I Could Write a Book

David Sudnow

Copyright 2003. All rights reserved

Contents

Overture As Time Goes By Sidewalks of New York Deep in the Heart of Texas Chicago, Chicago Route 66 Over the Rainbow

Overture

Im a sixty-four year old sociologist, with a Berkeley PhD, and one of a collection of musicians whose members would certify themselves as at least Competent Jazz Pianists (CJPs), entitled to say who is, who isnt, and whos almost. Consensus is easy. A thirty second gig and a yes-no vote. Like wed know if some guy really speaks French, beyond sil vous plait, and voulez-vous coucher avec mois, by just having him take a two bar solo on some of the finer details of a gal who just walked by. Not a slow blues with repeating ooh la las, but uptempo BeBop, close to typical talk. A consensus among our members would be as fast on whether some cat swings with a piano, as to say that now thats what Id call one good looking lady does, while this womens is there beauty much doesnt, not for the Anglo Saxons. CJPs practices are as finely formed and distinctly identifiable as the practices of speaking a specific honest-togoodness language. A correct classification of others can be made by some non-members, but only verifiably so with close on-site inspection. So consensus would be easy. But having a census and 3

an International Congress fully representing the major dialects from dixieland to swing to bop, cool, modal, free style and the rest - thatd be tough to orchestrate, since were a collection rather than a group. There are surely and possibly many thousands. Some now play professionally and some dont. Very few never did. Those who dont currently play for a living - if you can call it that for those who do - are best termed unemployed musicians, along with their other job titles. Many would drop most other things at the count of four to play just what they wanted to play with very very steady and pretty decent pay. Surely better unemployed than amateurs, a much too tricky term especially if you think historically, since it only means for just the love of it all, and badly blurs the usual connotations. CJPs share a common justified pride in the complexity of their achievement, performing a task whose requisite skills mature much more slowly than most. And a common complaint, to wit: others dont care nearly enough about providing congenial conditions for the cultivation of this extraordinary human handicraft. Its a drag to get such lousy bread for doing something so hip. So in 1982, seven years after Id given up a tenured professorship (though I got to keep the PhD), I decided to now earn a living by trying to design a very different way to more rapidly learn to play songs - not jazz, for thats a whole different business - just nice sounding standard songs, at the piano. My keyboard song-playing approach eventually came to be called The Sudnow Method, because a lawyer figured 4

that might be worthwhile which it was, at least for him, since he billed me more for the advice than I billed him for his one and only piano lesson. For thirty years, struggling to juggle a speculating and practicing point of view - the former without the latter making for merely interesting conversation - Ive ended up seeing perplexities and puzzles where ordinary and extraordinary folks practice their practices without a whole lot of philosophical preoccupation. And thats disposed me to write books on my own experiences as a way to approach one sort of privileged status for anything interesting Im lucky enough to notice about them. So I offer another one, written in this same spirit, a story of this Sudnow Method, which in many respects could as well have been called the Old Fashioned Way except that wouldve made for troublesome ad copy and there was enough trouble as it was. My account is all about a teaching method at the piano. But the way I see it, that makes it all about learning and teaching in general, as I hope becomes amply clear, since thats mainly why Im bothering to write it. I figure that with just a moments reflection youll easily see beyond most details of my account of this program to whatever other practices you like. And as a token of appreciation for asking that you put up with some simple piano facts, Ill reciprocally presume not even the slightest bit of any technical background in music or pianos, per se. Not even the facilities one must learn so as to carry a tune. Not even, for that matter, any 5

particular love for the stuff at all. Naturally, as a musician I feel occupationally obliged to stimulate more interest in this seriously endangered species of social conduct - everywhere under attack by button pushers - to be of some help to those who never got a chance to afford it the right kinds of attention, who, most of all, were probably not properly exposed to many of its better examples. But somehow, that all said, I still suggest that if youre really quite sure that you just cant stand music - a feeling I certainly share as regards much of whats called that today - consider not buying the book or, if you already did, giving it to a friend. My method wasnt so much an invention as a question of choosing a new area to apply and articulate a strategy for learning that was obviously once quite ubiquitous for eons. Throw em in the deep water to teach em how to swim, its metaphorically called. Though nowhere as dangerous as at sea, this is never seriously advised at the piano, nor in very many other places, where in the interests of learning it should be. Not nowadays. You tiptoe in a finger at a time. And yet various and sundry techniques - packaged up in a short seminar - for adapting a get-your-hands-dirtyright-away approach for the piano - produced over three thousand musicians, people of all ages who could sit down at the instrument and play songs very well. You couldve hired them for dinner parties, weddings, and at least on off-nights at the local pub. To continue supporting their families, most 6

wisely stayed with their day time gigs, though periodic independent sightings of working students were reported at shopping malls, restaurants, pianobars, and even, it was said, in one of those disreputable nightclubs in Amsterdam. These ordinary folks lived throughout the U.S. and abroad - truck drivers, judges, secretaries, doctors, housewives, movie actresses, some big time CEOs, an admiral, subway conductor, special agent of the FBI, and loads of retirees. Laborers and bankers, say, seldom adjacently situated for longer than it takes an elevator to climb or the bladder to empty, sat side-by-side in my seminar for several hours at a time. Half had never played, and the rest had widely varying extents of former study but werent still playing. Many hadnt played for decades, many doubted theyd ever play again, and many at first so fearfully touched their instruments it was as though theyd thought terrorists had tampered with them. There were surely quite a few more whod played pretty decently, since around twenty thousand were exposed to this system, shall we say, out of politeness to those who barely stayed awake or stuck it out at all, the term student as big an embarrassment for them as for me. Nearly a full half of the total twenty thousand, mostly my earlier ones, having no reasons to maintain contact, were lost touch of through unfortunate gaps in concern about a client database and as the natural and social results of a span of two decades. But over three thousand competent songsmiths can be vouched for convincingly, because in one of various ways 7

their progress was monitored. I thus like to think that a fair amount of music-making and not just listening came into being, and, while nearly all happily agree, I know theres an occasional husband, wife and other significant other out there who wishes Id never existed. The average age was 47 when they began, and a classic bell curve describes their distribution from two standard deviations down to 12 and two up to 90. All were nearly exactly 50/50 male-female, but a ratio change to 60/40 malefemale among those three thousand achievers who can be vouched for convincingly may lead one to speculate that men, no more or less adept, are, alas, somewhat more allowed to avidly pursue absorbing avocations. The full range of occupations was proportionately represented, with two notable exceptions whose quite different explanations Ill venture later. About 1 in 300 adult Americans is a doctor, yet of my total 20,000 students around 400, or 1 in 50, were male and female MDs. We had the notion of a Sudnow Method for Practicing Physicians club, and many of them, including famous ones like in those Best Ranked Doctors articles, signed a letter of endorsement to attest that along with regular medical checkups my program was good for your health. Then, because the other nearly equally over-represented players were lawyers, there was also talk of a Sudnow Method PianoBar Association, also with its impressive list. But because they were prosecutors, criminal lawyers, insurance attorneys and civil injury specialists, about all they agreed upon was that making music relieved 8

the stress of daily disagreements, with nothing to unanimously suggest regarding the rest of us. Alas, through my own neglect and other time constraints, these projects, like many such, never amount to much, beyond letterheads. I do know of a few hospitals where several of my doctor students held piano get-togethers. And I was once told of a keyboard in a surgical suite scrub room, where this chap liked practicing a little to nimble up before operating. As for lawyers? Before talking about them Id have to speak to mine, but by all appearances it never made it to the Supreme Court. Close to half of the 20,000 took seminars with me from 1982 to 1998, generally six to eight hour affairs, around a hundred and fifty of these given in nearly every large U.S. city and many smaller ones, though roughly 1,000 of these people participated in what youll see were very peculiar longer term meetings, held once weekly for from two to eight months, mostly in New York, Austin, Chicago, and Miami. The other ten thousand were exposed to this method on their own, with printed materials accompanying an edited live recording of a six hour seminar weekend. Actually, tapes of parts of two such gatherings were eventually spliced together front-to-back, and through years of re-editing in rather ridiculous ways, with a table-top technology for do-it-yourself home recording, earlier thousands fairly accurately figured Id spoken at a normal pace for roughly six hours, while later thousands thought I talked too terrifically fast for three (to fit it on that many CDs). If someone from 88 met someone from 98 and they got into details, 9

the latter would be confused. He said that? A long rap on the history of pop and jazz piano? I better listen again since I mustve missed it. For better or worse, various longer digressions and thousands of tiny uhs and pauses had been excised, so most recipients of the recorded seminar, including the middle thousands whose versions were less than six yet more than three hours long, were victims, first of razor-blade, and then those delete sleights of a market-oriented hand, doing window dressing. Despite such shenanigans - and if Sinatra could sing intimate Duos with a series of other singers that were each recorded over a special telephone why not? (actually for many good reasons!) - and taking into careful account what vouching entailed for those who can be vouched-for-convincingly, it can be readily shown that my advice helped produce proportionately as many good songsmiths when encountered on six cassette tapes purchased personally from me at a sales demonstration at a Holiday Inn, as it was gradually tweaked down onto three CDs ordered over the phone or through a website, or when incarnated in a sixmonth long weekly class with a bunch of particular people who came to know one another in the usual ways one comes to know students and teachers. That this may be seen as a finding of sorts, suggesting that claims of the essential inadequacy of so-called distance learning are false, implies one larger issue in my account, which best goes unnamed until its been described. I would, however, here like to apologize publicly to those later stu10

dents who found it necessary to stop their CD players too often to take a breath I didnt need. Thanks to essentially unavoidable packaging decisions, from choosing a tie to the title for a trilogy, what started out as listening to a rather relaxed seminar, gradually turned into something like having to cling to every single last syllable in the final briefing for a combat mission. Fortunately, however tense that mightve been for some, this never seemed to matter much one way or the other, in terms of the final outcome. But Im sorry for any stress, especially since I was selling the best relief I know (provided you watch your drinking, sit up straight, and take regular walks). Under circumstances Ill describe, thousands of hours were spent observing hundreds of hands learning to handle keyboards, and I spoke on the telephone with well over 40,000 people from every state in the U.S., often at some length, about music making - their backgrounds, theories, hopes, misconceptions, and lots and lots of excuses. It was always a one man, home-officed business, with the exception of occasional forced family child labor, some part-time helpers doing relatively menial chores on a few occasions, and a bit of outside help when several NBC Today Show appearances (too) briefly required that. Im a workaholic, both by disposition and in virtue of running a small business to earn a living. You can only imagine my 800 number bills. Ive never admitted to so much phone time with prospective students, and while my account is of a learning technique that transfers to thousands of tasks, its simultane11

ously very much a business story. An advertising and marketing saga. About a forever touring piano teacher trying to build a career on a method which claimed that in order to learn to play songs well extended instruction was unnecessary and often detrimental. About how this claim was disastrously detrimental to his ordinary life, since it meant charging lots of people much less than theyd have gladly paid for longer term instruction, using up town after town as a traveling minstrel because he couldnt think of more talk worth selling in any one place. Teaching, learning, and economy are inextricably interwoven in any instructional mode, and unraveling all of that, to provide a full context for my proposals and findings, necessarily takes me back to the very beginning, back to how I myself first encountered the piano. Think of this as the autobiography of a method, a case study if you will, as though a certain kind of showand-tell way for teaching could show and tell you everything about itself, its full earliest background and development, its notion of a proficient student, successes and failures, efforts to embody itself, issues of principles versus expediency, and so on. Think of me as just the designated subject, quite content to be deconstructed out of the picture entirely if some useful notions remain. Of course youll think of the book however you want. The first task is to find an editor wholl think creatively about which classified aisle in our supermarket bookstores to sell it 12

in these days. Put it in Education, Psychology, Business, Journalism, Music, Sociology, Autobiography, with the How Tos, Terrorism and Pianos, under Science Fiction for all I care. Put it in all these aisles, but mostly put it up front and keep it there for a while. Which means each of you will tell lots of friends but safeguard this copy. (Pay for the return postage and Ill autograph it and send it back, with yet another Free CD, of me playing the tunes that name my chapter titles, along with I Could Write a Book. Send it back to the publisher with your name and address, and five bucks payable to them for S&H; fast turnaround-times guaranteed). Incidentally, if you want to play songs at a keyboard, youll absolutely painlessly get all you need, right here, to learn that. Such a supplemental and altogether optional way of reading ought not distract one from engaging with the methods autobiographical intent: to reconsider the cultivation of human skills. And, most specifically, to offer up a bunch of details on the altogether confounding relations that obtain between whats called learning and whats called teaching. Most of the latter, Ill eventually come to suggest, we could all do perfectly well without.

13

As Time Goes By

Throughout my first sixteen years I lived in the apartment building directly behind center right field in this photo,

and from our rooftop I could follow the play in detail except for what happened on the far sideline. Every time the Yanks scored a run, and this was right after the so-called second world war when they owned baseball and did that nearly every afternoon, a roar rolled over our south Bronx neighborhood like a prop plane passing low and fast. You try practicing classical piano in such an environment! As an eight year old. DiMaggio meant much more to me than Debussy. 14

Though I could only catch half of Joes fielding from the roof, I always watched him at bat (the piggyback rides were even better). Actually it wasnt so much the neighborhood ambience but my father that ruined it for me. Or maybe it was learning Bach instead of BeBop. Or both. For ten years my dad was a cocktail pianist, a pathetic term thats often sadly applicable, since making a poor living with hard earned skills by playing and playing on bad pianos when its noisy and no one listens but the local drunks who sing Melancholy Baby for the millionth time off-key - well who wouldnt accept one free drink after another! My grandfather told my mother Youre not marrying a musician, so he became a pharmacist. He still played as a hobby, I loved to watch and listen, and could probably hum all of Gershwin, Berlin, and the Porter, Kern, and Rodgers tunes of the time by age six. But when I practiced my classical lessons and made a mistake he was one of those bad teachers who insisted (yelled), Start over from the beginning - precisely the worst thing for a student to do, but just right for alienated teachers to get through the hour more effortlessly, however painful. Who knows what it did for him to hear the repeating selfsame mistakes that such a practice inevitably yields, but to occasion more yells. After a year and a half of lessons, the bullying was finally too much. I whined back, You can make me go to school but you cant make me practice the piano, and one day I simply stopped showing up for lessons. I got away 15

with three weeks of movies on Wednesday afternoons before the teacher called to say he was sorry Id stopped coming. When I had my first serious crush some four years later at thirteen, on a camp counselor with magnificent hair who played beautiful folk guitar, and I pined away for her all fall by listening to Woody Guthrie records, my folks, refusing to give up on me and music, surprised me for my good school grades with a glorious Gibson guitar. I avidly took lessons and became the first (and hopefully last!) kid to be admitted to the famed High School of Music and Art by auditioning on a guitar, singing folk music with some slick funky strums Id learned from a black friend who worked in a neighborhood butcher shop and whose father was a Blues man. They let me in for my chutzpah. I played trombone in high school, but then when the big chain drugstores put my dads wonderful neighborhood apothecary out of business we moved to south Florida where I did my senior year. Going from Music and Art to Miami High was like playing Carnegie Hall one night and Joes Bar & Grill the next. Despite our inevitable conflicts, my father and I loved jazz together. Hed first taken me down to 52nd St. when I was ten. I sat at the bar with him at The Three Deuces, sipping my coke and listening to Art Tatum. Later, Music and Art buddies would go to Birdland on weekends, where they had a fenced-in peanut gallery for teenagers to have soft drinks. We got to hear them all - Bird, Dizzy, Miles, Bud, Monk. In Miami Beach there was a jazz club called The Onyx Room, named after another famous 52nd street venue, where 16

a locally acclaimed pianist, Herbie Brock, had a trio. He was a great Bebop player whod recorded on the renowned Savoy label. My dad tipped the doorman so theyd let me in, and soon arranged for me to take lessons with Herbie. I really wanted to play songs with the rich sound jazz players got, but Herbie hadnt much experience teaching. Say that a standard song, simplistically speaking, suggests a tune that was so often sung that when you hear its first few notes you catch right on and hum along, even if you havent heard that one in years. And please imagine such songs, for just for a minute and painlessly, I promise, in this way: Theres the melody, those notes you sing when you sing the song. And there are those group hums we speak of as chords. Sing in a shower and you sing just a melody. Unless you take group showers. Sing with a bunch of others, especially if the crowd includes women with high voices and men with low ones, in a shower or a clothed choir where the acoustics are better, and you can be a hum member too. Or you could remain just a melody-maker. Or, mostly depending on your height, you can often be both. We form into these musical groups - chords - with several singing people, with two or more sounding instruments, and with crowded guitars, vibraphones, harps and, busiest of all, keyboards, where virtual mob activity can be coordinated by just one persons independently fingered moves. Being at a keyboard is to have the whole town in your hands, these folks under your thumbs, those under the left and right pinkies, the whole village. 17

