The Week Ahead

This week is looking pretty typical in terms of what I need to do, at least musically.

I'm teaching tonight and tomorrow night. I've done most of the preparation for that, but need to remember to bring music with me for my students. I'll be leaving home at 2pm each day and spending a lot of time on public transport... I usually use this time to read. Right now the important reading is all to do with psalmody and church music. I had rather hoped to have finished my psalmody-related reading by now and be well into writing workshop outlines, but the last few weeks I've been flagging.

Wednesday night there will be a London Gallery Quire rehearsal. Some of the music is a bit technically challenging on the serpent so I need to take some time to look at it.

Thursday night Brigantia are rehearsing at my place, and I need to practise that music beforehand, too. I also need to spend a significant amount of time on programme notes and organisational aspects of our concert on 11th July. It would be nice to get a gallery up on the website, too, but I don't think that's going to be realistic this week.

Friday night I am taking the choir rehearsal at St Andrew's, and I will need to learn the hymns well enough to accompany. I also want to find recordings of some of the pieces for a joint Evensong on 27th June at which we've been invited sing. We're a small choir and don't usually have all four parts at rehearsals, and it can be disorienting to suddenly have whole sections of tenor and alto rather than one each, and any bass part at all. Since I haven't been taking the choir rehearsals for very long, I don't even know what the facilities are like for listening to a CD. This could be a challenge.

I've been working on a piece for a competition which has a deadline of 30th June. Late last week it became clear that I'd managed to go onto the wrong track and was writing something that wouldn't really be suitable for the terms of the competition, so I went right back to the drawing board, decided to ditch the organ for now and stick to SATB a capella... I found a new text, but alas no English translation that is in the public domain in this country, so ended up commissioning someone else to make a new one for me. I ought to try and have at least a rough draft by the end of this week.

In addition to that, there is a final recital at Trinity College of Music that I'd like to attend, I need to reschedule a dentist appointment (cancelled this morning due to transport difficulties), I have two peer support meetings and one project planning meeting, perhaps some other meetings getting in there as well and a physiotherapy appointment on Friday afternoon. Errands need to get a look-in, too.

I'll try and report back later in the week with how I'm getting on...

External validation

Yesterday was my graduation ceremony: I got to dress up in very silly clothes and was given a piece of paper confirming that I have done the work and can put letters after my name. It was a happy occasion, and a slightly surreal experience.

I have observed, as have many other graduates, that I couldn't have finished the degree without the help and support I received from family, friends, and Trinity staff. But it has also been pointed out that while I have had some help, it was me who actually did the work in the end, and that deserves recognition. Yes, it was a lot of work: but I think it's very difficult to separate my part of that from that of the people who helped me along the way.

Yesterday was happy for another reason, too: I got the results back for my students' most recent round of exams. I had four piano students take a TrinityGuildhall 'Initial' level exam this term. I'm extremely pleased that all four of them passed, as I thought they would. I'm delighted that three of them not only passed but were awarded Distinctions! But as a teacher, I am acutely aware that I turn up and teach for a half hour or so a week and my students are the ones who put in the time and effort to practise. I try to make music interesting, I try to show that learning is worthwhile, but no matter what else happens, I cannot practise for them. So while I'm pleased for and proud of my students, I mostly feel very fortunate to have students who work hard and do well.

Clearly there's some attitude adjustment to be done there, given the gap between how I feel about my students' achievements and how I feel about my own. Am I to take credit for anything?

But what I told my students going into the exam, and what I told their parents, still holds: it's only an exam. It's very useful and can be highly motivating to have an external measurement of how you are doing, to compare your skills to someone else's, but that isn't the end point of what we're doing in piano lessons. It's good for me to know how I'm doing in teaching basic skills like sight-reading as well as accuracy, technical facility and communication and interpretation, but that isn't the point.

Likewise, the piece of paper I received yesterday is a good marker of what I have done and how I developed musical skills over the time I was at Trinity, but the piece of paper was not why I was there. I was there to become a better musician, and I am not a musician because I get shiny pieces of paper to frame -- or the other sort of piece of paper for that matter, the ones that can be exchanged for goods and services in a lawful market.

I am a performer and a teacher of music because music brings me deep and lasting joy and fulfillment, and I wish to share that with others.