My studio has a long history of students charting perfect repetitions before an event such as a recital or audition. We put them on a chart on the studio wall. After the recital they get a prize of 50 m&m’s, cashews or stickers. It’s been a while since I have explained this and I think the idea is ripe for misunderstanding, so I thought I would write a little essay about it.
I think accurate performances are pleasing, and something to celebrate, but of course there is much more to creating music than just playing the right notes. And, we certainly don’t want to foster an unhealthy focus on perfection at the expense of musical joy and expression. Counting perfect reps seems like dangerous ground.
How is it that documenting perfect repetitions could actually foster joy in performance? Don’t we want the children to just have fun performing?
Alas, my husband, Mr. Kotrba, has famous quote, well—at least it’s famous in our house—"Fun? Fun? What could be more fun than playing really well?”
I need to take a side trip here for a moment, but I’ll get back to the reasoning behind requiring perfect repetitions. I promise it all relates. This is where I start to bring in the idea of the Ten Performance Challenge. . .which, I realized while writing this, fosters the exact same goal.
Stay with me here. . . Jazz players and pop musicians tend to have a book of repertoire that they play from, either with charts or by memory. Mr. Kotrba played with the Glenn Miller Orchestra for several years and those guys could play that book in their sleep. The same goes for my experiences with pop and country music. These ensembles were extremely successful and it was rewarding to perform with them because of the unconscious competence involved with performing the same repertoire over months or years. Talk about fun!
Juxtapose that with classical players at the student and collegiate levels who tend to learn a really hard piece at the edge of their ability and then get to perform it once on a recital or juried exam. Yikes. I lived through that during my undergraduate and master’s degrees. It was a recipe for pressure and performance anxiety. I don’t want my piano kids to experience that.
Dr. Suzuki (he is more widely known than Mr. Kotrba in the Suzuki circles) says success leads to success. Thorough preparation leads to successful confident performing. This starts in early childhood. Dr. Suzuki also says, increase your ability with a piece you already know. Children should be performing pieces they have internalized, and they should perform them over and over and over. He’s talking about giving classical music the jazz/pop/rock treatment.
In a perfect childhood world, kids would perform their repertoire with confidence for group lessons, for recitals, for church, for Schubertiades, for nursing homes. . . until that same repertoire that was at the edge of their ability becomes the easy piece. All the while they are adding expressive details and polish. This is the foundational reason for the tradition of the piano kids giving graduation recitals at each level. They polish all the pieces and perform them for friends and family. It’s a wonderful ritual. Still, even graduation, can feel like a final exam where we flush the pieces out of our memory, trophy in hand, sugar in tummy on the car ride home from the recital.
I want something more. I want kids and parents to take their time. As a recent empty nester, I have earned the right to say that time does in fact fly. The practice hours are slow and the years are fast. It’s really important to me that those hours and years foster the parent/child relationship and that we raise kids that love music.
Encouraging fifty perfect repetitions before a recital ensures confidence which leads to success and joy and freedom to really make music from the heart. These reps can be section by section, under tempo, or hands alone, but the kids should build up to the final twenty reps or so being a complete expressive run through. This will take some time. Yep. The hours can be long.
I’ll have that chart on my wall before the winter recital, with the students’ names in red and green sharpie, with my trademark holly decorations, where kids put tallies for their perfect repetitions. That stays, but in addition, I’m going to implement a new challenge where students are acknowledged for performing the same piece in public, ten different times. That will take them some time, but, trust me, the years go fast.
What do the kids get for all this work? Well, it’s a lot more than some red and green m&m’s and stickers. They get the joy of playing confidently and expressively, and sharing their music with the world. What could be more fun than that!