One of your most precious jobs as a pianist,
as a musician, and as a musician teacher,
a musician sharer, is to inspire imagination.
(Piano playing demo) You'll have a lot of
students who won't have a vocabulary for what
they hear. What does that sound like? What
does that make me feel like? What does that
make me dream of? And so one of the things
that you get to do is to give them that vocabulary.
Both in aural vocabulary that they can associate
beautiful music with that and a literal, like
words, vocabulary. That they can say that
sounds pretty, or that sounds dreamy, or that
sounds classical, or that sounds like I'm
at a bull riding competition and the people
are coming out, or that sounds like I lived
back then in an olden time. I had a fourth
grader and she was playing a fandango, which
is often used in method books because it's
got a pretty great combination of chords.
It's got four chords in a row, they often
repeat themselves. And, she couldn't play
it, she was just like playing it totally dead.
And so I was like, imagine that you are at
this beautiful Spanish ball and you're wearing
this really, really beautiful dress, and it's
red, and you're getting asked to dance by
this really handsome man, but he has a mask
on. I'm thinking like, Zorro, in my head.
And, she looks at me and she has no idea.
She has literally no idea. Either she hasn't
watched enough movies, or hasn't listened
to enough stories, or read enough books, or
something. But she was like, gone. She was
blown away. She was staring at me as if I
were crazy. But later I realized, as I kept
working with this student, I realized that
my descriptions of things, no matter how woefully
inadequate, or even my playing of things even
if it were woefully inadequate, gave her something
new that she hadn't thought of before. And
it wasn't my job. It's not like, when you
say, "I'm a piano teacher" it's not necessarily
your job to teach stories. But it is your
job. It doesn't sound like it, but it is your
job. Your job is to show them the world, their
music, and that's one of the most awesome
things that you can give a student.
