Your face WILL freeze like that!

There are a lot of sayings that our moms repeated when we were growing up, and some of them were right. With my four siblings, an array of pets, and half the neighborhood in my house, my mother had to be quick to discharge the right command at the right time. She knew that making taunting faces was just one step before physical retaliation, hence the speedy warning, "Your face will freeze like that!".

Turns out, she was right. The body can and does change, depending on what we do with it on a daily basis. Exercise is thought to be the way to alter muscle shape, size and strength, but everything we do is thanks to muscle movement, making all daily movement decisions forms of exercise.

Even if you have a daily dose of formal exercise, you probably still spend more time doing everything else you do. This is particularly true for musicians who have practice regimens of several hours per day. Our bodies adapt to the positions and movements we choose for playing our instruments. If those movements are balanced and structurally sound, our bodies will be comfortable. If those movements are out of balance and not well-coordinated, we will teach our bodies to push through the discomfort and to muscle our way through the the lack of ease. This forcing also changes muscle shape and effort for the task.

The worst outcome of these decisions is a form of muscle freezing known as dystonia. Dystonia produces uncontrollable muscle spasms and/or the inability to access movement in certain muscles while other muscles work far too hard. For musicians, this is the kiss of death, not just a "funny face".

It is surmised that Robert Schumann was a dystonia sufferer, and Leon Fleisher's struggle with uncontrollable muscle spasms is well documented by Fleisher himself. Dystonia is now thought to be a brain problem with muscular symptoms rather than a muscular problem alone. Dystonic musicians need evaluation by experts to rule out neuro-muscular diseases that can mimic dystonia.

One of the common treatments for dystonia is botox, injected to quiet the spasms, another form of freezing movement, if you will. Musicians with dystonia may choose this in order to stop the pain and disorienting jumping of muscles. Again, professional evaluation is required.

Another very helpful strategy is body mapping. Body mapping is a process of evaluating one's understanding of physical structure, thereby correcting any errors that may be limiting free movement.

As teachers, we can help our students by teaching structure along with technique. Avoiding mythical representations of structure and movement is a high priority. Our students are more likely to make healthy movement choices if they know how they are constructed, as are we.

Tools for body mapping can be found at www.bodymap.org. Teachers trained in this approach can also be located at this site.

Who Says?

"I remember hearing Yo-Yo Ma play the Bach sonatas for cello and keyboard. It was the first time I’d ever heard him live, and I remember thinking to myself, 'Well he’s a superstar, so it will be note-perfect, I’ll be dazzled by his technique and he’ll look great, but I won’t expect any revelations.' But just the opposite happened. My reaction to his Bach was 'Man, that was weird!' He didn’t play Bach at all like I’d come to think I’d known it. He was not afraid to be coarse and edgy at times, nor was he afraid to go beyond the accepted norms of polite expressiveness we’d been admonished to consider proper. He’d obviously asked questions before he started to consider the piece." John Adams in his 2011 Juilliard commencement address.

Thank you, John Adams. I like your operas, but I love this statement.

Recently I sat with a student as we poured over her jury sheets. I really like this student. She works hard. She asks questions. She is a risk-taker. I get that. I rather identify with it.

She played Mozart, and she played it beautifully. It was expressive and expansive, and she took just the right risks for her.

But as I read the comments, I was thinking, "Who says?" Who says the music is too loud, too slow, too dramatic, too full of rubato, too much like Beethoven? Really, I mean, really?

I know who signed the reports, but I don't know who told them how Mozart sounds. Or who told the people who told them. And on and on like a house of identical cards.

One of my colleagues tells her students that they must play according to custom until they become great. Then they can do whatever they want. HMMM. In other words, train all students to mediocrity, and then hope that a few will ferret out the right questions whose answers will lead to greatness.

I know that students are not born with historical perspectives on style, and that we need to teach that. I know that learning is a combination of discipline and freedom. But at some point we need to say, "Go, and do thou unlikewise."

This is where the art of teaching is most exciting and most perilous. We have to weigh the gain or loss in a situation against the dreaded "norms" that John Adams references. It's a tough call.

But the great ones make the call. Steven Blier, artistic director of the New York Festival of Song, is possibly the most exhuberant pianist I have ever heard. He knows songs from all over the world, and he plays every one as though he had grown up in its culture. When I told him how much I admired the joyfulness of his playing, he said that he never went to graduate school because he knew "they" would take that joy away.

The dreaded "they". Who says "they" are always right?

One juror who heard my student play apparently heard the same performance I heard. The comments were "lovely, expressive, emotional". In other words, the listener was touched by the performance. Who says there is anything wrong with that?

How Hard Can It Be?

"My dad taught me early in my coaching career that football is an easy game, made complicated by coaches," Rex Ryan told NPR's Steve Inskeep.

I stopped mid-sip in my morning coffee to listen to the interview on the May 13th issue of Morning Edition. I mentally rewrote the sentence to something like this: "Piano playing is an easy skill, made complicated by teachers."

OK, not really easy, not very easy at all once we get to high level literature. However, it is quite possible that we teachers make it even more complicated.

