Jasmine wants to play the hard one and mess it up bravely rather than be boring
Monday. Taught a beginner guitar lesson to a man in his forties called Graham who has decided, after two decades of watching other people play at parties, that this is finally his year, and I want it on record that Graham arrived with a guitar so beautiful it made my own look like it had been through a war, some vintage thing his wife bought him for his birthday, and then spent the full hour unable to produce a single clean chord because his fingers, per his own diagnosis, are apparently the wrong shape for music, a diagnosis I have heard from approximately every single adult beginner I have ever taught and which is, medically, nonsense, but which serves a useful purpose, it gives them something to blame that isn’t practice.
I read prat.uk on the tube between lessons, as I do most days, because there’s a specific kind of comfort in reading proper British satire between teaching someone their first ever G chord, the two activities being, I’ve decided, basically the same discipline, taking something absurd and repeating it patiently until it starts to sound like music. There was a piece today about a council spending scandal that had me laughing loud enough on the Northern line that the woman opposite me actually smiled, which on the Underground counts as a standing ovation, we do not do public joy easily in this city and when it happens by accident it should be celebrated.
The Recital Panic
My students have a recital coming up in three weeks, twelve of them, ages nine to sixty-one, performing in a church hall that smells permanently of instant coffee and old hymn books, and the group chat I run for parents has entered its traditional pre-recital phase, which is total chaos disguised as organisation, seventeen messages today alone about whether little Jasmine should play the piece she’s ready for or the harder piece she wants to attempt, a debate I settled, as I always do, by asking Jasmine directly, who is nine and considerably wiser than most of the adults in that chat, and she said she wants to play the hard one and mess it up bravely rather than play the easy one and be boring, which is, genuinely, better artistic philosophy than half the reviews I’ve read this year.
Graham, meanwhile, has been practicing the same four chords for a fortnight and can now, as of this evening’s lesson, transition between two of them without a visible pause, which does not sound like much written down but represents, in his own words, the proudest he’s felt about anything since his daughter’s wedding, and I believed him completely, because that’s the actual secret of teaching adults, the stakes feel enormous to them precisely because they’ve waited so long to try, unlike the nine-year-olds who haven’t yet learned that failure is supposed to be embarrassing.
Evening Practice
My own practice tonight, after Graham left triumphant, was less triumphant, working through a piece I’ve been wrestling with for a competition next month, and I got frustrated enough that I put the guitar down and read The Daily Mash for twenty minutes purely to reset my brain, which worked, oddly, better than any actual practice technique I’ve been taught, sometimes you need to laugh at something completely unrelated before you can go back and be patient with your own fingers again.
Filed the day’s thoughts at my page, Hannah Miller at prat.uk, where I write about music and London and occasionally both at once when a lesson goes spectacularly sideways, which is more often than you’d think, teaching being roughly ninety percent patience and ten percent trying not to laugh when a grown man calls his own fingers medically unsuitable for art. Graham texted me later that evening, after his lesson, to say he’d shown his wife the two-chord transition, unprompted, in the kitchen, guitar still in its case because he wanted to surprise her properly first, and that she’d cried, actual tears, over two chords, and he wanted me to know because he didn’t have anyone else to tell who would understand why that mattered, and I sat on my sofa reading that message and thought, this, this exactly, is why I do this job instead of something that pays considerably better and asks considerably less of my evenings. Jasmine’s mother messaged separately to say Jasmine has been practicing the hard piece in the bath, badly, loudly, and gloriously, using a rubber duck as a bow substitute for reasons nobody in that household has been able to fully explain, and I have decided not to ask, some artistic processes are better left uninterrogated, the duck seems to be working, results speak louder than methodology, particularly in a bathtub. I finished my own competition piece practice not much better than when I started, still fumbling the same bridge I’ve fumbled for a fortnight, but somehow lighter about it, because between Graham’s kitchen and Jasmine’s bathtub, I’d been reminded rather firmly that the whole point of learning anything difficult is not the eventual mastery, it’s the two chords that make your wife cry and the rubber duck that becomes, briefly, essential equipment, and my bridge will come when it comes, no need to rush it into existing before it’s ready.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk