June 7, 2006 at 5:30 AM
One of my students is a small, brilliant, but very distractable little genius girl of seven.By brilliant, she learns everything in an instant, by ear, and rather voraciously. A few weeks into Suzuki Book 2, she pretty much had the whole thing memorized and could play it all, which is to say she could put all the fingers down in the right places at the right time. A considerable feat, but one I'm completely ignoring as we meticulously go through each piece in the book to learn the lesson we need to learn from each one.
By distractable, sometimes these pieces are so far inside her head that she literally drifts off in the middle of playing one. The tone gets soft and whispy, scratchy and small. Her eyes roll to the heavens, and the music trails off. I'm convinced it continues in her head, probably in a perfect version that in no way resembles the noise coming out of her little fiddle.
Now, how can I get a voracious but distractable consumer of music to focus in a few beautiful details? It's like trying to make a hungry food lover to sit down for a sixteen-course meal at Spago, one that requires four different forks for tiny little servings.
"I'm noticing," I told her, "A lot of extraneous noises when you are playing."
She looked at me curiously and furrowed her brow.
"Do you know what extraneous means?" I asked. The puzzled look continued. "It means extra. Weird noises. Like extra notes and scratches. Did you hear them?"
A big smile. Then a strong nod in the affirmative.
"I have an idea. Do you suppose you could play the Twinkle theme with no extraneous noises? I'm going to stop you the minute you play even one extraneous noise, I wonder how many notes you can play before I stop you!"
She looked at her mom and giggled. She was up for the challenge.
Three notes later, "STOP! Did you hear it? Extraneous!" She did. She totally heard it. In fact, she hears absolutely everything.
The next week she brought me the Twinkle theme, and we counted only two extraneous noises, and it was the best I'd ever heard her play.
It's become a new feature in our little list of tasks for each week: review, note reading, new piece, and the "no extraneous noise piece"!
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