New hums are usually hummed every two or four beats - /1, 2, 3, 4 /1, 2, 3, 4/1, 2 3, 4 / - whether youre aware of it or not. And, whether youre aware of it or not, most standard songs have a repeating /1 2 3 4/ meter throughout. Sometimes chords are sustained for much more than four beats, and sometimes, they change, on each, and every, one. But most of the time, as a song moves along, the hums change every two beats. These gatherings of voices - which you must do without on flutes, trumpets, and when singing or whistling alone, for instance, however lonely that gets - at a piano, where theyre hand-sized bunches, these chords afford company to the tunes melody, which, as we know, is a succession of onenote-at-a-time sounds, da da de de do do di. Musical voices enjoy get-togethers. In standard tunes, which are slow so we may learn and hum them easily and big name singers and composers can sell lots of records - in this folk music the melody notes move only slightly faster than the chords. If they go too fast its not a song. Except to an Ella Fitzgerald or a new young rapper. Sometimes a melody voice stays right in one place, yawning or otherwise resting it out, while all the chord folks hum around for a few moves. Often theres only one melody sound for each chord, as in large parts of many slow ballads like All the Things You Are or Amazing Grace, where everyone all moves together lots of the time and thats the melody. But standard singable song melodies also often take one, two, or more - but not many more - steps, on and near each beat, 18

often thus moving four or more times for every single group hum. Think of a simple short number like Fly Me to the Moon and let me play among the stars, where the tunes melody voice jumps up and down at first (actually down and up), while the others lend their slower, steadily measured group support (on Fly, Moon, play, and stars). In songs, harmonious little gatherings with centuries of prior experience in communal ritual conduct, theres a mix of melody-notes-per-chordrates, within a quite narrow range. Youve nearly got the gist. Back to the story in a minute. First, try this: count one two three four, slowly, one count per second say, and on every one and three put all your ten fingers down on the table, hands curled as if youre taking two grapefruits that are a foot apart and setting them down six inches in front of you, or like bringing your fingers onto the typewriters home position. And then, just to really get the full swinging hang of it all, now move different individual fingers of your right hand - tap, tap, tap, tap - say four times, or just tap tap - two times, or three, or anything roughly like that - in between beats 1 and 3 when youre to put all fingers down (of course you must let go of the right hands grapefruit to do this, but holding down the lefts is fine, during this in-between part). Just count fairly slowly and it shouldnt take three seconds of practice (plus five minutes to decipher the instructions). Next you know youll be shopping for a piano. By the way, every time one of these chord bunches is struck (both grapefruits placed down), the melody tone, at 19

that time, is put on the top, highest up on a keyboard, usually beneath the fourth or fifth right-hand fingers, with various other digits voices assembled below. I wont go into the reasons now, but when we hear a typical song with chordal accompaniment, in an orchestra, band, on guitar, vibes, accordion or piano, say, we hear the highest pitches linking up to form its melody. So along with your taps-in-betweenchord-changes, the top note in each chord bunch, this small choir in your hands (with nicer sounds than grabbed grapefruits wed imagine) - these both together make up the melody. Back to Miami, and, very quickly, some pictures thatll get us both out of trouble in a hurry. As I mentioned, Herbie hadnt much experience teaching, so our lessons would go like this: He played a ballad I liked - Polkadots and Moonbeams was my first, which starts with A country dance was being held in a garden, and Id just ask him to hold his hands down every time there was a chord (so it looks a little different than holding grapefruits): A

coun - try - two individual melody notes, not shown, for the right hand, for coun and try, and then to:

dance

20

And I wrote down on a pad:

Left hand: l 2 3 F C Right hand: E G G A A C C F

D D etc

That was it. With my list I went home and duplicated the song. I knew the relevant looks of the keyboard, had been picking out melodies by hunting and pecking and getting decent at that since early childhood, could instantly spot the names of the notes and write them down while looking over his shoulder, knew how the song went, and it was obvious by the sound, and number of beats, where the chords changed. All I had to do to reproduce his arrangement was to memorize it, chord by chord. I didnt care about any rules, and Herbie didnt care that I didnt care. I was altogether satisfied with playing my tunes well, and he was happy I was happy. At each lesson I played my latest song, he sat back listening appreciatively, with occasional compliments because Id really practiced a lot, and then hed play for about fifteen minutes while I stood alongside drooling. Then we went through a new tune, chord by chord, and always finally spent about a half hour while Herbie showed off what could be done with his very latest ham radio equipment, one favored avocational world for many of the blind. By the time I graduated high school I could smoothly play fifteen ballads with nice Herbie Brock voicings - his decisions on how to spread chord and melody tones over two 21

hands whose logic I knew nothing about - and thats the only basis for the very little playing I did afterwards. I had no concepts to describe what Id learned, had quite thoroughly forgotten what little Id ever really known about so-called music theory, couldnt play any tunes besides those Id learned in that one specific way, and from age seventeen to thirty one I rarely touched a piano. Maybe a hundred hours total. Itd come time to pick a career. I didnt seriously think of being a musician, by seventeen hadnt had anything like the usual prior training, and for better or worse, hadnt yet heard of the likes of a Red Garland, to name just one example, whod had his first keyboard lesson at 18 and in less than a decade became a very major musician. While I loved jazz, I couldnt see myself living in poverty. In large measure because Id listened to this music so much, worshiped its inventors, and had been raised by Negro nannies throughout childhood while my mother did social work in ghetto neighborhoods, I had another inclination. I was flabbergasted by the Jim Crow signs we saw on our five day drive down from New York the year before. There had to be something wrong if you knew about people being forced to wear Stars of David, with numbers then tattooed on their wrists - and I saw them in the park on Saturday afternoons, a few survivors mingling with the older people - there was something strange inside if youve heard of such things more or less firsthand and didnt react with nausea to Colored Only. My biggest trouble in Miami was getting myself to pee in a restroom that read White Men. The 22

only real social science book I knew of before eighteen was An America Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdals monumental classic on racial discrimination, which I began as soon as we moved to Florida and studied all year. It had thousands of pages. Autherine Lucy finally decided my career for me. The first black person to seek admission to a southern state university after Brown v. Board of Education (where Myrdals work counted), her arrival in Tuscaloosa caused a minor riot. Browsing through the high school library collection of college catalogues at just that time I came across a course called Race Relations, at the University of Alabama, and I decided to go there, become a sociologist and begin by studying bigotry. The campus couldve been a movie set from a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney flick. I crammed four years into three with, indeed, a specialty in Race Relations. And along with some special thrills, like getting to uproot a monstrous circular shield of the KKK that welcomed you to town, overshadowing the BPOE, LIONS CLUB and FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH plaques, iconic communal sentries saying Howdy right there where the Birmingham Highway turns into University Avenue, three nervous Yankee boys whom theyd just as soon hang, in the middle of the night with a pickup truck and a chain - along with such thrills I got a decent education at Tuscaloosa. There was a good enough college library and some smart people to talk to, so if you wanted to learn you could learn. And of course there were Bear Bryant and the Crimson Tide to make weekends fun, and the KKKs Grand 23

Dragon Robert Skelton, to make late Saturday afternoon parades right through campus heading downtown and then across the river to their big open rally field very creepy. What a terrifying procession, those huge crosses wrapped in battery driven light bulbs mounted on the rooftops of big black Buicks filled with hooded horror. On to graduate school. One Erving Goffman had just published a book called The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life - a self-help sounding title for one of the most important American sociology works of the century - and I went to Berkeley to study under him. I did my PhD, first doing field research in a public defenders office where I wrote about how they and the prosecutors, in a mostly black district, worked out plea bargains to suit their offices respective court calendars, and then a year virtually living in Highland Hospital, an acute care facility for the large black slum of Oakland. I did my dissertation on the care (and especially lack of it) given to dying people in such a place. Erv had a knack for picking good topics (and selling book titles), so when it was soon published as Passing On: The Social Organization of Dying, my reputation as a potentially promising young sociologist was assured (his second suggestion, Away We Go, was a bit much). I took a post at the University of California at Irvine where theyd just started an experimental program in the social sciences, but when I began teaching I was at sea about where I was going intellectually. For four or five years after finishing my degree I drifted from interest to interest, wrote 24

about photography and perception, and did some research on behavior in public places. Then, in 1970, an extravagant event. Tenure. My lifetime job security scandalously assured at the age of 31, I was a newly divorced, custodial parent of two young kids, but with a low weekly course load and gobs of affordable daycare, living on a bluff overlooking the ocean in Laguna Beach, where in 1968 thered been an invasion of the largest collection of scantily clad hippies ever to grace U.S. shores. Two nightclubs in town were packed each night with only slightly more clothed ones, along with some of southern Californias best jazz musicians. So I took up the piano again. I bought a fine used grand piano and met a terrific pianist, Dick Powell, who, in a matter of a few hours, thank goodness, readily explained all about scales, song melodies, chords, and the basic rules about how to arrange them best. Things Herbie never taught me. I could now thus take a tune, with a typical fakebook chart that depicts chord symbols along the top of a melody line, like on the right hand part of any sheet music, and, like most musicians from Bach (was he a faker?) to Bacharach, construct and be able to vary my own arrangements. Using standard procedures for spreading the hands apart and variably enriching a chords sounds, when its a matter of accompanying a song melody one doesnt need a two-staved notation, where the parts are completely specified once and for all, for both hands in their entirety, and the arrangements are now usually lousy since theyre done for a very average amateur sight reader and not with the 25

sounds that, like many others, I learned to love. All I now did for several years was get on and off the campus as fast as I could, practicing the piano all day, first quickly coming to arrange and play tunes well and then very slowly learning to improvise jazz, raising my kids and hanging out in night clubs once I got them to bed. One memorable experience accidentally started with a lecture visit Id made back east late one spring. The week earlier Id heard the newly discovered pianist Chick Corea playing with Miles Davis at Shellys Manne Hole in Hollywood, and when I was in New York I stopped by at the famous and now defunct Schirmers Music Store, just to browse. And there HE was! I said hello, thanked him for his music, was invited to his loft that evening, and around three months later I arranged for his new band, Circle, formed just as hed left Miles, to do a seminar on musical skill at Irvine. The four guys stayed at my beach house for three weeks. Talk about being in the right places at the right times. Imagine the kick, for a beginning jazz player, of being with Chick Corea, Dave Holland, Anthony Braxton and Barry Altschul, as they rehearsed a new repertoire in a perfect quartet-ready beach house with a fine grand that simply had to be tuned twice a week. In 1972 I was a visiting sociology professor in Copenhagen, where there was a thriving music scene and I continued practicing and listening to live jazz. The University put me up in a townhouse district near the old center, and it was my first prolonged stay abroad. Living in a European city back then, being around very bright students 26

when a rebellion was rampant throughout the continent - it was one of my more exciting years. And I got to sit in now and then in a small club with a weekly jam session that the great tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon regularly frequented. Of course a real pianist played whenever he did. The return to California was depressing. A friend whod picked us up at the airport stopped at a supermarket on his way home, and within five minutes of wandering with him through a megastore the size of a Jutland village, with its freezing miles of frozen food aisles, I decided I wanted to move back east. A semester later I took a job at Brooklyn college. Back to New York, my home town. I got an apartment in the Village, and after nearly five years of practicing my playing was starting to show some glimpses of authenticity. I was finally gaining an inside take on how improvisation happens. With some skills basic competence grows so fast that theres very little to notice -riding a bike, swimming, roller skating - normalized before we know it. And many others, like talking, walking, handwriting, or tying shoelaces, are up to acceptability at an age far predating any inclination to reflect upon them. But adult years spent learning to handle an obstinate improvisational language? Topics I couldnt have imagined. I was finally seeing awkward facilities coalesce into the moves we call jazz, was in that great but thus far merely promised phenomenological heaven, positioned to closely describe aspects of behavior that really mattered for accomplishing something. Not just thinking about it once 27

its been already done. For a year I practiced and wrote as much as I could, often then out until one or two in the morning in local clubs, mostly listening to Jimmy Rowles - once accompanist to Billie Holiday, Ella, Sarah, Sinatra - giants like that - at Bradleys, a famous bistro at 10th and University Place, now tragically closed. Jimmy played ballads with a magically seductive allure. He never fully received his due, sad for him but probably good for music, for instead of superficially changing styles every few years to sustain fad driven audiences and conspicuous CD consumers, his ballad playing matured over a lifetime. Vintage Beaujolais of an artist. Jimmy decorated the place with his music and the management imposed a quiet policy during sets of play, out of concern for fans whod come to listen and pay, not, I assure you, some revolutionary respect for the players. Club owners. Landlords of the spirits. Watch the one always counting his dough in the magnificent Round Midnight, with the now late Dexter Gordon playing one of the most exquisite cinema roles in history as a hybrid version of himself and jazz pianist Bud Powell, and a score by Herbie Hancock thats a unique masterpiece of twentieth century music (with one great tune, The Peacocks, that Jimmy wrote). It took French director Bernard Tavernier to commemorate jazz, in this first film thats about the music itself. As youd expect from a Hollywood cowboy politician, Clint Eastwoods Bird, on the life of Charlie Parker, was mostly about Parker the black junkie, not the modern jazz he invented. 28

In the next fall at Brooklyn, in a sociology class called Communication, Id taken to doing a lecture demonstration by swiveling between a typewriter and piano beneath a homemade video rig where one camera focused tightly on the carriage and the other on the piano keys. I was typing live to students, and improvising, describing smoothness of action in language and music. Id come of academic age in Californias glorious mid-60s, when futuristic university campuses were given free reign to experiment. Last golden era of thought. A professor wants to teach about social life via a description of gestures say, using music and live writing as examples? His or her business. Call the course what you have to so tax paying parents dont think the catalogue is too bizarre, and then do your thing. Once the tuition is paid and theyre turned over to you Prof, youre the boss. Bona fides established by standard procedures, publications assessed in light of shared academic criteria, one was given rights to teach as one saw fit, all particulars up to the teacher. Do your version of sociology and these lucky kids get the chance, fortunate enough to get a college education, to learn from you. But the times theyd been a changin, and The Chairman of the Department was very annoyed that I was using a piano in a sociology class. It got ugly. I shouldve sued him for bribing two students with offers of better grades if theyd launch a formal complaint. His bribe offer backfired, they gave signed statements to me instead, so I had adequate grounds for feeling justified in doing what I really wanted to do anyhow - at least temporarily stop teach29

ing sociology to write about music making. I was advised to sue him anyhow, but, as my luck would have it, he died a few years later. Heads of Departments might not see how my studies produced sensible subject matter, but that was their problem - the problem of academic disciplines - not mine. So I finished off the semester swiveling between two keyboards, and then took my kids out of school and resettled in Cambridge, where I had some friends. I could stretch out scant resources longer there than in Manhattan, hopefully completing an account of all these years of learning jazz. My book came out in March of 78 and I was extraordinarily lucky to get a good review by none other than Jack Kroll of Newsweek. Jackpot! (Along with a letter of congratulations signed by the whole sociology faculty at Brooklyn College sans The Chairman). At the Harvard Press there was panic because only a few thousand copies were on the stands. Newsweek jumped the gun by a full week, and they didnt sell nearly what they would have if the review ran in the next issue, this not to be my last experience in the area of what gets called fulfillment. Meanwhile, a nice paperback offer came in the day after the review. That Jack Kroll or the paperback acquisitions editor liked the book didnt mean a large public would. I was stunned by the review since Id written to a really small group of social scientist-philosophers and hadnt for a moment conceived any possible non-academic appeal for my ideas, figuring Id probably be back on the job market once the study was published. Now I was fantasizing Id be a suc30

cessful writer, never again to face the Department Heads of the world. But then there was reality. The paperback money would come in three installments, so there wasnt all that much. One friend suggested I give piano lessons, but I didnt hear him for a couple of years. The idea of one-on-one teaching with private students on an hourly basis held no appeal. I heard piano teacher as synonymous with chronic poverty. But then I got a Guggenheim, just in the nick of time, and another year went by without resumes. Now its 1980 and there wasnt an open professorship in the country. Sociology had plummeted from its late sixties hip high place on the campus to lowest of the low, and even were there a job somewhere, in tight times the last thing a department would do was bring in someone whod have to get a senior slot at the expense of one coming up from within their own ranks. I wasnt that senior and, besides, whatd the piano have to do with Sociology? Just after my Guggenheim year I spent two quarters as a visiting prof at Berkeley, where my fourteen year old son was quite taken in with spending lots more of them on video games, this then the height of the Pac Man craze, and I tagged along to an arcade a few times. After a late-night session playing a home computer game called Missile Command at a Berkeley profs party, I was intrigued, and wrote a book proposal for a descriptive account of one who becomes obsessed with learning to win such a game while recording the perceptual details of his microathletic experiences. I lucked out. Two weeks later my New York agent awakened me with a 31

call at 6:30, a day after Time ran a cover story on video games, to tell me the first bid. I was floored. By mid afternoon I shook hands over the phone with an editor at Warner Books, owned by Warner Publications, owned by Warner Brothers, who owned Atari, head of the Pac of new video game companies. Id get carte blanche access to anything I wanted to study in their newly famous little two bit company. And a big advance. I finished the book in time for its tight deadline, but press interest in the game craze had dissipated as fast as it materialized and nine months was six months too late for the volume to do sales justice to its advance. Time to move on. Berkeley wasnt the same. With my teaching on campus over and this book done, I wanted to be back in New York. Much had changed in fifteen years. Berkeley was now stuffed with gourmet shops, fancy boutiques, and unbearably healthy looking students who could make it up the hill to campus on a ten-speed without shifting gears and called a Cappuccino a Cap. So many of those over thirty seemed consumed with knowing the best brands of French goat cheese, ranking deserts at Chez Parnisse, and the latest home prices on the best Berkeley blocks. When those under thirty thought of Marx they thought of Groucho. Back to New York, where I could smoke a cigarette without some toe-headed kid glaring as if Id exposed myself in public. While still back east, Id started up a short seminar, for groups of novices and prior piano players all together, on how to play standard tunes at the keyboard. Over the shoulder private lessons suggested a marginal existence at best, 32

but Id had enough beginning experience with a seminar style layout back in Boston the year before, and for some months in California too, to think things could be different. And while most people give less attention to live music making as an endangered species than the plight of spotted owls, I figured the near extinction of a unique member of only a handful of ancient ways humans have of behaving especially social - that surely warranted an assault. Music teachers failed to teach music making for amateurs to handle well and maintain. Theyve religiously sustained a curriculum bound to notation, yet one that doesnt stress fluent sight reading, with its once-well-had then rather readily maintained skills. The focus is on memorizing for an exacting performance, an altogether different matter, especially in the context of a life that involves only modest amounts of daily practice. Learning pieces up to a certain sense of perfection for an annual recital has some special merits, forcing a fine tuning of aspects of ones performance thats often quite difficult to routinely muster in other institutionalized ways. But when thats all or most of whats ever done, and with small amounts of time given to it in the first place, ones memorized repertoire rapidly deteriorates. So the typical piano experience (at around a billion a year in lessons) affords a capacity for the performance of a gigs worth of music to only a tiny percentage who stay involved over the very long run, providing almost no endurable (sic) skills to everyone else. Armstrong, Rodgers, Gershwin, Arlen, Porter, Tatum, 33

