Taubman tidbit

At my recent piano lesson (described in my previous post), while we were talking about my interest in learning Bach, my teacher mentioned a pianist who teaches at the Golandsky Institute seminar every summer in Princeton: Father Sean Duggan. He is a Benedictine priest who teaches at SUNY Fredonia and who won the International Bach Competition twice, in 1983 and 1991.

I came across an interview with him in which he said this:

"The Golandsky/Taubman approach is useful for Bach,” Duggan says. “It’s useful for any piano playing. Ease at the keyboard, facility, and tone production come into play with Bach. Even pedaling. I believe that when you’re playing Bach on the piano, you should use the resources of the piano to make the music come alive. If you try to make the piano sound like a harpsichord, the pieces sound dry and lifeless. You have to be true to Bach and, also, true to the piano.

“Edna had a big impact on my performing and my teaching,” Duggan says. “My performing keeps improving, and my teaching has grown a lot. Edna is a remarkable teacher. She has incredible insight. She knows the right words to use to get you to do the right thing. She has razor-sharp eyes and ears. A lot of teachers have that, but she has it to an extent that I have never before experienced in anybody else.”

I would love to hear him play.

New teacher, first lesson

I had my first lesson with the new teacher over the weekend. He is a Taubman technique devotee/trainee. I did not seek him out strictly because of that but because I feel having this focus on the physical -- how you are using your muscles in dealing with the piano -- offers some promise of staying away from mysticism. What I mean by "mysticism" in relation to piano lessons: attempts to define, explain, and categorize the various phenomena involved in playing with things that have no basis in physical fact. For example, I once had a teacher tell me that my approach to learning music was "masculine." Excuse me? And that means what? And of course is what every young woman wants to hear. Or my recent teacher's constant marveling at how I was able to play anything at all, given that I work all day -- aside from making me feel like a freak of nature, how does that help me figure out how to improve? I want someone who can look at what I'm doing at the moment and tell me what is preventing me from playing better.

And of course, there is an appeal in working with someone who at least has learned some relatively proven methods of avoiding pain and stress and gaining fluidity. Naturally, you never know how well someone can teach something that he knows, but at least you are starting with a basis that means something.

Don't know if any of that makes sense, but, FWIW ...

Anyway, I felt we communicated well and on the same wavelength (oops! a little mysticism there, I guess!), and I found this initial lesson helpful. I have not decided if I want to plunge into what in Taubman they call "retraining," which tends to commit one to some months of no music, just exercises. For now, I'm just going to keep plugging away at my chosen pieces. The first thing I played yesterday was my current Bach prelude and fugue. They are at the stage where they are almost memorized but not quite, so I used music and played them all the way through, which in itself was extremely helpful to me. Yes, I could play them for my husband or my friends, but as I may have mentioned in the past, playing for the relatively uneducated listener (i.e., musically speaking) stresses me out more than playing for other musicians. The former tend to be very ho-hum -- if something does not sound bad, they think it must be easy -- and easily bored, and then they say things like, "Well, as long as you're enjoying yourself!"

After I played, we talked about what I thought could be better followed by what he thought could be better. I mentioned my perennial problem with rushing, and he pointed out things I could do with phrasing and figuring out where to breathe and where to shape lines that could help. From there, we got into a little Taubman work -- he noted that my weaker fingers (3 and 4) are pretty tense, and that in general I am curving way too much.

We kind of left it that I would just keep these observations in mind but continue to work on my pieces -- the Bach, Debussy, Beethoven, Scarlatti, or whatever else I want to learn. It's a little amorphous -- I mean, don't we all at least secretly want some genius taskmaster to say, "I want to you do this, this, and this," which then will magically solve all our problems? -- but on the other hand, I really am a big girl now and can think for myself, at least on a good day. So I will have another lesson in a few weeks. At the very least, this gives me a goal that is not as stressful as a performance as well as the opportunity for some educated feedback.

This and that

I see it's been a month since my last blog post. Here is a rambling post reflecting my rambling frame of mind.

I've been practicing the piano -- mostly my current Bach prelude and fugue (WTC I/18 in G sharp minor), and almost have it memorized.

I've also been learning Debussy First and Second Arabesques. The First Arabesque, in E major (more or less -- though there is some whole-tone tonality thrown in) is popular with intermediate students, and I'm very familiar with it, but I've never heard anyone play the Second Arabesque (G major). I thought it would be a good exercise to learn them both. Debussy wrote both pieces in 1888, and they were his first works for piano, I believe.

