Joe's Blog
Beginners. C.C.’s lesson on 12/16/20
January 10, 2021
She has difficulty multi-processing. Especially when it involves two
I asked her to make circles in the same direction with both of her arms at the same time. This was very easy for her. Then I asked if she could circle the arms both in the opposite direction. Then in two directions at once (one arm clockwise the other counterclockwise).
Then I asked her to place both her hands at the left end of the
keyboard, and then move both hands until they both reached the right
end of the piano. Then I added this extra request, let the speed at
which the right arm moves to the right be faster than the speed at
which the other arm moved. This difference in speed had to be
maintained throughout the course of travelling along the keyboard.
When the arm that was moving faster reached the right side of the
piano it would just remain there quietly until the other arm caught up with it. It was not OK to let the slower arm drift aimlessly and then catch up to the faster moving arm at the last minute.
the next along the music score. This took a little guidance from her
specifically to this particular new location on the page.
Next, we practiced simply moving her eyes and head up and down,
in order. Her daughter was to play the note to which her mom pointed out
that was when it was being pointed to. This she was able to do! For
the first time, too. Before we inserted the in-between steps, she had not been able to do this.
Although this put her mom in control of her playing, she was OK in ceding
was in making the sounds.
Then, we reversed things. The daughter was to be in control of her
mother. It would be the daughter who pointed to the notes in the score, in
temporal order, one at a time, and her mom had to play the notes at the
keyboard in tandem with her daughter’s pointing.
The daughter soon learned that she had the ability to control the
rate at which her mom played, by pointing to the next note when she
felt good and ready to do it. Sometimes she sped up the tempo of her
pointing and sometimes slowed it down. The mom dutifully stayed with
the rate of her daughter’s pointing out of the notes.*
Afterthought: The act of creation often requires the preliminary step of
destruction: a taking apart the pieces that went into the construction
rather than assuming that since the parts are together now, they were
always together (see Chapter 9 of my book “The Spectrum of the Arts” a
link to which is on the front page of this site under the heading “Joe’s
Book”), The only way to disassemble a process that was built through
the passage of time is to temporally reverse it and turn it back into
its original state. This is destruction. It is the way an artist can
travel backward in time to run things forward again.
* As is my wont, the steps that I followed were not thought about
previously, they just came to me spontaneously by watching intently
what was happening moment to moment at the lesson.