Six Talks on Music, Teaching, and Learning

by John Steinmetz

I gave these talks at the National Conference on Piano Pedagogy, October, 1994. Richard Chronister, the director, didn't like long speeches, so he invited me to give six short speeches scattered through the four days of the conference. Since I am not a pianist, I came prepared to talk about music, using ideas from my article Resuscitating Art Music.

The theme of the Conference was preparation, and there were six plenary teaching sessions, each with three teachers and one student observed by maybe a thousand piano teachers. Each student had videotaped practice sessions, and the teachers showed us clips to illustrate points about practice.

After my first talk I scrapped the rest of my prepared speeches to address issues that came up in the teaching demonstrations and in hallway conversations. This written version of the talks tries to retain their conversational tone and improvisatory character. I am indebted to the many piano teachers who helped to elicit these thoughts during the conference, and I dedicate the texts, with gratitude, to the memory of Richard Chronister. The first talk followed his generous introduction.

Talk #1: Keynote Address, Wednesday Afternoon

Thank you. I’m afraid to follow that! I’m also nervous about competing with these guys on the big screens. [The conference stage was flanked by two huge video screens projecting giant images of the speaker.] Watch over here....oh, they’re pointing to themselves, too, aren’t they?

Well, I'm very excited to be here, because this is a chance for me to be in a large collection of people who are interested in the same things that I am. I'm hoping that I can learn a lot from watching the teaching demonstrations, and from the place where all the real learning goes on in a conference like this, which is in the hallways and at lunch.
Before I say anything else, I'd like to invite you, in between the many times when I will come back to haunt the conference, to catch me in the hallway with questions or comments or suggestions, because I'm very interested to find out what are the burning issues for you. I'll start by telling you about a couple of my burning issues, but I'd also like to be able to speak to the things that are of greatest concern here.

I know that many of you are involved in quite different musical traditions, and I'd just like to get a feel for who is here. How many of you are involved at all in jazz? [Some hands go up.] How many in classical music? [Almost everybody.] How many people play music from some culture other than Western culture? [Not too many.] How many play music written since 1950? [Quite a few hands go up.] Oh, that's good. How many since 1980? [About the same number.] Hey, that's great. How many are composers? [I can’t remember how many.] And is there anybody else here besides me who is not a keyboard player? [A few hands go up.] Oh, thank you. I'm grateful.

Well, I think it's worthwhile to look at music from a lot of different viewpoints, and one thing that I'll be doing as I come back to give these six talks during the course of the conference, is to look at music from different vantage points. Music is such a rich field that, when you look at it in a different way, you can sometimes discover a whole new set of truths that you hadn't noticed before. Sometimes you can stumble across the answer to a problem that you were struggling with from the other side of the same question.

From these varied viewpoints, I'm going to be talking about this kind of music that Richard was referring to in his introduction: art music. Now, that is a term that has been used in a lot of bad ways, I think. It sounds kind of fancy and hoity-toity, and it's been used to exclude and put down other kinds of music. Both because of the diversity of interests here, and because I love a lot of different kinds of music, I was looking for a way to think about art music, and to define it that wouldn't be exclusive and wouldn't put down other kinds of music.

A culture needs lots of different kinds of music, art music being only one kind, so I've been thinking about how to define art music without being rude to other kinds of music.
One definition was suggested years ago, at a computer camp, by a high school kid. I wasn't looking for this definition at the time, but that high school kid said something that stuck with me, and later I started my article with his idea.

I was teaching a music class at a computer camp, and I had never had such a terrible time teaching in my entire life. I'd taught at music camps or at music schools before, places where I had a lot in common with the students: at least all of us had had to practice scales. We had struggled through some of the same things, we had some things in common.

But these were students who didn't play instruments and who didn't know very much about music. The most troubling thing to me was that they weren't very curious about things. They would say, “I hate that,” and I finally realized that what this usually meant was, “That's unfamiliar to me.” “That's unfamiliar” and “I hate that” meant the same thing. (Sort of like a symphony audience listening to a piece of new music!)

I was very unhappy until I finally gave up trying to teach anything and just asked them about their own musical experiences. They agreed to an experiment: I asked them to pick one piece of music that everybody loved and another piece of music that everybody hated. They had a little trouble deciding on something that everybody liked, but they finally settled on a song by the rock group Journey. (This was in 1983.)

Then they had to pick something that everybody hated. That was hard, because anything that anybody had heard of, at least one of them would like. I finally said, “Well, I have some music here. What do you think about a fourteenth-century love song?” And they said, “Oh, that'll do just fine.” They were absolutely sure, without even hearing it, that they would hate a fourteenth-century love song.

So we listened to both of these pieces, and, sure enough, they loved the Journey song and they hated the fourteenth century. I asked them to talk about the feelings that they had gotten from the music. What was the experience like? Why did they like one and hate the other? The answers were fascinating.

One of them said, “I don't like that fourteenth-century music because the music isn't in English.”

Another said, “I don't like that fourteenth-century music because it reminds me of the stuff my parents listen to. You know, Pavarotti and things like that.”

Then there was a kid who said, “I like rock music better because even if I'm in the other room, doing something else, I can still get it. I can still feel the beat.”

And then this particular kid said the thing that really stuck with me for the next ten years—and if it sticks with me for another minute, I'll tell you about it. He said, “I like rock music because you don't have to pay attention to it.”

And I thought something like, Yow! I've been devoting my life to honing my attention to be ever more aware of subtler and subtler things, as a performer, as a listener, and as a composer—and here is this kid saying that his favorite thing is not to have to pay attention.

Well, sure enough, many people have noticed that, in America, art forms that require attention are in trouble. And it's not just art forms. If you look at what's happened to our political discourse, you can see that where once we had political speeches, we now have sound bytes. A lot of people talk about this problem. (There's an excellent book by Neil Postman, called Amusing Ourselves To Death, about how Americans are losing the ability to pay attention.)

And so it occurred to me that one interesting way to think about art music would be as the music that you pay attention to. I liked that a lot, because it didn't exclude any kind of music, and it didn't sound too snobby. A little bit snobby, but not too snobby. Certainly it's not a complete definition; it leaves out a lot of things. But working with that definition has turned out to provide some interesting thoughts.

I'm going to suggest this definition, not because I think it's any kind of ultimate solution, but only because I think that when you stay with that point of view for a little while, you start noticing some fresh things.

So art music is the music that invites and rewards attention, and I think we have to add that it requires a certain amount of experience, too.

You’ll notice right away that many different kinds of music can fit this definition. Jazz can fit. South Indian classical music can fit. Indonesian gamelan music can fit. Japanese gagaku music can fit. In fact, if you think of a kind of music that you really like, and you're just about to get mad because you think it's being excluded, you don't have to do that. You just include it in the definition.

There has been a lot of concern from musicians about the declining audience for this or that kind of music—orchestra music, chamber music, jazz, art song, new music. If you name a kind of music, there's probably somebody worrying that the audience for that music is shrinking. Well, what do all of those endangered traditions have in common? They all require the audience's attention. They require an experienced audience.

And it seems that music that requires attention is generally in trouble in this country. I don't think I have to go over the evidence for that; we're all too chillingly familiar with the bad news.
If you define art music as paying-attention music, that suggests one way to work with the problem of the declining audience. It's a way that hasn't actually been tried very much. We've tried different kinds of marketing. We've tried different kinds of gimmicks. But we haven't really tried very much to work with the audience's attention.

What if we tried to help them learn what was worth paying attention to? Or how to direct their attention? Or what the music is actually doing when it's playing with their attention? What if we help them to get the kind of practice and experience that they seem to need?

Another intriguing aspect of this definition is that it doesn't describe the music at all. It describes the listeners. And that suggests some interesting thoughts. Art music, as I'm sure many of you have noticed, requires listeners who want to participate in the music in some way. You can't just be a consumer. You have to participate as a listener.

European art music—and I'll talk about that a fair amount, not because I think it's any better, but just because I'm most familiar with the tradition that needs bassoon players—European art music was developed for an audience that played instruments, that sang in choirs, that learned to play the piano at home, that took composition lessons. This was an audience of practitioners.

Imagine with me what it would be like to be a musician in Mozart's time, say in Vienna. Think about it: there were people in Vienna who spent their whole fortunes on musical activity. I guess music was the drug of Vienna.