I have dabbled a bit in two Scarlatti sonatas (the Toccata I have mentioned in earlier posts and the beautiful slow sonata in F minor that is played a lot). Schumann has gone by the wayside mainly from lack of time and energy -- my job has been demanding this summer, and I've been coming home drained and tired, and there are some technical things in Papillons that I'm afraid I could hurt myself with if I proceed without due consideration. I figure it's better to play whatever I play with deep concentration and as well as I can rather than forcing myself to do everything I had hoped but at a lesser level.

I've been experimenting with different fingerings for my old nemesis passages in the first movement of Beethoven Op. 2 No. 3. At the Taubman workshop I attended this past spring, in my 15 minutes with Edna Golandsky, she suggested playing the double thirds as well as the broken arpeggios beginning of the development with two hands. With the former, a little extra muddiness is introduced because you have to hold down the pedal to keep the left-hand notes sounding, but it's extremely freeing -- the beginning of the piece goes from potential disaster to "Hey, this is fun!" With the latter, it's slightly trickier because you have to jump around the keyboard, but most of the tendonitis-causing tension from trying to play the arpeggios with the right hand alone disappears.

It really bugged me that when I brought this piece to my teacher this past spring, after working a bit on those first measures, she kind of threw up her hands and said, "Some pieces just aren't meant to be played!" I knew, of course, that what that really  meant was that she didn't know how to teach it, having never played it, but this pronouncement zapped my confidence. I mean, here I'd worked on this on and off for almost a year, feeling like it just needed some tweaking to be pretty good, and this is what I got instead.

This, among a multitude of other reasons, is why after mulling it over during the summer I decided that even though I did learn some things from this teacher, I didn't want to continue with her in the fall. I have made contact with another teacher who was recommended to me by several people, and I will have my first lesson next weekend, so we'll see.

Cello playing has been limited. For one thing, I hurt my shoulder while we were on our vacation (I think it happened when I slipped coming down the steps of a double-decker tourist bus and kept myself from falling by grabbing the handrail -- which wrenched my shoulder). It wasn't so severe that I noticed it much until we were at home -- and it was exacerbated especially by the motion required to move the bow across the cello strings. I decided to rest it as much as I could, like in the old joke:

Patient: "Doctor, it hurts when I do this."
Doctor: "Then don't do that."

(Okay, it's not funny. But you get my point.)

This plan appears to have been working because most of the pain is gone, and I can play the cello with only a touch of soreness now. I got together with our neighborhood band and played for a couple of hours, and my shoulder feels pretty good. This is good, because we start rehearsals for the first orchestra concert of the season in a couple of weeks.

Aspirational

This appears to be a favorite encore piece for Marta Argerich. Could I ever possibly play this that fast? I guess a girl can dream:

Still practicing

Even though my run of piano lessons had a somewhat discouraging effect on me, I have continued plugging away. My return to practicing after our vacation was not as difficult as I thought it would be. So here's what I've been doing:

• Bach, WTC I/18 in G sharp minor: I chose this partly because I wanted more work on something with lots of black keys. I know "they" say that C major is the most difficult key, but come on -- reading all those accidentals in a key with lots of sharps or flats is not easy, nor is learning what to do so that your fingers don't slip off the narrower black keys. I started this in the middle of May, and only now is the prelude memorized. The fugue is not, but it's at least starting to feel like music instead of a finger tangle. The prelude is a gentle, melancholy one, in 6/8, really more like a fugue than a prelude. The fugue is somewhat marchlike, in 4/4, but odd in that the subject starts on the second beat of the measure, and it is hard to find the downbeat anywhere in the piece.

• Chopin B major Nocturne and C sharp minor waltz: These are the pieces I worked on a bit in my lessons, after my teacher chose them for me. These pieces are full of what should be singing melodic lines. I had the nagging feeling the entire time I was working with this teacher that she looked at me as your average uptight, perfectionist adult student who needed lots of help with freeing myself up to be expressive. Now granted, there's some of that in me, but you'd only have to ask any of my former teachers if I were a perfectionist to get a big laugh. I'm almost convinced that the most freeing thing for me would be improving my technique so I could come closer to what I imagine without having to struggle so much with everything. Whenever I mentioned this, though, my teacher would say I had plenty of technique -- as if "technique" were only the ability to play lots of notes! I think of technique as anything one does physically, and there are lots of things I am only managing to do by instinct, without really understanding them, and many others I am not able to do at all. Anyway, I never felt like the things we worked on in these pieces helped me play them more expressively. I just felt tension and awkwardness. I want to record them so I can really hear what I'm doing, but I haven't had the time or energy. Maybe this coming week.

