Boogie Boarding in December

WINTER: Snow is falling through the night on the studio roof, and the piano teacher crunches over the snow in warm, fur-lined boots and teaches for one hour. The piano student, a young man named Tae, is wearing shorts and a T shirt and is barefoot. But the piano teacher wastes no sympathy on the thinly clad student: she pulls her sweater closer and sips a hot drink and closes the piano lesson with these words:


"Have fun boogie boarding!"

And he does, too, directly after the lesson. He will not die of hypothermia because he lives on the beach and it's hot: it's a sunny afternoon in Australia and the way he leaves the studio is to turn off the computer.

Tae was the top prizewinner in the Queensland Junior Eisteddfod for 2011 and won top prizes in many divisions of the regional piano competitions in the last few years. He also received a music scholarship from his school and is an avid tennis player, and a high achieving scholar. 


Alexander Graham Bell would have flipped to see Webcam. Washington State and the Gold Coast all hooked up for music lessons! (Bell was a pianist too.) I began teaching Tae this way just over four years ago. In fact, it would have been about this time that his mother Helen Donaldson announced in my studio that they would be returning home to Australia and that was the end of our happy nine months of incredible piano progress together. They made the bog move, and as we stayed in touch we came across the idea that the lessons need not end. They had not started him on lessons because they had not found a suitable teacher, and I had been regretting the loss of such a promising student. We began very shortly after that, with meetings at our respective pianos with respective computers before us, sometimes at ridiculous hours of the night, sometimes not at all due to forgetting daylight saving doesn't exist in Australia (oops), sometimes with windstorms abruptly powering out the lessons or miserable rainy night connections obliterating the entire development section of a sonata, or sometimes having Windows Live screen suddenly freeze my face into one of those in-the-middle-of-a-blink faces that looks like I have a decimal point in front of my IQ, and equally frozen expression makes him look like he hasn't slept in fifty hours.

Most of the time it wasn't that eventful, but webcam lessons have more than enough disadvantages to make up for the lack of commute time! However, these lessons have allowed us to continue a very good student/teacher relationship, with the added advantage of Tae having come over for a week of lessons once in April of 2010, so I was able to see him in person, and also ran him through a gauntlet of performances, masterclasses, field trips and lessons. More recently he has had a lesson with a teacher from Belgium who was in Australia and was able to connect with them in person while there. Again, technology allows wonders!

We tried out Skype, Logitech, Windows Live and maybe some others, but windows live is the best for musical connections. After I'd hear Tae play, I'd give him suggesting, hear him work it out at the keys, and also have him carefully go through sections checking for notes because if you have someone who loves forgetting that accidentals carry through the measure (truly the only fault of this talent!) and you're working through an obscure, polyphonic and nearly atonal passage, working on the computer is a tremendous challenge.

Afterward, I would type an assignment either in a Word document or in the body of an email.
The following was a randomly chosen example of the type of follow up notes I would send after a lesson. He studied music theory with his mother and from books. (Teaching theory over the internet is very, very difficult!)
___________________________________________________________

October 23 2010

Technique work - Scales at 120 A flat, Bmajor this week, HT coordination

J.S. Bach This week- bring to at least 120 to an eighth note

Voice the daylights out of your chords to get that brilliant color

Brillance: flashes, constrasts, direction: peaks and valleys

Preludes are always accompanied by Fugues

Countersubject Repeated notes buildup intensity, following 16^ths release pressure

17 hear every note every clearly- Episode -take LH alone to study fingering, notes

Bach is so good for every musician: So solid, structured, so RIGHT. You just can’t fake Bach. MM needed for structure. Put a goal to each section with the MM so it is accurate. Your Fragments are ragged. Make sure they follow the subject in parallel motion. Take care! There was a lot of “approximation”- it is more exact. Learn notes like you’d learn surgery.

Knowing keys of subjects

Haydn

Pulse: set it up – stick with it

m. 23 rushes. Get control of pulse- put the heartbeat in your fingers

39 LH seventh

Leif Ove Andsnes playing this: Pay special attention to his skill in pedaling

Make this 100% clean 65-79

What is the character of Theme 2? Little bird trying to make up his mind in a candy shop, maybe. Sweet and golden, with levels of sound and sure 16^th rhythm.

LH woodwinds piping up a slow incline

95 virtuosic

Rush Hour

Mozart

Schubert

Mendelssohn- I have to send it through still…

Thank you for taking care to write in your music. This is so helpful. In my music I like to mark peaks and echoes. You may find that helpful as I did. 

______________________________________________________________

Though it is nearly shorthand, Tae is the kind of student who sees the meaning between all the lines, and rarely do I have to bring something to his attention more than once. He has an enormous repertory for a thirteen year old, and I am curious to find out the rest of his future story...