Dear readers, I can’t decide which metaphor seems more apt: stocking the shelves, or POKER. Or, as you’ll see as we go, maybe gin rummy is a better fit…. It wouldn’t be the first time we mixed our metaphors here at Pride & Practicing, so let’s just go with both. My grandmother (Clifton’s mother) was a notorious poker player; I never knew my other grandmother, but I strongly suspect she would never so much as have touched a deck of cards. So, something for everyone! Pick the language you relate to best.
Last time we were talking about the fabulous and inspiring Yuja Wang. While I was, and still am, unwilling to come out and say that it is objectively impossible for others—for us—to play the way she does (or to learn to play that way, at least to move in that direction in this lifetime), still, of course it was necessary to acknowledge a few things. I stated the obvious: that she has clearly been dealt the pianistic equivalent of a royal flush. For you non-card players out there: that means the five highest cards in the same suit, and the chances of being dealt this combination is 1 in 2,598,960. In other words, probability is low—but possibility exists! Maybe I’m not the only one who’s still been thinking about this. Before we get back to another hard-core, back-to-school practice tool for subscribers next week, I’d like to explore this idea of what cards we hold in our hands just a little bit more.
All of us have, right now, some “good cards” & “bad cards.” (Except for Yuja: look at all those beautiful high spades! Benjamin Grosvenor’s hand isn’t too shabby either….) If you’re not a card player: okay, we’re in the store room, taking stock. We’re bound to discover that our inventory includes some things that are useful for us, and also some old junk cluttering up the shelves (or worse! I hope there’s not too much that is slowly poisoning us, but you never know. Too many wrong notes can do that over time).
In various forms of poker, one has some opportunity to replace cards, but not a lot. More of the game is in how you work with the cards you end up with—betting, bluffing, exercising those facial muscles as carefully and consciously as we pianists exercises the small muscles of fingers, hand & arm. I wouldn’t really know anything about that. I don’t play poker. Do you believe me? But I do play gin rummy! As that game goes along, with each turn we replace unneeded cards with more useful ones, gradually working our way towards a better “hand.” (My fellow pianists, don’t we all sometimes want a better hand? Or maybe two?) The game consists of a continual process of letting go of what’s not helpful while at the same time accumulating the elements we need. The choices of which lines of possibility to follow are not always clear (shall we go with whatever it says in the top YouTube hit, or listen to Pride & Practicing?). Sometimes we regret our choices and have to start over (subscribe today!). Yuja’s cards are already a winning hand. It was either dealt that way, or dealt so close to gin (or royal flush) that she was able to get there in a small number of elegant plays, executed with panache and perfect ease before she was old enough to drive. Nothing about that observation says that we can’t all gradually work our way towards a more advantageous set of cards.
A place where the card-playing analogy just does not suit at all (suit!—get it? Ugh, sorry) is in the fact that the game has winners and losers. It is competitive. Music, dear readers, is in its very nature not competitive; it is an art form, a form of personal expression, and no one else can express our expression for us. But that is for another day. And if the winners-and-losers aspect puts us off of the cards analogy, let’s get back to that inventory on our shelves.
What’s all this, on this dusty old shelf at the back? Is it something I need, something long-forgotten but that just may be resurfacing today because its moment, or, the moment of my receptivity to it, has finally arrived? Or is it junk? What is it? What are some of the kinds of things we find in our store-room? What are some of the kinds of cards we might hold in our hands? We probably have some kind of a shelf for…
Attitudes. For example, if we don’t have the cards of both confidence and humility in our hands, we’ll want to keep discarding til those come along. We will need them both. If you find ‘em anywhere on those shelves, don’t throw them out! Other qualities that help us on our way: curiosity, patience, rigor, honesty… an open mind…. Trust in practicing itself…. But probably we also find on that shelf some other things. Oh, there’s that old stubbornness again! Sloppiness, excessive certainty, excessive doubt, fear, vagueness, perfectionism….
There’s bound to be a a shelf for technical qualities and tools. If we’re lucky (and have practiced well), we find on it: good posture! Experiential knowledge of what it actually feels like to relax our shoulders, our thumbs, our jaws… Healthy alignment of finger, hand and arm. A knack for streamlining, efficiency and economy of movement. But maybe we also find chronic tension in our neck, or habits of twisting at the wrist, a slump….