Ellington, Fitzgerald, Holiday, Sinatra, Miles, Streisand, Hancock - they more or less define twentieth century, worldwide popular music, yet your average non-literate tribesman knows more about his peoples songs than we do about ours. Ask the man on the street to define a major scale and youre lucky if he knows youre talking about music. Ask him whats involved in being able to play songs by ear, for example, and you wont get a remotely decent answer from those who can do what they call that, let alone those who cant. And the methods available for learning? Materiel. Only for use with the guidance of a Certified Teacher. They actually keep instrumental scores behind the counter in some music stores. You have to have a note from your teacher, like filling a prescription. Quasi-professional service fields of all sorts, electronic repair shops to social workers, hair dressers and music teaching studios, often adopt various ritual appurtenances of the doctor-patient relationship out of an insecurity over their bona fides. The Tinkering Trades, my mentor Goffman aptly dubbed them all. Playing songs was just there for the taking. Getting to nicely handle any standard tune - Aint Misbehavin to Over the Rainbow to Yesterday - well my lessons with Dick Powell had long ago made it obvious that nearly all songs are very organized short forms, describable in simple terms with a few named places and rules, and that they can be non-simplistically and variably played exclusively through the application of standard principles. And, in principle, I figured all the needed facilities to play tunes well could be attained and 34

sustained with an amateur time commitment. Such music made much sense for an avocational undertaking. With decent start-up funds from the video book advance and the realization that if this is what Berkeley was becoming there was little very chance of intelligent life on other campuses, I had to solidify a new source of income. Once again, back east it would be.

35

On the Sidewalks of New York

I relate to New York like most do to home towns, and its always unsettling to move away. Two years later, flying off to fill a last minute half-time teaching post at the University of Texas at Austin in August no less, with two teenagers and a few thousand bucks to my name, the separation was really acute. On one of those rare cooler summer days when you can see forever and ever, a day just designed to make leaving feel worse, I pressed my face against the Boeing window until the last trace of the Trade Towers faded, held back some tears, and wondered how in the world I hadnt sensed from the start that Manhattan might be among the riskiest places to start up certain enterprises. For starters, just think of its actual population size. Successful avocational programs must meet in the evenings, for all but homemakers and the elderly (not your larger Manhattan cohorts), yet millions frantically scramble to get their cars in line and slowly vacate the island each sunset. Of Manhattans one million actual residents, nearly half of them, mostly those above the upsidedown Mason-Dixon line 36

at Duke Ellington Boulevard (125 St.), are in or near poverty. Americans often get it wrong when it comes to memorial place names. Arguably the nations best composer, Duke gets a decrepit slum artery dedicated to him, and theyve bizarrely baptized the birthplace of BeBop, 52nd Street, as Swing Alley, instead of naming it after Charlie Parker, who made modern jazz happen there in reaction to what was then called Swing. With its W.C. Handy Place, no less, though Handy hardly had a hand in it. Such faux pas are as much about the cultures illiteracy as regards art in general, as about racism. Consider the especially entertaining example of a recent flag for the Mostly Mozart Festival, flying high over Lincoln Center all spring with a huge keyboard logo showing only black-note threesomes separated by spaces, with no twosomes. Asking many thousands, maybe 1 in 50 could sketch a keyboard (at least get the pairs and triplets of blacks, and the white spaces suggested, let alone name the notes):
C# Db D# Eb F# Gb g G# Ab A# Bb

# = Sharp; b = Flat

And were not talking about reciting the Greek alphabet. There are pianos in over 20 million American homes, plus many millions of electronic keyboards, not just a few dozen fraternities and sororities with their alphas, sigmas and 37

omegas. To not know the keyboard layout - my statistic for aspiring pianists no less - is like not knowing the primary colors, or whether Van Gogh or Rembrandt came first. I doubt those figures are much better. After pianos were first marketed, for about a hundred years the members of those wealthier households to which they went played them. Now, thanks first to player pianos, perhaps our most perverse product, then broadcasting and recording music and finally that thief of all human sociability - TV - millions of pianos are mostly touched and viewed, from Beverly Hills to Bedford-Stuyvesant, while dusting and displaying family photos. We only vaguely know the looks of their relevant details. A modern aberration par excellence, this piano, the third most costly object for many families alongside house and car, which after some months of horrible instruction then goes permanently unhandled, the fear being that if you do something that doesnt follow the rules, like playing around with the feeling of the notes and your fingers instead of obliging a strict set of relatively precise written directions, itll blow up. Many thousands of dollars for the most ludicrous piece of decorative furniture in the past century. Boats are another apt candidate; we go to yacht harbors to sit on Sundays, moored at docks in expensive ships, watching football on portable TVs and rocking in the water a little, while many beautiful bays are boatless. In any case, nearly half the islands residents were poor blacks who make it downtown to invent BeBop, dance Broadway, play the Garden, clean Macys or cook hot dogs, 38

leaving home turf, out and back for a service gig in a huge daily ghetto passage in the most important city in America. With the exception of a few pockets comprising no more than fifteen percent of the remaining half million, the rest of Manhattans residents were disproportionately young single hopefuls, sharing apartments, where a piano wouldve then meant sacrificing the couch, this cohort, moreover, one for whom the image of a family singalong had already lost significant salience. Total piano-ownership-per-household back then, just before we had those small electronic keyboards where the push of a button has your fingers making sounds that (very) roughly sound like those requiring lips or a drummer arms, probably put the total number of Manhattan keyboard owners near the total number in Des Moines. Thinking as much about where Id want to live as to where to best make money, I was already only a pretend-businessman. Youre first supposed to do your demographics. An old friend was an architect, who with a sense for special places spotted an ad for my first loft. Directly above the once illustrious Folk City, across the street from the still illustrious Blue Note jazz club, was a space that couldnt fail. A piano studio on West Third. Perfect. And what a loft. The space was huge. Ninety by thirty five feet. At the rear end was a large elevated kitchen, cupboards and sinks surrounding a massive combination butcher block/stove console the size of a double bed. And at the Blue Note street-side end of the loft a complex labyrinth of terraced teak dividers on multi-leveled landings partitioned off a half dozen built-in 39

couches variously angled in on a large fireplace, the whole making for a sort of space I could always rent as a ski lodge film set. Heres where I would hold classes. Quite absurd in its way, this Aspen in Greenwich Village was nonetheless a most impressive renovation, and while I was plenty nervous about the rent there was certainly the prestige factor. A major subway stop right at the busy corner, good restaurants and renowned clubs everywhere. The Cafe Reggio, among the last vestiges of an intellectual world that once brought the neighborhood its international fame, was right around the corner, so thered be a place to have a Cap and read the Times each morning. Why not? It could be a perfect place for group keyboard classes and whatever exciting living had come to mean in the Village of the eighties. So I signed the lease. Like winning large lottery jackpots, big book advances make ordinary types crazy. Folk music means guitars, banjos, harmonicas, singers. Right? We were just about fully unpacked, Id rented a grand piano, a thousand posters advertising my course were being printed, a bunch of college kids were on hand to start putting them up all around the city. And it started. Around 10:30 at night. Folk City became Rock City, our Aspen ski lodge a Pittsburgh steel mill under full steam. The cool piercing neon from the Blue Notes marquee filled the still curtainless cavernous loft with an eery glow as the kids and I sat in the dark with these amazing throbbing bass and drum reverberations. Continuous rhythmic blowouts in the Holland Tunnel. 40

Meanwhile, business also started booming. Within two weeks of postering Manhattan, downtown Brooklyn and parts of Queens, around two hundred people called. I manned the phone myself each day, did my sales pitch, and a hundred and ten students sent in deposits for my first classes. I scheduled five sections with twenty odd people in each, to meet for two early evening hours every week for four meetings, and charged a hundred bucks including materials. Eleven grand gross per month. Subtract $2800 for the rent, $1500 to produce and post enough circulars each month, $1000 in course materials, and wed be able to make it there, and, if Frank was right, thus make it anywhere. Everything was fine in October when the first classes began. Then around a hundred called and seventy five of them sent in deposits for my November series, down to seventy-five callers with forty deposits for December. And after a week of trudging the snowbound streets of Manhattan in search of new postering places with my one last employee, we managed to generate enough calls to put together a class in January with twenty seven students, three of whom left after the first session without paying their balances. Luckily Id never stopped complaining about the infantry battle downstairs, so I could break the lease and get out. I shouldve seen it coming. Id had only one tested means of advertising, designed when I first developed the course in Boston, one of those tear-off-posters you se offering magazine subscriptions, tradeschool programs, and other dubious services, placed on bulletin boards in copy or coffee 41

shops, waiting rooms, on kiosks, bus and subway panels, atop cigarette machines, and the like:

It was about 7 by 10 inches, with the tear-off sheets measuring around 4 by 5. The backs were of a glossy white card-stock and the pads, with twenty or so stapled sheets, could be done up in a variety of splashing colors, bright blue and pink becoming apparent favorites. There was a commonsensical theory for the ad. A young graphic designer in Cambridge had done some jazz lessons with me, we talked about my idea for a seminar to teach people how to teach themselves to play songs, and then put the ad together. The goal was to get a prospect to read the extensive copy you can get on the back of a tearoff-sheet, far more than whats affordable in places like a magazine or a mailing piece. For a small outlay, youd have potential students self-selecting themselves, taking an interested action, and theyd retain a 42

reasonable amount of copy to carry home and read. On the flip side, under the obnoxiously pretentious but apparently catchy headline,
David Sudnow wont give you weekly piano lessons. He doesnt have to.

a slogan thats by now, alas, been seen if not noticed by at least a fifth of the U.S. population (though not on posters), along with a brief synopsis of what the course was about, and my phone number, there was copy about me, with lots of quotes - that I was a famous expert on piano skills, author of a famous Harvard Press book on learning, and the like - bragaddacio to warrant my claim to be able teach anyone to be a good Standards piano tunesmith in a short lecture course detailing the nature of songs and keyboard learning, with materials to follow a do-it-yourself method for gaining the needed skills at home. And the ad theory worked, in its way. Yet at the same time Id already had two remarkably similar experiences of quickly using up a population of interested prospects, first in Boston, where over the course of six months of extensive postering in every corner of Harvard Square I went from four classes with twelve students in each (in a smaller apartment), to two, with five or six; and then again during the visiting year at Berkeley where I taught some piano seminars advertised this same way, using a postering service that actually put them up for you, the Bay Area not short on former academics experimenting with other ways to make a living and advertise for them; and again the 43

enrollment steadily dropped with nearly the same time curve as before. It just simply never occurred to me that that could happen in Manhattan. Not with all those people. We hastily retreated into a sensibly priced sublet and I allocated my remaining video game book money to the rent and a budget that would let us hold on for six months while I figured out whatd gone wrong and the kids could finish out the year in the same school. It didnt take much analysis. The question was what to do about it. As things started to slow down quickly, my workers found that fewer tear sheets were taken from the posters each week. When they first went up in new locations there was a rush of interest. Then they rapidly lost drawing power. The keyboard logo, with me to this day, caught interested eyes quickly, but in any given place we exposed ourselves to the same people over and again. Put one in a coffee shop or neighborhood laundromat. The customers are mostly regulars, and the regulars are apparently very regular. Those whove got an interest see it right off, and then it hangs there, unplucked and soon fading. Going from place to place, replacing or replenishing posters soon became unnecessary, and possible postering locations were far too limited. And recall that such neighborhood shops serve neighbors, albeit with that meaning unique to New York, but not many of the five million employees who move in and off the islands shore like the tide each day. This was anything but interesting at the time. That people who somehow wanted to study the piano would 44

notice a new ad right off the bat is grist for a phenomenology of marketing, for describing how at any time a set of persons are saliently oriented toward a world of certain options in a way that inclines them to very quickly notice means for possibly actualizing them, that the world becomes an instant background for an image that may then immediately solicit these particular inclinations, and that, apparently, playing the keyboard is one such proclivity. Why some logos rather than others are stronger figures in such a field that way? A puzzle for the gestalt psychology of perception, a Rorschach analysis of those hankering for something to fill up their lives, what have you. And that the depletion rate from place to place, eventually in eight cities before postering finally fizzled, always followed the nearly selfsame statistical pattern? Nice subject matter for a new sort of sociology on the demographics of perceptual horizons, an ethnoeconomics of advertising, that ancient, essential, and yet always only ambiguously rational endeavor. Homo vendoriens. I was into combating and not studying the depletion phenomenon. OK, we use up neighborhoods quickly. Now what? Id had only one experience with a newspaper ad, back in Berkeley, and it was disastrous. The publisher of a upscale magazine, The Boston Monthly, mostly distributed on Beacon Hill, had taken my course back east. Shed also just come to the Bay Area, to launch a Berkeley Monthly for the Berkeley Hill, spotted my poster on a kiosk near campus and called just to say hello but really sell me an ad. For 900 bucks I took out a quarter-page space and ran a cartoon drawing of 45

a guy dreaming about Santa bringing him great piano lessons instead of just another bathrobe for Xmas. I got one call. My copy had contained the line If you walk and talk you can play the piano, and someone from one of the paraplegic centers in town telephoned to protest that my advertisement was prejudicial against the handicapped. It was almost worth it for the only-in-Beserkeley story. So when it came to New York it never even occurred to me to consider an ad in a paper. By 1994 and afterwards, Id come to spend $20,000 a year for premium position ads in the New York Times national editions first six pages. But not then, not when there were six months left and wed be broke, not before getting the publicity I could successfully cite in later ads. The posters quotations commended my past achievements, not my methods efficacy. I was nearly ready to call it quits and forget this piano course, which wasnt only conceived as a social service but a means to make a living, and in a very particular way, like a college professor who earns a decent enough salary by teaching six or eight hours a week and has lots of time left over to write. How many years get used up trying to create the right conditions to write? I quickly wrote a proposal and got a contract for a book about using personal computers, this in 82, long before email and the WWW, and I spent three aimless months playing with this PC, which then meant little more for me than writing small routines in Basic and watching streams of numbers shoot by, imagining Id think about learning programming. Unsuccessfully trying to find anything interest46

ing to describe, and nearing my wits end with the money running out, in late April one of my former postering staff stopped by to pay a visit, with a plan. The posters had all been put up indoors that fall, in establishments serving a nearly self-same clientele every day. Wed learned that. But now, with the weather becoming nice, why not try putting them up outdoors, on lampposts, phone booths, all over those massive plywood walls surrounding Manhattans ubiquitous construction sights, near parks, subway entrances, wherever large crowds use the sidewalks of New York? Wed reach far more people that way, he urged, than with a coffee shop, bookstore, condo-mailroom, laundromat strategy. Recalling that other enterprises taped circulars onto lampposts, and having just learned that the minimum monthly rate for ad space for an overhead panel on even just one of the bus or subway lines was prohibitive, I took a chance and gave Roy a precious thousand bucks, five hundred for posters and five as pay, telling him to blanket Midtown. He was right. Within three days after he started there were two hundred calls, and by the end of two weeks Id scheduled six full classes, each meeting once a week, each with over fifty students. The profit was awesome. Maybe wed make it there after all. I immediately rented a large dance rehearsal studio with folding chairs for 75 bucks an hour at 57th and Broadway, across from Carnegie Hall, booked up a bunch of weekly slots for the whole summer, rehired my full staff of 47

workers and a secretary, ordered a huge number of posters, and put the kids to work after school stapling tear-off pads. Throughout May, June, July and August the calls hardly stopped, and for those months and the six that followed nearly every corner in midtown Manhattan told you lots about playing the piano by ear. (A totally misleading expression, by the way, the playing by ear, as youll come to see. Like most, I find my hands far more facile at a piano). A year later, just after Id gone into temporary exile in Texas, a friend wrote that the city had outlawed lamppost postering, so there was at least some small solace in the chance that I mightve inadvertently contributed to a cleaner New York. By the end of the summer, with hardly any let up, over fifteen hundred people had taken the seminar, Id accumulated a bunch of cash and was absolutely exhausted, but decided to open up a real keyboard school, whatever that was, back in the Village at a far less extravagant but larger and even better organized working/living loft, also on Third Street, just two blocks from where the first had been:

48

It was the strangest studio you can imagine, as surrealistic as my own strategic thinking. It takes most business folks years to gain productive skills, but for those coming from backgrounds like mine, a lifetime of fumbling is more likely, a central difference being that many of them really love money, while many academicians (at least used to) care only about a certain modestly livable amount. To start a business just to earn enough to do other things is like running for President because you love flying, casual sex, formal attire and fancy friends, or overpowering a global league by a semi-pro ball club, with whos on first, whats on second and wheres on third. To make a very long and just as soon forgotten story short: I knew the summer postering wouldnt continuously sustain volume, so I figured Id design some new sort of musical learning environment, a large group keyboard center. And Id work on attracting publicity as the primary way to then generate a continuing flow of students. Sure enough, the outdoor campaign eventually used up all the local populations passing particular places. Put four up on the corners of Madison and 40th, most of the same 10,000 people traverse that intersection every day, and while in May and June the lampposts had to be repostered every week, by October the tear-off sheets flapped away until the fall winds took them. In September I was down from three to two hundred students, sinking to a hundred a month by Christmas. Six months later I was penniless. And the publicity? It came, and was one of the final 49

blows. After New York Magazine ran a piece in their esteemed Best Bets column in August, when three quarters of their subscribers were out at the Hamptons reading about anything else but whats going on back in the city, and I enrolled fifty students instead of the expected two or three hundred - after that publicity, which cost months of persistent phone calls and help from well-placed contacts, The New York Post, with over a million in circulation, spent days interviewing and photographing, and then ran an article on my course in midwinter under the heading If you can type, you can play the piano. It was a nice enough piece of several hundred words, quite visibly located in the front part of the paper, with a decent shot of the studio and description of some principles of the course. There was only one problem. The reader hadnt the slightest hint of where in the world I was located. After some details of my philosophy were tolerably paraphrased, the article just ended. Without a single mention of any place, not even New York. No phone number. Nothing. Nada. Theres this piano method. Somewhere! Having anxiously awakened to get an early morning edition, I frantically called the writer at 5 am. His sleepy Hello? was instantly awakened by my frantic Steven? into a somber Im really sorry David, since I know how much youve waited for this, but at the last moment yesterday my editor decided to leave out the location because she thought it seemed more like a plug than a news story. To my incredulous when she reports a war does she leave out the 50

names of the countries for christsake?, he consolingly passed the buck with Im so sorry, but I simply cant do a thing about it. Its out of my hands. And that was that. Maybe the editors devoted mother was a sweet old-fashioned, make-the-lessons-last-forever-piano-teacher. The New York Posts switchboard stayed so swamped all day that despite the boxes of chocolates I messengered to the receptionists at noon, hardly anyone made a connection. I managed to recruit about fifty students after laying out a fortune in time energy and cash to assemble course materials for a thousand, and, at the end of a this-couldve-been-astroke sort of day, with increasingly desperate efforts to get through to the editor to have her please insert an addition in the next of their dozen daily editions, in the very last print run, hitting the stands after midnight just before their first issue of the next day, with a circulation of about fifty bored cops, it was noted as a postscript that Sudnows studio was in New York. The whole Manhattan experience was a nightmare. First of all, a studio with those keyboards made no sense whatever. Id simply happened upon a small storefront a few blocks away on Canal Street, an outfit run by Hasidic Jews who held the monopoly on discount electronic shops that partially thrived on black market goods, apparently now in Arab hands, whose larger outlets still line both sides of Times Square, and I saw one of the very first four octave keyboards:

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It was an interesting object for a pianist. When I was nine I took a wooden practice keyboard to summer camp. Nothing moved. It was just a lightweight piece of painted pine, a trueto-scale relief replica of four octaves with keys of regulation piano size, color, and proportions. The sounding keyboards Id first noticed coming on the market in the seventies were either miniature toys or monstrous synthesizers. Now here were four properly sized octaves self contained in a five pound package that could actually make music, albeit with PacMan inspired timbres, and with a headset plug so you could play just for yourself, a novel replacement for a room with a door (and making keyboard study possible for a couple of hundred bucks). Id just rented the studio, was preoccupied with the idea of a publicity-worthy keyboard learning center, and I got such a deal, at wholesale just for you, that I bought thirty of them at around a hundred bucks each. By the way, octave is a bad term that needs replacement by one denoting the distance from any note to the next, going up or down, with the same name. Octave means eight, yet the forty-eight spots in a four octave range computes to twelve notes per octave, a terminological tongue-twister that casts aspersions on the purportedly close relationship between music and mathematics. What octave really means is eight notes along a certain path on the keyboard. From any 52

white note you may count up eight places to reach the next one in the same place in respect to the field of whites and black groupings. But start on a black note? Which eight spots to count to get to the next black note in the same situation? Eight places on this path (the so-called major scale). No wonder so many have anxieties about musical nomenclature. Four such octaves are all one needs at hand for playing songs. The scope of forty-eight keys, treating blacks and whites equally as musicians do, encompasses most normal singing ranges, and if so many spots were good enough for Bachs Well Tempered Clavier, the bible of the piano, theyre good enough for the tunes of Tin Pan Alley. (I wonder if and how theyve consecrated West 28th? Maybe its Country and Western Lane, or Elvis Square.) Among the musicians Id come to know at Bradleys in the early seventies was Phil Markowitz, one of the countrys most skillful jazz pianists, for many years singer-trumpeter Chet Bakers accompanist. Id run into Phil this time back in town, told him about my studio idea, and hed lent a hand. In several evenings we built ten tables for three keyboards apiece, and put five rows on each side with an aisle down the middle. Then, as you see in the photo, I mounted a camera pointing down at my hands on the grand piano up front, with a video projector and a large screen so everyone could watch them as I zoomed around within that four octave range they use for song playing. I also contracted for an electrical engineer to design a little system whereby I could monitor each student from a switchboard on my piano bench, and 53

listen and speak to any of them individually, or all of them at once, through their headsets. The basic wiring was done, the video worked well, but by the time the engineer got around to finishing the rather complex control box, around Xmas time, we were in such trouble that I was very lucky to have a student whod planned to open a computer training center on the model of my studio, and he bought the contraption so as to field questions privately without disturbing others at work at their consoles. So it was never installed. Students could play, and I could talk to them en ensemble over their headsets to interrupt them and continue my lecture. But I couldnt listen in on them. For all I know they sat there for two hours each week playing Mozart, Chopsticks, or examining their fingernails. I talked, they watched my hands, or so it seemed, and I managed to improvise some student keyboard handling into a lecture/performance Id already given nearly a hundred times with no one at an instrument. When the studio first opened I shamefully hired Phil as a teaching assistant, to pace the aisles and watch students hands. Our best musicians are often most likely to be out of work for they charge more and club owners figure no one notices the difference between the greats and the okays after one or two drinks or even when sober, a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one. But after two weeks of this nonsense we agreed that it was completely useless, and thereafter the class stayed a solo gig. During the course of the full eight hour seminar from then on, I had students put their 54

hands on these keyboards for fifteen minutes at most. Surprisingly, no one ever asked what they were really for, probably not to embarrass me. I wont get into all the gory New York details, like, for example, the full story of the guy who spent his entire days for two whole months traveling the length of the five boroughs from the Bronx Zoo to Staten Island tearing off our posters, then calling us and hanging up. Once in a while hed say something like Ripped off seventy five today. Click. A tracer put on our line revealed that he only used pay phones, and a week was eventually spent by three of us with our hands holding the phones all day long, trying to pick up the receivers the very instant they rang so we could wipe him out of quarters. Maybe he and the Post editor had the same mother. Maybe it was the Post editor, disguising her voice. When his project really began to hurt because he managed to remove nearly half of our posters a week, I posted several posterers at major intersections, but they couldnt catch him in the act. And other forms of advertising were still a total mystery. Soon after my great news story, a chap in one class, always first to arrive, always in the front row, came up to me one evening to say, I never do what Im about to, but I want to make an exception. My name is Paul Rubinstein, and my father was the pianist Arthur Rubinstein. I love your course. So if my name might be of use Id be glad to help. Honored and hopeful, I placed a large ad for a thousand bucks in the Village Voice, with a photo of the studio and a balloon above 55

Pauls head:
My name is Paul Rubinstein, son of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, and I had the very best piano lessons that money could buy. But I always preferred Mercer and Ellington to Mozart and Beethoven, and the lessons never stuck. Now, with Davids course, Im having the time of my life.

Not one reader called! Id simply remembered the Voice way back when most of its nightclub ads were for jazz, by this time already tucked off in some tiny corner within dozens of pages of the those Rock & Roll spreads that look like Dracula did the layouts. The Village Shout. It wouldve perhaps paid to peruse the paper prior to placing the ad! Paul is a stock broker, yet as honest and caretaking with his clients and friends as his father was with Chopin. As the end drew near, with resources quickly dwindling, he and several other students basically confronted me with the obvious though ominous news, a fact that was to guarantee and define my angst for many years to come: You have hundreds, no thousands of people coming in here, paying a hundred bucks to learn to play the piano. You take the money, give them a great short course and then say goodbye, never to meet again. Probably seventy five percent would gladly stay for a year at a hundred bucks a month. Your problem isnt New York or posters. Just make it a long term program and youll have a thriving concern That never once crossed my mind. A longer course? About what? How? You mean become a real piano teacher? Id just as soon work for the phone company... 56

... It was incidental that my pedagogical hunches and personal goals so nicely dovetailed, at least in fantasy. A short lecture series I could deliver to decent-sized groups, compressing the needed info and advice on how to learn quickly into a brief spate of time with abundant materials this all warranting a decent fee so that Id only have to teach on a part time professor-like basis (hah!) - the approach seemed quite sensible on abstract pedagogic and not just personal grounds, or at least so Id unwittingly thought as Id reflected on my own early learning experiences at the piano and nearly anywhere else. I wasnt designing a scam. I must interrupt to confess to a long term affliction, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), debilitating me well before the widely prescribed drug of choice was on the market. It stayed with me from early childhood until I got tenure and started learning jazz. The cause of my disorder? Not some defect in the paying-attention gene, nor, best as I can tell, a deficiency in the number of my brain cells, as they now try to tell us. For me, as for many others, the cause was Teaching. The effective cure? Choose any of many better ways to le n, for yourselves and/or your kids, and toss the Ritalin. I never much needed teaching, always doubted that anyone much does, figured to this day that when we really need and want to learn something badly enough we teach ourselves in the best possible ways. It was always complete57

ly transparent to me that among the worst places to learn things fully were those places where things are taught, especially when the places become Educational Institutions with a curriculum of scheduled grades, classrooms, PTA meetings, and periodic standardized exams, then becoming as much committed to the policies needed to maintain their own existence as to participating in the growth of skill. Or to put it rather more fairly, accurately, and generically: when you learn whats taught in the ways its taught, you gain skillstaught-that-way. Learn to play the piano, say, through years of regular weekly lessons. You havent learned to play the piano, as if that were a universally unidimensional undertaking in the world. Youve only learned the years-of-regularlessons-way to play the piano. And even for those who somehow succeed at that, skills fashioned that way do not, but for cultural (i.e., economic) reasons, define some best way to play. The music, for one thing - when youve learned how to listen for that - never loses its once-a-week sound. Imagine if do-it-yourself or true on-the-job-training, a la Socrates, Michelangelo or Bach say, were now seriously instituted everywhere, as they had been for millennia predating the emergence of Home Rooms? The Greeks held arguments, not lectures every Tuesday and Thursday from 10 to 11:30. And as Lenny Bruce used to say, Without a sick world Id be out of a job. With a truly successful,widely recognized do-it-yourself keyboard-learning method, instead of the obviously diseased piano lesson - candidate for the most failed-at instruction in history - about half a million tradi58

tional teachers would be out of work. I wish. I dislike what so many have done to music making. Few discoveries distressed me as much, in nearly two decades of delivering my lectures, as having learned that many local piano teachers associations have explicit manifestos actually prohibiting the teaching of so-called popular music, which pretty much means most music made in the last century. Id read that that was so back in the early 1900s, when Protestant ministers disguised their hatred of blacks by anointing jazz as the work of the devil. But Id never imagined it was still a current practice until I first saw it with my own two eyes in the Palm Beach Floridas Piano Teachers Manual: The teaching of popular music is forbidden. Maybe piano teachers stole the election instead of the Republicans, just like they probably stole my posters from lampposts. So help me God, there it was in black and white. Popular Music Forbidden. And speaking of God, would you believe that in Philadelphia, home of the Liberty Bell, the owner of one of the citys largest chain of piano stores insisted upon two conditions for me to give my seminar in their biggest showroom, to over two hundred and fifty people, several of whom then bought pianos because of me? Id have to strike two things from my course manual. First, I couldnt quote Nietzsches dictum that Life without music would be a mistake since he was the anti-Christ; and second, I had to change or at least blacken out the title of a satirical essay in the course manual entitled Play the Piano and Save the World, because only Jesus saves the world. True story. Ive kept the 59

fax. I called my lawyer. Bruce, what should I do?. Blacken them out. What if someone asks whats blackened out? Tell them what it said and why it was blackened out. Oddly and sadly, no one ever asked. I shouldve planted the question. The used car lot is a weak image for sleaze. Mom and Pop Piano and Organ Stores make used car dealers seem like Consumers Guide outlets. Quick cash commissions from big ticket purchases always attract drifters and con-artists. Need we mention Nasdaq. And such Moms and Pops are among the authorities on the best teachers for your kids in Philadelphia, second largest city on the east coast (and it isnt much better in Seattle, Phoenix, Atlanta, St. Louis, Chicago or Houston - forget the Houston story entirely, since I cant tell that one without risking my life, as was threatened). You might as well give them summer internships with Enron so theyll learn about organizational responsibility. The scam? Dealers sell pianos by recommending just the right sorts of teachers to insure that kids drop out at the economically optimized rate, taking care that these are never known as bad teachers, since its always obvious that the kids these days cant concentrate, all with ADD, like me, naturally. The dropout rate is then finely tuned - yes, piano tuners are also in on the action - and re-tuned, year after year (for far too much money), on the basis of continual spreadsheeting to keep that chosen handful of suggested failed pianists supplied with a steady enough flow of newcomers. Of innocent young victims of a piano selling kick60

back scheme. Affiliated teachers phone the store to announce that one of their students is coming in (whereupon the teacher commission is immediately tagged onto the sale price); or teachers must accompany a student to the store to collect their fee once the deals done, this being easier because, it often having been discussed in the past, the salesman is then likely to know just which instrument to overprice; and so on. With the right rate of pupil turnover, teachers can earn as much by helping sell pianos and tunings as with their lessons. Of course the quite significant tragedy is that all we had to do instead, if we really cared as much about our kids developing a love of music as how to best decorate the living room - all we had to do was drop the Puritanism long enough to teach them a little sexier way to play Heart and Soul, even with only the same four chords, one kid playing the roots of the chords and the other playing the right hand. Millions of kids had it almost right, and it was just grabbed out of their hands, while an hour of guidance on how to make this little cycle of chords sound a lot better, and how to see and then best use the fact that this same little cycle was the basis of all songs - such an hour, or four, or eight (or twenty minutes depending on the economics of the guidance system) could have had them playing forever. Heaven forbid! The piano cant really be made for just having fun. Imagine what would happen if all the lessons worked? Illicit emails cant even begin to compete with piano playing when it comes to potential decreases in worker pro61

ductivity. Thats why most professional pianists live in poverty in dank little cellars in the ground, where slowly seasoning Steinways take up most of the living space. Of course such problems are by no means confined to issues of church and state, although thats now omnirelevant in even serious school systems now. After all, one really cant just keep them in one Home Room all day, so you need classes in x+y/z number of different subjects. Who knows whatd go on at their evening residences if they had daytime privileges to hang out there all day and play around with pianos. You must have a schedule, of hours, and weeks, and the rest. Ancient inventions, these days of the week and hours of the day, to coordinate all domains of activity since the dawn of humanity. But the fifty-minute hour was invented by medicine (sic) in this century, such a mathematical possibility inconceivable before Einstein. It, along with Home Rooms, MWF, 10-11, or TTh, 2-3:30, etc. - certainly at the level of mass, so-called general education. My ADD took the form, in the fourth grade say, of distracting myself from that drivel called American History, as conceived in Bored of Education curriculum meetings, by playing scales on an imaginary keyboard on my desktop. With the exception of a brief remission at Music and Art, where instead of any single one really teaching much of anything we all just learned together in workshops and rehearsals, my symptoms of drowsiness and disorientation always recurred whenever in the vicinity of those bizarre baroque buildings called Schools. I took learning quite seri62

ously throughout my school years, but with the exception of listening to great lecturers if they were giving a great lecture, I usually dealt with the teaching parts by a very early gained and then finely cultivated knack at digesting disguised novels during class, from Twain in grade school to Rilke at Berkeley. My education in sociology came from reading, doing research, and, like most, from interacting out of class with fellow students and faculty. I think Id sensed from even the earliest of school grades that the only reason formal education as we know it today was invented was because in the mass movement from farms to cities there was then nothing else to do with the kids all day but send them off to child sitters whom we called teachers to justify the unavoidable abandonment. I had to suffer through years of a deficit disorder because a drugstore can be a one-man operation. Had wed owned a big farm Id have probably been spared the likes of P.S. 114, 31, 78, Miami High, and Sociology 101, then 102, and, very very eventually, 404 and 405. Early in my piano seminar I would say that it was important, when building ones own arrangements of songs, to be able to quickly visualize the twelve scales, each formed by the same rule:
Take any keyboard note. There are 12 before the pattern repeats itself. Go up 1 whole step to the 2nd note of a major scale. Then 1 whole step to the 3rd note of this scale. Then one half step to the 4th, whole to 5th, whole to 6th, whole to 7th, and final 1/2 to the 8th.......Whole Whole Half, Whole Whole Whole Half (the first whole is from 1st to 2nd notes). Each scale is unique, each returns to the same named note it began on, eight notes, one octave, higher. Twelve starting places. Twelve unique paths. Whole whole half, whole whole whole half.

