Keeping going

My posting on this site has slowed down recently because, as you may know from reading my other site, we've recently moved to Taiwan. This has been an upheaval and, I have to admit, a serious challenge to my son's piano practice. A piano isn't the kind of instrument you can take anywhere, and we decided that we would ship our piano here rather than sell it and buy another when we arrived. Consequently, my son hasn't had a proper acoustic piano to practice on for several weeks now.

In an earlier post I wrote about how it was important when you start out to buy the best instrument you can afford because this impacts the quality of learning your child experiences. I warned against hiring a tutor who teaches on an acoustic piano but allows your child to practice on a digital piano at home. Now that we've been keeping our son's practice going until his piano arrives with the use of a digital one, I can safely echo the advice I gave earlier. There are many things that my son learned to do that he simply can't practice using a different kind of instrument, such as playing legato and echoes. While it's been better than nothing, using a digital piano has reinforced my understanding of how it is a completely different instrument from an acoustic piano, and the perceived similarities are merely surface appearances.

From our experiences, I can give some tips as to how to keep going if you're moving house or even just going on holiday.

DO

• Define a practice location in your accommodation. This helps reinforce the idea that practising is an important part of everyday life.
• Stick to your normal routine as much as possible. Practising an instrument should be like a habit - don't get out of the habit!
• Carry on learning. It can be tempting to put progress on hold until circumstances improve, but for many children one of their greatest pleasures is learning new songs. Don't deprive your child of a sense of progress and achievement.
• Maintain musical interest. It easy to ignore those aspects of life that support learning and motivation, but continuing to listen to music, watch performances and read about composers are some of the easiest activities to sustain.

DON'T

• Substitute a poorer quality instrument if you can avoid it. Some piano shops will hire out pianos for practice, or if you're very lucky your hotel may have one in the lounge!
• Delay finding another teacher. It's taken us some time to locate the possibilities in our area, and minimising the break between lessons is ideal.
• Forget to allow for practice time every day (or however often is normal for your family). This is very easily done when other routines are disrupted.

Continuing to work with your child in their musical education can be challenging when your everyday lives are temporarily or permanently changed. One positive thing to come out of this is the knowledge that if you can manage to maintain good habits during these times, then you're on a steady path for the future.

Cultivating an interest in music.

A genuine interest in and love of music can be one of the best motivators in a child's musical education, and of course, a source of inspiration and pleasure throughout their lives. If you're playing the target musical pieces constantly in the background, as is wise, it can be easy to sometimes forget that there are a lot of other excellent examples of musicianship your children can learn from and enjoy. Parents often start with the famous classical pieces that were written specifically for children, such as Peter and the Wolf

and The Carnival of The Animals

But there is no reason why any other classical piece cannot be played for your children's enjoyment.

It is said that if you want your child to read, read yourself. I believe the same applies to music. It is difficult to encourage musical appreciation and understanding in a vaccuum. Similarly, if no one shows an interest in your child's playing, they will understandably be less inclined to play. So, if you want your child to have a good attitude to music, the answer is to lead by example.

Listening at Home
In our household, we're in the habit of always playing music in the background at family dinner times. Not only does this expose my son to good quality music, it also teaches him that enjoying music is a normal part of everyday life. Sometimes the music is a topic of conversation too; usually it's our appreciation of it or occasionally why we want to turn it off! But the idea behind this habit is that my son's musical interest is being fostered.

Of course, you needn't confine background music to any particular time of day. I have only instituted evening meal listening time to ensure that we heard some music every day. Another possibility, and something else we do, is to always play classical music stations on the car radio. Whenever there is no other background noise to compete with there is an opportunity to put on something beautiful. At the very least, it improves your quality of life.


Attending concerts and operas
The next time, (or perhaps the first time!), you attend a classical concert or operatic performance, take your child along with you. We generally don't give children much credit for their ability to enjoy classical music and opera. In fact, we give them the message that it is difficult, boring and inaccessible, by dumbing things down to their 'level'. In my experience, with the right preparation, children can successfully attend and enjoy sophisticated musical events from a young age, certainly from the age of eight with most children.