One night you’re playing chamber music with your friends. Another night you go to an orchestral concert, and some of the same people from your chamber music party are playing in the orchestra. The next night you go to a reading of a new composition. The composer of that composition was the concertmaster in the orchestra the night before. The next night you go to a ball; some of the musicians are the same, and the dance music was written by the same composer.

The next morning you have a choral rehearsal. You might have a composition lesson. And that night you listen to another concert.

Now imagine what it would be like to perform for that kind of audience! Those people would be curious about new developments. They would be aware of subtleties of performance and composition. They probably wouldn't be saying, “I'm not going to go to that concert. I only listen to music by dead people.”

And also, the line between amateurs and professionals was much less clear in that situation. It didn’t matter as much as it does now. People weren't so specialized.
I had an experience performing for an audience like that. It was at a choral convention, a gathering similar to this one. There were two thousand choral directors, the American Choral Director's Association. I was playing the Bach B-Minor Mass with musicians from the Oregon Bach Festival.

The singers in our choir were all choral directors themselves, so they had many friends among the people in the audience. Everybody in the audience was a singer or a choral conductor. Most of them had sung the B-Minor Mass. Many of them had conducted it. They had heard of the reputation of the conductor, Helmuth Rilling, and may have even had his recordings of Bach. They seemed excitedly curious about what his interpretation would be like.

The quality of attention during that performance was unlike anything I've ever experienced. There was a hushed attentiveness, and you could tell that people were really following what was going on. At the end, there was a complete silence after the last note, a silence that, as one of my friends said, seemed to deepen and deepen and then finally to explode into applause.

And when the conductor turned around to stand the choir, there was an incredible eruption of shouting and screaming and yelling. Just the sort of thing we always tell children they're not supposed to do at classical music concerts. Many of my colleagues remember that performance as one of the highlights of their musical lives.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that in order to have a good concert everybody in the audience has to be a musician. But I do think that, for the kinds of music that we're interested in, a certain percentage of the audience needs to be musicians. When that percentage drops below some currently unknown level—there’s a good research project for somebody!—the level of the music-making may deteriorate.

The short way of saying this is, “To have a great concert, you need a great audience.” We've been assuming that, while we were practicing to get better as performers, or while we were training performers, somebody else was taking care of training the audience, so that when the performers went onstage, the audience would be there to meet them. I think we've all started realizing that we need to check that assumption. Probably we're going to need to do something that wasn’t previously part of the music teacher's job—but it is now. It wasn’t previously part of the performer's job either, but it is now. Now part of our job is to help train the audience, so that the concerts can be better. One thing I was hoping to avoid at the conference was to tell you something that you ought to do. But after all, keynote speeches are supposed to end with a ringing call for something that you're supposed to do, something that seems like such a huge burden that you're sorry you heard about it.

So let me change this a little bit, from a burden into an opportunity. I don't mean to say that we all have to go out and revitalize concert audiences. That's not everybody's path. But I do think there's an opportunity here for people who have been looking for ways to make concerts better. For those of you who have been trying to make concerts better for performers and listeners, here's an opportunity: consider helping the audience to understand what to pay attention to. If there is pleasure in this music, consider helping the audience to understand where those pleasures lie.

This help doesn't have to be complicated or sophisticated or elitist. Sometimes you can show people something in thirty seconds that will completely change the way that they hear music. (I'll be talking a little bit more about that during the conference, and especially during my workshop here.)

I'd like to leave you—temporarily—with a couple of questions. These questions are not a test. I'm giving these questions in hopes of flushing out some more answers and, maybe more importantly, in hopes of giving all of us another way to think about the music that we make.

One question isthis: if this music—-whatever kind of music you're currently thinking about, art music—if art music is so great, what's so great about it? That's hard to answer in words, but think about it—not now, but as you're listening to people play, as you're listening to people teach. What grabs your attention? What touches your heart? What's great about that music? Not great in some lofty, large-screen-video sort of way, but great in a way that's powerful for you, or touching for you. Great in a way that puts something into your heart.

And then, having thought about that, whatever that great thing is, how can we help people perceive it? That's our biggest problem now. We've got all this great stuff that we can do, all this wonderful music we can play. All this greatness, and people can't perceive it. They're not getting it. So how can you help, what can you do to help people perceive what's so great?

Just to clarify these questions, this is very different from “What's important to know about the music?” or “What should I put in the program notes?”

This is something different. What would really help listeners have a vivid and powerful music experience? What would help them to be affected by the music?

If art music is music that rewards your attention and requires some experience, you can monitor your own musical experiences right here. Notice where your attention goes. Notice what the rewards are. Notice what experience you bring to bear in order to have that special thing happen.

Let me know what you notice. Let's talk about it in the hallway, and I'll see you in a few hours.

Talk #2: Thursday Morning

First of all, everybody stand up, jump up three times, turn around, and sit back down. Do not talk. Do not think of new ideas.

Okay, now we're all prepared to better enjoy these chairs that we've been so lovingly provided.

I think that what I have to say now will probably take two parts. I don't know exactly where I'm going to wind up, but I want to warn you that I probably won't be finished at the end of this precisely fifteen-minute section.

What I want to talk about first is the unexpected, unanticipated effects of technology. I'm going to talk to you for a while with the video screens on and my two friends with me [the speaker’s image on the two video screens], and then at a certain point in my talk, I'm going to ask that they please turn the screens off. If I didn't have a cold today, I would also turn my microphone off, but I'll leave it on.

I'm doing this not to show you that video technology is bad, but to show you that video technology changes the expression, changes what's being said.

A technology is a means that human beings use to accomplish something. Many of the technologies that we see around us here happen to be amplification technologies, used to amplify some human impulse so that more human beings can receive it. But there are, of course, other uses for technology.

There are hardware technologies—like a hammer, or fire—and there are software technologies—like language, or piano pedagogy. All of these technologies were invented to accomplish something, to help somebody do something that they really want to do. All of them have effects that their inventors didn’t expect.

For instance, the piano, as I think you're all aware, is an amplification device. It’s a technology for amplifying certain human impulses, and making them big enough so that more people can receive them.

An unexpected effect of this technology is that it can result in playing that is less expressive, because of the mechanical nature of the instrument. In fact, the piano can counteract the very purpose for which it was invented.

Another characteristic of the piano is that intonation cannot be adjusted during performance. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage. On the one hand, the piano liberates you from the need to control intonation—if the instrument is in tune, anybody can play it in tune. On the other hand, this very freedom can foster an insensitivity to pitch.

Every technology has this kind of double-edged quality. We're familiar with it on the piano; everybody has learned how to work around these things, how to be aware of them. But as new technologies develop, I think we have to be aware, as much as we can, of those unexpected effects. Later I'll come back to teaching as a software technology, because the way we design and use that software also has unexpected effects, in some cases exactly opposite to the effect that we want—just as you see piano students who think they are sensitive to pitch when the piano is preventing them from developing that very sensitivity.

Let me say a little about some other technologies. Here at the Conference we're using amplification technology to make the sound of the piano audible to people in this room, which is, as you've all noticed, horrible for music. This is not a good room for music, so we have to help the room with amplification.

So the sound reaches all of us now, but the dynamic range and the timbre of the piano are altered, and the differences that are key to expression on piano, those very subtle differences of dynamics and timbre, are compressed by amplification technology. You've noticed, I hope, that people have a difficult time getting across the dynamics in their music in this space because the electronics are compressing the dynamics.

It was interesting to hear John Bayless perform here. I believe he has played a fair amount in amplified settings such as the Hollywood Bowl. He seems to know what he has to do in order to make us really get it about the dynamics.

So start noticing this about the other technologies that you see. There are tremendous advantages to something like a digital keyboard, and there are also disadvantages, which are usually exactly the same as the advantages. They’re just the flip side.

Before I say anything else, I want to express my admiration for all the teachers who have been talking up here onstage. [The Conference featured teaching demonstrations on the same stage, with three teachers and a student watched by a thousand people.] Having been here before, I realize how incredibly intimidating it is, and how difficult it is to get anything important said in such a short period of time. I think the grace that all these people have shown under pressure is really admirable. And thanks even more to the students, who have been willing to let us look inside their hearts in their practice videos. I think we all owe them a debt of gratitude.

I'm particularly grateful to all of them, because they are enabling me to see some things that I haven't been able to see before. So I want to thank people for coming up here and letting us look at you and learn from you.

I've also gained a lot already from people who have stopped me in the hallway with things to say, and I want to thank you all for doing that. Please continue to do that. I'm here not because I'm an expert on anything; I'm just another musician who's trying to figure some things out. There's a lot of expertise and experience here, and I've already profited a lot from things people have said.