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And I suggested an exercise:

Play these - do re me fa sol la ti do - scales up and down with just your right index finger. If you use all of your fingers to play them, using the standard fingerings youll find in a chart in your manual, your hands quickly come to traverse these routes with no visual help, and then you can easily lose sight of those details of the paths one needs to quickly attend when learning to play songs well. Most accomplished classical players are somewhat slower than good songsmiths when it comes to rapid fire questions like point to the fourth note of an A flat scale? It may be OK, if youre only reading music, to quickly get the scales into your hands, as pianists say. But when youre taking a melody and a series of chords and putting the song together yourself, at first and for some time it can help to do quick visual analyses of the keyboard. And these twelve scales are like the squares and pieces on a chess board. Using only a single finger to identify and play them, as one exercise, forces you to keep looking at them a little longer while. Thats useful.

And then Id say,

If you ask me which scale to learn first, whether to start with the simplest or most difficult - though theres obviously no such thing, Beethoven having said, for instance, that if one managed to play a C

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major scale very well - the only path with only white notes, from C to C - one then had all the technique needed to play the piano - if you ask me which one I should learn first, Ill just answer that you dont care enough.

And then, should someone ask, for instance, to take a prevalent sort of query:
Should I learn the names of the notes, or just go by their looks?

Id answer:
Sounds like an excuse in the making! You can learn them by touch if you want. There are plenty of great blind musicians. Yet since you probably know how to count from one to eight you might use numbers to help see them better, and the note-names can help, so follow the popular convention of naming the first note of scales that start on black notes by their flat names, and spelling all scales with letters of the alphabet used in consecutive order, without repeating or duplicating a letter. Learn them every way. Like twelve common words you can see at a glance, and as a sequence of letters, front to back or reverse, and so on.

Often elaborating with a hypothetical offer like this:

Say I give a hundred thousand bucks to that student who, by next week, best uses one single finger to perfectly play the notes in each scale, going up and down. Will you ask me which scale to start with? Or whether to learn the names or not? Not unless youre Bill Gates who earns more than that much a day even while sleeping, which looks like most of the time. No you wont ask me. Youll fly out the door in a frenzy and get to your flat as fast as you can to finish in the finals. And if we wanted to learn what effective learning is really about, wed all come over to your house to watch you show us, better than I or anyone else, probably especially including anyone in the field of learning psychology, could ever say.

Or, again, in opening remarks Id situate somewhere within my first half hour, expanding or contracting a digression with periodic glances at my watch:

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Ever notice how every textbook has seventeen chapters? Biology, History, Sociology, Intro to Marketing, Geology. All seventeen chapters. As though God created the universe in seven days and seventeen chapters, one for each week in the semester, except where theres a trimester system, for whom He compressed it all into to twelve chapters. Take two kids. Give one driving lessons. Week One on Accelerating. Week Two on Shifting. Week Three, Emergency Stops, Four, Right Turns, Five, Left Turns, and so on, yes, for seventeen weeks, to integrate with school schedules. Give the other the keys to the car and say: See that empty parking lot over there? One nick on a bumper and thats it. And let go of the key as soon as the engine kicks in or youll burn out my starter. If a car or pedestrian comes close, stop completely and wait till theyre far away from you. Now go learn to drive. And, by the way, itll be easier if you slowly use the gas, anticipate stops well in advance so youre gentle on the brake, and practice staying in a straight line, stopping, starting, and cruising slowly, before you try turns, although you can practice turns first, since it probably doesnt really matter, and if youre really clear of everyone else, with lots of space around you, you can use the gas and brake pedals anyway you want to and youll figure it all out yourself. Youve probably been studying cars and driving and traffic for quite awhile. The main thing is - one tiny scratch on my car and thats it. If he or she has a cutie, and gets to use the car on Saturday nights once theres a license, which way is better? Id give 50 to 1 odds on the empty car lot over those ridiculous doubly steered Drivers-Ed cars, any day. Imagine a set of dual training reigns on a horse! Bulk it out and make it last forever. Look at the Hanon Exercises. A classic for developing piano technique. In these drills the two hands go through a simple little sequence of the same notes, at the same time, an octave apart, and then they both move up to the next note on the keyboard, where this precise little pattern is repeated. And it keeps rising all the way up the keyboard like that, note by note. There are thirty exercises (in Book One!), and they write each of them out over a full two pages, when all you need are the first two measures (1,2,3,4, 1,2,3,4) and then an etcetera. Only an idiots eyes move along the page to actually keep track of the places in synchrony with the hands. But there they are, very many of them purchased around the world every day, the full note-by-note drills absurdly written out over two entire pages, well not absurdly of course, but to make a sixty page book at $9.95 (for Book One!) out of what you can produce on two sides of a single piece of paper for a nickel, including lamination with a big

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enough print run. An economy of scales. Then there are those graded series, like the John Thompson Red Books, the mere sight of which has been medically proven to provoke nausea among millions. You begin with C major, the easiest scale (obviously!), with no black notes. After some weeks you get to G major, where theres one black note and a silly little piece with a melody along that scale (nearly all melodies of popular songs, and most of the western classical tradition, are sequences of paced notes taken from one or another of the major scales, each of them interchangeable, so you can play the same tune in any key, i.e., choose the same sequence of places and paces on any scale path). In six months youve learned six scales and six insipid pieces that use them. And after several years of this youre ready for some grownup music (and naturally still somewhat fearful of many black notes). Of course Book One prepares you for Book Two, and it for Book Three. Really? Says who? A team of neurologists, physiologists and phenomenologists studying the hierarchical nesting of generic and incidental manual facilities? A body of experimental psychological or musicological research findings? No. The American Piano Teachers Association. In fact you can play Bach beautifully while Chopin may immediately reduce you to infancy (or the other way around as well), with nowhere nearly enough skill transfer to justify the years spent learning this before that. Its been debated whether such grading is really needed in some branches of mathematics, let alone for learning to play the piano. But how could teachers possibly survive if they said: Heres all you need to selfinstruct. Have a good day!

Of course if Rubinstein and the others were right, such essentially vague pedagogical predispositions were digging my own grave just as well. But what else could I do? The facts are simply too simple. There are twelve scales and three kinds of chords - not The Thousand Chords Every Jazz Player Needs to Know. Such books, like those on how to succeed in business obviously written by those who didnt, are central villains when it comes to the protection of timberlands. There are twelve scales and three types of chords, period, despite what anyone else says. A Major Chord is the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes of any scale, played simultaneously. The Minor Chord 67

is the 1st, flatted 3rd (the 3 brought down, to the left, to the very next lower note, black or white, thereby flatted a half step), and 5th notes of the scale. And the Dominant Chord is just like the major: 1st, 3rd and 5th, but with a flatted 7th added on. There are twelve major, twelve minor and twelve dominant chords. Everything else there is to know about chords for playing standard songs well, their further coloration and arrangement - all most economically described with a very small collection of simple instructions in reference to these three chord types, and the twelve scales. Its not only in the classical music world that one finds these Piano for Dummies books, like that John Thompsons Series (and if that John Thompson is a real and still living person instead of this merely being a good corporate name, hes certainly among the most body-guarded billionaires around). In desperation, being even more unemployable than schizophrenic writers who tell us how to make a million in a month but cant distinguish fact from fantasy, too many jazz and other popular music players similarly take to writing bogus method books. So there are huge numbers of these Thousand Chords Every Piano Player Needs to Know books around, written by musicians who rationally know better, where eachs saleable approach to naming chords so as to satisfy what we might generically dub the Hanon Method of Book Production means that there are by now actually several million chords on the market! Casual perusal through the music instruction aisles of any bookstore brings one to imagine that to learn music theory - which in the interests of more honest 68

though perhaps less appealing college catalogue copy ought be renamed musical terminology - must be easily as complex as mastering advanced calculus. In fact, the ingredients and conventional cooking procedures for a passable souff l are considerably more intimidating. This is hardly to demean the incredibly magnificent possible variations forever generated from its basic elements. Just listen to a minute each of, say, Bach, Chopin, Jarrett and Hancock, over and again for ten daily minutes for a month, with no images or inner sounds except your softly attempted singing along with the music (though trying to imaginatively follow with your hands playing accurate air piano wont hurt). No thinking with sayings, like good, bad, complex. No words whatsoever. Its a definitive testimony to human creativity that all one needs to linguistically know in order to play any song from Down by the Riverside to Body and Soul, and play it well by the usual sober cocktail pianist standards, can be straightforwardly described in terms of these simple scales and chord types. (Consider what weve made out of 26 letters!) Such standards for playing standards are in Keith Jarretts and Herbie Hancocks immediate family histories. And given the misery of Bachs life as a court servant churning out choirs for church each week and getting paid for his variations on these same chords with cords of wood instead of cash, who knows but that he wasnt a Schnapps Organist on the side? The basic rules of chess are easily as complex, and youd hardly need a course of any length to teach them. A page will do. The reader has over half 69

of the needed facts already. Mozart was just another little kid writing symphonies, with the same unique fingerprints we all have, and an incredibly idiosyncratic infancy. As for instruction on how to sit up straight and hold the hands close to the keys, curling the fingers, striking the keys with their tips and not your nails, keeping fingers near the surface, close together and not stretched out, striving to make all notes in any chord sound simultaneously by making sure all digits reach the bottom of the notes together and not serialized? Well there, you nearly have it all as far as just playing tunes well! When I taught the course for eight hours Id devote about twenty minutes to technique, which was nineteen more than I needed. Predictably enough, it was always here that people did the most note-taking, wrongly figuring this was the important part of my lecture, the real piano lesson part. If I taught the seminar compressed into one afternoon, as Id now and then have occasion to do, say one-on-one with a high-paying student, like a politician, CEO, or famous person (once a real-live European Princess!) who didnt want to sit in a class with a bunch of others Id fit a technique discussion into five minutes. Over the years to follow, with increasing regularity from 1987 on, a common question was asked on the phone when I described the resources that students would receive at the seminar: Is there a video?, to which Id answer:
No, theres no video since theres nothing worth looking at. If I wanted to teach you how to play chess would I have to watch you place your knight one step forward and two steps over, or the other way around, to make sure youre moving your hand correctly? Of course not.

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You can monitor that perfectly well by yourself. If I tell you where to take your fingers youll be able to figure out how. As Bach said Get your fingers from the right notes to the right notes at the right time and the music plays itself (though in standard chess, unlike standards at the piano, youve got all the time in the world for your chessmen to properly play themselves). After all, you dont have trouble bringing a cup of coffee up to your mouth without scalding yourself. The keyboard has its places, youve got ten fingers, so theres no major mystery. You just dialed a telephone, didnt you? And as for being able to learn something intricate? Well you taught yourself how to use your mouth to make the most extraordinarily intricate sounds of all, those we somehow sum up as speaking a language. If you wanted to speak another so-called language, the fastest proven way isnt with Berlitz or even the relatively effective militaristic approaches used by the Defense Department. Just have a three month long, torrid and wonderfully multi-faceted love affair with someone who doesnt understand a word from you, nor you one from them. Since you already have one language, youll be saying more in three months than a kid learns in years (unless its too torrid!). Of course along with a risk that the other might learn your language instead of you learning theirs, theres a chance that youll each lose any known language and develop one just for yourselves. Or the gain, since theres always the possibility that an elegant simplicity in your private tongue might lead to far less cultural misunderstanding and a long term affair indeed. We do rightfully speak of music, with these twelve scales and three chords in global use, as a universal language, and, after all, what are talking and making melodies but getting the body from one socially appropriate place to a next, at an appropriate time. Talking just tells itself its special because its words mean things, while music isnt nearly that pretentious.

I continued to talk and talk myself into a bigger and bigger bind (and there were many occasions when phone chats went on for well over ten minutes, so I couldve often just sold the information by charging them for the call instead of my 800 number). My philosophy of learning wasnt in the first instance purposefully designed to create absurdly ideal, professor-like classroom hours, so as to have time to do my writing. I hardly thought of myself as The 71

Music Man. I believed in my maxims. I wholeheartedly felt that with a few rules and a reasonably short lecture, I could deliver a more effective do-it-yourself course for adults who wanted to enjoy playing tunes nicely at the piano, than what piano teachers had achieved with their years of lessons that mostly get nowhere. If I didnt know I could prove that, Id hardly have good rights to invite you to read the autobiography of a method. Nor the stamina to spend two decades as I did. .... At the same time, all of my ideas, at the very outset and for four full years until shortly after I went to Texas, were nothing more than a collection of possibly decent hunches. Id not had any ongoing piano students whose skills Id witnessed, had never yet held any follow-up clinics or get togethers with students, and, even while claiming to have had three thousand piano students, Id yet to hear a single one play a single song. Only in America! At the time I flew off to Austin, nearly flat broke, I hadnt the slightest shred of empirical evidence for whether a true beginner, as my seminar ad copy and actual course content promised, could really work on his or her own and successfully use the rules about chords and scales and arranging that Id described, and especially in the unorthodox ways I suggested that they ought to practice, as youll soon see. As it turns out, though it was many years before I came to see it clearly in such terms, initial confidence in my 72

approach was born of an absolutely authentic amnesia for a year of enthusiastic childhood lessons, years of picking out melodies and watching my dad play jazz from infancy on, and my last semester of high school at the piano learning Herbies arrangements from 3:30 until 9 pm everyday. I taught the rules of the game of song playing in the same way Dick Powell taught them to me back at Irvine, coming to use a grab the whole song right from the outset approach to learning that barely differed from my first way of encountering Brocks chords - in a few hours total, with a notebook, and at home, practicing songs and nothing but songs. But I was now in a big room full of students, nay customers, many of whom had had prior piano practice, while a great many others? - well, they didnt even know the names of the notes. On my escape flight from New York to Austin, in August no less, a nice guy sitting next to me on the plane asked, in one of those possible fantasy conversations you may have if one-on-one for some time with a stranger whom youll never see again after a short while longer, like on airplanes, life rafts, or in the bleachers: What do you do for a living? I answered, I have a piano method, with around three thousand students. Then I told him a bit about my program, and he asked, Does it really work?, and I said You bet it does. The best piano course in town, and then I realized it was one of those fantasy chats, since the true answer wouldve been To tell you the truth I havent the foggiest idea whether it works or not, but I think it should, if they really practice the way I suggested. Meanwhile, 73

though my name wasnt Harold Hill and Manhattan was a far cry from Iowa, this Professors gettin out of River City. Whenever the issue of whether or not it really worked came to mind I dismissed any slight worries on that score as if my concepts were as a prior as Kantian time and space while, it turns out similarly, they were only half, at the very most, of an altogether incomplete picture. I never intended a con game, but it wouldve taken lots of phone calls to round up those New Yorkers whod taken the seminar seriously, if Id had to defend myself successfully against criminal charges that I had. I couldnt name names.