The key to not having a child squirming in their seat and embarrassing you by loudly asking when it will be time to go, is to prepare the child properly for the event. For example, when my son was 5, a performance of The Magic Flute was coming to my town. We had three months or so to go before the performance, so I bought a couple of dvds of the opera and started to sit down and watch it myself. My son was initially just interested in just one or two parts, such as the Queen of the Night's arias, but as I watched it several times and explained the story to him, he became genuinely interested in the whole opera.

These are the versions we have: this one and this one.

As the performance date drew nearer we explained to my son that we had tickets to go and see it live and emphasised what an important occasion it would be. On the night, we all got dressed in our best clothes and went to the performance with a view to leaving at the interval, thinking that would be quite enough for a 5 year old. In fact, not only was my son amazingly and unusually quiet (we had bought tickets towards the back of the theatre to make a quick exit if he became noisy) he actually wanted to stay and see the rest of the performance!

Lives of the Composers
Children understand and are interested in concrete things that are relevant to their lives. Abstract thinking is something that develops with time. As adults, we know that the music we hear has been written by a real person who had, or still has, a real life. It can be of great interest to children to find out about the composers of the pieces  they are listening to and learning to play. Just a little research into Mozart's or Beethoven's life reveals many interesting facts, and even things such as the fact that a composer was a child once with brothers and sisters, and that they had lessons and practiced too, can be a revelation to a child.

Why Beethoven Threw the Stew is a good example of a book that provides some interesting tales. It can also help to have portraits of composers on display, or watch films based on their lives, though 'Amadeus' is apparently not  historically accurate!

In short, your child's musical education need not be , and should not be, confined to the music they play. There is a world of listening for them that will enhance their playing, help them relate what they do to the wider world, and give them enormous pleasure.

Keeping up with the other children

One of the best things about learning a musical instrument using the Suzuki method is that usually your child will be learning in a community of children and parents, all with the same goal. Part of the learning process is to sit in on another child's lesson, so that the exposure to another child's playing and instruction can enhance the learning process. So much of Suzuki is listening! Also, the local Suzuki association will often organise one or two concerts a year, plus workshops. So there is plenty of opportunity for parents and children to hear and see what other children are doing.

Similarly, in a more traditional environment, such as school music lessons, the school orchestra, or when studying for music exams, children and parents can, if they wish to, compare their experience and achievement with others.

These opportunities to share in musical learning are usually beneficial for many reasons. There is a sense of community, the chance to share tips or offload concerns and worries, and the pleasure of hearing others play, to name but a few. Sometimes, however, there is a more negative side to this situation.

Parents want the best for their children, particularly the parents who go to the trouble and expense of providing them with a musical education. Children also want to do their best and not feel as though they are worse at anything than their peers. We all approach learning with baggage from previous experiences, our individual personality traits and our pre-formed expectations of what will happen. Unfortunately, any of these factors can occasionally cause things to go awry.

Personally, I had a crisis of confidence when my son started sitting in on lessons with a girl about a year younger than him. She had an older sister who was also learning to play the piano so she had been exposed to everything her sister had done, as well as the endless hours of hearing the Suzuki CDs. Consequently, she progressed very quickly until she caught up with my son and they are now roughly at the same stage in terms of the songs they have learned.

My son is naturally competitive and noticed very quickly that this little girl was learning new songs far more quickly than he had done. He also had that perception of an age hierarchy that is instilled in children in mainstream education, so was disturbed to realise that a younger child was 'catching up' with him. On top of this, because I lack a musical background, I also lack confidence in my ability to guide my son through this process. The result was my son spiralling down into a mire of self-doubt and unhappiness over his playing, compounded by feedback from a concerned mother who was convinced that somehow she was to blame for his apparent lack of progress.

I became convinced that I should pull my son out of his learning programme, because it was clearly becoming detrimental to his self-esteem, and practice sessions were becoming tortuous ordeals, very far from the enjoyable industry that is the ideal. I had failed. After a rather emotional email to his teacher, asking for help, we had a long talk about how children progress at different rates and her perception of what he had achieved so far, and also about how parents can unconsciously influence their children's feelings about their learning.

