I maintain an active teaching and vocal coaching studio on Manhattan's Upper West Side.  My philosophy about teaching is encapsulated in the following two Essays from my book,

{ www.ZENandtheARTofPIANO.com }

Enjoyment – The Kernel of Talent and Persuasive Performing

 
In Korean, the adverb chal  has three distinct but intertwining meanings.  The first is well, as in, He plays the piano well.  The second is often, as in, He plays the piano often.  The third is enjoy or like, as in, He enjoys playing the piano.  The correlation is easy to see:  If you enjoy something, you will do it often.  If you do it often, you will do it well.  And if you do well, you will enjoy it even more, and so on.

I’ve always felt that talent, even genius and near-genius, is rooted in a combination of enjoyment and curiosity.  If you cultivate enjoyment in your playing and never cease to be curious about what more there is to learn, there’s virtually no limit to how much you will continue to grow.  Go beyond yourself!

As a performer, the energy you give out is multilayered.  Many of the layers are buried deep inside of you, containing the endless hours of preparation.  They transmit to the listener as residual energy.  But the audience perceives your present state of mind and emotional generosity on a much more acute, direct level.

They need to feel that you’re enjoying what you’re doing, that you’re giving them something present and honest.  Non-musicians, sometimes even more than musicians, pick up on the quality of the energy you send out in the moment of performance, and they respond more directly to it.  A cold, unenjoyed performance on the part of the performer can occasionally be appreciated for its artistic excellence by an initiated listener, but most people just pick up on his negative energy.  In performance, if you’re nervous, they’ll be uncomfortable.  If you accuse yourself of missing a note carelessly, they’ll take you to task for it.  On the other hand, if you forgive yourself for missing a note and keep on enjoying the music, they will too. 

A six-year-old aspiring virtuoso I teach asked me the other day, perplexed, But how do they KNOW whether I‘m enjoying myself or not?  And I answered him as directly as I could:  They just do.

 

On Teaching

Teaching revolves around two dependent poles: generosity and selfishness. 
 

Generosity

One of my conducting teachers loved to say, Show yourselves to be generous souls!  Generosity is the key to great artistry!  And how right he was. 

The first and obvious reason to teach is to give back what you’ve been given.  If you’ve been blessed with enough musical talent and training to have reached the point where a book of this nature would interest you, you’ve probably also been blessed with teachers and mentors along the way who gave beyond the call of duty to your development, both personal and pianistic.  In these increasingly bleak days of Classical culture, those who have received training are needed to maintain a living tradition.  It’s not inevitable that the living music tradition could become extinct and need a Renaissance several centuries from now.

Every student is unique and needs a personal approach.  Teaching piano is rarely about teaching concert pianists or even professional musicians.  The path of the musician from a practical standpoint is often so difficult and demanding that many choose to follow other professions.  But many who leave serious musical ambitions for a time come back to music later in their lives for pleasure.  And many who have connected with music as children encourage their own children to study music.

My goal in teaching is twofold:  1) instill a life-long love and enjoyment of music – all music.  And 2) teach the student how to become a more mature human being through the study of music.

I’m always fascinated by the relationship between real life and the study of piano.  If you learn to overcome a problem at the piano, you will likely have overcome the same problem in your life, and vice-versa.  They’re ultimately inseparable. 

If I’m privileged enough to come across a student who might ultimately make music his career, the obligation is generally greater.   You need to create frequent opportunities for him to perform and test his abilities.  Goals need to be nearby, tangible and attainable.   But most of all, the joy and passion for the study of music must remain.  Otherwise all is lost.  Many teachers in their ambitions forget what really counts.

I sometimes wonder which of my students will be left with the most lasting impact and which will have impacted me the most.  I was the most talented and ultimately successful piano student of my first and most influential teacher, Patricia Reeve, at least from a professional musical standpoint.  She nurtured me from the time I first began lessons at the age of seven until I gave my first solo recital and debuted as soloist with orchestra at the age of twelve.  Then she had the grace to pass me on to a concert pianist who would be able to continue guiding me through me teenage years.  I doubt though that she feels she affected my life as profoundly as many of her other students, many of whom never became professional musicians or even possessed enormous musical talent.  She used music to teach people how to grow and express themselves, to better themselves.  Shouldn’t that be the ultimate goal?

Seeing my talent immediately, she made me see the beauty of pursuing a career as a concert pianist.  She opened up a path to me and encouraged me tirelessly along the way.  With each student the path was different, and she encouraged each along his.

How do you know which student is talented?  Although you can usually see some kind of spark, you can never really know until you start seeing fruit, and even then, you don’t know how long the joy and drive will continue.  Life is too complicated to predict a young person’s future. 

But you have to always hope.  Hope not that the student will develop into a great artist, but hope that they have more potential than you imagine they might.  Hope that they will grow and become greater than you expect them to.  Give students the benefit of the doubt.  Sometimes being generous with your encouragement may produce results that surprise you!

On the other hand, how easy it is to kill talent!  Treat a kid with real talent as if he’s untalented, and soon enough he’ll prove you right.

Teaching is an enormous responsibility and a great joy.
 

Selfishness

They say, give and you will receive.  In order to possess knowledge, you have to confess it.  You have to translate it into actions and words and share it with people.  Few lessons go by where I don’t consciously realize that I’ve just learned something myself.  Teaching is a necessary part of growing as an artist.  The two greatest and complementary ways of claiming knowledge are performing and teaching.  One without the other suffers.

Read the Introduction to Zen and the Art of Piano’s companion work, Zen and the Art of Music – www.ZENandtheARTofMUSIC.com

Go to author David Michael Wolff’s homepage – www.davidmichaelwolff.com 

Feel free to send questions and comments to david@davidmichaelwolff.com 

Thank you for reading!