• Schumann, Papillons: I had started this before our vacation, but I haven't looked at it since we got back last week. There's some technical stuff here I'm really not sure about, like all the octaves, and the pedaling, but it's fun to practice.

Over the weekend, I worked a bit on some new pieces:

• Debussy, First Arabesque. Okay, the reason for this, aside from its being pretty: It's relatively easy, and easy to memorize; very familiar; good vehicle for practicing tone and voicing; and a nice piece to have at the ready. I have never learned any Debussy, so this seemed like a good place to start. (Though, full disclosure, of course I used to sight-read through this years ago, so it's far from being new to me.)

• Scarlatti, Toccata in D minor: When we were in Barcelona, we went to hear a guitar duo concert (it was aimed at all the tourists who throng Las Ramblas and the Old City at the center of town, but it was actually charming and tasteful, and the duo was very good), and this is one of the pieces they played. They also played a slow Scarlatti sonata that is also a favorite with a lot of pianists, which I would also like to learn, but I need to look it up and dig out the music. I had printed the Toccata out a while ago out of curiosity so I had it at hand. This may be a total wild goose chase in that the repeated notes may be beyond me, but I thought it would be fun to give it a try.

As for the cello: It looks like there will be no big concerto in my future, at least not in the coming year. The conductor said that another amateur orchestra has programmed the Dvorak so he doesn't want to play it as well (though frankly, I doubt if our audiences overlap). He suggested the Faure Elegy instead. Okay, I know it can be beautiful, in the right hands, but it simply doesn't interest me. I suppose I can pretend I'm 15 years old again, but I'm afraid no one will be fooled. In the meantime, this has given me a further excuse to avoid the cello. It's odd, because I do have a hankering to play, but there's something keeping me from diving back in.

The vacationing musician

I'm not accustomed to taking time off from everything and going somewhere for no other reason than to go there, but that is what I have been doing for the past 10 days. My husband had to drag me kicking and screaming from all my Stuff -- piano, cello, kitties, garden, sewing (though note that I did not include "work" in that list) -- for a trip to Barcelona. It took me at least four days after we arrived to unwind enough to start enjoying not having to do anything more than figure out where to eat next.

I had thought that maybe I could find a piano or two along the way, but it wasn't meant to be. Our hotel happened to be a few blocks from a music school (Esmuc), so I went over there the first morning and (figuratively speaking) pressed my nose against the window, but the young woman at the front desk said no, I couldn't rent, borrow, or otherwise use one of their practice rooms unless I was enrolled at the school. Perhaps if I'd had a name to drop it would have gotten me in there, but I just gave up. However, I did take a trip through a nice museum in the same building featuring an exhibit about the history of western music, with instruments of all kinds beautifully displayed (read more about it here: Museu de la Musica).



They also had an exhibit that was a sort of petting zoo for a handful of instruments, one of which was a cello, but when I tried to play it found that no one had rosined the bow recently so it was impossible to get a sound out of it. Maybe someone on the staff had sneaked in there and greased the thing after hearing one too many children sawing away.

Note: This is not a picture of me. I nicked the link from the museum's website.

As our time there progressed, I felt my identity as a musician seeping away a bit, not altogether a bad thing. But I dreaded that feeling you get when you eventually try to play again, when the first touch of the instrument is bizarre because you know what you are supposed to do, but it feels like a distant memory at best. We returned yesterday evening, and with trepidation I sat down at the piano -- but it wasn't so bad. I played the C major Bach prelude from WTC I and then Chopin's B major nocturne, and then I decided to quit while I was ahead (i.e., before I fell over from jet lag).

Thought from the interwebs

On one of the message boards I read, someone started a discussion about "life lessons" -- particularly things people wish they had learned earlier in life. One woman commented (and I hope she doesn't mind my quoting her):

For some reason we get it stuck in our heads that all the people we've ever answered to are still watching us and waiting in the wings to correct us -- to tell us our priorities are wrong or to critique the way we do something. Last summer I was sitting there wondering why I wasn't drawing anymore, and I realized I was waiting for "permission" from all my critics. Why they would have opinions on this, I don't know (none of them are even artists). But like many people, for most of my life I've carried around an audience of critics in my head, assuming they would correct me and disapprove of things I did or didn't do... even if they wouldn't really. Anyway, I did start drawing again, and the critics in my head didn't say a word. I may have prejudged them. Critics typically don't even notice what we do right, anyway, when it comes right down to it. So don't wait for their approval.