Category Archives: Motivation

Image

Why do we do this?

19 Monday May 2014

IMG_4146

The Seven Teen Quartet at Goshen Middle School

This article, Art Makes You Smarter, reminds me of the questions being asked of various disciplines in schools and colleges these days: Why do you think your subject is worth studying?  If it doesn’t directly lead to desired academic and vocational outcomes, how does it indirectly support those aims?  In public school settings the “specials” such as music, art and physical education increasingly need to justify their existence, and are the first cut when budgets are tight.

It is therefore good to see the mounting evidence that art makes you smarter, though too often we forget its other value. I readily fall into this myself, telling the prospective music college student who wants to be a doctor that med schools love undergraduate music majors, or preaching to my daughter that piano is a part of her education because of what it does her for mental acuity, and for how it develops good discipline and fine motor skills.  I believe in these rationales, but I wish it was enough to say, or that at least I would remember to also say, “Because it will bring you great joy and because the world needs art.”

Two recent conversations reinforced this wish.  A few weeks ago my daughter Greta was describing the experience of sight-reading through a new piece with her 60-member 8th grade orchestra.  It was an exciting work with a rich sound and perpetually moving parts, and the reading of it for the first time felt both dangerous and thrilling as they rallied on, determined not to fall apart. When they made it to the end, the silence of the room felt amplified. “It was so satisfying.  It was like we all took a big sigh together when we were done and just wanted to stay in that moment.”

My other daughter, Naomi, is in 5th grade and part of a traveling soccer team. The spring season recently started and I wondered how she would handle the additional demands on her time. One evening practice fell during a cold and damp day and I assumed it would be drudgery. But on our way home from the field, she said with a sweaty glow, “Mom, I am exhilarated right now. It feels so good to move.”

This is why we do this.  Yes, kids should have more recess and physical education at school because it will help them learn better. Yes, there should be more arts exposure and experience because of the great academic outcomes. Yes, in today’s world it’s naive to think we won’t need to defend our place in the educational system with proven outcomes.  But more than this and beyond this, we need movement and we need the arts because they uniquely satisfy and exhilarate something within us. This is enough.

Posted by | Filed under Learning, Motivation

≈ Leave a comment

The WTC and Me. And Amy Grant.

06 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by in Learning, Motivation, Practicing

≈ 1 Comment

My background with the Well-Tempered Clavier Book One is somewhat scattered, as is my whole piano past.   Were it not for a childhood experience in Kingston, Jamaica, I would likely not be playing piano today.  When I was nine years old my family moved to Jamaica for my parents to be country representatives with Mennonite Central Committee.  By then I had completed two years of mediocre piano study (on my part), but my parents had the sense to find me an excellent teacher in Kingston.  Mrs. Foster-Davis had huge and scary guard dogs outside her estate, an impressive studio with two grand pianos, and a commitment to the Royal Conservatory of Music piano materials and examination sequence.  Although she was nearly blind, she used a magnifying glass effectively to check my hand shape and fingerings.  She assigned music that was too difficult for my limited reading skills, but with a slower pace of life allowing lots of time to play piano I gradually rose to the challenge. I left Jamaica a couple years later having completed the R.C.M. Grade Four adjudications and returned to southeastern PA with the awareness that playing the piano was one of my best gifts.

Back home and working with another fine teacher, I learned some of Bach’s two-part inventions and enjoyed them as much as anything that allowed the fingers to fly around quickly.  I learned only one piece from the WTC book one in high school, a pair often assigned as one of the easiest, the Prelude and Fugue No. 2 in C minor.  The prelude is a classic pattern piece, an excellent rotation study for the fingers building to some fun tempo changes and improvisatory moments that nicely set up the fugue to follow.

I found special motivation for the fugue from the 80’s Christian contemporary song “Sing Your Praise to the Lord” made popular by Amy Grant. Composed by Rich Mullins, the song opens with six measures of the fugue and continues with some fragments as the song unfolds.  I am not much of a music snob (I went to a Merle Haggard concert last night, for goodness sake) and I loved this fusion of classical and Christian pop.  True, I loved it more in 1985 but I still kind of love it.

