Skip to main content

Teaching Practicing

This morning I was working to polish the Mozart Quartet with a student.  The piece is full of tricky, finger-y passages, and we had spent the first 20 minutes using a range of practice techniques to solve some of them.

Can you tell where the problem is?  OK, let’s just play that bar.  Just that beat.  Just that interval.  Play it faster.  Play it backwards.  Play it slower.  Change the articulation.  Change the rhythm.  Etc, etc.  We’ve been working together since last September, and we’ve solved a lot of technical problems in lessons, using lots of approaches.

Eventually we started a run-through of the piece.  He got about half-way through and bumped into another touchy section.  And before I could say a word, he played it again, fast, then more slowly.  He correctly diagnosed the problem - “I’m not putting that C# in!” - and fixed it.  He played the beat in question, at tempo, and then added one note before it.  Then two notes, then three.  He ran the measure slowly and made sure he could get all the way into the next bar.  Then he backed up, reset his tempo, and zipped over the previously problematic area.  Within two minutes we were back on our way.  Without a word from me.

I just about fell over.  That is EXACTLY the kind of work I do and teach, but I’ve never seen it in action.  No one ever practices in front of me - oboe lessons are pretty structured.  Usually I only hear the playing I direct, and although I talk ALL THE TIME about ways to approach a technical passage on your own, I’ve never watched it happen.   This student showed me that that he’d been listening, and paying attention, and learning, and I LOVED it.

I constantly talk about practice techniques when I teach, and frequently use lesson time to work through examples.  Honestly, learning how to break down a difficult passage, diagnose a problem, and find an approach that solves it is much more valuable to your average student than learning how to turn a particular phrase of Mozart.  We learn pieces so that we can learn HOW to learn pieces.  In a single hour a week I cannot make anyone a better player, but I can give that person the tools to fix himself, and that is my mission more than any other.  

Today’s lesson was a great validation of that approach.   Thank you, Seth, for closing out my teaching week JUST RIGHT. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zoe's Musical Beginnings

I've mentioned before that I started out on the piano by figuring out melodies.  Connecting notes and trying to learn how they worked.  I'm fascinated to observe that Zoe's initial approach to the instrument is totally different from mine. She sits at our new piano and plays random notes, and tells us what to feel.  If she is playing slowly then the music is sad, and we should cry. When we are "crying" she either gets up and hugs us so we feel better (so awesome!) or bangs faster, to indicate that the music is now happy and we should dance.  Her other piano game is accompanying herself - she plays "chords" in alternating hands while she "sings" the ABC song or Camptown Races or Sesame Street.  She makes us sing along.  She loves it when we clap at the end.  When I was little I wanted to know how music worked. Although I make my living as a performer now, I learned about the interpersonal aspects of music later.  Her immediate interest is in ...
2 comments
Read more

Cleaning Your Reeds

Updated: I've posted a video of my plaque cleaning technique HERE ! Oboe reeds are made from organic material, and over time it is inevitable that they will age and change. The first few days of change are usually quite welcome, as you break the reed in by playing and the opening gradually settles down to something you can be comfortable with and the response becomes more and more predictable.  You might even hit a plateau where it appears to be perfectly consistent and reliable for several days! But after that, the reed seems to be on a constant gradually accelerating downslope, until it eventually collapses into a sharp, non-responsive, mushy mess. We can rejuvenate the reed during this time by cleaning it, and can often extend its life as well! There are three good ways to do this. First, least invasively, you can just run some fresh water through and over the reed AFTER you play each time.  Go ahead and rinse that reed in the sink, shake it as dry as possible, a...
6 comments
Read more

Knife Sharpening

I've gotten a lot of questions on this topic, and the most recent querent prompted me to make a video to demonstrate.  You can find that  HERE . Knife sharpening seems to strike terror into many hearts.  And it's little wonder.  Many famous oboists have gone on record as saying that a sharp knife is the most important aspect of reed making. People have entire systems of stones and strops and rods set up to sharpen their knives. And it is important, of course it is - but I don't believe that you need your knife to be razor-like, or objectively the sharpest blade of any in your home.  The reed knife has one job - scraping cane off in precision ways - and it has to be sharp enough for that, and sharpened optimally for that purpose.  More than that is overly fussy for my taste. This is not to say that I allow my knife to be dull.  A dull knife forces you to put too much pressure on the reed and can cause cracking. Obviously it can lead to terribly inc...
7 comments
Read more