Creating a virtuous cycle: My secret

I do well when I'm doing well. I thrive on momentum. I can spin anything into a positive, whether it's for the benefit of my students, employees, or me. There's always an angle that can shed light on an underappreciated virtue or accomplishment. "Well, just think of where you were last year at this time - you've made so much progress!" Whatever it takes to keep feeling good. Preserving a winning streak is easier than making a comeback.

Princess Mary of England at the piano, 1910 (Library of Congress)When I do feel down, I have many strategies to employ in order to press the reset button on my life and get back on track. Prayer and meditation. Exercise. Being outdoors. Water - the ocean is best but even gazing at a pool or fountain will do. Spending time with friends and family. Playing music, especially with others. And when all else fails, a little caffeine.

In addition to these wonderful things there is one activity that, throughout my life, has been an unusually powerful catalyst for change. Believe it or not, it's playing classical piano.

Although I have always made my living as a music teacher, playing classical piano is little more than a hobby as far as my professional life goes. I don't play weddings or concerts, and my degree is in voice. On good days I am a solid intermediate player but I have yet to learn much important repertoire.

In spite of all of this, classical piano has held great significance for me since I taught myself Schumann's "Melodie" (Op. 68, No. 1) at age eleven.

Playing classical music is both the cause and the consequence of a calm, even temper, self-acceptance, connection with my emotions, a well-ordered life, and an alignment of priorities.

My playing is inconsistent, which is ridiculous given the clear benefit that provides me. What can I say - I do not always have a well-ordered life and an alignment of priorities! However, because the piano is something I return to again and again, each time I can see anew the changes it sets into motion, and one conclusion I can draw is that perhaps I am not always ready for such dramatic upheaval.

In other words: I can head to the piano bench, have some quiet and apparently boring moments with a few measures of Mendelssohn, and three days later I must be prepared to question everything I have ever believed about my existence.

Okay, maybe that doesn't happen every time. But it's happened often enough that I'm wary when I start to find myself gravitating to the piano.

On the other hand, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario. When I have enough free time and mental clarity to spend several hours a week working hard on classical music, I've clearly got my shit together. Then the additional clarity and peacefulness created by all that playing begin to infuse the rest of my life. It's a virtuous cycle.

Even if I don't want to shake things up I find great satisfaction in playing classical music. The fact that it is recreated from the page makes me feel the way I do when I'm engrossed in a novel, a willing prisoner of a rich inner world created by the collaboration between the writer and me.

There is a sense of communion I feel with the composer, as though I am literally bringing him to life as I play. This long-dead European becomes my friend and colleague as I decode the symbols he lovingly placed on the score centuries ago. An almost-forgotten cipher is his only way to intimate the physical and emotional road map of his work.

There are no words in this music - the presence only of sounds refreshes and entrances me. I am drawn into a deep concentration that lingers after I am finished. I remember an afternoon working on J.S. Bach's Inventio No. 13, hypnotized by the ticking of the grandfather clock I was using as a metronome. Several months later, I played the same piece, now mastered, on the morning of the PSAT exam that would yield a National Merit Scholarship. Better than amphetamines.

Unlike a drug, this high is long-lasting, cumulative, and bears no side effects other than a sometimes uncomfortable expansion of one's capacity as a human being.

I know that not all of my piano students will feel this way about playing. I only hope that they will find something in their lives, whether a hobby or a vocation, that will inspire them to learn and grow out of love rather than duty. I hope they will find something that will allow them to turn the volume down on the less pleasant things in their lives while amplifying their joy, satisfaction, and renewal.

When not to use momentum

I've talked about the value of momentum, how it allows you to create a positive feedback loop when learning a skill. However, there are times when momentum actually slows you down or interferes with the learning process.

Heavy Lifting

When you tax a muscle beyond its ability, you allow it to grow. When you do it right, this process is so intense that it fills up your entire physical and mental experience. Big results come from this kind of effort.

At the gym, you aDon't be a dumb bell! Slow, deliberate work is most effective. Photo by jerryforlife.lways see dudes putting a ridiculous amount of weight on the barbells and then lifting and lowering as fast as they can. They are letting momentum do the work for them instead of the muscle. A better approach would be to lift far less weight and go as slowly as possible, feeling every sensation on the way up and the way down. This is much harder, and that's why it will pay off.

My piano teacher, John Swiedler, used to tell me, "You should practice so slowly that a listener will not be able to tell what you're playing." Why is this slow playing so important? Because it prevents you from being able to use momentum. This leads to a deeper understanding of the music you are playing. Students always say, "but it's easier to play it faster." Exactly. If it's easy, you're using momentum. We don't want it to be easy. Bwahahahahaha...