What I'm going to say today has been particularly helped by a conversation I had yesterday with Bill Westney. Today’s talk is based on my article (the one that Richard referred to) but some of the ideas have been clarified by our conversation, and by some of Bill’s articles, which he gave me yesterday. I really appreciate that.

Sometimes people who are new to classical music ask, “Why don't the musicians look like they're having any fun?” And it's true that musicians often do look like they're suffering on stage. It turns out that many of us are unhappy.

Audience members are stunned to learn how ambivalent some musicians are about their careers. I know two fantastic oboists who gave up playing to go into the computer business. I heard that a successful conductor, whose career and whose work I have admired, is just barely hanging in there with conducting. He's thinking about taking the civil service exam.

I think we're all familiar with the picture of a famous soloist, someone at the peak of a career, who gives a fabulous performance and smilingly accepts the ovation, and then goes back to the dressing room to sulk in despair over some mistake that nobody else noticed.

Maybe one of the reasons that Americans have a hard time understanding the joys of art music is that musicians have a hard time understanding the joys themselves. Certainly musicians often have trouble perceiving the beauty in their own work.

Now I'm going to ask, please, that you turn the video screens off at this point, just to see what difference there might be. I don't really know, but I'm sure it'll be different for everyone.

Now, I didn't really get it about this kind of unhappiness among musicians until I caught a glimpse of this in myself. I had an experience with hearing two tapes of my own performances, and my reactions to those tapes really gave me a shock.

Here’s what happened. I had given a tour with a trio, and the tour was maybe the most successful musical experience I've ever had. All the audiences were wildly enthusiastic. The leader of the group was very happy. I was happy. I came home and said, “This was one of the best experiences of my life!”

About two months later, a tape of one of the concerts arrived, and the leader asked, “Would you like to hear the tape?” I thought to myself, No way! I'm going to hate that!
I smiled and said, “Oh, sure.”

I sat down in an armchair, and I gripped the arms of the chair—like preparing for some kind of awful takeoff. He played the tape, and I was really surprised—because I liked it. And then I was surprised that I was surprised.

Why had I been so sure that I was going to hate that tape?

About a month later, my wife and I were traveling, and we stopped to visit an old friend. He put on a tape of a performance that he and I had given at a music festival ten years before. I remembered the performance, but I didn't remember much about it, other than that it wasn't very well prepared, and the conductor didn't know the piece, so we just got through by the skin of our teeth.

He puts on this tape, and I hear myself ten years before, playing the way that I remember hoping that I would someday be able to play.

That one really threw me for a loop. I wondered: why didn't I know that I was meeting my goals? It wasn't that this was a perfect performance. It was just that the basic sound and the basic approach were what I had hoped I would someday be able to achieve.
As my wife and I drove on to our next destination, my head was spinning from these experiences with these two tapes, and I was wondering: what in the world had happened to me? Why I had been so deaf to my own successes as a musician?

It occurred to me immediately that, as a professional musician and as a student, I had received plenty of positive comments, but they had almost always been very general positive comments, like “Nice playing,” “Good sound,” “Great show.” The negative assessments, on the other hand, had usually been very specific and detailed, such as “That f-sharp on the third sixteenth note of the third beat of bar three is a little bit too sharp.”

This meant that I had been trained to see the problems in my playing with great precision, while having only a vague and general idea about what I might be doing well. My wife and I talked about this, or I talked about this, and she put up with it, while she was driving. She's a musician, too. "That sounds like Bradshaw's books about shame," she said, referring to some self-help books she was reading by the psychologist John Bradshaw. And I think, although I haven't read the books, that she might be right about that. If shame is a deeply-held conviction of unworthiness, then a lot of us musicians are suffering from shame.

Let's think about this for a minute. If you watch musicians at the end of a performance, when they stand up to receive the applause, do they seem to be enjoying it? I went to a violin master class given by Kato Havas, and in the master class we heard performances at all levels. The audience was the other students, and they would always clap enthusiastically for everybody, no matter how bad the performance, because they all knew they would soon be going through the same suffering. The students appreciated each other.

Sometimes, if people played badly, they wouldn't bow. And Kato would always say something like, “You must bow to receive the applause. You've just spent a long time giving out something to the audience, and they haven't been able to give anything back. Now it's their turn to give something back, and you must complete the circle by receiving it.” She advised us to watch people like Pavarotti, who receive the applause, and drink it in, and revel in it. She said, “If you do that, audiences will love you for it.”

In orchestras, to give a counter-example, musicians usually look like they can hardly wait to get off the stage. You'll see a lot of this [looking at watch], and it's not just because their fifteen minutes are up.

Watch a musician accept a compliment. Quite commonly we turn compliments aside, or we just say “Thanks” and try to get it over with as soon as we can. Meanwhile we're thinking, Those people don't really know anything.

We're familiar with receiving criticism, and we know how to use that to improve what we're doing. But we don't know what to do about praise. It embarrasses us.

I'm going to leave you at that point, in the middle of this thinking. This afternoon I'd like to talk about how we got this way, but I'd like to hear from you about how this connects with your experience.

I'd like to leave you with a couple of questions. As you watch the teaching, who do you think is having the most fun? Notice who is making discoveries. Notice who is the most animated.

Think about whom the student is trying to please. Is the student trying to meet his or her own goals and please herself? Or is the student trying to please the teacher?

Who is the most busy?

Think about those things, about what you've seen and what you're about to see. I'll be back to see you again this afternoon.

Thanks.

Talk #3: Thursday Afternoon

Okay, stand up again, jump up four times, raise your hands, and say, “Ste-pha-nie is cute.” [In the previous session a teacher had created lyrics like this.] Then turn around in the opposite direction from the way you turned around last time, just to keep the world in balance.

And then sit down.

All right, class! No more passing notes! I'm sorry—we have lots of interesting things here, and no time to respond to them. So stop responding. [Reluctantly, the audience settles down.]

Let's see, when we last left our hero, he was off screen. So let's start off screen. [Video screens go dark.] Bye. Thank you.

Our hero was worried about how to accept praise. He had no idea how he was doing in his performances. And he was thinking about technologies.

When I was talking about the unexpected, unwanted side effects of different technologies, I only talked about hardware technologies. I think the trickiest ones are the software technologies.

One software technology that has proven very valuable for our species—and has also caused us endless trouble—is language. Language is, of course, what we use to help us think. It shapes our thoughts, and it helps us communicate with other people. Language also has the unfortunate side-effect of screwing up our thoughts, and screwing up our communications with other people.

For example, this afternoon I might say some things that will seem like the truth. It's really helpful to remember the advice, from whoever it was that said it, that for everything that's true, there's also something that's opposite and equally true.

Language cannot encompass this very well, and, because our minds are shaped by our language, we can't hold on to this very easily. So we have to keep reminding ourselves.

Another example of the language problem is the ongoing debate about whether one should start practicing with the technique or with the expression. Which of those two things should be emphasized?

Of course, they're not too different things. They are the same thing, like different parts of the same elephant felt by two different blind people. If you don't have something to express, then your technique will be of no use, and if you don't have any technique, you won't be able to express what you want to express. Those two things are hopelessly intertwined—or hopefully intertwined—with each other. They're not different.

This is an example of how language messes us up. The only way we have to talk is about the two different aspects of this thing in the middle that they're both a part of. We don't have a name for that thing in the middle, other than “Music.”

Okay, we have a musician who is suffering and trying to stop suffering. We'll say that I'm now a recovering musician, and we're going to start a group called Musicians Anonymous.

How did we get into this mess?

Every musician brings his or her own unique emotional baggage to the task of making music, and certainly part of becoming a professional musician is learning to overcome, or at least cope with, one's emotional baggage. We are very lucky to live in a time when we can talk about these problems openly, when there's lots of help and encouragement available.

I think past generations of musicians didn't have that knowledge available to them. Their bookstores weren’t exactly overflowing with self-help psychology books. They didn't have permission to say, “Gee, I gave a great performance, and everybody clapped really wildly, but I feel lousy.” They wouldn't be able to talk about that before. Now we can, and that's great.

But in addition to the personal baggage, which is different for each of us, I think that we also have some professional baggage. As our teachers passed along the tradition to us, they also, completely unknowingly, passed along the baggage. This baggage has been handed down through the generations of musicians, in the same way that disorders like alcoholism get passed down through the generations of a family.

