Last week I was privileged to teach a most wonderful lesson. The lesson was with an 11 year old who started her piano lessons just one year ago. She did the Summer Crash Course which saw her go from never having a played a note to reading music and playing with all 10 fingers in just 8 lessons. She continued her lessons in September and has practiced every week since. She has made consistent progress and is now finishing Book 3 of the series. Along the way she has asked insightful questions and reflected on her own progress as well as her own limitations.
I should probably mention that this student has cerebral palsy. She has to work doubly hard to get her hands and fingers to follow her brains instructions and to get them to do so quickly and in conjunction with one another is no mean feet. She is constantly looking for ways to better her technique and to try and get her body to do what she wants.
In todays lesson she was struggling with the piece she has been practicing all week and she was keen to show it to me so I could help her move forward. This is the first sign of a great musician, someone who see’s a difficult piece as a challenge- she didn’t want to move on to a new piece, she wanted to work out what the problem was with this piece and fix it! This determination and focus and drive for perfection is a skill as essential in music making as it is in all aspects of life.
She explained that whilst she had been practicing all week she had failed to achieve the fluency she wanted. She played the piece as best she could and then we discussed what might be the issue. We talked and discussed and played and explored for the whole lesson until we had cracked it.
We spent a good 15 minutes on the first 4 bars of the piece, which I think made her stop and think about how she is practicing. This level of detail, to the smallest amount of music, was something new. Once she had mastered those first 4 bars, first the right hand, then the left hand and finally the hands together, perfecting the rest of the piece came surprisingly quickly! Once her hands had learnt how the music works, and felt how the music moves the problem disappeared.
The process we went through together will hopefully help her to get more out of her practice in the coming weeks and months. As a teacher I am always trying to get my students to identify the problem, the challenge, the difficulty, so that they can fix it. It might be reading the notes, it might be that one hand is in an unfamiliar position, it might be the coordination of the hands playing together- it could be one of a million issues, but the first step towards improving is to know what the problem is!
Isolating the problem is a skill in itself, and in order to get the most out of ones practice, you have to become accomplished at this skill. Today reminded me why i love my job. It is both exciting and rewarding to go on this journey of discovery with a young person, because the skills they are learning are about so much more than the piece they are learning today. It is about all the pieces they will ever learn in the future and it is about building confident, independent musicians who can take control of their own musical journeys.
