Tonight, my kids had their annual Christmas recital. Rudolph played piano and Holly played both piano
and violin in the recital.
The kids’ music teacher does these recitals roughly 3 times
per year – he borrows the sanctuary at his church, rolls in a big grand piano
and gives each of his students a chance to perform. The format is very simple – he starts with
the newest students. These included a
little girl (roughly 6 years old who wore a fluffy dress and a tiara (yes, a
tiara) and plunked out a simple song on the piano. They also included the music teacher’s twin granddaughters
who I’m guessing are 7 years old. They live
in the city but schlepped out to the suburbs to perform in grandpa’s
recital. I guess I should note that this
wasn’t just nepotism – the music teacher comes into NYC once a week to give his
granddaughters lessons. The young
performers were adorable. It didn’t
matter that the songs they performed were simple and rudimentary, or even if
they hit a few clunky notes along the way.
They each put on a pretty dress, got up in front of a church full of
strangers, and did their thing. Everyone
in the room was very supportive and encouraging.
In the middle, there was quite a range of performers. And this is where I noticed something. Some of these middle range performers were
technically, quite good. They hit all of
the notes, their tone was good, and they made it from start to finish without a
hitch. What was troubling about some of
these performances, however, was that in some cases, the performers seemed like
audioanimatronic robots like something out of the Hall of Presidents at Disney
World. They were so mechanical in their
playing that I imagined that a similar performance could probably be given by a
machine -- programmed to perfectly hit every note.
But that’s the rub – music is emotional. It can be happy, sad, passionate,
frightening. It is music in movies that helps set the tone by the emotional
weight it carries. Not to judge too
harshly, but the performances by some of these kids, while technically perfect
in some instances, were somewhat boring.
In those cases, the kids were not performing music – they were playing
notes. It was interesting to me how
disparate these middle range performances were – simply by the passion infused
in the performance of the instrumentalist.
Is it possible to teach this kind of passion? And if you can, how? I’m willing to bet some of these middle range
kids practice an hour or so each day. Is
it somewhere around 37 minutes into a practice that a kid suddenly smacks
his/her forehead and exclaims, “Wait!
This is a love song.” And from
that point forward, they inject gobs of passion into their playing. Is that the way it works? It’s quite fascinating to me.
Thankfully, the last group of performers – the ones that
have been studying with this teacher for years – for the most part “got it”. Their pieces seemed full of nuance – quiet passages
followed by melodic explosions. Their “highs”
were higher and their “lows” were lower.
And when they played, they seemed to get lost in the music, feeling the
passion of the piece. So if most of
these advanced students “got it”, again I wonder what was the magic agreement
that led to their Helen Keller moment of understanding?
Fans of music on the radio get the passion of it. Whether we’re talking pop, rock, classical or
country, listeners understand these are often tales about love, loss, anger and
lust. We can feel the emotional state of
the songwriter shining through the air to our radios. I’m willing to even bet that most of those
middle range students have favorite songs from the radio and if we asked them
why those songs were their favorites, they would mention things about the
emotional impact of many of these songs.
Even so, when these kids play their instruments, they fail to produce
music and only play notes.
In my mind, it is kind of like learning a new language. Someone could take high school French and nail
all of the vocabulary, conjugations and pronunciations. Technically proficient but without any
passion. For anyone out there with any
teaching experience, I’d be very curious to hear how this kind of passion gets
taught.
-- Frosty
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