When we were music students, our well-meaning teachers, hoping to raise our standards and help us meet our potential, pointed out our mistakes. And even the most loving, gentle, and supportive teachers spend almost all their time telling students what they need to do differently.

I still catch myself teaching this way, and that's the way I was taught. Unfortunately, there's collateral damage from this kind of teaching: students become more or less deaf to their successes. We don't ask them to practice hearing what they're doing right. We ask them to be ever more attentive and ever more precise about what they're doing wrong.

And so, the ability to recognize what is okay atrophies.

Now, going back to what I've been saying about technology, if that's our technology of teaching, you can see that it's well-meaning: the way to make somebody good at music is to find everything that's bad and cut it away. However that technology has a really significant side-effect that all of us have felt—or at least a lot of us, judging from the number of people that have come up to me in the hallway. We need to think about that technology and that unexpected effect.

A friend told me that he had once burst into tears at a lesson. Through his tears he said, “Don't I ever do anything right?” His teacher was surprised by this outburst, and somewhat taken aback. He said, “Oh yes, of course you do lots of things right. I just don't have time to talk about that.”

That's the voice of our professional baggage.

According to our baggage, the teacher's job description is to improve the student. That's not so bad, is it? No, but if you think about it from a certain point of view, this implies that the student is somehow inadequate. Even if the teacher doesn't want to, he or she gets forced into the role of judge. Our current teaching technology, based on finding faults and correcting them, has this undesired side- effect—undesired both by the teacher and by the student.

I want to emphasize that this is not the result of malice on anybody's part. This result can come from people who are being loving and helpful.

Another aspect, another side-effect of this professional baggage, is that an unhealthy relationship develops between the student and the teacher. It can lead to teaching in which the student focuses not on the music or the sound or the feeling, but on pleasing the teacher.

There's a clinical name for that kind for relationship. It's called codependency.

That can lead to such things as the teacher asking a question for which there's only one right answer. The student has to read the teacher's mind and guess what the teacher is thinking, instead of the student examining the music, or the student examining her own heart, her own reactions to the music.

This codependent relationship can coexist with love, and intelligence, and courage, and the best intentions in the world. But it is not healthy. It results in students who know what their teachers want, but not what they themselves want. It results in students who never learn how to please themselves.

It results in students whose main job is not to create beauty or joy, but whose main job is to be correct.

I certainly know about this, because I've struggled with it myself as a student and a teacher. I find these kinds of teacherly statements coming out of my mouth, and I see my students looking to me to tell them how they're doing.

I'm seeing it happen now with my daughter, who is playing the violin. She studies with a wonderful teacher, and I coach her practice. She is already, I think, starting to lose her joy in the music that she's making. She is already looking to me more to see how she did, instead of listening to herself. And she's only five years old.

What can we do about this problem?

First of all, I would think that the remedy is not to give out more praise, because we're simply too good at ignoring it. I just heard in the hallway from somebody who went up to thank one of the performers for a performance here, and the performer replied, “It had its ups and downs.”

It might help if we could learn to collect and dispense more balanced data. We might look for ways to gather detailed information about what we're doing right, in order to balance the details we collect so expertly about what we're doing wrong. If we had more complete data, then we might have a more accurate picture of our playing. To help our students have a more complete picture of their own playing, we might help them to see what they did well with same clarity that they see what they didn't do well.

Musicians, after all, ought to be able to recognize what works as easily as they can recognize what doesn't work.

Here's some advice that I once received about how to teach: “Make sure you say something positive before you give your negative comments.” But if a teacher gives a positive comment only to soften the blow for a negative one, do you think anybody is going to hear that positive comment as positive?

On the other hand, if positive comments were given not as praise, but as important data to help the student get a clearer picture, maybe that would help. It has helped me to make a distinction between praise and data. Praise and data are two different things. Both seem necessary for psychological health and musical growth. But they're different.

In the past, data have been exclusively negative. I think we need data that are both positive and negative. (Perhaps this means that we also need cursing and swearing to balance out praise. I'm not sure about that.)

Part of what good teachers do is to stretch the ears of their students, to help them notice things they hadn't noticed before. That's a really great thing to do. Unfortunately, teachers usually help their students become aware of unnoticed problems, not unnoticed successes. Is it any wonder that so many professional musicians aren't sure how they're doing, or are pretty sure they're doing badly?

As teachers, we could help our students learn how to know what their own standards are, recognize whether they're reasonable, and recognize when they're meeting them. We could help them develop and modify their standards in order to develop both their performance and their awareness.

This doesn't mean that teachers have to stop criticizing. But they have to say what's bad and what's good, so students learn to hear everything they're doing. Striving to get better doesn't require ignoring it when you're good.

A cellist who attended Gregor Piatigorsky's class is a friend, and I gave him a paper that I was writing about this [ Resuscitating Art Music]. He wrote back, “Piatigorsky encouraged us to play the passages we did well over and over. He said that no one needs to be told what he does poorly, but we all need to know what we do well.” Play the passages you do well over and over—how about that? “And then if we did that, the sense of musical well being could spread to infect the rest of the music, including the difficult stuff.”

Once I was backstage after a student performance, and I overheard the teacher say to the student, “That was great!” And the student immediately began listing all the things that had gone wrong. The teacher interrupted him and said, “Hold on, here's what's supposed to happen. First I say, ‘That was great.’ Then you say, ‘Thank you very much; I'm glad you enjoyed it.’ Okay. Let's do that again from the top.”

When a performance is over, it seems that the only language that we have available to us to talk about what happened is an evaluation language. We have our little clipboards in our heads, with our rating sheets on them. Was it any good? How was the rhythm? How was the stage presence? On and on. We've got our inner rating sheet as performers and as listeners.

I think we need to rediscover other ways to talk about musical experience. I don't think any child is initially drawn to music by the pleasures of note accuracy or good rhythm. What drew us? There was some other thing, something about wonderful sounds, amazing feelings, maybe the physical pleasure of working the instrument. Isn't it sad that we don't talk about these things more?

Of course they're hard to put into words, and of course it's very personal and kind of intimate. You feel bad when you put it into words. But if we don't talk about what's most important, if we don't talk about what moves us and what gives us pleasure, then our discussions of performances contain everything except what's most important to us.

Perhaps we thought that all those important things went without saying. Or maybe, like that teacher, we thought we just didn't have time for anything but those little details. As one of the master teachers in a session here said very eloquently, we hate mistakes. And so, as a result, we concentrate on what we hate.

I think that when we don't talk about what we value most, and about what moves us, then these precious things slip away, and we're left with a big mountain of technical details and a vague feeling that something is missing.

I've been thinking that, if the job description of the teacher is to make the student better, and the job of the student is to be inadequate and strive for a perfection that can never be attained, maybe that's not such a healthy job description. I've been looking around for a better one. I couldn't think of one, except something kind of vague, like what I've been talking to you about. But just three days ago one of my colleagues, not knowing that I was thinking about all this, said, “Hey, I found an article you might like.”

I read through it, and I put five stars next to this paragraph. This is by somebody named H. Wesley Balk, whom I had never heard of before. He teaches singer-actors, people who want to sing and act at the same time—seems like the hardest thing imaginable. Here is his idea about a different job description for the teacher and student:

We can become aware of one of the beautiful paradoxes of life and performance: we want to become different—more skilled—than we are at what we do; but we can best attain that goal by totally loving what we already are. Loving what and where we are now, not criticizing, judging or regretting it, is the best possible way of allowing that state of being to change. Love equally what you are and what you want to become.¹

I think that somewhere in there is an idea for how we might rewrite our job description, and how we might revise the software technology that we've inherited. We didn't invent this technology. It's come down to us, it’s almost two hundred years old now probably, maybe older. I think we can use a lot of that technology to good effect. We have brilliant strategies for helping people get better, and I don't mean that we should throw those out.

But I do think we need to hold that technology in a different way, in this way that Balk is describing. People do their best when they stop trying to do better. I know I've certainly experienced as a player, I've seen it happen in students over and over again, and I hope you have noticed this, too. When we are content—not complacent, but happy and loving toward ourselves—then we are able, almost by magic, to get better. That's the beautiful paradox that Balk is talking about.

Now, this is another one of those things that language struggles with, because we have to hold both the wanting-to-get-better and the loving-ourselves-just-the-way-we-are at the same time. We can't do that with language. I'm hoping that we can begin to do that in our hearts and with our actions.

Thank you.