 

I found the sheet music and learned my first Bach fugue, or at least part of one, in this format.  I sang the song, pretending I had the ascending backup instrumentals supporting me at the piano, and dreamed of being Amy Grant but only better because I could also play the fugue part.

In a future post I will write more about my past experiences with the Well-Tempered Clavier.  Now I need to go practice, motivated by something other than wanting to be Amy Grant.

How we spend our time

02 Thursday Aug 2012

Posted by in Motivation, Time

≈ 1 Comment

I feel like I should explain my “Dead White Guy?  Really?” title and commentary in the first post.  Attempts to be witty can easily be interpreted as disrespectful, and I meant no disrespect towards J.S. Bach.  I hope he knows that.  Taking on a project like this, however, involves some evaluation of how I spend my time broadly and specifically with music.

A few weeks ago at church we had a guest speaker from Goshen’s Interfaith Hospitality Network (IHN) who shared about the organization’s work with our city’s homeless population.  It was a moving and sobering reminder of the significant needs right here in our community.  As I listened I found my mind wandering to my exciting new project —  “I’m going to learn WTC Book One! I can’t believe it!”  Then the speaker’s voice cut through my delight and I snapped back to the stories of families struggling to break out of poverty and those dedicating their time to help them. My new project seemed slightly more ridiculous — perhaps my first post should have been titled, “Hours of your life learning solo keyboard music when there are so many needs in the world?  Really?”

The usual responses to this forever question are comfortably lodged in my consciousness — a hurting world needs art and beauty, etc.  But the next layer of guilt soon arrives, reminding me of today’s creators and composers who represent so much of the world’s diversity, work hard on their craft and are in need of exposure.  Why not focus my time sharing the art and beauty of this breathing music rather than on a volume that is so deeply entrenched in the Western classical musical canon?

Last night I watched a Jon Stewart clip about the Chick-fil-a mess and a solution for these life conundrums was revealed — like carbon offsets, let’s offset our money and time choices. For every Chick-fil-a sandwich we feel guilty about (if we do), a Ben and Jerry’s pint.  For every prelude, I could volunteer a couple hours at or donate to IHN.  For every fugue, I could do something tangible to promote music by a living composer.  (Start at 2:15 to see the relevant part of this clip):

 

Will I do these things?  I don’t know yet. To be honest, my encounters with poverty and my concerns about ethics don’t result in as much concrete action as they should. At a core level, in fact, I feel fine about hours spent practicing Bach and don’t know that they need to be routinely offset with anything. However, consistent practices to live out my concerns, even if motivated by guilt, keep me grounded, aware, and honest. And may even do some good.

A dead white guy? Really?

29 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in Knowing, Learning, Motivation, Practicing

≈ 3 Comments

I am going to learn the Well-Tempered Clavier Book One by J.S. Bach this year.  I thought at this point in my life I’d be exploring music by living classical composers, finally learning the language of jazz, or even on my way to achieving my dream of being the next Joan Baez. Instead — a dead white guy?  One of the deadest, possibly most over-exposed white guys of them all?  Really?

But.  It is this music that I’m most drawn to these days. My fingers experience a unique joy as I play it, my brain is extra stimulated as I read, analyze, and listen to it, and it makes me sigh deeply and often for its emotional content. I feel a strong need to learn the entire collection (book one, that is).  Now.  This year.

For weeks I’ve been sightreading through WTC book one and reading commentary and analysis on the preludes and fugues. Starting August 1, I’ll begin some sort of disciplined process to learn on a new pair every two weeks with the hope that I’ll know all 24 within a year.

What is a disciplined process? What does knowing mean in this context?  Why do my fingers like this music, what does it do for the intellect, why does it make me sigh?  What thoughts about learning, teaching, leadership, relationships, politics and more might emerge while my brain and hands work through it?  These questions will be part of the experience, which I will process on this blog.

If others read this and experience the process in some way with me, I’ll be grateful to a very dead white guy for enabling that connection.