Ryan, successful coach of the NY Jets, says that he approaches coaching by requiring the whole team to be in on sessions that involve defense, for example. While he does split the team for specific coaching, he always makes sure that every player understands every part of the strategy and the contribution of each part to the whole. Holistic coaching, you might say.

I like this idea. I like it a lot. While we know as teachers of young students that they don't always see the value of things we want them to learn, it is not a bad idea to consider when and why they need to learn them in the larger scheme of skill-building.

Let's take scales, for example. Yes, scales. Many years ago one of my friends asked me if I taught my young students scales. I said, no, I use other simple technical exercises first. "Oh," she said, "my teacher made me play scales right from the beginning." (Enter my default insecurity.) She followed it up with, "I hated that."

Right, because hands-together parallel motion scales are hard to play for most young children, and they don't know why they need to learn them when very little, if any, of their repertoire uses them. For that matter, hands-together parallel motion scales don't appear all that often in more mature literature. So right out of the gate, this child-now-adult hated piano lessons. It was too hard to do something that didn't make sense.

There are certainly easier ways to teach scales - hands alone, tetrachords, etc., etc. - but many students learn scales more quickly and easily at a later stage. Up until then, they can be working on musical skills like good legato, hand balancing and moving the thumb. These technical elements are central to good scale playing. When students mature a bit, they can add these elements to the other challenges of scale playing, thereby putting the parts into the whole.

I was reminded of how important it is to make skill-building simple while watching a clip of James Levine, noted Metropolitan Opera conductor and vocal coach, working with Placido Domingo, life-long tenor cum baritone of international renown. Domingo expressed a technical challenge for his voice, and Levine said every so kindly, "I'll show you how to make it easier."

Now that's good coaching.

Autism and the Search for the Self

Two traits of autism that are in the popular vernacular: 1) autism presents across a spectrum and 2) autistic people will not look you in the eye.

As for Number One, it is the norm for all kinds of human traits. Stating it reminds us that a label like autism is not a UPC (uniform personal code?) that guarantees the contents of the human inside. It is Number Two that is the foundation for this post, and also the foundation for the continuing research into the neurological basis for autism.

V.S. Ramachandran is a highly-regarded researcher into the mysteries of the brain and the nervous system. He writes for those of us who are fascinated on a practical level, and he has a wonderful sense of humor. His latest book is "The Tell-Tale Brain", published by W.W.Norton and Company. I recommend it highly to teachers, especially the chapters on mirror neurons and autism.

V.S., as those of us who would like to be his friend call him, has been involved in significant research that proves the link between non-functioning mirror neurons and autism. Mirror neurons are the elements of the brain that allow us to imitate what we see, sometimes called the "monkey see, monkey do" neurons. Autistic people do not have the same mirror neuron response to human actions as non-autistic people, making it difficult for them to adapt a standard of social interaction that we classify as normal.

However, what is even more fascinating - or frustrating, if you are a parent of an autistic child - is that mirror neurons function ideally in connection to an understanding of the concept of self. Without a concept of self, the ability to imitate appropriate behaviors is limited.

The word "autism" suggests a quality of self-absorption, exhibited through a failure to display interactions with others that fall somewhere in the spectrum of normal. I have thought for a long time that this meant an autistic person was overly interested in the self. This is true, but the framework for that interest comes from the inability to feel secure as a separate self. This explains why some autistic people subject themselves to head banging or other extreme sensory self-stimulation. They want to know that they are there, somewhere in there, functioning on at least a sensory level that gives some feedback for their separateness.

It is this link between sense of self and sense of others, according to current theories by V.S. and others in the field, that is missing for people with autism. Without a secure sense of self, a person can not allow that self to imitate other people.

It may be that forthcoming research will demonstrate that high-functioning autistic people, such as those classified with Asberger's syndrome, actually have a more functional mirror neuron network than those who are low-functioning. It still may be more limited than "normal", but it may prove to be the source of the different levels of functioning.

For those of us who depend so heavily on the principles of imitation in our profession, learning more about mirror neurons and the sense of self can be extremely helpful. If you are currently working with students with autistic traits, it is necessary.

April is Autism Awareness Month, the ideal time to explore and learn more about autism.

There are no "undecideds" at Juilliard.

Or at Curtis. These are the two most competitive schools in the country, and not just among music schools. They are the most competitive schools in the country, period, and they are populated with specialists.

A conservatory admissions staff doesn't care whether prospective students were on the debate team, prom committee or jai alai squad. The faculty doesn't have much interest in the number of AP science courses applicants took or the box tops they recycled for charity. They want performers - very, very dedicated performers.

It may be that the performing arts schools are the last bastions of specialization for undergraduates. Just watch your students run from practice to event to committee meeting to social gathering.

There is nothing wrong with being "well-rounded", as the expression goes, nothing at all. There are lots of well-rounded undecideds occupying seats in freshman writing classes across the country. They keep universities in business.

They don't keep conservatories in business.

The current economic situation is, once again, kicking us all in the "arts". Public schools are facing increasingly difficult monetary decisions, and we are certainly feeling the pain here in Pennsylvania. Non-profit musical organizations are struggling to keep their budgets in the black, or in a respectable amount of red.

