... Depends what you mean by "progress": the potential for artistry in average young performers.(The Back Page)

I had a young student once who, having learned that I got goose bumps on my arms when she played her very best, would check to see and say, "Are you goose bumpy yet?" I often was, because there was a certain integrity about her tone, expression and relationship of oneness with the piano, that most certainly moved me in a physical way.

I have thought many times about the pleasures and the frustrations of a given teaching year and how I assess my students' progress, or movement through the curriculum I want them to have. Like everyone else, I mark occasions for new music and ratings given by adjudicators in festivals and competitions and celebrate advancement in musical skills. In fact, when a student finishes whatever pieces we have decided to learn in a collection or method book, the last assignment is to pick and play five favorites for the following week, thereby necessitating going back through the collection and taking note of what has been accomplished--our progress.

In our society, we measure progress as forward movement, usually the accumulation of new skills and information. One of the things I like about Guild auditions every spring is the chance to review pieces learned over a long period of time as well as in the current semester. And most, if not all, of the parents of our students measure progress by how complicated or "big" the next project piece appears to be.

I had an occasion this year to rethink all that. A young high school student who had experienced a rather "flat" year was all set to play just two or three pieces she had learned during the year. "No," she said, "I want to play 10 pieces again this year because I just loved ..." and she named half a dozen more pieces she had played over the period of two or three years before. So we began to line up the repertoire she would ...