Footnote 1 H. Wesley Balk, “A Workbook for the Performing Modes,” p. 12. (A supplement to Performing Power, Univ. of Minnesota Press.)

Speech #4: Friday Morning

We've been running an experiment here the last couple of days, and I forgot about it in all my passion yesterday. We've been turning the video screens on and off, and I'm curious to do a little study, in the least effective way: a statistical study.

I'll give you a choice: you can vote to have the video on, to have the video off, or to have a little of both so that you can examine the differences once more. Could I have house lights so I can see the contest? (You can see that the video guys are getting really nervous now about this.) How many would like to have the video stay on? [Lots of hands go up.] How many would like to have the video off? [Lots of hands.] How many would like to have a little bit of both? [Not too many.] It looks like the Ons have it for today, so we'll leave it on.

Of course, the real question isn't, “Is it right or wrong to have the video?” The question is, “What are the effects of having it on, and what are the effects of having it off?” I've heard from just a few people, and it's been interesting what you have to say. I think it's really worth discussing what you gain from the video—you certainly gain something, otherwise we wouldn't have all those yes votes—and what you gain by not having it on.

Any technology can be thought of, and should be thought of, in this way—as a double-edged sword. That way you are thrown back on your intentions. You have to consider what you are trying to accomplish. Will the technology help me accomplish that, or will the side-effects of the technology overwhelm my intentions? In some cases, a technology will completely obliterate my intentions and create a whole new set of intentions that wasn't at all what I wanted in the first place. (Just pick up U.S.A. Today, and you can see a lot of evidence of that kind of thing.)

Now I want to say thanks to all our teachers. Yesterday I was pretty hard on teachers, and I did that Keynote Speech thing, standing up here on my high horse and wagging my finger, and giving a ringing call for the elimination of all these terrible things that have been bequeathed to all of us. I know I need to thank my teachers, and I think all of us here need to thank our teachers, and their teachers, and their teachers before them.

They are the ones who handed us our shame. They handed us their own shame. We probably created some of it ourselves, but, to the extent that they handed us some of their shame, we need to hand it back to them, and say, “I'm really sorry about this, but this isn’t mine. I took this by mistake from you and I'd like to give it back now.”

I heard a tape of John Bradshaw's, and he takes people through a guided imagery in which they do that in their imaginations. Apparently it's a very powerful thing to do. You might want to sit quietly some time and, in your imagination, go pay a call on your teacher and give back whatever you'd like to give back. It might be a certain sentence that rings in your ears that you'd like to give back.

At the same time, I want to thank all of my teachers for having the courage to go ahead and teach me, even though they weren't perfect teachers yet, because I learned a lot of great value from all of them. I also learned from people who didn't know they were teaching me anything, people that I heard or read somewhere. They were all flawed human beings. Not one of them had achieved perfection; not one of them had eliminated all the mistaken assumptions or brain damage from their lives.

But they went ahead anyway, and I profited greatly from that, and I want to thank them. I want to try and remember, as I do my teacher bashing, to do it in that spirit of gratitude.

I've been pacing around inside my head ever since yesterday, trying to figure out what to say today. I think that I'd like to do one more talk today about teaching itself, and then get back to some other, more general topics.

From where I wound up yesterday, when I was so hard on the current technology of teaching, I need to come back a little bit and talk about how we can go about discovering or devising or utilizing some other kind of teaching technology. Do we have to create that technology, or can we find it somewhere and begin to put it to use?

Before I do that, I want to put in a moment for reflection. I think this is a typical conference, in that it's really rich with input. That's why we came; we want to soak up as much as we can. I personally am at the point, now, where I'm starting to leak a little bit.

So I want to take two minutes for us all to sit and not say a word—don't say anything to anybody. You can close your eyes if you want, or you can leave them open; I wore a different suit today so you'd have something different to look at. But just reflect a little bit, in whatever way you want, on what's happened to you so far. Something somebody said, some music you heard, something you remembered from your own experience. Let's just take a minute to reflect. Please don't use this time for sharing things with other people, but share with yourself.

[Two-minute pause.]

Okay. Wake up slowly. That feels kind of nice; I hate to have stopped it.

As I was thinking about what I would say about an alternate technology of teaching and what it might be like, I was struck with how easy it was for me to slip back into the old technology that I'm so familiar with, in order to teach about the new technology. I remembered how often I heard people give lectures about how lecturing isn't a very effective way to teach.

In fact, I've noticed that education innovators often use the very techniques that they are trying to get rid of, to teach about the new techniques. I once went to a conference about art education, at which people gave ringing speeches about how art could go where words couldn't go. And there was no art at the conference anywhere, just words.

Sure enough, I ended up doing the same thing, slipping into the old technology. These are some of the things that I caught myself doing: I started worrying about what a short time I had to dispense all the wisdom that I had accumulated. I had so many good anecdotes that I wanted to tell, and pitfalls to warn against, and “Don't forget to do this,” and so on.

And then I thought, well, a really good way to do this would be to point out the mistakes in other peoples' teaching. I could shame them in front of you, and then you'd know that that wasn't the right way to teach. I actually thought about doing this.

Or maybe I could talk about what is wrong in our current teaching technology, and then talk about how we ought to fix it. I made a whole list of the assumptions of our current teaching technology, and then, in a second column, I wrote assumptions of the new teaching technology, so that you could eliminate your unacceptable thoughts and substitute the correct assumptions.

And then I realized that I wanted, in fifteen minutes, to make you all into perfect teachers, instead of just letting you be the flawed and terrible teachers that you are.

You can see how much trust I had in all of you.

So I said no, that's no good. I can't do that. That's terrible. Instead, I'll just make you uncomfortable about what you're doing, so that you'll do it in the right way.

I think that really worked well with this panel this morning, don't you? [In the teaching demonstration, the master teachers had repeatedly complimented the students on their work.] They were afraid to give any critical comments at all to the student! I'm really happy to have been able to terrorize them out of their bad habits.

What all this boiled down to was that, as a teacher and a Resident Wise Person, I was, in fact, a sham. I had better put on my best suit, because I really wasn't good enough to get you all to be perfect.

I thought it was important to tell you all those steps that I went through. All those methods occurred to me. This current technology of teaching is deeply ingrained in us, and it's deep in our culture.

As I was watching the session this morning, I really enjoyed the way they taught us by using examples of what the students had done well. The same kind of messages were transmitted—”Here's the kind of thing you want your students to do when they practice”—but they used examples of what the students had done well, instead of examples of what the students had done badly.

As I watched that, I also noticed that this was more boring. There was no drama—we didn’t have any problems to solve.

I remembered a workshop I had given one time, on rehearsal problems. The workshop was musicians at a chamber music camp. I said, “Let's make a list together of all the problems that come up in rehearsal.” I stood at the blackboard and wrote things down as people said them.

It was hilarious. There was a tremendous release, as people were able to talk about things. “What about when you get made into the scapegoat of the group, and everybody blames you?” I’d write that down, and everybody would laugh. Somebody else would come up with another one, and we'd laugh. We had about twenty minutes or half an hour of hilarity and recognition, and release of things that had been pent up for a long time.

Then I said, “All right, we'll just leave that list on that blackboard.” I went over to another blackboard, and I said, “Let's make a list of techniques for solving rehearsal problems. We're not going to go through the problem list one by one and find solutions for all those. We're just going to think of all the solutions we can.”

They thought of a whole blackboard full of solutions. But it wasn't anywhere nearly as much fun. We didn't laugh as much.

I suddenly realized that problems are a lot more fun than solutions.

That's why I kept wanting to bring up all these problems in everybody else's teaching, because that would be a whole lot more fun and entertaining. I think this attitude is deeply embedded in our culture. It's not our teachers’ fault. It's something about the way we think.

As I was considering that this morning, I remembered an article I read recently [in In Context magazine] by a Swedish doctor who has been doing research about what helps people to be healthy. He discovered in his research that almost nothing is known by Western medicine about what helps people to be healthy. Everything we know is about what makes people sick. All the measures we take are to stop the sickness; we don't actually know very much about what fosters health.

So he went around interviewing people who had had cancer—had had a kind of cancer that was supposed to kill them—and had lived longer than they were supposed to. He wanted to find out what made them stay alive. That kind of thinking was shocking; nobody had done this before.

And—surprise, surprise—it turned out that the people who had survived so long had a special vitality and love of life. Some of them didn't have that before they got cancer, but something about getting sick triggered that, made them suddenly realize for the first time in their lives, “Hey, I'm alive!” Getting passionate about being alive seemed to be the one thing that all these people had in common.

