinced that he really understand the significance of equating the number of syllables as a rhythmic representation, I brought out the ball on instinct. Immediately his eyes lit up.

“Okay, here’s what we’re doing. We’re going to toss this ball back and forth, you to me, me to you, and each time we pass it, we’re going to say ‘blue,’ okay?”

He looks at me kind of funny.

“Okay?” I said again.

“Okay.”

He got immediately excited, mostly at the prospect of moving around. I realized that this idea might just work. I tossed him the ball –

“Blue!” I said.

“…blue…” toss

“Blue!” toss

“….blue…” toss

“Blue! Come on buddy, I can’t hear you.” toss

“…Blue!” He fumbles a bit. toss

“Blue!” toss

“…Blue!” toss

“Jello!” toss

“…bl-…what?” Drops it.

I would switch back and forth between words for each toss…have him say ‘jello’ while I said ‘blue’…have him say ‘pineapple’ while I said ‘jello’…and so on. The purpose of this was to get him to internalize the physical movement of a ball as well as the implied intervals (the number of syllables) within each toss. This brings what was previously more of a logical exercise of notation into the realm of music, as music relies so heavily on the human body’s physical response to an already internalized idea. It’s not just a mind thing, it’s so so much a body thing too.

A couple posts of his:

Teaching Rhythm to young students

Piano Checklist

So simple. Awesome.

(Made to Stick is a great book, by the way.)

How do you play emotionally?

Different venues call for a different relationship between mind and body. The emotional effort needed to do stand-up comedy really well is going to require a very different mind/body awareness than sitting down and playing piano (it would also require a refined personal relationship to linguistics and oratory). The trick is to constantly chip away at and refine that which blocks the essential ideas flowing from your brain. A pianist will focus on what is stopping him from playing a difficult piece. The practice is directed at himself, his body, not the piece and its contents. A great comedian will constantly test out and squeeze the impurities from a joke…finding that perfectly comfortable combination of rhythm and syntax that can make an an otherwise banal idea sound brilliant.

By the way, this “trick” takes several lifetimes. Enjoy.

Point:

I.

Physical imposition is COMPLETELY counterproductive to the process. The music is what needs to happen in SPITE of you, not because of you.

This is a piece I wrote ages ago (with help from Kaija Matiss) and I’m doing the wurly/wah solo thing again. I like Bach a lot, can you tell? Sweet.