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. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

The Blog has MOVED

 Have you been waiting ... and waiting ... and WAITING for a new Prone Oboe post?  Don't wait here anymore!  The blog has moved to https://jennetingle.com/prone-oboe/  and will not be updated here on Blogger anymore.  Please come and check me out there!  I love you all - stay safe out there!  Jennet

How Do You WISH You Could Describe Your Reeds?

In Reed Club last Monday, we took a moment before we started scraping to set some intentions.  We each said one word - an adjective to describe what we WANTED our reeds to be.  An aspirational adjective. Efficient was a word that came up, and Consistent . Dark and Mysterious . Mellow . Predictable .  Trustworthy .  Honest .  BIGGER . Reed affirmations actually felt helpful - both in the moment and in the results we found as we worked.  I don't know why that surprises me - I set intentions at the beginning of the year, at the beginning of the month, at the beginning of a run, in the morning before I work.  I love a good affirmation.  I love WORDS.  But I'd sort of forgotten about the possibility of applying one to the mundane work of reed-making.   You don't have to know exactly how to GET to that result.  But having clarity in your mind about what that result is?  Helps you to stop going down unhelpful rabbit holes...