Supporting the specialists who are taking the path less traveled is going to be up to us, the independent teachers, more than ever. We may be forming the line that connects the dots between a dream and reality. Let's do our best to be up to the challenge, to identify those who are willing to go the extra mile and help them along the way.

Let's also be gently honest with those who are undecided as to how narrow the road to musical success actually is.

A Pro-pain culture?

A few weeks ago I read a two-sided article regarding the validity of competitive cheerleading as a sport. The pro-sport author contended that cheerleading was a sport because the participants suffered injury and still had to perform, just like other athletes.

I kid you not.

In essence, sport was defined by its propensity toward harm. Hmm. I used to think that sports were touted as healthy activity. Humility strikes again.

I couldn’t help but wonder if there are musicians with the same mindset. I do know that the technical demands of music have increased considerably in the last 50 years. Eckart Altenmüller, musician, physician and highly regarded specialist in the medical problems of musicians, lists this as one of the major reasons for the increase in focal dystonias among musicians. (Music, Motor Control and the Brain, published byOxford University Press) Our challenges are simply harder than they were in the past, and we work harder to meet them.

Does that mean we should expect - even glorify – potential pain and suffering that comes from music making?

Unlike professional athletes, musicians rarely get sophisticated physical training as part of our development. We also don’t get paid if we’re placed on the injured list. Lots of us may not have any kind of health insurance at all. Others are, to quote the old song, “playin’ real good for free”.

Fortunately, there are groups like the Performing Arts Medical Association (PAMA),
“an organization comprised of dedicated medical professionals, artists, educators, and administrators with the common goal of improving the health care of the performing artist.” www.artsmed.org

And Andover Educators ™, “a not for profit membership organization of music educators committed to saving, securing, and enhancing musical careers by providing accurate information about the body in movement.” www.bodymap.org

There is also a stronger movement toward integrating what sports medicine specialists have learned with the requirements of the performing arts. The new president of PAMA is Dr. George Shybut, whose history includes work with professional athletes and musicians. Another example of training cross-pollination can be found at the website www.athletesandthearts.com.

However, none of this developing interplay does a service if the participants are cheering for pain.

Parental Pedagogy

If you haven't heard of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" by Amy Chua, I'd be surprised. In her family memoir, as she calls it, Chua describes a no-excuses style of parenting that demands nothing but excellence in all endeavors, and moms are reacting. Have we really gotten too soft on our kids? Are we wrong to accept that they won't excel at everything they do? Or are some of us as equally unaccepting of lower standards as Chua, denying our children anything that won't put them academically at the forefront?

Let's face it, moms, we are to blame no matter which route we take. We keep family therapists in business, just another gift to the economy.

Seriously, as both a mom and an experienced teacher, I have to admit that it is tougher and tougher to take a tiger's stance these days than when I started teaching 40 years ago. At that time and in that place, parents watched their pennies and wanted value for every one of them. The value in piano lessons was directly related to the amount of practicing each student completed. In a lot of ways, it was easier to be the tiger mother and the tiger teacher.

The expectations and circumstances have changed dramatically. There are more families with multiple income strains and therefore, even in the current economy, with greater ability to budget music tuition regardless of the progress of the student. There are certainly more activities that pull students away from the piano and more technologically magnetic forms of entertainment at home and on the go.

There are also more students who live in two or three different residences in the course of a week. A flute student can readily transport his or her instrument from home to home, but the piano student cannot. Not having an instrument to practice on is actually a valid excuse.

Quite possibly the biggest change is a greater awareness of learning challenges and the impact of interaction styles on students. More and more students are presenting with visual learning challenges, aural difficulties, and forms of autism. We want to help them - we really do! We don't always know the best route, but we do know that standing over them and growling will probably not alter their biology and neurology.

How can moms and dads help the piano student and teacher? First, please let your teacher know if your child has been identified with a certain type of learning challenge. We will probably guess sooner or later, but sooner is always better than later. That gives us time to lay a foundation for the way that particular child will learn and to investigate resources. Most of us are not trained in special education techniques. We have to do some homework.

Second, let us know if your child works best with a tiger or a kitten. We are human, and we sometimes choose the wrong mode. We are sorry when we do.

Third, give some thought to the kind of structure your child requires. Most students do benefit from a scheduled practice time. Most families benefit from a scheduled practice time as well. I know, I know - it is not always easy. However, it is generally easier to start with something more structured and tweak it as needs arise. Be aware that youngsters do not develop scheduling skills for many years. They need help.

Fourth, give some thought to the structure you require. If you need quiet time first thing in the morning, you may not want to awaken your budding pianist for early morning practice. If you are tired at the end of the work day and not patient enough to supervise practicing, set the alarm back 20 minutes.

Piano students spend far more time teaching themselves than teachers spend teaching them. This is how skills advance, by conscious repetition, which is sometimes fun and sometimes very challenging. Progress always requires discipline, which is an orderly way of learning, by definition. The style of that discipline may vary widely from family to family and even child to child. But without it, progress is unlikely if not impossible.