It wasn't a good time for either of us, but I feel it was so helpful to my son and me in the long run. I learned not to mirror back a negative attitude to learning and to concentrate on praising the things my son could do, not to worry about what he couldn't do. I stopped acknowledging his comparisons of himself and this other child and concentrated on making his practice as much fun as I could.

I now understand that learning anything is not an even path. Sometimes we struggle uphill and the going is slow, other times we are racing downhill at a pace. There is no predicting when these times will come. Sometimes many months of patient repetition pays off all at once. Other times the progress is by such small steps that achievement arrives almost unnoticed.

I've found it helpful not to think in terms of the number of songs learned when it comes to my son's musical acquisition. Each time that a child or adult practises, as long as it is a striving, purposeful practice, then that is one step forward. Whether the effects of that practice are immediate and noticeable or not doesn't matter. When learning an instrument, there is so much to learn in terms of technique, knowledge of the instrument, and general musical knowledge, that to think in terms of simply learning more and more complex songs is deceiving and prosaic.

For children, though, this is often how they measure their progress and maintain interest. The novelty of a new song is preferable to improving technique while playing an old song. It is something simple and easy to understand, some tangible evidence of the work they have done. If a child is focusing excessively on number of songs learnt, this means they don't perceive or value the other ways that they progress.

I realised with my son that something I could do to develop his perspective on his work was to make apparent the results that he had achieved. These days, I take time to talk things through with him before and sometimes during practice. He knows what he's doing and why, and could write his own practice schedule now if he had to (though he would probably be shorter than the one indicated by his teacher!) I also keep recordings of performances and parts of practice sessions, so that in years to come he'll be able to see how far he's come and how well his hard work has paid off.

Holiday piano times

Many music teachers who teach children don't offer lessons during the school holidays, and for us this brings its difficulties and its pleasures. I'm not the most confident Suzuki parent so continuing practice times without a teacher's assessment of progress and her guidance tends to leave me worrying that I'm doing everything wrong. On the other hand we are also less constrained by the teacher's direction on what should be done.

Holidays bring a relaxing of tight schedules and an element of  freedom over the direction that practice takes. I try to reassure myself that even if I fail to spot errors or take my son down the wrong path, the teacher can always correct my mistakes when lessons recommence. I don't have to be perfect!

We have reincorporated a listening task/game that we used to do when my son first started to play. His teacher calls it note hunt. In its original form, the child chooses a particular note, say for example C. Then he or she turns their back and the parent plays a C. The child then has to guess which C it was. The reward can be a decreasing number of points according to how many guesses the child needs, or gold, silver or bronze medals (imaginary!). Three tries is normally sufficient.

My son loved playing this game and awarded himself increasing numbers of points, trying to beat previous scores. (Basically, anythng that temotely resembles a computer game is a major motivator for him.) Of course, the idea is that it helps the child learn to concentrate on differentiating between the notes. My son ended up giving himself millions of points for a first time correct guess.

Just recently we've been playing a slightly different version where he chooses any key and he has to guess which note I've  played in that key in a particular octave. We're doing this because at the moment he's learning the different scales. As always, his knowledge is greater than mine and he has to show me which notes are played in that key in the first place, but we manage. In fact, I think he takes pride in the fact that he knows the keys better than me.

So, we're currently enjoying this opportunity to our own thing for a little while.

Listening and watching

We've recently incorporated a new item in my son's piano practice time. He loves going on the computer, so I thought that an opportunity to embed some computer time into practice would be seen in a positive light. The way I did it was to add a listening section, where he can go to the computer and choose one thing to watch on Youtube. Of course, I have to steer him away from Sonic the Hedgehog episodes, so he has a set category that he can search in. So far, we have done famous composers and famous pianists. Famous composers lasted us a few weeks as he worked through the ones that he knows. (He can choose one each week, so he sees a selection of their works).

One thing he really likes to watch are these graphical representations of the pieces:

They're called graphical score animations. I can't vouch for the quality of the music, but as something that may be of interest to more visually-oriented minds, I can recommend them. They're interesting because you can see what's about to come up just before it's played. My son has great fun anticipating a loud crescendo!