"My brain is full."

There's that Far Side cartoon where a student raises his hand in class and asks to be excused, because "my brain is full." Now, part of the punchline is that he has a smaller head than his classmates, but in reality, this feeling happens to those of us with normal-sized brains all the time. It's that feeling you get after staring at a single math problem, crossword, Sudoku puzzle, or highway map for a quarter of an hour with no apparent breakthrough. Believe it or not, very good things are happening in your brain even though it feels like it's melting.

Yes, he has a band-aid, but slow practice won't hurt you.Where this often comes up in music lessons is switching between chords on the piano. One chord is A, the next chord is D. The pianist has to locate the three notes of the A chord, and then find the three notes of the D chord.

Students always rush through this, and sometimes accidentally get the notes right. They are using momentum. Far more difficult (and far more effective) is to slow down and do the mental heavy lifting that this activity requires.

Find each note separately and deliberately. Think out loud. Take note of which fingering will work best, and be consistent. Resist the temptation to rush yourself. Stay completely calm and in control.

It may take you minutes, not seconds, to find the next chord. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely this slow, painstaking process that will allow you to nimbly hop from chord to chord without conscious thought in the near future.

The bonus

You lifted ten pounds instead of your usual forty and you were incredibly sore the next day. Two weeks of this regimen, and you see muscle definition you thought you'd have to lift eighty pounds to get.

You see that same crossword puzzle sitting on the kitchen table the next morning. All of a sudden, three previously inaccessible answers pop out at you ("Aha! Magnum, P.I.! Elk! Spartacus!").

You lay your hands on the instrument, and you play a difficult passage with ease and precision on the first try.

An unexpected bonus often comes along after a period of concentrated effort. There is thus another layer of paradox here: Take the slow, frustrating path, and it ends up being the quickest, smoothest one. Deliberately avoid momentum in the short-term, and you'll end up gaining a lot of it in the long-term.

Momentum: more important than talent

One big thing you have to forget about is whether your kid is talented or not. Just take it off the table.

Here's the thing: for kids, it's all about the work they put into it. Yes, work. It's not all going to be fun, although it might be enjoyable. You have to help the kid set up a routine for playing every day. Or at least four days out of the week, at least ten minutes a day. If you can't do this, the chance of your kid succeeding with the instrument over the long haul drops precipitiously.

It's all about momentum. If you can build momentum from the very beginning, you will be amazed at how well your child will do. Some early success on the instrument will help her continue to stay motivated to practice, which in turn leads to more success. "She's so talented!" Uh-huh. How mysterious.

Contrast that with the alternative: Teacher and kid cover pages 10-12 in the first lesson, and kid doesn't look at them again for the rest of the week. Kid comes back, teacher realizes the kid didn't practice. Two things happen then: First, the teacher knows that practicing is going to be an issue and unconsciously holds back her best stuff. Second, the kid gets assigned pages 10-12 again. There goes the momentum. It takes a lot to fix this problem: The kid has learned that practicing is not a part of taking music lessons.

I cannot overstate the importance of the crucial first few weeks of music lessons. Developing the practice routine is a lot like practice itself: getting it right on the first try is exponentially better than fixing mistakes. It takes seven repetitions to learn a given musical figure, and thirty-five repetitions to un-learn it once it's been learned incorrectly. Likewise, a child who gets off on the wrong foot has learned incorrectly that learning an instrument is about attending the music lesson and nothing more, and once a child makes this erroneous assumption it is extremely difficult to get him to a place where he is learning music for real.

This is such an avoidable problem. But how involved should you be in preventing it? This depends on the age and temperament of your child. For most children under twelve, you can pretty much assume that you will be overseeing daily practice, reminding your kid to do it, and providing rewards for doing it/consequences for not doing it. If you are not willing to be this involved, it is unlikely your child will succeed at music lessons, even if it was his idea.

For children twelve and up, it is a judgment call. You have to choose your battles on everything at this age, so maybe you want music lessons to be something you don't have to be involved in or fight over. If this is the case, you have to decide whether you are okay with spending the money on lessons even if your kid isn't practicing. The exception to the momentum rule is that sometimes when teens are given the space to develop their passion for music, it will bloom on its own.

Be prepared for the teacher to have a say in this, too - your teacher might not be willing to work with a student who is not practicing. Children who don't practice are not fun to work with.

Many a parent wants his kid to be a natural - our culture fetishizes prodigies and overnight successes. But practicing music is really about training the student to feel pride in a sense of accomplishment - to derive pleasure from a sense of progress after a period of hard work. That's not glamorous at all! So what's the shortcut?

You guessed it: momentum. The funny thing is, momentum starts to look eerily like talent when developed early and cultivated faithfully.