This afternoon was the last day of the Christmas holidays, unexpectedly sunny, crisp and breezy. After the departure of some visitors, Robert and I were about to go out for a walk and some tea and cake, when he suddenly pointed to a patch of light on the wall behind me. The reflections from the garden of waving branches and the wrought iron of a clothes post were casting flickering shadows onto the wall in an astonishing fashion, almost like a silent movie. Robert grabbed his iPhone and captured some video. “You could use that for a poem-film, “ I remarked, thinking about the beautiful short videos some friends had made recently.

When we got home from our walk, I began improvising to the footage on the piano, while Robert listened and wrote.  Within twenty minutes we both had something. Remarkably, when Robert read his poem aloud, it was exactly the right length. He recorded it, synchronized it with the video, and then I recorded my part on top onto a different track so that we could experiment with individual volume and colour.

I’m not a recording engineer, but I know what works when I hear it. In this case, I knew we needed to take the ‘edge’ off the sound on both tracks. It took a little whole to find the right effect for the piano part. It wasn’t until Robert added a little reverb that it harmonized with the imagery. It sounded as if it had been recorded many years ago in a dusty, cavernous ballet studio on a slightly tinny upright. Perfect.

We both could hear that Robert’s voice was also cutting through the texture in a way that sounded too immediate, modern and dynamic. When he equalized it, using an effect called RCA Victor 1947, it all came together.

Result: a film-poem in one evening. If only making art could be this easy and graceful every time.

I just blogged about one of my passions– traditional Christmas carols–over at Music Teachers’ Helper , complete with audio excerpts of the best recordings. Enjoy!

Thankfully, in the years since I left college, many institutions have also radically updated their own techniques also, and are now approaching music-making in remarkably innovative ways. More on that later….

However, I’d love to point you to a couple of posts I wrote for the Music Teachers blog: one on how to develop effective communication with your students, and one on how to manage your energy in relation to your students. I’m enjoying focusing on the psychological side of teaching and communicating in posts for this particular blog, as I feel it’s a way to contribute what I know, both from study and from experience.

My new blog post over at Music Teachers Blog is about boosting your creative energy. It’s primarily aimed at musicians, but there are some ideas anyone with a creative bent can enjoy too. I’d love to hear your ideas…

I’ve been enjoying this blog for nearly a year already, as I find great value in being able to exchange ideas with other independent music teachers. It’s very easy to feel isolated, and it’s been interesting finding out how many of us have the same challenges and pleasures, as well as having the opportunity to benefit from new ideas and resources.

I’m going to be contributing ideas from the point of view of a life coach who is also a longtime performer and teacher, and I’m excited to have the opportunity to try out my ideas. Here’s a link to my first post.

Vaslav Nijinsky

Last week, I saw an amazing article in the New York Times, describing the creative relationship between an experienced and adventurous choreographer and a young and talented actor with cerebral palsy. Tamar Rogoff, the choreographer, saw the actor, Gregg Mozgala, in a Shakespeare play and immediately knew that she wanted to work with him to create a dance piece. He, understandably, with muscular and neurological challenges, particularly in his legs, had not considered himself a dancer until this point, but was intrigued by her offer and agreed to the challenge.

The miraculous part of this experiment has been the changes they have wrought together in Gregg’s body- more dramatic changes in eight months than he had achieved in twelve years of physical therapy. For example, after walking on his toes his entire life, his heels now touch the ground, allowing him to walk normally. He is now aware of, and using, parts of his body that he had no relationship with before. And, most wonderfully, he is becoming a dancer, creating a piece called “Diagnosis of a Faun”. The first performance takes place on Dec. 3 at La MaMa Annex in the East Village, New York City.

I wrote to Gregg to congratulate him on this incredible achievement, and to ask whether he considered the creation of art to be part of the healing process, to which he replied emphatically, “Yes.” And this “yes” makes me curious about my own healing process. What if I could heal some of the old patterns of tension, contraction and pain, which prevent me from leading an active life and playing my beloved piano? What if I could do this through movement, through a creative process, so that rather than just repeating a series of mindless physical exercises, each movement had a purpose I believed in? It’s an intoxicating idea, one that speaks to me on a deep level. My next step is to contact the choreographer. Wish me luck!

Photo Courtesy of Warner Brothers

Recently, I went to see the movie “Where the Wild Things Are”, not quite sure whether to trust this expanded and re-envisioned version of the classic picture book, since it had received mixed reviews. It was tremendous. Grounded in the mundane life of a real little boy, Max, when the movie takes us across the sea to “Where the Wild Things Are”, it convinces us to believe in the magical world he discovers, even as it is fantastical in nature. Strange, adult-sounding monsters who behave like children become his friends, and Max begins to create a new kingdom fresh from his imagination.

What I didn’t expect is how powerful an experience the movie would be for me. When Max and the Wild Things created a rumpus, or howled plaintively at each other, I felt an echoing desire to take part. I left the theater moved and provoked, with memories surfacing of the wild energy I had experienced as a child and how it had gradually been socialized out of me.

Looking back, I could now remember the early tantrums at the piano, gradually suppressed, as I became a dutiful child who stopped creating her own music and surrendered to scales, exercises and the compositions of the Great and the Good. I remembered the child who fought back against bullies in the playground, even pulling hair and biting, becoming the ‘goody-goody’ with braids who strove to be teacher’s pet. And I remembered the mischievous small girl who loved to play “Doctors and Nurses”, becoming the teenager who was too scared of boys to date. I sometimes wonder if my long-term challenges with pain and inflammation arose through becoming disconnected with this essential part of myself.

As Mary Pipher described graphically in her groundbreaking study of adolescent girls, “Reviving Ophelia”, many girls experience similar changes on their way to adulthood, moving from confident, spunky kids who believe they can do anything, to teenagers beset by anxiety and lack of confidence, whose main goal seems to be to please their peers.

How do we reconnect with our wildness? How do we become free to create? For me, this is an ongoing journey of experimentation, which has so far included free dance, therapy,  art,  play,  writing,  improvisation workshops, spending time in nature, learning spiritual practices…..and the odd howl!

What about you?