Let me just tell a few stories to try and begin to fill in a picture of what another technology of teaching might look like. How might we create a technology—or find a technology—that can hold simultaneously the two things that I was talking about yesterday?

If it's really true that learning happens best when you're not trying so hard to learn something; if it’s really true that growth happens best when you can hold, at the same time, that you love who you will be when you grow and you love who you are right now; if what we need is that kind of situation, then what kind of teaching technology would foster that?

I'll tell a couple of stories that might help lead in that direction, but I think it's crucial that everybody understand that we're all going to have to find this for ourselves. It's not going to be a list of steps to take. It's not going to be anything like, “Here's how you hold your wrist, and this is where your fingers have to be.”

Betty Edwards is the author of Drawing on The Right Side of The Brain, and she writes [in her second book, Drawing on the Artist Within] about how she changed the way she taught. She was teaching a drawing class in high school. Betty Edwards herself had always been able to draw. It was easy for her. She could make marks on paper that would realistically represent something that she saw.

This seemed to her to be an easy thing, something that any person could do. In her drawing class, she tried to promote that idea and make it easy for people. But it wasn’t always easy. Sometimes something like this would happen:

A student is trying to draw a still life, and Betty comes over and says, “Well, that's good, but can you see that the apple is in front of the bowl?” And the student says, “Yes, I can see that,” and Betty says, “Well, now look at your drawing. Can you see that it looks like the apple is kind of in the middle of the bowl instead of in front of the bowl?”

The student says, “Yes, I can see that,” so Betty says, “Well, then just draw it the way you see it.” The student says, “I don't know how to do that.” Betty says, “All you have to do is just look. All the information you need is right there in front of your eyes.” The student says, “I don't know what to look at.” Betty says, “It's right there, all you have to do is look.”

This is sort of like, “Just concentrate!” It’s a method that you might call Exhortation. Sometimes it works, but for this student it didn't. So Betty went away, and instead of doing what a lot of teachers do, instead of saying, “Oh well, that student doesn't have any talent for drawing,” she got mad—not at the student—she got mad because she knew everybody could draw. So she tried to figure out what the problem was, what was really going on.

It took her a long time to do it, a long time of talking to people and reading a lot of things and watching students. She began to notice that there were normal functions of the brain that prevented most people from seeing what they needed to see in order to make a drawing.

I'll do a quick example of this. Look around and notice that everybody's head looks about the same size. We don't see any big giant watermelon heads. Everybody is about the same.

Now take your program and roll it up, and use it as a telescope to look at somebody fairly close to you, so that the person’s head fills up the whole telescope.

See, participation is good! Okay, now move your telescope and look at somebody far away (but not on a video screen). Look at how much smaller that head is, how little of the space in your telescope is filled by that distant head. Can you see that?

Now put your telescope down and look around. Do you see any tiny pin heads or big fat heads?

Our brain translates what we see to make it seem that everybody's head is the same size. This is hard-wired brain damage. This brain damage is useful to us; it prevents us from mistaking heads for watermelons. But this brain damage does get in the way of drawing. There are many, many ways in which our normal brain function interferes with drawing.

Betty began to discover this, and so instead of saying, “Concentrate more!” or “Just look!” she developed a bunch of techniques, like rolling up the tube, to show people how to overcome their hard-wiring so that they could actually see what was there. The kids who learn how to draw at an early age stumble on a way—naturally, without anybody teaching them—to overcome their hard-wiring. But anybody can be taught to do that.

You can think about music in the same way. There are things that are hard-wired into us. They don't have to do with concentration, they have to do with perceptual blocks, and we can learn to notice what those are.

Another story is from Tim Gallwey, the tennis teacher who wrote The Inner Game of Tennis, and one of the great teachers of all time, in my opinion. He is a gifted teacher. He's also very insightful, and has noticed things that hadn't been noticed before.

His moment of changing from old technology to new technology of teaching came when he was teaching a tennis lesson. He was just an ordinary tennis pro somewhere, nobody famous. He's giving a lesson, and he's watching somebody hit the tennis ball, and the student is doing something bad with his stroke. Tim is about to make a correction. He is about to say something like, “Your racket's too high; put it down lower.”

Tim is just about to say this when the student, on his own, puts his racket down lower and corrects the stroke. Tim's first reaction was to get mad, because he didn't get to give his correction. His second reaction was a kind of horror, as he realized that he apparently wanted to teach more than he wanted the student to learn. That's when Tim got curious, and he also went on a long journey, mostly of close observation of students.

He took with him this question: What really helps learning, and what gets in the way of learning? He decided to change his mission, so that his mission was no longer to see that the student learned. He abandoned that mission completely—it seems like an irresponsible thing for a teacher to do!

He changed his mission to a research mission: “Let me see if I can learn as much as possible about what helps learning and what blocks learning.” And that was a brilliant choice, you see, because even if he gave an instruction that messed up the student, he would learn something about the learning process, and so would be better able to help.

If he obstructed learning, he would learn. If he helped learning, he would learn. He was in a win-win-win-win-win-win kind of situation. That's a great kind of new mission, I think. One result of his new mission was a book that has been influential for many of us here.

Two more quick stories from Tim. These are from his book, The Inner Game of Tennis. A guy comes to him saying, “I've been to five other teachers, and I've got this problem. I take my racket back too low. Could you help me with that?”

Tim goes with him out on the tennis court. They hit a few tennis balls. Sure enough, the guy is taking his racket down too low. Tim says is about to say, “You're taking your racket back too low,” but it occurs to him that five other people have already said this to this student. Maybe Tim doesn't want to be the sixth one to do that.

They go over to the club house, where there's a sliding glass door. Tim says to the student, “Look in the glass door like it's a mirror, and watch your stroke.”

So the student does his stroke and looks in the glass mirror, and says, “Oh my God, I'm taking my racket back too low!”

It occurs to Tim that one is not surprised by something one already knows. Even though that student had been told five times, and even though he could tell Tim, apparently he didn't really know it.

You could meditate on that one for a couple of years. You can draw a lot of conclusions. One of them is: The body does not speak English. Another one is: Teaching is not telling.

Here’s the last story. Exhortation in tennis is “Watch the ball!” I'm sure Tim used that. Of course it’s the right idea: if you don't see the tennis ball you're going to have a much poorer chance of actually hitting it. But “Watch the ball” is a little bit like “Don't think of an elephant.” You end up doing the opposite thing somehow.

Tim developed a clever trick. Instead of saying “Watch the ball,” he says to the student—even somebody who has never played tennis before—he says, “When the ball bounces, you say ‘bounce,’ and when the ball either hits or misses your racket, you say ‘hit.’”

He throws some tennis balls, and the student is supposed to say “bounce” when the ball bounces, and then swing and say “hit” when it hits or when it doesn’t. And, sure enough, in order to do that, you have to watch the ball.

What he wanted was for them to watch the ball, so he gave them a task that they could succeed at easily, but that they couldn't do without watching the ball.

I think a little reflection on those stories—and particularly the moments of change for those teachers, who started out as old technology teachers and came to very different kinds of new technology—might help us all to figure out how to overcome the difficulties of the current technology that we have for teaching. The old technology is very firmly ingrained in us, it's very ingrained in our students. That makes it difficult even to see that we're in a box, let alone how to get out of it.

I wish you all luck in your explorations.

Speech #5: Saturday Morning

Okay, if you want to stand up, you’d better do it and sit right back down.

All right, class! Silence in the classroom, please. You can pass notes.

I want to make sure that you all understand that almost everything I've said here has been stolen. There may be one or two semi-original thoughts in these talks, but almost everything is a rip-off from somebody whose work has inspired me. In a few cases, I forgot to mention the sources of the wisdom; I want to make it clear that it's not mine.

That wonderful quote, “Teaching is not telling,” comes from a very inventive math teacher named Mary Laycock. When you're putting that in your dissertation, you can attribute that quote to her. [One of the conference attendees later told of hearing this same phrase long ago from a piano teacher. Does anybody know who first formulated this bit of wisdom?]

I want to check in about how we're all doing with the video. I expect we'll leave it on, but I want to honor the wishes of the assembled multitudes. If you have changed your vote from yesterday, just raise your hand so I'll know that we need to take another vote. If not, we'll leave it. [No hands go up.] Okay, thank you.