What’s this next shelf, close by? Physical attributes! The size of our hands, the length of our fingers, whether our thumb is double-jointed or not… How tall we are, the circumference of our wrist… are we Michael Phelps? Probably not, but we have our own bodies on that shelf, for better and worse. There’s that old tennis elbow, maybe a touch of arthritis in our thumb. Some cards we are never able to get rid of, but sometimes that can be where the poker face comes in…. Also, maybe our ancestors were in the circus! Who knows what we’ll find?
Shelves for different kinds of knowledge and experience we hold; for our various learning styles… For habits, good and bad, new and very, very old.… There are the bins and boxes for all our practice tools, the ones we use and the ones we completely forgot about; the ones that don’t work, and all those other ones we read about here.… Shelves for every kind of resource that helps us, right in there with shelves full of all our insecurities and fears…
Dear readers, I’m tired already of organizing the store room! Aren’t you? I’d like to get back to playing cards! Let me just shuffle this deck. What follows is a random list of cards we might hold. Some are advantageous, some may appear dreadful when we first pick up our hand. But even that queen of spades can decide the game in your favor (do you play Hearts?)! We take what we are dealt, and we are realistic about how much time we have for this round (how many practice hours, how many years or lifetimes)—and then, we dive joyfully into the game. Or, okay, fine: we diligently load up all the old junk we found in the store room and haul it to the dump. You would be astonished at some of what I myself recently hurled onto the dump—and I mean the real dump here in Seattle, as my beloved sister Ingrid cleaned out her art room en route to her new position teaching at Indiana University…. but that is another story! The point is, we find a lot that even WAS WONDERFUL, but that we just simply no longer need. Whose usefulness had lived itself out, and passed. It’s okay to take it to the dump! Getting rid of it makes room for what we need now.
Here are 52 cards. Go ahead, deal yourself a hand! Which ones will you keep, which would you like to discard? Which cards have the potential to move you spectacularly in either direction, depending on how you play your hand (like that queen of spades)? Which cards on this list are you looking for? Where might you find them?
Counting out loud
High standards
Low self-esteem
A metronome
The ability to look ahead
The practice tool of Once and Only Once
Fat, stubby fingers
Willingness to sing
A natural ability to memorize
A mental block about memorizing
A bench that’s too low
A phone book (but who has that anymore?)
A fear of hard pieces
A disdain for easy pieces (Rachel, did you really shuffle?)
Stage fright
Plenty of free time
A childhood teacher who taught us chord progressions
Tendonitis in our elbow
The advantage of having learned this piece when we were a kid
A good Urtext edition
Unwillingness to count out loud
Lack of ability to tell whether the beat is steady or not when we count out loud
An in-tune piano
A bangy sound
Knowledge of key signatures
Good fingerings
The chance to go to piano camp
Long, narrow fingers
A tendency to be hard on ourselves
A too-fast tempo
A list of 100 adjectives
The ability to sing the bassline
Tension in the thumb
Low motivation
A new glasses prescription
Comparisons with others
Knowledge of conducting patterns
A lot of dishes in the sink
The ability to relax our arms
Tenacity
A sharp pencil
Skepticism of everything our teacher tells us
Willingness to do wrong notes on purpose practice
Words that fit this rhythm
Parents who pushed too hard
Money for lessons
A tape recorder
Taubman technique
Resistance to change
10 years of study
And we might as well add these two jokers:
YouTube
Pride & Practicing
Let’s take stock of what’s on our shelves, dear readers! Keep the things that are useful; dust them off & bring them to the front if that feels right. Some things were probably useful once, but can be discarded now to make room for our growth. Organize that store room to your hearts’ content; make it shine like the top of the Chysler Building! Or—forget the inventory on those shelves. Take the cards you’re dealt and develop your gin rummy hand patiently, one card at a time. Enjoy the game! It’s not a contest; the game itself is a joy. Happy practicing!
Just one thing: don’t play poker with Yuja Wang.