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Deep in the Heart of Texas

When we got off the airplane at Austin in August of 1983 I thought Id entered hell itself, and for the next six weeks the temperature topped a hundred every single day. The campus was deserted, the brand spanking new downtown streets were deserted, people pulled into parking lots and left ignitions on with the air running so theyd be able to get back into their cars without frying, and they carried quarts of iced tea everywhere. A friend of an acquaintance put us up in an unused home, but there was no car. Id have gladly traded trudging Manhattans snowbound streets for riding around in the blaring Texas sun all day on a rented motor scooter with a backpack full of posters, finding about one condominium laundry-room every three miles. After six unbearable days at that heat stricken insanity - for I was really broke, the semester didnt start for a month and my teenagers were angrily sharing a guest room - I happened upon a large store with 75

fine pianos, guitars, horns and drums in the windows. Strait Music Company. Praise the Lord. This town plainly wasnt a postering place. I parked my scooter (maybe one of a half dozen in the city) out of sight, sauntered in to the store as if the heat meant nothing, and sat down to ostensibly try out some instruments in their large piano showroom. Because the place was empty and very cool, I played softly for about fifteen minutes on a few different grands, and was thus soon into a chat with an elderly chap named Dallas Farris, former professional jazz guitarist turned piano salesman, working for Robert Strait who now ran the store, and before him his father Dan, since Dan began the family business twenty years before. I was lucky. It wasnt the least bit like one of those far more prevalent Mom and Pop places I was yet to encounter. Dallas listened to me play, we talked about my course and how Id come to Austin to teach at the University but could probably find a little time to do some piano teaching in town, and I interrupted to scoot over to the guest house and then right back with my small PR packet of nice looking albeit only retroactively useful press releases and book reviews. A half hour later Dallas reported that Robert would run a series of newspaper ads for me to do seminars at the store. Theyd cram aside a bunch of pianos one or two nights a week to make room for an audience if Id really bring in new potential customers. And I could pay for the ads later when they were billed for them, though Id not even mentioned that. 76

By the time I left Austin two years later when the heat finally got to me, around nine hundred people had taken my course there, at least two hundred of whom learned to play some standard tunes quite decently, with about fifty of them becoming so proficient at it that they couldve soon played in cocktail lounges, for weddings, or department store lobbies that provide live Muzak for your shopping pleasure. In fact some of them then did and still do perform, though Id temporarily made the venues too competitive in the small local Piano Bar market. A half of all those whod learned to play standard tunes well had never had lessons before. In 1984 and 85 Austin had more decent adult amateur piano players per capita than any town on earth, and since my students, from celebrity CEOs to common cowboys, purchased around three hundred thousand bucks worth of instruments from the store - small keyboards to very professional grands - the Straits had no big qualms about popular piano playing. Dallas scared with me with his suggested first ad copys simplicity: only the stores logo and a couple of one liners about the Harvard Press author, Dr. Sudnow, Now at Strait Music Company, with his famous New York City course, so yall come down and learn to play it by ear. My poster copy was crammed with three hundreds words! About forty five people signed up for the first four week seminar, from a thousand bucks spent on three 5x5 inch ads, so there was at least a beginning cash flow. The right newspaper ad in the right paper with the right local sponsor could work. 77

Within a couple of weeks one of the people in this first class called to say that a friend who hosted the local NBC-TV affiliates Good Morning Austin show, would like to have me on her program, and a week later I did a live interview, sitting at a grand with this tall, leggy anchorwoman by my side on the piano bench, to whom I somehow described my course in a few minutes. By the time I scootered back to the store from the TV studio a half mile away, all seven incoming phone lines were tied up. And it didnt have to do with my figure. Over 250 people, fifty-fifty male-female, made seminar reservations. I bought an old Oldsmobile, rented an apartment, registered my kids in school, and packed the store a few nights a week with around forty people in each class. At last a piece of publicity that produced paying people! Though one could certainly still smell a fish in the notion of a course with so many students and still no substantiated results, it wasnt really a matter of now being a big one in a small pond. As were acutely aware, affluent Austins affect on us all is awesome. Strait Music was the store in town, serving many nationally known musicians for twenty years, and NBC Austin had no problem with identifying my location. The interview, intimating that fantastically common fantasy of piano-bench snuggling with mutually appreciated finger play, closed with the stores phone number and familiar local logo, which they just happened to have on hand, held on screen long enough to draw a detailed sketch. (Is stupid ergonomics, or sublime design sophistication the reason standard-sized home piano78

benches barely seat two embracingly close adults? The family that plays together has to stay together.) It was all just a question of my being lucky, and while the Doctor, Harvard, New York Post and Best Bets stuff didnt hurt, knowing the music education business pretty well, and perhaps some people in publicity, Robert was probably far more at ease about fronting for the first ads by the fact Id be a professor at UT, where hed been a quarterback. ...

Of course it wasnt really so much a seminar as a show. And its performance aspects naturally became increasingly relevant as the class size grew. Back in Boston or Berkeley, with five or six students at a time, I suffered no grief in charging the hundred bucks I got for my lectures.But by the time there were forty in the room, as I readied myself for an entrance Id always imagine that at least some people in the audience were busily multiplying forty times one hundred and figuring wow, this guys making four grand for an eight hour seminar, with some materials that cost him a couple of hundred bucks, if that! That they were lousy accountants (i.e., Americans), and forgot to reckon in the money in advertising it took to get them to come? That was irrelevant. All explanations aside, what counted was that I had to get up in front of larger and larger groups of people who were expecting magic, and hold their attention in ways that would 79

always control the imagined rebellion or worse that a trouble maker or two could readily cause. What to do? They werent students whose parents or some foundation were putting up the dough, so that they had to take Sohsh 101 or 505 whether they liked the teachers style or not, and with ten classmates or five hundred whether they liked that or not. I was a Privatdozent whose income depended, hour by hour, on my ability to seduce them into believing, right from the start and all along the way, that this seminar was not nearly expensive enough. In the years to come, as the audiences would reach as many as two hundred once I took the course on the road as a weekend long affair and the calculation went up to twenty grand, so it was like working Vegas, one opening strategy was comedy. Id begin with a customary one liner designed to display, right off, that here was at least a somewhat clever person and at the worst they were in for a few laughs. Given a modern audiences well trained inclinations to behave like proper members and at least not moan or snore too loudly once the tickets are already paid for even if the show stinks, it hardly took the craft of a Henny Youngman or Bob Hope. So many semesters of schooling usually suffice for us to slip into the same subordinate shoes as soon as someones up front and the seats are situated in the standard way, if youll pardon my playfulness and forgive the fricatives. Id go to the piano at the front of the room, usually set up on a small platform, and at first feigning complete obliviousness to the presence of any other people Id start right in 80

on a familiar standard tune, suited to the particular crowd if possible - Moon Over Miami, Chicago, Chicago, By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Meet Me in St. Louis, I Left My Heart in San Francisco, yes even The Yellow Rose of Texas, which can be turned into a tolerable ballad sans the drum-roll rhythms. Then, looking out over the crowd of mostly over thirty-yearolds, all nicely groomed as if theyd come to church, with a look which the musician at play can warrantably sustain quite well, for it can be directed straight into your eyes and yet youre rightfully uncertain of whether its even seeing you or absolutely anything at all - with that look Id secretly study the large group, always noticing, for one thing, that very few people listened to their teachers music until it was framed as something to be much more specifically attended to, as starting right now, this always true everywhere, alas, since music foolishly allowed itself - what else to do but take whatever gigs there were? - to become merely decorative, partially accounting for Arthur Rubinsteins reluctance to attend a party if there was a piano on the premises. And Id try to spot potential trouble makers, like those with their notebooks open and pens poised who werent chatting with new classmates, or people whose peculiarly unconventional dress or grooming might portend something significantly more worrisome than the possible atheism of those simply in blue jeans instead of their Sunday finest. Then Id interrupt my play when I figured everyone was well enough adjusted in their seats, and actually acknowledge looking at them by now obviously focusing with a slight 81

smile at first this one and this one and that, learning to shift this little hello around nearly democratically, though slightly leaning towards the more congenial faces and avoiding those with pencils in hand, and the first words theyd hear from me might be something like a fairly loud, sarcastic and yet clearly jovial, I get all the failures. Then, whether that produced any chuckles or not, since one must be ready to quickly follow possibly weak one liners with a bunch of better ones, Id try something like:
Look at you all (or yall, if need be)! A bunch of grown adults all sitting upright on folded chairs in an over-crowded classroom for a whole sunny weekend, and the guys not gonna to talk about retirement planning, probate or prostate problems.

...a few fast piano licks, and then:

Hold up your hand and keep it up if you ever had piano lessons.

When the predictable fifty percent of the hands went up and the class looked at itself and then laughed over the irony, Id earned myself fifteen seconds of time-off to go back and enjoy the tune Id been playing and wait till the giggling almost stopped, and then, of course, Id increase the length of each bit, like a good jazz solo starts out by saying something once, and then again, and then a little bit differently yet again, eventually sprinting into an ongoing course of continuously unfolding sounds without any noticeably big breaths. Of course in the early days, on Third Street and in Austin at first, Id had less experience in expanding and contracting my agenda than when I later took the course on the 82

road and did well over a hundred seminars in almost half as many cities. There were fewer jokes, smaller classes, and, perhaps most significantly, four two-hour sessions over four weeks to deal with, instead of two two-hour sessions with a lunch break on Saturday, with the same again on Sunday. I was always then flying out of town Monday morning, while in New York or Austin I could worry about a disgruntled student gunning me down one night some time later. Still, the basic agenda remained more or less fixed over the years from Boston until I gave my last live seminar, the same twelve scales and three chords in use back in 1982 (and 1650) as in 1998, with the same rules for playing standards in the contemporary way - on how to distribute a melody and chords between two hands - in worldwide use since our so-called world war two, with direct antecedents in much of classical music from the onset of the 19th century and evolving styles of popular song play ever since. Ill put Austin on pause for just a brief while, and, in order to easily lay the groundwork for many issues, ask that you just imagine Id conducted my class by coming in, perhaps playing for a bit, introducing myself, immediately passing out this picture:

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3 5

Look

at

me

and then simply saying:

This is the opening of the Erroll Garner standard Misty. All and only the dotted notes in each picture are to be sounded together, each with equal intensity, the vertical line dividing the hands responsibilities, numbers representing fingering suggestions only, with thumbs 1, pinkies 5. M brilliantly denotes Middle C, the C closest to the center of your instrument. Once at home, situate yourself relative to it as shown and reproduce the first chord, sustaining it for a second or two, then letting go and putting your hands in your lap, keeping them there for a second or two, doing that back and forth until you can do it twenty five times, without a mistake - into your lap and into the keys, get ready get set, and getting to go with all tones sounded exactly together, with as close to equal intensity as you can get it, and you know perfectly well what I mean when I say you have to grab it very well, on time, perfectly. Just like youre grabbing these words. When you can do this in your sleep with the first chord, then

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work on the next and then the next, and get to where you can play the three in succession, each one cleanly articulated, evenly counting: One, Two, Three. Look, At , Me! Its a perfectly hip sound for the opening of this fine tune. Every new chord gets learned a bit faster. Of course if you want to learn the chords in a backward order it wont bother me. Others, however, will definitely insist on an order of playing, or that you buy yourself an electronic keyboard with a headset. On your way out, please pick up the twenty page booklet on the table in the back of the room. You can start right out with the booklet if you like, and forget these pictures of Misty. Its up to you. Your booklet has over a hundred such diagrams presented in an order that provides the arrangements for six well-known standards, where the chords change mostly every two beats (though in Mistys very opening they change every beat). The melody note is always on the top when chords are played, as seen, but when melody notes occur between the chords theyre left out since youll be able to easily find them because you know the songs and can hum them, and theyre quite slow, these standards (and when a first melody note is played before the first chord, that first note is named). When you can play the six tunes very well, without error and on demand, always maintaining a steady pulse, then read both inside jackets of the song booklet, called Scales, Chords, and Chord Arranging, where all the relevant facts are presented in two pages of diagrams. But if you want to memorize these tonight its your business. The more you play these chords, the more easily youll be able to work out your own arrangements for songs without using such pictures, but another more common chord symbol notation instead, described on the jacket along with rules on different options for how to color each of the three chord types and to spread these notes out to play them, applications of which these pictures show. When you play a couple of dozen more songs, well, you wont often need notation of any kind, because the common chord patterns found in all songs will get into your hands. Youll soon be playing by ear, which ought to be called playing by hands without written instructions. This is only a temporary notation. Starting on a first song and memorizing each chord well before going to the second is perhaps the fastest way, but if you want to do it some other way thats OK too. As long as you learn the songs and can play them smoothly. If you have questions about picking out melodies, theres a two page statement in the booklet that gives anyone all the insight needed to learn to do that well, and theres a reference to a good fakebook, with lots of melodies and chords, your only needed resource,

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for first learning more songs, once youve know these first six. Of course theres nothing special about the number six, except for the outrageous fee I had to pay for permission to reproduce them, and you can forget these dot arrangements entirely, read the rules, get a fakebook, and learn that way. If I could afford to give you thirty tunes this way, you could learn all them and then worry about the rules. Either way is equally effective. Then there are a couple of pages covering the important exceptions to these arranging suggestions, which are very few, and a ten minute CD of me playing the songs as theyre written out. Yes? A question? How long will it take? Some of you will struggle for some weeks to play the first single chord correctly, while others will learn the whole first tune in a week and be ready to sit in at a supper club lounge in six months. It partially depends on how much keyboard experience you have, but probably nearly as much on simply how much you want to play. Anyone in this room can proudly perform at a party in a year. O.K. Please make out your check for $100 payable to The Sudnow Method, and just leave it in the box on the table next to the stack of picture books. Yall enjoy now. Hear?

Once, elsewhere in Texas, someone passed in a name registration card at the end of the first two hour session of a weekend seminar and on the back was a very skillfully drawn sketch of a grassy knoll grave sight with a cross on the top reading Sudnow. Maybe the poster-ripper followed me south. I had to hire an off-duty cop for the second day. True story. A background check on the name found nothing, and the guy didnt show on Sunday. But itd take the Texas National Guard to keep me alive if I tried to get away with a three minute gig like this and fly out of town with twenty grand, or New Jerseys, had it been so nice of yous to come. Rightfully! If youve got a new method that can be summed up so easily professor, you could write a book, sell 86

it to us for $19.95, and dont take up our whole weekend. But I didnt have a book, and at the time it seemed completely obvious to me that such a learning procedure, jumping right into the deep water and tackling a full song arranged in a grownup manner this way - well seeing how unusual that was it simply had to be given a pretty plausible account by the pedagogue in person. Whats a plausible account? It depends on the format and what that costs. I did, after all, have to take up their weekend to make a living. First of all, a sensitivity to fellow musicians urges me to point out quickly (but only parenthetically for now), that such pictures, provided for everyone to begin with at once, arent at all in the same bag, as wed say, as those common and insulting efforts to redesign music notation to make things easier since the standard one with all those dots on all those lines is so difficult. Unsuccessful notational schemes have been dreamed of for over for a century, and then often touted by those who never themselves learned that reading regular music is neither harder nor easier than following myriad sorts of other movement instructions, like roadmaps, typing tutors, handwriting, and the sights whose imprinted sounds youre now silently saying. Simplifying systems belong on remainder shelves alongside the millions of chords on the market. Of course these days, as acoustic piano sales continue to skydive while electronic instrument sales skyrocket, they make keyboards with little lights perfectly absurdly lighting up over the keys to show you where to take your fingers next, as though the best solution was there in 87

principle and now the technology finally allows its realization! Without now discussing the possible yet by no means essential (and in any event temporary) merit of such dot pictures as a first map for song playing, it merely needs to be noted that handling these notes aint easy. However much a diagram of dots on a keyboard rightfully makes one cringe, youre surely not in the presence of one of those insipid Easy Play systems all the instrument manufacturers now primarily target to an older market with a simple-minded sales strategy based on the stupid supposition that those over fifty are too far gone to opt for the genuine article. Try these three diagrams (but not now!). If youve never played a keyboard before youll be trying to say Look at Me for quite some time before anyone does in a kindly way. Perhaps thered have been a profitable market for such a radical, through-em-way-into-the-deep-water, twenty page (with inside jackets!) piano method, endorsed by Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and the Pope and sold on the Home Shopping Network for $5.95 plus shipping and handling. But while Id kept in touch with Chick Corea Id have no more approached him for that than to ask if hed play a friends funeral as a favor. Besides, I wasnt even particularly motivated to think in terms of making a possible bundle, but a predictable ongoing living. Id have been quite content to teach a piano course three or four evenings a week for some while, for Id always had good experiences at lecturing, then spending the rest of my time writing about music. That 88

was the goal. To the extent I thought about it - and as a-thenrecently-ex-academic still accustomed to conceiving thinking of fields I vaguely imagined myself possibly coming to crash the Discipline of Music Education - someday there might be an embodied program to put out there in the world of cultural products, as an articulated pedagogy, whatever that was. Not a postcard. Of course I readily admit that had someone come along and seriously said Put it all on a TShirt and Ill make you a millionaire I wouldnt have turned them down. But I didnt know or especially like Arnold Schwartzenegger, and Demi Moore unfortunately didnt live in the neighborhood. My initial commitment to teaching music this way wasnt that strong, but neither were my contacts. I needed more income, had this apartment, these posters, there was Harvard Square with swarms of people, and a quickly formulated format. Im first to admit that I gave much less thought to the longer term import of teaching the same restricted collection of notions week after week, indefinitely, than Id given to former career projects. Mostly, I hadnt a proven anything to market. Just sheer conjecture and promises - a combination of Dick Powells elegantly succinct explanation of scales, chord types, with those voicing rules Ill tell you about in a page or two later on, and Herbie Brocks alphabetized fingers, with my ways of straightforwardly simply duplicating them, chord by chord, just as hed used them, grownup style. I had a pretty decent argument, roughly formed at first and becoming nicely nuanced over the years, that let me speak 89

quite persuasively about pushing people to plunge in and gain all skills in the actual context of the full blown song, and not with decompositions of dubious worth. But it wasnt really terrifically comforting at all. My holistic approach, if youll pardon the Berkeleyeeze, tackling a whole song without practicing simplistic anythings first, however radical an idea in the area of musical education, was basically a default strategy:
No one really knows much about these piano skills, how some abilities relate to others, whether doing this facilitates that or the other way around. Since thats all only very vaguely understood, why take chances? Just gain the skills it takes to play songs in the way you want them to sound. Dont risk spending valuable time gaining so-called preparatory facilities which might ready you for a next lesson but not necessarily the music. After all, its not like youre six years old with lots of time. Nor are you intent on playing Brahms with the Berlin Philharmonic, in which case a mini-muscle specialist might be worth consulting for an initial appraisal.

I could become persuasive and possibly interesting on that score, but it wouldve been so much nicer to have had something to say like seven repetitions of this, in this very particular way, is proven most efficacious, since a cynical hearing couldve easily heard me to be really saying that no one knows the best way to learn and neither do I. Then I actually did have a couple of genuinely worthwhile pieces of advice on how to practice well, but they can be perfectly adequately conveyed with three words and a comma: on time, perfectly. That was news from nowhere.