Today I'm just going to blather about a few seemingly unrelated things that have occurred to me. I'm blathering because that's about all I can do any more at this stage of the conference. I sense that many of you have reached that state, too, and that overload is imminent, so I'll try to say only stupid things that aren't worth remembering. Then you won't have to worry about writing them down.

One of the questions that's interested me for a long time, for which I have no answers—and that's why it's really a good question to bring up now, because you don't have to write down any answers—is: How do we help people to have their own independent insights? We know pretty much about how to help them do other things independently, and I think this conference has tried to approach that question.

How do we help students become independent learners? How do we create a situation where they don't need us anymore? Practicing is a great place to start, because if they can learn how to practice really well, then they’re not going to need very much from us any more.

Ultimately, of course, musicians begin to figure out a way to teach themselves. Not that we ever give up looking to other people for coaching and help, but we start having our own ideas about how the music should go, about how to rehearse, and we might invent a new idea of our own about how to practice.

It occurred to me, as I was watching the stage today, that we've seen really fabulous demonstrations, over and over again, of people having insights. When people have insights, you can see how excited they are, and you can see how frustrated they get when they can't share all twenty-seven thousand of them. I feel the same way, I must say.

It is always very difficult to coach other people to have their own insights. I remember a session, at a conference about learning, that was specifically devoted to coaching people in how to coach. The subject was tennis, and the teacher was Tim Gallwey, who, as I said, is a teacher I greatly admire.

He was to coach a student in how to serve in tennis, and to talk to us, the observers, about what his mental processes were as he was coaching. He had to do two things at once. He had to coach a student about how to serve, and he had to talk to us about what was going on in his own head, so that we could understand why he chose a particular instruction, why he switched to a different instruction at a certain time, and what he was trying to accomplish.

It was just fascinating to see that this was nearly impossible for him, and for us. We immediately got distracted by the serve, and almost all the questions from the observers were not “Tim, how did you decide to give that instruction?” but were questions like, “How high should you throw the ball?” or “What about the way he takes his racket back?”

We immediately gravitated toward the thing, rather than the coaching of the thing. And Tim himself kept forgetting to turn to the audience and tell us what he was thinking about as he coached.

I remembered all this as I was watching today, because it's been so difficult for the panels to remember to play this weird role of helping the students to develop their own ideas.

How do you help people think independently?

In a little while I'm going to ask you to do something that will involve writing. While I'm talking, please get out a piece of paper, or find a scrap of the program book that's not crammed with information, and get something to write with. You're not going to have to turn this in, although it is a test, and your future happiness will be determined by what you write down.

How do we help people have their own insights? My answer is, “I don't know,” and I hope I can put “yet” at the end of that.

While you're getting your papers out, I want to say a little bit more about contradictory truths. Earlier in the conference—about a month ago in the conference—I said that for anything that you can say that's true, there's something opposite that's also true.

This is a problem of language. I want to give you an example. I once said that a good question to ask yourself in observing teaching, or in observing your own teaching, is: Who is having the fun? Is the student having the fun or is the teacher having the fun?

Now, you can tell from the way I ask, that the implicit answer is that the student should have the fun—the fun of surprise and insight and “Aha!” and “Ooh, wow, I never noticed that before!”

Of course, a very common situation is the opposite. Once when I was walking across a college campus, I passed a series of three classrooms inside a wall of windows. As I walked by, I could see into these classrooms, and in each of the three classrooms was a different version of the same picture. There was somebody in the room who was very, very excited, and talking and gesturing, and being extremely involved and stimulated, and having a wonderful time. Usually that person was at one end of the classroom. And there were a bunch of other people who were sitting there in various stages of boredom and despair. The body language was the most striking thing. The person having the fun was extremely energized, and the people having what I took to be the not-fun were extremely de-energized. I think we're all familiar with being in both places. I'm happy to be in this one right now.

When I talked about who is having the fun in learning, I intended it to stimulate that kind of observation: quite often there is one person having the fun, and that same one person might be the person doing the most learning. The person who is the designated learner for the day might not be doing as much learning, precisely because that person is not having as much fun.

However, as an illustration of an opposite truth that's also valid, I remember another experience. It was when I was teaching music at the computer camp, and I was so miserable. I couldn't get through to anybody, because they didn't have any musical experience, so we couldn't connect.

One of my friends, who was also a consultant on that project, came to visit me. He's quite an old friend and an advisor, and I told him how miserable I was. I was not enjoying the teaching, and the students were clearly not enjoying the learning. He observed right away that nobody was having fun.

He gave me a really nice piece of coaching: “What if you forgot about the students learning anything, and just tried to have some fun yourself? After all, it would be at least slightly better if one person in the room were to have some fun.”

When he said that, a whole picture flashed into my mind about what I wanted to do, what would be fun. I really didn't know whether the students would learn anything from it, or whether they would have any fun, but I knew that I would have a good time.

Sure enough, when I did what I had imagined, some learning, and some fun, started happening for those students. So there's the opposite truth: if the teacher is having some genuine and authentic fun—probably we could research that a little more and find out what kind of fun is most helpful—then there’s a better chance that the students will have fun. (At least somebody will have fun.)

Now take your test papers. Remember to fill in the bubbles firmly so the computer can read them.

I just want to ask you a few things, since I know that you've all absorbed a lot here. One of the things that's helped me the most, in my own trying to be an independent learner instead of trying to copy the people that I admired so much, is to ask Stupid Questions.

I would like to ask you, first of all, this Stupid Question: What is it that you want for your students? You may answer that in any way you like. You may rephrase the question, if that makes it easier to answer. You may write as many answers as you'd like.

[Pauses between questions.]

As you're doing that, if you think of something that you really want for them, that underlies what you said you wanted for them, then put that down also.

You can always come back to each of these.

Next I'd like to ask: Why do you want that for them?

Now look at the answer that you just wrote, or those answers. Since I don't know what they are, I can't ask you quite the correct next question, but the next question is: Why do you think that? or Why do you believe that? or What makes you so sure?

Don't worry about spelling and penmanship.

The next question is: What do you think your students want? There may be multiple answers for different students. If you have ninety students, then just start writing fast.

Then ask yourself: Why do they want that?

And then: How do you know?

Now look back over your answers in order to answer this question: How would you compare what you know about what your students want, with what you want for them?

Pick one of the things that's emerged from this, as what you want or what they want or what everybody wants, pick one of those things, and write just a little bit about: What experiences helped you with that? What do you remember about your own experiences that helped you with that? It could be anything—a person, a book, something that happened, a recording, a flash of inspiration.

Just a couple more. Write down performances or recordings that you've heard that were special to you, that hold a special place in your memory.

After that, write down performing experiences you’ve had, that are special to you in your memory.

All right. First of all, you can see that you could do too much of this. But you could take any one of these questions and go deeper into it, by asking, say, “What was special about that?” or “Where did I get the idea that that was so special?” The idea is to try to go farther back into your own formation and deeper into your own beliefs. For me, this kind of questioning, asking the most basic, stupid questions, has been really helpful for finding out what my own values are, and what I care about.

It's really easy to forget what you most care about! Thinking about it a little bit can help greatly in acting from your own values.

In addition, you can begin to discover sources of wisdom that you carry within you. How many of you found something in what you wrote that surprised you a little bit? Anybody find anything that surprised you a lot? [A few raise their hands.]

How many found things that you say all the time? [Quite a few.] How many found things that are really important to you, that you don't talk about very much? [Some.] How many don't feel like raising their hands today? [Lots.]

I'm going to leave you with one last Bonus Question. This is an essay question, not a short answer. You may take as much time as you like, and you may feel free to ignore everything else that goes on around you, in order to answer this question. Feel free to rephrase the question in whatever way suits you best. But feel free to take it seriously.

I'll give it to you in two formulations: What is the meaning and purpose of human life? Another formulation of that is: Why am I here on this planet?

You don't have to turn those answers in to anybody, but turn them into anybody that you'd like to turn them in to.

Thanks.

Speech #6: Saturday Afternoon

I want to try something that I've tried before, that has always failed. I want to try it once more: everyone please move forward as much as possible, so that we can all be together up front. Please stand up, pick up your things, and come forward.

[Pause for relocation.]

For those of you who arrived too late to hear the first assignment, the first assignment is, “Do not sit in the back.” Move up toward the front please.

Unless you really don't want to.

