The effort in noticing

Over the Christmas break, I noticed that I had a lot more scope - and space - for the imagination.

I noticed and remembered things about my teenage years, now bygone, that I hadn't thought about for a very long time.

There was a period of two years, following Oberlin, when I was living my own flat for the first time. I knew *nothing* about housekeeping, decorating, cooking, dating, or being a very young professional musician in a large musical community.




Yet there I was.

Some close friendships forged in those years remain close to this day. And I still remember being happy, non-judgemental on my self, and have fond memories of the coffee shop and grocery store nearby.

Sometimes we ask, how can our "older" self be a gift to our younger self. That question is on the point of absurd. It's impossible.






It is entirely possible, however, to have the past teach the present.




Therein lies the reason for this blog.

We've had more snow here in January than last. (We didn't have any in the northeast for Christmas!). It has yielded some gorgeous pictures and moments. Now that Zheng is teaching during the day in addition to evenings, I am without a car altogether. My commute is by foot.




I'm able to stop, breathe, and take pictures.




Even the ordinary can stop us in our tracks.
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Location:Wellesley Dr SE,Albuquerque,United States

Graph

I had the pleasure of guest-lecturing in someone's song literature class this past week. I've been thinking about how to represent in pictures the things which I think about often. Here is a graph of languages, ranging from dark to light, Slavic to Romantic.

I have been trying to make an effort to write more of what I impart to my students. This is perhaps a symptom of the head feeling too "full" at this time in the semester.



A friend of mine asked me what my preference was for a to-do "app." My response - a legal pad, and when things are finished, they get crossed off. One page of "done" is then ripped out and hurled into the trash!

Here's to a "low-tech" (in a good way!) end of the semester!

Top-Down, or Bottom-Up?

Yesterday was the first day of the CoOPERAtive program now in its ninth(!) year at Westminster Choir College. No matter how long I have been away from this iconic campus, it always feels like I've never left. I did my MM here from 03-05 and then worked here until '07, then left for work in San Francisco and Philadelphia. 

The things that this place has given me are astonishing - a true sense of purpose as a collaborative pianist, countless lessons in life and music (actually, in that order), and a sense of urgency that repertoire and languages must be learned and polished immediately.

The program is divided into two categories of students: Fellows and Young Artists. Fellows, in general, are graduate students or beyond (early professional or pre-professional). Young Artists tend to be finishing undergraduate or about to finish (or having just finished).

I feel so grateful that I get to work here again this summer.

I had terrific sessions yesterday with the students. In one of the sessions, the student and I were working on an excerpt from Barber's "Hermit Songs." We were working on how the verses start differently (sometimes Barber uses retrograde-inversion to differentiate the vocal line starts of each verse). Then I realized that the student maybe wasn't thinking about the overall structure of the piece ... 

So ...

We laid the piece of music on the floor and analyzed its sections. 

First, we just spent time picking the large sections. (I would say that no matter how large the piece is, anything from a Chopin Mazurka or a Sondheim tune to a Mahler symphony movement, divide the piece into two or three large sections. Not eighteen or nine or eleven).

Here is a photo of "top-down" - from Arkansas:

 



Next, we chose further subdivisions per section (so, within a section, we chose two or three divisions per that section). Every piece will be different. In this particular Barber piece, the sections and sub-sections are delineated clearly by piano interludes, verse changes, or key changes). 



We don't necessarily have to start practicing at the beginning of a (concerto, song, piece, movement). Much better to eat the frog, one bite at a time, and not necessarily start with the head. It's also easy to get bogged down and overwhelmed with any over-abundance of something in a piece: lots of text, tricky rhythms, or tons of black notes. 

Here is a "bottom-up" photo from New Mexico:

 

I had a major revelation about myself at Eastman while taking Theory 402 with Dr. Headlam. He introduced us to the big-picture concept of "top-down" or "bottom-up." He explained that learners had a default, but we could train the other side. I discovered that I was definitely a "bottom-up" learner, seeing details (but not necessarily getting them all). I would get so overwhelmed with the details that big-picture ideas, including big-picture scope of a piece, would be missing entirely (and some of the details would be missing too, so therefore, the audience wasn't getting much). 

Now, as a result of this teacher and his work with us, and the doctorate in general, I'm a "top-down" thinker. Understanding the largest confines of something allows you to break it down, and then break it down again (again, again) , until you can actually really get some work done. 

I was delighted to have this time with this student yesterday. I feel that it helped, and I learned something in the process about her, about how she looks at a score and will then go forth and prepare a performance.

Idioms, part 1

When I was talking to Zheng last night, he mentioned that he was feeling a little pudgy and that he was "growing some weight." I giggled and explained that we say "gain some weight."

How someone uses idiomatic phrases, or prepositions, is often a true mark of how fluent he or she is in a language. Each language has its hurdles. Italian prepositions are very difficult. English isn't much better. German has adjective endings which still boggle my mind, ten years after initially studying the language (and I'm continuing to work on these). I have no idea how this works in Mandarin, but I know I'm about to find out.

This is now "down time" in the semester. I have more time to visit family, friends, and now the young children of these people. It has been fascinating to see how kids pick up language, or how quickly parents can "understand" their kids even if the kids can't say anything intelligible. I've heard "I want nie," "wainie wainie ottawo" in the past few days. The parents of these children perfectly understood them.

The essence of language, and the function of the human voice, is to communicate. Here's to all of us who are students and practitioners of language.

Photo: from Dresden, summer of 2013. The swan supervises the ducklings' speech.