Theory

This is the 'academic' part about learning music, or mastering any instrument, if you may. But essential, and necessary, for any good musician. The most brilliant composers of classical music were masters in their understanding of music theory. They sought to expand, challenge, and even outrightly break the rules of theory through their written compositions. (Now you know, they didn't become famous just because they died.)

Part and parcel of teaching music is that each year, I have the opportunity to put some students through the theory examinations. Now exams are not fun for most I know, but teaching theory gets me quite excited. It is truly a fascinating subject, with plenty of intellectual concepts providing great stimulation for the mind. It never fails to amaze students when they first come to understand the circle of fifths, and how all the key signatures they had been memorising since childhood are all interrelated. 

Theory is simply amazing because it is a language of its own. To put on paper the sounds we hear, to translate them from the intangible to something which can be recorded in written form. Sometimes in great detail, with a high level of sophistication. This is a language which like any other, takes years to master, and even more to fully appreciate the nuances within.

So students and teachers of music alike, never ever neglect this musical language in the course of music education. It may be all just black and white on paper, but without it, it would be hard to pass on the art of producing beautiful sounds of music, generations after generations.

Accompaniment

Actually early this year I had already started on a couple of accompaniment jobs, just never got around to writing about the experience.
It all came about rather by chance. The boss of the music school I work in is a violin teacher, and he approached me to check if I could help a couple of his students in their violin exam as accompanist. I haven't done this officially for money before, even though I've played accompaniment many times in ensembles, choir and other instruments back in school days. Nonetheless, it didn't seem too daunting a task and I gladly took on the work.
It has been really fun actually, the interaction between two instruments and players reminds me again how making music in a group really multiplies the fun element in music making. In addition to the music exams, I also helped out in the annual music school student recital, accompanying the little violinists on the piano, as captured below.

"Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language" by Eva Hoffman

There is a passage about piano playing in the above memoir which I find particularly beautiful.

"  Although she never raises her voice, and is unfailingly kind, Pani Witeszczak exercises great authority over me. She is the first in a sequence of music teachers to whom I owe the closest thing I get to a moral education. In this intimate, one-to-one apprenticeship -- an apprenticeship mediated through the objective correlative of music -- they teach me something about the motions and the conduct of my inner life. When Pani Witeszczak attempts to convey to me what tone to use in a Bach invention, or the precise inflection of a theme in a mazurka, she is trying, indirectly, to teach me the language of emotions. "Music is a kind of eloquence," she tells me. "Ask yourself what it says here. See? This is like someone pleading. And here is someone is getting angry, and more and more angry, and trying to persuade somebody else, who is not listening." 
   It is that speech that Pani Witeszczak tries -- by cajoling, by explaining, by guiding my hand -- to tease out of me. Like all teachers in Poland at that time, she emphasizes the importance of tone, and I soon find out why: tone, I discover, is something about which I cannot lie. If I do not feel the kindling of a fire as I play, my tone betrays me by its coldness; if I do not feel the capricious lightheartedness of a scherzo, my tone turns wooden in spite of my best attempts to feign playfulness. By some inexplicable process, the precise nuance of what I feel is conveyed through my arm to my fingertips, and then, through those fingertips, to the piano keys, which register with equal precision the slightest swerve of touch and pressure. I gradually learn, though, that expressing this musical speech involves a paradox. For if the spirit is to flow into the keys through the conduit of my arm and hand, it has to move in the other direction as well -- from the keys info my arm and soul. Pani Witeszczak's ideal is to make the music sound as if it were playing itself. It is to that end that one has to relax, relax as much as possible -- relax one's arm and one's self, so that one can become the medium through which the music flows as naturally as melting snow in the spring. "Relax," she keeps saying. "All you have to do is let the music be itself." But there is a further twist of the paradox -- for such freedom, such receptivity can be achieved only through the rigor of controlled technique, if I don't ahve to worry about just how I'll execute the next passage, and whether I can manage a jump or a trill. One's fingers can become boneless conduits only if they've been made very strong first. Music may express the deepest truths, but it expresses them through a material medium, and in order to say what I want, I need to bend the physical medium of my arms and fingers to my will. To that end, Pani Witeszczak insists on the virtues of strict, daily discipline. 
...
Music -- philosophers have known its dangers -- inspires me with such grandeur that I think I know what inspiration is about. As I progress to pieces by Mozart or Chopin or Beethoven, I begin to feel in possession of enormous, oceanic passions -- anger and love and joy and grief that surpass merely being angry, or happy, or sad. ... I understand all emotions, no matter how raging or large. If I can express the passions contained within a Beethoven sonata or the Chopin Berceuse, then I know everything about being human. Music is a wholly adequate language of the self -- my self, everyone's self."

@15

Can't believe that we are almost through a quarter of 2010 already. The student number has hovered at about plus/minus 15 and has been keeping me BUSY, to say the least.
This March 2010 season I had 3 students that took exams, one was Grade 3 practical and the other two were Grade 5 theory. The student that took practical achieved a merit after just one year of lessons (he had never learnt piano prior to starting with me) so it felt quite good to have produced such results in a somewhat short period of time. I'm eagerly anticipating the theory results, as this is thus far the highest grade I have taught since switching over full time to teaching. Hoping for the best! 

Music School

Besides freelance teaching, I have started giving instruction at Sovi Music School located about a 10 minute walk from my place. Anyone interested to learn in a studio setting most welcome to register and request for my services.

Hear thee, hear thee

Students come and go, business rises and falls. All part of life and making a living. These days the dust in switching careers is beginning to settle. Sometimes having a more stable routine is good, but the freedom to be flexible is even better. Free will is such a wonderful gift.

Yes!

Got a new student starting next week! :-)