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Indeed, theyre the only universally accepted maxims, everywhere intoned as sacred mantras, throughout a huge literature of otherwise completely competing and ad hoc assortments of just what, and in what order, one is to always practice that way - on time, perfectly. All I really had were some close descriptions that speculated on how these widely taken-for-granted givens of professional advice might be actually grounded in genuine phenomenological facts. And while that didnt matter much to anyone but me, talking about it, which could easily take a full hour (or year) - and I could even draw graphs on the blackboard - that made things far more interesting, and since were adults well profit by having an understanding of these skills, and how they develop, and so on, and so on, and so on. Etcetera. As for some of the actual detailed practices that I recommended on this score - the on-time and perfectly business? Well, as youll get to see, when taken literally they were absolutely preposterous, but flexibly grasped they were hardly worth mentioning. And much the same holds for the whole holistic business.
Play this first chord of Misty twenty five times, on time and perfectly, and then go on to the next? Why not thirty two times? What if one time it isnt exactly perfect? What if I first learn the left hand, and then the right, or just parts of each hand, and practice these first, then work on the skills to grab the whole chord, with a style of aggressive learning thats always trying out all sorts of approaches, with continuously improvised modifications in the time spent doing this versus that, like Ive always learned to try something at which I really wanted to become good? You mean if I do that, rather than grab a whole chord, then to my lap, then again, and so on, Ill never get to play in a cocktail lounge? Will I have to start all over again from the beginning?

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If theyd all actually taken such advice literally rather than basically appreciating the overall commonsensical gist of it, there could be twenty thousand completely psychotic people still trapped out there, each desperately trying to yell one clearly effective Look at me so that somebody might, by now neither knowing their right feet from their left, hats from gloves, or one hand from the other. I do know of a rare student here and there who actually followed my advice as explicitly as Id exaggerated it. It can be tricky to authoritatively urge others to only attend to the general gist of an instruction, especially when they have to take it on your say so that the details will clarify themselves once they get to their instruments while youre a thousand miles away somewhere. And while most do get the gist of just getting the gist, a few have problems hearing past that pedagogically rhetorical artifact, and seem to need and enjoy literal guidance, possibly actually thus learning a tad faster than others. More flexible and equally caring hearers and doers learned plenty fast enough, and none of them, to my knowledge, lived in a mental hospital or could only make it around on an outpatient basis if they didnt step on cracks. One excessively precise learner was a computer programmer who apparently spent nearly his full other seventeen waking hours, after exactly sixty minutes of daily practice, writing machine code for IBM. Though he very quickly learned to play several songs, he eventually became much better with Bach than the Blues. And then there were some very serious doctors, so that when contemplating general anesthesia we 92

may all be thankful that most of them have over-learned what it means to be obsessively perfect. There were occasions in class when they were certainly the most persistent in getting every last possible detail thoroughly written down (if you call that handwriting), even though it was all there plainly in the manual. You know those types, who feel compelled to ask a question after every single new concept is introduced, so whenever theres a significant pause everyone knows whats just about to happen, and where, in the interests of group cohesiveness there were times I wished Id had a good general anesthetic and the skills to administer it properly, or not. Finally, rounding out my expertise as a piano teacher, because Id pondered such esoteria a good deal, I knew I could effectively critique those completely cockeyed (even music-professionals) conceptions of having an ear for music, or playing by ear, issues especially pertinent when you spend time thinking about song playing. So, at first, all I could rightfully claim as a method was clear and direct talk with lots of pretty neat explanations and the public service benefit of dispelling potentially offputting myths (to those whod already signed up). As for some actually successful, real live, playing students? None at first, since Id never previously experimented with my approach on others. It worked for me, so why not anyone. ...

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Not one known successful student until Austin, to which I temporarily return, interrupting the interruption to quickly introduce a first finding: About two weeks after the end of my opening Strait series, I came into the piano store one afternoon and I actually heard someone playing Misty, slowly, getting it right by the dots, so it sounded nice, albeit a little hesitant. I tried to approach slowly but she saw me and stopped. I said hello and we chatted. A thirty-seven year old housewife whod not studied music before, shed hadnt had an instrument in the house. Her dad used to listen to records a lot when she was growing up, especially to great pianists like Nat King Cole and Art Tatum, so she really liked those nice chords, and what with the kids now in school fulltime it was something shed always wanted to do, so shed rented an instrument, and now here she was, back in the store again, thinking of buying one. Imagine how often Ive heard This is something Ive always wanted to do, and, sadly, how often it was intoned with the same apparent authenticity as Have a nice day! at Seven Eleven. But this woman obviously knew what she wanted and how to get it. She apologized (!) for not having learned the scales, or really the names of anything much yet, said she was still a little confused about all that voicing stuff but figured itd get clearer later. She loved playing the chords and that song, and while it was mighty hard work it was just so such fun that its all shed done, for at least several hours a day for two weeks, since taking the class. She played three quarters of the tune with only a few slightly wrong notes. I 94

was delighted. And somewhat surprisingly relieved. It wouldve been one thing to take a subway, with two transfers from the Upper East Side and three or more from Queens say, down to my Village loft, to stop in and show me how it was going. If I were there. In a place that was a daytime office/apartment, and an evening class room. Twenty years of living next door on the same high rise floor doesnt give New Yorkers rights to a hello in the elevator, so four classes hardly warranted just falling by the crib to hang, as the cats would say. But it was another matter for me to be on the scene, in yes a small town, hanging out at the music store on a major avenue right near the center, whose parking lot was shared by the first Whole Foods store in the country, in the afternoon. And there were housewives! It was an ordinary place, not Manhattan. She was the first success Id seen, and if a professional had walked in what wouldve been heard was Someones working on Misty whos almost got it down, and those are hip changes (chords). Of course if the pro asked her to talk about absolutely anything other than feeling as-helpless-as-a-kitten-up-a-tree she wouldve been, with some fancy explaining to do to a pretty perplexed musician. Such people started appearing regularly in Austin. Id gotten my first known affirmative results. People with no piano practicing in their pasts could, as Id only commonsensically guessed with an unanalyzed past, indeed start out by handling many fingered configurations right away, not just those John Thompsons Mary-Had-a-Little-Lamb-like ditties with one or two keys depressed at a time so there are plenty 95

of more lessons to follow. They were, of course, just playing by the dots, like me with my listings of Herbie Brocks chords back in high school, not, at first, working out their own arrangements, let alone playing with only a standard chord notation or none at all. So they were at least potentially successful first-known students. But as I said, shed almost learned Misty, in two weeks, with hip changes. And one just doesnt start beginners out that way! She, and then others, cared a lot. It wasnt easy at all, getting novice hands to grab all those places at once, but they could gradually get hold of Misty, whom they seemed to prefer over Marys little lambs, and those other musical materials equivalent to Run, Spot, run. See the doggie run. Go Spot go. Good doggie. And that was a central hope for my method: non-trivial musical sounds in a realistic amount of avocational time. Back to the interruption. Constraints on my presentation. From the very start Id wanted a group class, on financial grounds pure and simple. And, as they usually unselfconsciously do, all other features fit together quickly, so that as a format was found everything else formed up as naturally as the sunrise. It didnt take any spreadsheeting or system analysis (though perhaps I couldve used some). Lemonadestand ingenuity sufficed. I didnt at first foresee a possibly large enough clientele to offer a different class for novices and those with prior experience. And to put them all in the same situation itd have to be a short program. There werent any of those key96

boards on the market back then in Boston, my apartment was too small, and in any case, aside from a proclivity for giving lectures, the very moment I first seriously thought about teaching the piano I knew a short course was all I needed. And all I had to offer! I didnt then seriously think about teaching improvisation, since I couldnt see selling something as specialized as that, and besides, in 1982, Id only been a just barely decent jazz player for a couple of years, but a good enough solo songsmith for nearly a decade. Why four weeks, of two hourly meetings? That, simply said, was a standard, saleable, short seminar sort of schedule, held in the evenings, for working adults, a month of serious happy hours for cocktail piano wanabees. Yoga classes, group therapy meetings, dance lessons, skill training workshops of all sorts - theyd had a similar layout. Its a 9-5 weekly, 12 month world, and it was hardly as though these five major topics each required no less than an hour, while those three each needed forty minutes, no more or less, and so on. It was a standard short course format, and apportioning the time to an account of the basic essential components, as Id conceived them, was as flexibly manageable as when you take twenty minutes to give someone good sightseeing instructions with a map and pencil, or three hours to give them a tour around town. And as for pricing? I just made a guess. It turned out to be a good one, since tons of later data proved it to be just the right price point, as they say: a hundred bucks, for a six to eight hour course with lots of materials, that being all 97

important - this brought the best return. Charge much more and too many fewer signed up. Charge much less and not enough more did. I didnt have any way of knowing thatd be so, hadnt any notion itd be stably so everywhere, even when the course was much later first available in a cassette form. It was just a good sounding fee to me because of how many classes I wanted to teach, what itd cost for posters and materials, how many I could comfortably fit in my living room, and what the perception might be of the sensibility of my fee in light of the group size. Then one (rare) correct business intuition told me it was critical to get the money up front, not week by week, and a hundred bucks seemed a lot less risky than two hundred, say, paid that way. Just having some endorsements about my book and a blurb about this course on a stapled-up tear-off poster (with glossy backs and yet obviously Kinko Copy tearoffs) - that wasnt enough, and on the basis of a phone chat with no trial tour of the facilities, to warrant that sort of fee. Or so I figured, and somehow fairly correctly. Understandings were established in the ad copy, the sales calls, and looks of the place right off, so there was already a contract of sorts, an agreed-upon definition of the situation as the sociologists say, which, very conditionally, provided for a reasonable amount of crowd control. They more or less knew what theyd be paying for.
Will there be keyboards for everyone? No, youll not be at keyboards. Its a lecture format. Ill be at one, up in front. Youll be in a group, with a manual in your hand, and its diagrams are directly tied to my discussion. So youll relax and follow along, and Ill tell you all about

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the skill and how youre to go home and work on your own with the materials I provide. But I cant carry a tune? You might think youre tone deaf, but theres absolutely no such thing. Ill talk about how you get good at humming and picking out melodies. Anyone can learn to carry a tune, and pick out a melody, and find the right chords to play a song well. No one is born with a better ear for music. Thats a whole lotta hogwash. How can you teach the piano in eight hours? Youre not going to learn to play in eight hours. For that I charge a thousand bucks. Of course not. But in eight hours Ill tell you all you need to know to learn on your own, so youll never require any further instruction. How can you teach beginners and people whove played before in the same class? Because when it comes to playing by ear, which really means playing by getting chord patterns into your hands, everyone has to start over from the beginning. Its a different way of handling and looking at things. Of course those with former experience will move faster, and sometimes much faster, once you start practicing. What kinds of materials? Lots of them! Tapes, a manual, a song book. Bring a briefcase.

What had to be discussed? It was obvious. Of course there was an introductory rap, a sense for which you can imagine, mostly an attack on traditional piano lessons, with evangenical proselytizing for my alternative becoming a cycling choral subtext of the whole sermon. And a growing armory of anecdotes allowed me to gradually allocate more and more time to them than to the technical topics throughout, which, as the years went by, were increasingly presented in a summarial way wherever possible, often pointing to printed materials for people to peruse on their own. It got to where Id get pretty sustained laughter by interjecting, a good forty minutes into an opening spiel that had yet to even 99

mention middle C,
Ill get down to the lesson part in just a few more minutes. Actually I could put the whole thing off till tomorrow afternoon, if youd pay the same for that. But since I got that better airfare, with the weekend layover, we might as well make it last for the whole eight hours, dont you think?

But early on, and for some years, I dared not try that. So after fifteen or so minutes it was after all now time to turn to the keyboard, and there was no way to easily get by without knowing the names of the notes. Of course you dont really have to look at anything, Id tell them. Herbie Brock was blind, which means he couldnt see, not that he didnt have a linguistically expressable grasp of the keyboard as a place with discretely named spots wherein one could plot out various scale paths, devise various chord types, and follow common and idiosyncratic ways of distributing the tones. Of course he did. Hed had no trouble discussing such details in ordinary musicians shop talk with the guys in his trio or anyone else. He simply didnt tell me about all that, and for all I know it may have been because he figured I didnt especially seem to want to know. Incidentally, he also handled spatially embodied numbers just fine, dialing a rotary phone, and then a touch tone too, faster than anyone Ive seen. Picture the absurdity of alphanumeric keypads if we had to watch our hand to use them. An abacus would be easier. Accountants have enough anxieties already. When people ask How can you play all of that without looking?, retort How do you manage to walk so incredibly precisely, stride after stride each within a centime100

ter of the same length, without watching your legs? And there was an aside (with footnotes, no less) to take up a few minutes on just that issue, assuring them that not even the music professionals were of any help, and that their sense of things was commonsensically wrong too, doing so by poking fun, for example, at the renowned authority on modern music, Gunther Schuller, esteemed musicologist and composer, for a decade The President of the New England Conservatory of Music, for writing, in the second of his highly touted volumes on jazz, about the American father of the piano, Art Tatum:
In these two respects - his incredible speed (all the more remarkable since Tatum was virtually blind, having been born with only partial vision in one eye) and his astonishing harmonic inventiveness...(The Swing Era, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989, p. 478) ... (he) played at a dazzling tempo...the right hand flying along in eighth notes most of the time - and all this by someone known to be virtually blind..., Ibid., p. 482).

Sheer nonsense! Vision isnt the least bit needed once you get your bearings, and Tatums phenomenal piano technique had absolutely nothing whatever to do with his blindness. Its a non-fact in the context, except insofar as the disability may have generated his energy, which isnt Schullers point. Not that he had one. Any moderately experienced pianist can let the mere edge of a pinkie faintly graze a group of black notes, say, while moving to sit at the bench without looking at the keys at all, and through that infinitely slight appraisal the whole layout then becomes specifically available in note-for-note detail for all further lookless steps. I cant recall or imagine a competent player who couldnt easi101

ly play blindfoldedly. Theres wondrous human mystery here, but it aint about Art. And then I could make fun of all those related mystifications that made a full thirty percent of my callers feel obliged to report a Mendelian history. Id ask, Do you play at all now?, inviting most answers usual rights to continue the talk by giving me another turn, and Id get - No, but mother played violin, or I never took lessons but my sister can play anything by ear, or Both Aunts on Daddys side are wonderful pianists, The boys do real well in band, Granny sang opera. It runs in the family, this musical talent, like brown eyes. Biological bologna. DNA tinklers trivially think that cloning sheep and concocting cocktails automatically confers them explanatory squatters rights in all quarters. Sure musical talent runs in families. Where other people make music for others to see and hear. Like talking runs in families. Or used to.

Glenn Gould at the Piano

(May I eat now?)

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In any case, to my knowledge I had no blind students, so they might as well do what most tune-smiths do: read the keyboard. You can do it all by feel, and eventually, indeed, its all done by feel anyway. But when it comes to working with chords, and voicing procedures, to achieve such arrangements as with Misty, and quickly move beyond the need for such pictures, and so on, you might as well look and see the paths. When I said might as well, thats what I meant. Might as well. If I said reproduce those chords of Misty without looking down, they could find the notes by feel, and practice and learn them that way. You dont have to look. But you might as well. Just as I might as well have gone into more detail about that since there were completely commonsensical yet tasty tidbits of advice to give, and doing that would use up five minutes or so, and so Id go on about it:
Of course we dont need these note names. You could number them all from 1 to 88, except that along with many other troubles that gets confusing when it comes to moving between full length and 49 key keyboards (four octaves plus an extra C on top). And while music and mathematics are related, youd need a pretty hefty algebra to represent the simplest chord. Then again, we could just name places in reference to the blackness-whiteness feature. Theres the first note of black twosomes, and the white in front of twosomes, and the white between blacks in twosomes. But youd need a paragraph to refer to the simplest anything, with a real mess when it came to more than one octave. The alphabet works pretty well, surely related to the fact that little kids learn it early on, which makes its use for the keyboard sensible enough, along with the numbers one through eight. Youll get used to not saying H, and seeing that it keeps repeating itself.

And then, in the early days, Id actually suggest a practice equivalent to making a pedagogic point out of which 103

end of a hammer one grabs, though I didnt dwell on it for too long since experienced former players would begin to squirm if I did. I taught them how to draw a keyboard, which was really quite underhanded of me, however helpfully intended, since Id not have been able to sketch one quickly myself but for the fact that a friend had just happened to point out this fast way only a few weeks before my very first class. Of course I naturally presented it as though it was learned in kindergarten, First make skinny rectangles without tops, in groups of twos and threes with space in between:

then this

and this

and finally

I actually showed grown adults how to do that, saying it would help their perception of the keyboard, whose relevant looks Id known as intimately as the backs of my hands if not better for at least thirty years and I couldnt have rap104

idly sketched this layout two weeks before. I couldve drawn one, but it wouldve taken a bit of work to get it right. I dont play the piano with a pencil. Itd be like having to fill in a blank QWERTY keyboard picture if you touch-type well, where you need to mimic a bunch of words and, one-by-one, slowly fill in the names of places you can blindly reach for at a hundred miles an hour. Of course I quickly became very fast at drawing these, like any three year old would, and as if students should,

and told them to practice drawing them until they could do it quickly, and make up bunches of them, or one clean one and run off copies, and practice pointing to a note and calling out its name. A typical teacher, Id be so insulting as to make it a point to say something like...
You dont want to have to count up, say from A, to find D. So you need to isolate D, not see it in relation to the C before it, and the E after it. Not at all. You have to see D all by itself, in relation to the field of blacks and whites. So find a D way down here (I play), low on the keyboard, and then way up here (play), and then randomly poke around at Ds everywhere (example). And then do the same for another note, but not Cs or Es yet, since that might allow you to retain a relationship you want to sever. So take Gs, say, and find all the Gs up and down, and keep practicing that, choosing them randomly, and then far off to the sides also, so that you get to easily see the twoness-threeness aspect from an angle, and not just looking down from above.