Once we've exhausted the known composers and pianists (our knowledge isn't extensive), we'll move onto the different types of music: sonatas, nocturnes, concertos etc. Another possibility is pieces in a chosen key. Those should keep us going for a while. At the moment this is the most enjoyable part of my son's practice. Once he's done what he has to do, some form of Twinkle, the next thing he always chooses is listening. In doing this, he's quickly building his musical knowledge, and hopefully coming to appreciate that there's a wide world of music out there to explore and participate in.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

The process by which we learn a new skill is still something of a mystery to scientists. I've been reading this book recently: The Genius in All of Us. It's quite a cheesy title for what is a very interesting book, about the respective roles of genes and environment in shaping our abilities as we grow. One thing that's clear from reading it is that there is still so much that is unknown about exactly what it is that makes us so different from each other in the things we can and can't do, and the extent to which we're able to practise those abilities.

It seems, according to the author, David Shenk, that much of what we believe to be determined by genes, such as intelligence, talent and personality traits, are shaped much more by our environment and experiences than we are aware. Mr Shenk cites numerous example of people who are believed to have God-given gifts, who in fact won their supreme achievements through favourable environments and sheer bloody hard work.

Yet exactly what's happening in the brain during the period of learning and honing those skills, and how the brain responds to what's happening in the body, is nowhere near clear to those working on those mysteries. What is known, is that prolonged periods - the current thinking is 10,000 hours - of dedicated practice of the desired skill will result in mastery of it. It's important to note that it must be the right kind of practice. Mindlessly going through the routine won't do it. It must be the kind of practice where the person either pushes themselves or is pushed constantly into new challenges. Never complacent, the student must reach constantly beyond his grasp.

This was brought to my mind today as I was watching my son doing his Sunday Repetoire performance. Every Sunday he'll play through all the pieces he's learned, using a lucky dip of lolly sticks with the song titles written on. For some reason, things fell into place today. He remembered and used most of the little polishing points that he's learned for each song, which for him is something of an unusual occurence. Usually he rather unthinkingly plays them through if he isn't prompted to try to remember.

What's got me puzzled is: why today? What was different about today that helped him to concentrate more? Or was it just that the penny had finally dropped, after practising those points so many times; that something had slotted into place in his brain; that enough hours had been done? When I figure out the answer to that I'll be phoning those scientists up.

We're currently working on a Kurtag book for reading. I have to confess that I'm a Philistine when it comes to this. I just wait for the pain to end and try to smile. My son is learning to read Let's Be Silly which occurs about halfway through this performance:

This is how it looks on the page:

Of course, my son loves to be silly, so has great fun with this. I appreciate our wise piano teacher's understanding of how to make music appeal to young children, but what about the parents, that's what I want to know. What about the parents?

Progress report

We're having good times at the moment. It's a school holiday here in the UK, which means that we can have piano time in the morning when my son isn't tired after a long school day. He concentrates much better, gets less frustrated and is more interested in what he's doing. We've also got a new practice sheet that shows a spider in a web!

As you can see, the practice points go around the outside and a portion of the web gets filled in as each point is covered. There are lots of flies caught in the web but the ones that are free are fighting for their friends with missiles!

We're working on learning the minor scales at the moment. My son learns them by starting with the first note, then working his way up by listening to what sounds right. As a non-musical person, it's quite amazing to me how one set of notes will sound right and even one out of place sounds wrong. I know there's an explanation for this but the fact is that even without knowing why, we can all independently and without having been taught, agree on what sounds correct and what doesn't. Humans are a quite remarkable species.

Bobby McFerrin demonstrates this to audiences regularly:

An added interest to practice is my son's teacher's use of this site: http://www.dropbox.com/ She uploads video demonstrations of practice points for her students to use. It's extremely useful to view these during piano time. Of course there's the novelty of doing something a bit different, but my son's piano teacher is the one who can play the piano, I can't. It's so much easier to simply show him a video than try to explain what the desired goal is.

I was really disappointed not to be able to get tickets to this:

World-renowned concert pianist Lang Lang invited children to audition to play in a special concert of fifty grand pianos on stage at once. Five hundred children sent in videos of themselves playing and one hundred were chosen. The title of the endeavour was 'Lang Lang Inspires'. I imagine all those children participating and watching the event will be enormously inspired to continue with their learning and enjoyment of music.