#32 Patience

The number one thing a teacher needs for small children is the patience of a saint. The teacher will be required to repeat things over and over again, and a really good teacher will make the repetitions be fun, or even enlightening and not monotonous or boring. Gruffness is the mark of an impatient teacher, and is a character trait to watch out for when looking for a teacher for your child. Make sure you judge how the teacher talks to the children or in front of the children though, some teachers- like me- are extremely gruff but soften up completely with the kids.

#31 Don't play with a fever!

I've been sick for about two weeks now. My wife had a really bad ear infection, and then she passed it on to me, and then it developed into a throat infection and I passed it on to her, and now she passed it back to me.

[caption id="attachment_376" align="alignright" width="220" caption="I've got millions of these stupid buggers wrecking havoc in my ears and throat."][/caption]

An easy way to injure yourself is practicing with a fever. If you feel a general ache and tiredness, don't play.

The few times I've had tendon or muscle pain that lasted more than a day were when I practiced strenuous things regardless of being sick. We use very small muscles and movements to play, and these are easily injured. They can also be easily overstressed without you noticing until it's too late.

If you're sick, take it easy with your practicing. You'll probably be too tired to do any kind of meaningful progress anyways.

#30 Practicing slowly is not always good.

A lot of students practice slowly because, for some reason, they feel that they have to do it. Everything you do when you practice should build up to a single purpose, to play the piece in the ideal way, this being the image in your head of what a perfect performance of that piece would be like.

Practicing something very slowly has a purpose: it gives you time to remember and react to everything and to process everything that is going on when you are still unfamiliar with the music. It also gives you more control over the actual movements that you are going to use to play a particular passage. Playing the piece very slowly without a mental image of how it must sound in the end is absolutely useless. It is also futile to play the piece slowly if you are using movements and impulses that are different from the ones that will be used when playing the piece in its proper tempo.

Most importantly, there must come a moment when you make the leap from "practicing" to actual playing. This requires some will-power and determination. Playing really slowly is comfortable, and getting out of that routine and actually trying to go for the end result is sometimes disheartening.

A runner won't gain speed by running in slow motion. He does it by pushing himself beyond what he can do. Slow practice is good for analysis and to make sure we are doing everything right. It is another tool in our toolbox to be used to achieve a practical result.

Non-sense latin in Alexander Nevsky.

Composers can be petty too, as Prokofiev shows by having his rivalry with Stravinsky come through in his score for Eisenstein's movie Alexander Nevsky and the corresponding cantata. My school's choir and my wife's orchestra have now been rehearsing it for a while, so it has been on my mind lately.

If you have not seen the original film, here it is in its entirety (with a severely damaged audio track):

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3081784922766209878]

The choir part that accompanies the Teutons is supposedly a medieval pilgrim's chant, but it is really complete non-sense. Prokofiev searched in the Moscow conservatory library for medieval chants, but they sounded all pretty bland and boring in the context, so he decided to come up with something better. He used the Latin text: "Peregrinus expectavi, pedes meos in cymbalis" which could be translated as "We wanderers look forward to having our feet covered with cymbals". Morag G. Kerr, a soprano in the BBC Symphony Chorus found what I think is the real origin of this text: Prokofiev being petty and taking a jab at his rival, Stravinsky. Read all about it here.

Daily piano tip #29.

One of the big impediments some people have when trying to play fast octaves is the positioning of the thumb. A good rule of thumb (groan at the bad pun please) is to make sure the thumb is taking the shortest route from key to key. That means playing with your thumb near the black keys. Lots of people make the mistake of playing with the thumb on the edge of the white keys when playing octaves. You might think that it is safer to put the thumb there, but you are actually making your octaves clumsier.

Practice fast octaves only with the thumb to make sure it is near the black keys most of the time. The jump from black to white key with the thumb is one of the big factors that prevents people from playing fast and accurate octaves.

Daily piano tip #28.

Remember that scene in the pianist, where he is locked in a small room with a piano but he can't make any noise? He sits down and plays with his imagination. You don't actually need a piano to practice; my teacher used to tell us about learning a whole Mozart concerto on her kitchen table and playing it a week later. Glenn Gould supposedly recorded the Brahms Ballades without having played them once on the piano before, through mental practice for a month. John Ogdon was known for learning whole pieces on the plane ride between concerts. Mental practice is not impossible to learn and can be just as good as actually sitting down and plunking out the notes. It is actually a lot more strenuous work to have keep your mind active and engaged while you imagine all the harmonies and notes of what you play as well as how it would physically look and feel to play. Even so, you can get better at it, the more you do it. Imagine an invisible piano and use your mind to practice.

Daily piano tip #27.

One of the things that most throws us out of balance when playing in public is a heightened awareness of what is going on. You can, and should, prepare for this when you practice. Before you practice, close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Hold the air in and then concentrate on the way your body relaxes as you breathe out. Now start to notice and label the different sounds you perceive, trying to listen to the most distant of these; other people talking outside of your practice room, cars passing a nearby street, the sound of your own breathing, the sound of the pipes in your house, etc. You will quickly notice how much more noisy it is when you start noticing all these things. Now be aware of how the seat feels beneath you, of the solidity of the ground, of the air around you, of the temperature. Now look around you and notice the appearance and position of objects in your room, the way your hands and the keyboard look.

Take a few minutes each day to settle into your practice environment, it will help you practice better. It will also prepare you for the heightened sensory awareness that is the result of the adrenaline rush that comes from the fear of public performance.