Concentration & Focus

Many kids have short attention spans, and I find myself saying "focus!" quite often when I am teaching.  Other favorite phrases are "pay attention" and "concentrate." If you let your mind wander for just one second, you can lose the whole song. One thing music education teaches you is how to pay attention.

In Buddhism, this is what meditation teaches us. It teaches us how to pay attention to our own breath as well as the world around us. When we can pay attention, we can see what is really happening, verses what our ego thinks is happening.

For the past month, I have been working on my own focus. I committed to doing yoga 5 days a week before I put in my 2-3 hours of practice. It's been quite the boot camp of concentration, and I'm pretty sure it's changing my life.

Now my goal is to simply focus on each moment of the music when I sing or play piano. I use the word "simply" quite loosely, because the truth is that focusing on every single moment for the duration of a 5 minute song is anything but simple. It is hard work.

So my friends, that is what I have been up too. What have you been up to? I have to go to yoga. I'm trying Hot Yoga this week. I am surprised at how much I like it! I will write back soon.

Peace & Music,
Bella

Courage & Fear

Last weekend, my students and I had a recital. It was really beautiful, and a very proud moment for me. I spent a good deal of that week thinking about and discussing fear. 95% of my students have to deal with stage fright. I could feel it and became quite nervous myself. I must admit, however, that some of that nervousness was truly my own. At a recital I worry about the kids having a good experience and I worry about being viewed as a good teacher. I worry about the song choices on my part and the decision to allow certain performances. I worry about parking and seating and I worry about my own performances as well. I am more of a singer than a speaker, so I always freak out about the MC part of my job on Recital Day.

Fear and worry can be so draining to your energy. They just take over your entire body and mind and make it impossible to get anything else done. By Tuesday of last week I was so over it! I decided to do something, so I began asking all of the kids and parents about their stage fright and if they had any tips for overcoming it.

One day, both a dad and a student said to me, "You just get up there and do it!" In other words, you summon up some courage and just dive in. Courage, the opposite of fear. I realized that music performance is an opportunity for building courage, and I saw the fortune in this opportunity for both myself and my students.

Another dad said that before he goes on stage, he peeks out into the audience, looks at every single person and asks, "Can you do this?" Doing this brings forth the reality that most people are afraid of being exposed on stage and the answer most of the time is "no." So when you make a choice to stand in front of a crowd and perform something amazing, you are summoning up courage. Rather than dwelling on my fears, I decided to manifest courage.

As the week went on, I continued my conversations with students and their families, and each day, I spent a few moments thinking about my own worries and fears, and consciously replacing them with thoughts of courage and bravery. When I would begin to feel nervous about standing up and speaking before each student's performance, I would look at individuals on the street and mentally ask, "Could you do this?"

On recital day, I was surprisingly calm. Spending a week facing my fears and worries made me realize what a beautiful opportunity this nervousness gave me. We all have impossible goals we want to achieve and we desperately want to believe we can achieve them. In order to do that, we have to replace our fear with courage. The little performers last Sunday taught me a very good lesson that if you just prepare and then dive in, you can do anything. If you can believe whole-heartedly in yourself, you can accomplish any goal. If you want something bad enough, you have to replace your fears with courage.

Nat king cole, Nature Boy

This is my inspiration for the day. What a voice!

Edith Piaf

I started reading this book about Edith Piaf. My goodness, what a life. Did you ever see "La Vie En Rose"? I knew nothing of Piaf before I saw that film, and after I did, I fell in love. What a beautiful and dramatic character she was. If you haven't see the film, see it, and if you have, read this book. It is hard to believe so much tragedy can happen to one person, but it is easy to see how the tragedies served in creating that beautiful and haunting vocal performance of hers. 

Knowledge Is Bliss

I have mentioned that I have listened to many adults mourn their long-lost piano lessons, wishing they had stuck it out so they could read music and play into the late evening hours after their children have gone to sleep. I have never mentioned the other side before.... the ones who say they are glad to be without formal music training because they think they hear music in a more magical manner than someone with trained ears. There were moments when I would hear them and wonder if they were right. Did I ruin my ability to love music with child-like wonder by devoting so many hours to the science of it?

I got my first twice-weekly paid gig straight out of high school, and after that, it was only a matter of time before I was technically professional, which really just means I was paying all of my bills through music. Just like any job, it can get tedious. I found the other professional musicians to be just as jaded as any other professional worker. It was just a job. I was so scared I would become like them, and I have to admit, it only took about a year before I began to feel the same sense of bored obligation to my "job" as I had felt when I worked the hosiery counter at JC Penney's. I wondered if those blissfully-uneducated music fans were right.

With the swift decline of music education sweeping across the country, and entire generations now growing up without any kind of formal music training, I have to ask myself if this is a serious problem or not. And are the happily untrained music fans right? Is music more magical when covered with a veil of secrecy? I don't think so. I have been playing and studying music for most of my life, and the beautiful thing about it is there is always something new and magical to uncover. It is like Math or Science. Many of us never study past basic Biology or Algebra, so we can never even attempt to understand the mysteries of the universe, and I feel it is the same with music. When you don't study music, most of us hear it as one blob of sound... albeit a beautiful blob if we like what we hear... but nonetheless a blob. A giant mass of sound. Most of us cannot hear the bass line. Our ears can't pull out the violin part from the rest of the instruments, you hear a singer and a clump of instruments making a wall of sound.... that is... unless you had a music education.

After a long and ongoing music education, I feel like I am reaching a point where things are starting to become magical in a completely different way. The difference between pre-education and post-education is in what I hear. After years of ear training, I can hear every instrumental part in a song clearly, and I can comprehend the musical choices the composer made. When I improvise now, I am aware of just how many choices there are to make in a composition. My friends... there are so many choices! There are so many options and how one decides is so personal. When I hear a great composer, I want to know why they make the choices they make. They're choices are ultimately so different from my own. I have no idea why these individuals make their particular choices, and that is what makes it continuously magical. It is so much more than luck when a great songwriter or composer makes a beautiful piece of music. After playing "Blackbird" on the piano tonight, I am convinced that Paul McCartney is a genius and a master of music theory, despite rumors that he cannot read music. If that rumor is true, take note that it says nothing about his grasp on the theory of music. That man knows more about music theory than most of today's pop stars ever will. The way he crafts a song and his harmony choices are simply incredible and awe-inspiring.

I wish music education were not so nearly extinct. I fear this attitude of blissful ignorance will catch on and make it ok to not study music. There is so much more to musical magic than power chords, I-IV-V compositions, A-B-C song structures, and unison-only singing. If that was Greek to you, and you love music as much as I do, I encourage you to go deeper in your understanding of it. There is a whole universe out there waiting to be explored. If you don't have the time, then at least make sure your kids are in music lessons. I can't handle the thought of another generation growing up with a knowledge of music that doesn't go beyond the Billboard charts. There is so much magic out there!