I want to start with thanks to Richard Chronister, who made it through the first sentence of my article and continued reading, and had some idea that I could do something here. He wasn't sure what that was, and I wasn't sure what that was. I was also, secretly, pretty sure that whatever it was, I couldn't. So I want to thank him for being wise enough, or crazy enough, or stupid enough, to try this kind of experiment.

I'd like to thank all the organizers of the Conference. To be perfectly honest, I think all conferences are irritating; I have to admit that right away. But I think this conference is less irritating than any other conference I've been to (someone said you should always give very specific praise), and that's because there were lots of things happening here that we could use to think with.

At most of the conferences I've been to, maybe all of them, the only thing available to think with was people talking. Almost all this talk was people making pronouncements, giving us the finished products of their process, not letting us in on their process. We got a list of twenty-seven thousand things that we had to remember, and that we were all responsible for doing from then on.

At this conference, we've certainly had some of that, but we've also had lots of process going on in front of us, and people have been willing to show us their process. We've had music, with which we could think about music and about teaching music. We've had teaching, with which we could think about teaching. And we've had a lot of words about these things, too.

I really enjoyed that mix, and I've profited greatly from it. Now I see a little more clearly why I was so annoyed with those other conferences that only gave me one very poor kind of tool to use for thinking about the issues.

I'd also like to thank all of you in this gathering—and those who were part of the Conference and have gone already—for being so helpful to me. When I started off doing this on the first day, I was pretty strongly aware that I wasn't going to be able to do anything of any use. In fact, after I finished my first talk, I was pretty sure that I hadn't done anything of any use. People came to me quite regularly in the hallway to thank me for what I'd said, and to say something about what it had touched in them. That helped me to get a better view of what I was doing, and what the effects, and the potential effects, were for the people here.

I think that's just one of many examples we've seen here of how teaching and learning are circular. It usually doesn't work very well if it's only going in one direction. If it's going out and coming back, then that usually seems—at least in my experience—to work better. It really works great when it goes out, swirls around, and then comes back.

So I'm really excited about all the buzz and talk, and about what you've given back to me here. I have learned a lot from all of you, so I thank you for your help.

I guess that's another example of how you can't have a good performance without a good audience. I didn't realize how much I meant by that.

Since this is my last shot, and I need to tell you those twenty-seven thousand things that you have to take home and remember, I want to say a little more about what my experience has been. It's a little elusive, so I hope I can get it into words. If I don't, you can catch me in the hallway as usual.

I told you that I was nervous, and maybe you gathered from what I said that I felt a certain sense of responsibility. That sense was very vague; I just thought there was something very important about being here. Well, you know, you're the Keynote Speaker—and it's even a pun, of course, at a piano conference . . .

So you've got to do something really important, and you have to know something. I wrote my article because I realized that I had learned a couple of things—a couple of things that seemed to me rather small, just beginning-stage things. I wrote this article, first of all, to find out what it was that was rattling around in my head, and then to share those couple of things around and see if they could do anybody any good. Also I was hoping to shake loose some people who had learned some better things, or some more things.

I've had some feedback from that article, and I have learned a little bit more. But it was just as clear as ever that I only knew a couple of things, and that I was going to be talking to quite a lot of people here who knew a lot of things. I guess this is a long-winded way of saying that it was clear to me that I wasn't good enough to do this.

I'm bringing this up because many of you have talked with me about the feeling, that we often have as performers, of being not good enough. Not ready. Not sufficient to do the performance. It has been interesting to see how much one can accomplish from that place of being not good enough.

A fun part of this job is that I've had a chance to try a few experiments, just because I thought it would be fun to see what happened. Sometimes it turned out to have been a really good idea, one that fit in with something else that was going on. For instance, doing without the video screens and hearing from a few people about the differences; and to be able to take a vote, and do silly things like jumping up and down, and asking you to move up. It's been very nice to remember that advice my friend gave me, not to let that slip away in my nervousness, but to go ahead and try something that seems like fun.

Another part of my process was that, as you might have gathered, there are a lot of things about conferences that I'd hated. I took a lot of negative inspiration from those conferences, and from those other keynote speeches. It made for an interesting challenge, because negative inspiration doesn't tell you what to do; it just tells you what to avoid. That can tie into your nervousness in a really interesting way, as I'm sure all of you performers have experienced.

I had my usual very hard time figuring out what to leave out. I think you've seen all of us who have been up here suffering with that: having so many things to share. So much wisdom, so little time.

One of the hardest problems was to find a way to talk about this idea of a new technology of teaching, without using the old technology too much. That's tough, because the new technology, I believe, is not invented yet.

One way of thinking about the old technology is that every person has a zipper on the top of their head. The teacher can open it up and dump some stuff in, and then zip it back up. As many of you have told me, this way of doing things does result in a lot of knowledge, but when you zip that zipper back and forth so many times, it leaves a scar. Maybe several scars.

So that was an interesting challenge to me, and there were a couple of nights when I spent a lot of time writing notes and casting notes aside, and writing more notes and casting those aside. I might say, I was really glad that nobody was videotaping my process at that time. I was being extremely inefficient. I would stop in the middle of what I was doing and have breakfast, or do something else to dodge it. Last night it got so bad that I went back to my room, I thought about what I was going to do this morning, came to an idea about what would be okay, got completely ready to go to bed, and then realized I wasn't going to be able to sleep at all. I put all my clothes back on and went dancing. That turned out to help me more than anything else.

I guess the final thing I have to say about my process is that, in some very strange way, it turned out that the thing I had most to fall back on, and to use here, and to bring before you, was my own insufficiency. This is a very strange thing to say, and I don't propose that we all go out and do all the things that we're worst at.

The poet Robert Bly has made a point about something related to this insufficiency. He thinks that the best poetry, and perhaps all the best art, is created from the place where the artist has a wound. In the course of working with that wound, it can be turned into a kind of jewel, precious for the artist and for other people.

I'm not even sure if that's true, but it feels like it's related somehow, in some poetic way, to the experience I've had here this week.

The last thing that I want to talk about is the importance of all that you've been doing and thinking about here. I think it's clear what the importance is for teaching and for learning to play music. I've heard so many people talk about how they feel our art form is dying in some way, that the life is going out of it. The love that people wanted to put into it, somehow doesn't seem to be there. Whatever the good thing is that we believe is there, the audience isn't able to receive it. Maybe we're not sending it very well.

There's a lot of concern about that, which I share. I think it's clear that the things that we've been thinking about here are important to the process of making our art form more full of what we want it to be full of, and not blocked by side-effects of technology, by scars and wounds.

But I think there's another way in which what we're thinking about is important. This might be the most elusive thing of all to try and describe, but I'll give it a try.

Right now our country needs us to be doing this work. I'm not about to suggest that we need an Uncle Sam poster pointing at every piano teacher in the country, but I find—and many people have talked about this and felt this—that our society has a kind of soul sickness. Some people have even said that we're living in an insane culture.

It's certainly true that Bach’s music, as great as it is, has never been able to stop a war. There's only so much that music can do. But I believe that the things that we've been thinking about here have extensions that go to the depth of that soul sickness that we feel around us.

What's happened to the arts in America is that we've been marginalized. We're seen as a frill or, at best, as some kind of expensive and sophisticated entertainment. Those of us who are involved in the arts know that that's not so, that works of art offer things that are key to living. We've all felt that, even though we don't quite know how to talk about it.

Robert Bly, again, has written eloquently about this. He says, with respect to America's habit of denial of its problems, its unwillingness to face its problems, that one thing which can really help with this problem is great art and great literature. In fact, these are almost the only things that can help.

He says something very interesting: “What we need now is not avant-garde art but great art.” [This is from an essay in The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart.] He doesn't specify great art of a certain period; the emphasis is on the greatness. I think that there's a strong connection from that idea to the talk that you're doing about how to improve your teaching, and to the ongoing effort to improve the quality of the performances so that more of the artistry can come through.

In allowing ourselves to be marginalized, we're not just hurting ourselves as artists. In whatever little way we can teach with more clarity and compassion and awareness, to whatever extent we can play with real artistry and self-love and acceptance, to whatever extent we can do that, I think that we're going to help more than just our teaching, and more than just our art form.

I think that this is a kind of thinking and playing and composing—and being as human beings—that's really needed right now. We—all of us—have skills that we don't even know we have, or didn't know we had until we got here, amazing skills like combining intuition and logic, and using them together instead of in opposition; skills like being very precise about matters of heart and soulfulness; and other skills that are almost impossible to talk about.

What I'm saying is that these are valuable, and valuable in ways that we may not have realized. I certainly didn't