The swing of the pendulum.(ad lib)

Years ago I taught an undergraduate piano major whose playing was naturally and admirably facile, but whose musicianship was not as well developed. This combination is certainly not rare, but the student did reveal artistic potential because one could perceive the overall structure and largest musical ideas in her playing. However, there was a significant lack of detail and nuance; a stock sameness pervaded. Phrases and their lengths, harmonic events, melodic shapes, rhythmic arrivals, "orchestration" changes through register shifts and textural variations--elements such as these were not apparent. She seemingly listened in low resolution. Yet, artistry demands a dynamic balance between unity and variety, sameness and contrast, structure and colon This young pianist was on the far left on those spectra.

When she began learning a Mozart concerto, we spent several lessons on just legato cantabile, blending the color of each tone into the next, inspired by an overriding vocal shape. I had her listen to the smallest of details, such as how longer melodic tones faded more than shorter ones and many other facets of pianistic diction. She was not accustomed to listening to her playing that meticulously, but she endeavored and made modest progress. After a few weeks, however, I believed we had eked out only a bloop single rather than a home run. Almost in desperation, I gave her an outrageously myopic assignment: for one week she was to practice only one phrase at a time at half tempo, just three pages. When she returned to the next lesson, she had succeeded because her legato in many passages was gorgeous, and she was responding to numerous musical events. She also mentioned that she had started practicing her other repertoire the same way.

When we got to her romantic character piece, I was not surprised to hear her play one beautiful detail after the other, but now with no line, no sense of structure, just a mosaic of jumbled unrelated tiny gems! I happily communicated my observation to her: now the problem was the opposite--the details were running the show. When I saw the discouraged look growing on her face, I realized I had erred; I had inadvertently assumed that she understood something natural about the learning process just because I did. Backtracking, I explained that her "overreacting" in ...