Of course I just now, this very minute, made up most of that, about avoiding Cs and Es after Ds. Not to retain some relationship? And far off from the side seen from an 105

angle. They appear reasonable enough. If you just first reach for Cs, and then for Ds, you might remember where Cs are and then count up to the Ds. So randomization is one reasonable routine, as anyone whos acquired such a skill knows without been told. And pianists probably do perceive some aspects of these patterns from a wider angle faster than others. But Id certainly never practiced doing that specifically. Seeing from angles? I sure wouldnt admit it if I had. I just invented such expert Competent Piano Players advice with the ease that a plumber, repairing the kitchen sink, could appropriately advise the little daughter of the house who was playing a piece badly in the next room, Sounds like youre trying to go too fast. Slow down. You keep making the same mistakes over and over again. The teacher as a Certified Anyone. And I do hate to admit that I did actually give out flash cards in the beginning. The end of my manuals very first edition had two card-stock pages, one with twelve little one octave pictures, each with a different dotted note, the other with twelve scale diagrams, and evenly drawn suggested cut lines for making up neat stacks of flash cards. On one hand Im criticizing piano lessons for dragging things out forever, and then spending a full ten minutes of a first driving lesson talking about how to turn the ignition key. The notes have names. Learn them well. Then there are twelve scales. Start on a note, any note, and go up a whole step, then another whole step, then a half step...and, right there, invariably, Id get confused looks, so Id say: 106

As long as I tell jokes everybodys happy, but the minute I give you a first simple concept you all look nervous, as if thats a students obligation. I promise you, the average televised western human being, at least one over thirty, can still learn almost right there along with the best of them, if they somehow decide to do that despite themselves. A whole a whole a half, a whole a whole a whole a half. Its as easy as a phone number like 221 2221. Now dont think. Just listen. Close your eyes and just listen. (This is how some faces asked me to appeal to them, which Id take advantage of at times, after a glance at the watch.) Just stop. Before you ask questions. Dont think at all right now. Just listen. There are white notes and black notes. Right? Right. O.K. If you go from any note, whether it is white or black - from any note at all, up to the very, next, one, going up, or going down, the very, next, one, from white to black, or black to white, and sometimes between two white notes, like from B to C, and from E to F. Right? Right! Thats a half step. Got that? The very, next, note. Thats a half step away. Dont think. Please. Just listen. A half step is from one place to the very next spot you can press, going right or left, black or white.

Of course once you start in on the kindergarten kick, with kiddie talk and flash cards for note names, youll make adults, and children, behave like infants in a hurry, and wedve all been sitting around in a circle on the floor with scissors and colored paper before long if I didnt cut short the note naming business.
You need names, these are the names. Learn them. Theres the scale, a whole whole half, etc. Learn that rule. If your memory is good, just make believe that this fantastic other person, whom youve had your eye on for really some time, just gave you their phone number, can you believe that. At last. Wow! But you dont have a pencil! 221 2221. Maybe it happened recently and you had a pencil but didnt want to write it down anywhere, so its easy to get the picture. Youd remember the number. Pretend that a whole whole half, whole whole whole half is that sort of possible start of a whole new life, and less likely to lead to aggravation. When you really want to learn something, with the right kind of caring you usually learn it on the first attempt or first few. Ever experience not remembering a phone number, like your own say, when youve just moved to a new place? Each time someone asks you for it you have to

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look in your wallet, until you just once literally tell yourself: now Im going to learn it! Get ready, get set, go. And you learn it. New words are usually like that. Melodies also. Think of melodies and words and words that are numbers, all these and more, as organized movements. Millions of organized movements are learned just like that. On the first single occasion of motivated caretaking, with, sometimes, just a few perfect repetitions.

There was only so far I could go on the names of the notes, with a class half full of folks who knew them perfectly well. But the scale paths, and their spelling, and then, especially good reasons for learning to handle scales in a certain way? There I really went off the altogether sensible and yet clearly ridiculous deep end. First Id use that common crass teacher stunt of showing off some slowly gained and altogether subsidiary skill as if it were an essentially requisite one. How many of you had lessons? They raised their hands, and I picked one. Yes you. Whats the sixth note of the B Scale? And as I studied this minds eye counting up that path, just before it came up with its answer I did: Its a G sharp, Id say, then scatting, in an up-tempo bebop time, and the fifth note of an A flat scale is E flat, and the sixth note of a G flat scale is E flat, and the seventh note of a G scale is F sharp, and the third note of a B scale is D sharp, and..., and of course they couldnt keep up with me, and of course no one dared say You can only do that so fast from teaching this course for so long! I kept the anxiety level of those who knew the keyboard perfectly well from getting in the way of my timing over the first hour, by emphasizing an importance to really seeing these scales well, because, as you just saw, you dont 108

really know them fast, like that, since youre not used to looking down at scales, even if youve played for years. And youll be working with these chords, made up of notes of the scales, putting some here and others there. Youll need to see the paths clearly. And I went over the alphabet rule for spelling the scales once again
Choose a sharp or flat name for black notes by spelling all scales with letters used in order, e.g., D, E, F sharp (not G flat, leaving out F), and, with this rule youll see that its much easier to clearly name notes in a scale if you call the first notes of scales starting on black notes by their flat names.

Of course, thinking back on it all now, I clearly remember being told me about how to arrange chords, one afternoon with Dick Powell saying, for instance...
Dont play chords in a clunky way, like C, E, G, and Bb right in order in one octave, for a C dominant chord. Spread them apart and get the left hand thinned out. In general, if its a dominant chord, or a minor seventh chord (the common minor chord form in song play, which includes b7, like dominants - 1 b3, 5, b7 - this really the third chord type in song play, which I didnt mention before, in the slight simplification where I just named minor chords, for fear of overloading you with the sheer bulk of technical information) - for dominants and minor sevenths, play only the first and flatted seventh notes of the scale with your left hand, putting the first note on the bottom - its the chords root - and then put the melody on the top, with a little finger of your right hand, and put in the third or flatted third, depending whether its dominant or minor, in the right hand, below the melody note, this before you do anything else (and this one of our breathlessly awaited Voicing Rules!)

Instead of a clunky-sounding chord, a C dominant chord with C, E, G, Bb, 1, 3, 5, b7 of the C scale beneath a C melody note, for example:

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Instead of this unappealing chord position, with left hand voices too closely clustered - a quartet with three bass players and a flute - you spread the voices apart for a more democratically ensemble, which simply sounds better, lets say:

(Dont read this note! Some sorts of observant readers might notice that the 5th disappears from the chord (G, in a C7). All chord types share the same fith, this tone without great content, mostly used only for fill and often omitted)

Told by Dick to do that, I very vividly recall spending hours, that same evening, working on just a few chords, getting this all figured out, along with picking good color tones, other notes, also named in relation to the scale, which are chosen in varying combinations to give chords a slightly dissonant and richer texture, and then they really sound better than three basses and a flute playing that chord; some such tones add color to majors, others to dominants, others for the minor sevenths, with some nice for all three. Powell wrote out a small three column table which I wouldnt dare burden you with now (for youll then have all you need to learn to play and yet theres the promise of much more to say to make this a genuinely proper book for everyone, and with what I have in 110

mind Im barely a third of the way there). It took that whole first evening to put together just the opening few measures of a tune whose chords hed given me to work out. I had to so often review the notes of the scales that it was like being lost in the Everglades in an airboat.
Lets see, a whole step up from here is to here. And then a whole. Right. Thats it...the third note of a C scale is E, so, lets see, I put an E, in the right hand, below the melody note, which is here. And now he said that the second note of the scale can also be called the ninth, by just counting up past eight, and that this ninth can also be used, and a flat ninth with dominants. How cool! Better write down the names, like with Herbie a dozen year ago, only now Im using the rules and making such chords by myself. Wow, its just a matter of using these rules. And just great sounds. Alas!

It took me at least a couple of hours, for the opening several measures of my first song, just to figure out what should go in the left hand and right, and I then end up instructing paying students they must become really adept at seeing scale paths quickly. For what? A seminar franchise license? I knew the names of keyboard notes as well as the numbers one through ten, probably for nearly as long, but hadnt especially ever looked down at scales this way, to find this third one to put there, and that one to play over here. Following Herbie Brocks lists meant looking for named spots, not place locations on a scale. Of course thats not to say that was easier, since, in order to actually play a tune, its grabbing and remembering the movements towards and through each grab to the next

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which is very quickly much more important than remembering the names of the places grabbed. The names guide you to spots whose achievement your hands must then learn, and then these names, if recurrently used for guidance, are eventually so deeply tied into the sights that theyre always around for ready use whenever you happen to think about the places in a way that needs them. Eventually, but most certainly not when you first start to learn - for this viewpoint becomes ever more subtly enriched over many years and can indeed be said to never stop refreshing itself - very eventually this place is certainly never shiny, nor even white, nor the key before a twosome, not even a key on the keyboard. Its completely and thoroughly nothing other than a seen keyboard C. To the experienced pianist, its C-ness encompasses the place as if it were dipped in C-paint, just as the appearance, here, of a C - this circle with a third cut from of its right side, fully embodies a texted C for us all. Aseen keyboard C can be only approximately shown this way (so only approximately as to mean not at all):

for it calls out its name when viewed from any distance or perspective, faster than instantaneously yielding up its own appearance into a linguistic noise - see, which weve learned to instruct with the sign C. Like WORD shouts out 112

its sounds to us, the pacing and placing of those moves we make as we see-say WORD magically solicited by and residing in the generic shapes of these angles and curves grasped as a whole. Not having analytic looking experience with scale positions, even though my look roughly outlined the general arc of the paths and my hands could play them from childhood on, it took twenty minutes to build the first chord, and fifteen for the next, and at least seven or eight for each one of the next, all week long, to construct the fifty-odd different postures of the tune. Perhaps I shouldve made up some scale flash cards first, and strolled the beach memorizing them. It mightve saved time. But with my nice new freshly tuned used grand waiting home for me, I could hardly wait to get to it, with nice chords to a great standard to now work out, and these fantastic voicing and chord-coloring rules, keys to a universe on a slip of paper. Flash cards? Im surprised I didnt get a whole fleet of flashing lights, driving down the Coast Highway as it were a Bavarian Autobohn...

One task did require treatment in the early hours of my seminar, because without discussing it in some way I couldnt fully deliver on my contractual fulfillment that theyd learn to play songs without reading any musical notation at all. The task is picking out a melody. 113

Ill get just a bit detailed here for a while, since describing various phenomena about finding melodies nicely leads me to venture some general observations about learning and teaching. But please rest assured that if you can make your way from a turned-off computer through the Wizard of Google to the Land of Ease to check your mail, handling this discussion is roughly equivalent to flushing a toilet by comparison. And if you just take it in with one single and careful enough reading to grasp the general gist, you can then flush the toilet and eliminate all details. An adequate context will have been provided for whats to follow, as my saga of the Anti-Teaching-Teacher continues. But before I get down to that business, another quick update on Austin. Ill soon start reporting observations about students hands, and you need to know that Austin is where that first became both necessary and possible. To make it short: Recall my multimedia studio in New York with the video and keyboards, and that obvious solution to my troubles, a longer term program, where I saw myself becoming just another piano teacher whod sooner work for the phone company? Well I changed my mind. At least a little bit, for a little while. Now and then. You, but probably not me, great businessman that I am, could well guess what would happen with ads in the newspaper in Austin. Exactly what happened with posters on the sidewalks of New York. My first piece of publicity 114

and some ads packed the hall for the fall and winter, and then, as spring quite quickly jumped into summer starting in early March, it would be more or less sensible to say that of those people who read the Austin American Statesmen so as to notice ads in it and repond to those that interest them, or more specifically of those whod respond to that ad about a piano course, in the newspaper, down at Strait Music Company so yall come - well by then Id gotten the all of them I was gonna get that way. And some changes in the wording didnt help anymore than changing the colors on posters ever did. Id never systematically addressed the question of how to keep a large ongoing flow of new people interested in a short term program. First I had a poster, and now one profitable Austin newspaper ad. And Id tinkered with them a little. When a very good Austin businessman-student said, to take just one of many such suggestions over the years, Try a large billboard out on the highway, there wasnt ever enough extra to risk possibly throwing twenty five grand right out the window. And to suggest Why dont you try a large billboard and well go into business if it works doesnt work in business. When it came to considering anything terribly adventurous I was never in a position but to not carefully heed Jerry Lewiss wise advice, that the safest thing to do when you reach Las Vegas is to get off the plane and walk into the propeller. So by July I was teaching private piano lessons in one of the stores private lesson studios, right next to another pri115

vate piano teacher who rented her space too, because we couldnt inexpensively round up enough new folks for a new class. It was a long, hot, and pretty unhappy summer. But it was cool in the store, and things couldve been worse. I wasnt starving. For one thing, my first wave of students had yielded a group of decent players by the end of the first year. Theyd stayed in touch, stopped in at the store regularly, and there was a sufficiently sized bunch who urged me to start up some sort of an ongoing, continuing class in the fall. Which meant expectable future income. It was either that or pack my bags. And go where? Live in places for a year at a time, hoping Id be lucky enough to scoot into another Strait Music somewhere? Enough was enough, for a while. I figured I could work out something to do in a longer term class. Theres always plenty to talk about, sitting at a piano with others around who want to talk and learn. And I came to know several nice folks among my students, befriended some salespeople in the store, there was a great R&B joint in town called Antoines, with big name blues players, and I got to sit in now and then and play a huge old Hammond Organ and just make believe I was using my feet. A couple of graduate students from the University who were interested in my academic work had shown up, and we met on a regular basis. Austin had awesome Mexican restaurants, more than partially thanks to one of my best students there, with a breakfast place that beat any Id known. And taking a swim in Barton Springs when its a hundred and three out116

side had its short term appeal. As I say, things couldve been worse. And they quickly got much better. There were enough folks whod agreed to join a continuing followup class in the fall, so instead of packing my bags there could be a practice in Austin, at least for a while, and the last thing I then needed was another nightmare like New York. While bumper stickers on pickups everywhere read, If You Love New York, Take I-95 North, though I did I wasnt about to. (I found it odd that the most favored PianoBar tune in Austin at the time was Sinatras New York, New York; everybody loved singing it, because theyd all sneaked out of town on jets to spend weekends there!) In the back of the store there was a small room that had been used as an organ showroom. The organ business fell apart when synthesizers came on the market, just around this time. Those giant automated creatures, part organ and part Boeing cockpit, were hugely popular high-ticket items, with their massive speaker systems and amazingly automated doodads that allowed one, playing a melody with one finger, to sound just like the whole Tommy Dorsey orchestra, convincingly enough, so it seems. In many parts of the country they were as popular - and almost as big - as mobile trailers and fishing boats. But then this monstrous hybrid, whose massive hidden electronics required that much cabinet space, quickly mutated into a relatively tiny transistorized offspring, in that great reductionism of our time - the small synthesizer you can carry under your arm and plug into a high fi system. So this room was a showroom but no one was look117

ing anymore. They did a major renovation of the whole store that summer, more like four stores in one - a new paint job, carpeting and more, and decided to allocate this organ showroom to a Play by Ear studio, for a longer term program. My first wave of students had been sufficiently profitable for the store in terms of instrument sales that I was an asset, and a nice room was outfitted, with a TV camera aimed at my hands, clearly visible monitors, a grand piano on a pedestal up front, with a capacity of fifteen people, each at their own keyboards. No communication stuff, thank goodness. But still, the same idea: a hands-on group keyboard class. But now for sixteen weeks. So I could go through town in two years instead of one. And so it came to pass. And so it happened, that fall, to my good fortune, that one of these earlier students who wanted an ongoing course was a reporter at the Austin American Statesmen, and she published a four page full-color, photo illustrated spread all about this studio and and my students, in a widely read supplemental section of the newspaper, with an awful closeup of my face filling the entire cover, a long story reporting pleasures my course had brought to a bunch of Austinites, many of whom were quoted in the lovely article, some of them from people who were quite well known in town. So around four hundred people very quickly signed up for a four month long class, and I got around two hundred and fifty bucks each, after paying the store a percentage of the tuition for the extra expenses involved in 118

building this studio, exactly on the replica of the ridiculous facility with the video and the keyboards that you saw in New York. Eight hours. Sixteen hours. Big deal. So it had turned into a very good year indeed, seeing how significantly publicity and advertising - being promoted versus promoting yourself - can differ. Four hundred of this same papers readers were now, with this story, suddenly determined to study with me, and for six solid months I was performing for twenty hours a week and could hardly stand up. Poor me, right! My only reason for mentioning this now is simply because from here on my account will regularly invoke observations of students learning, and, just as often, not learning, and of me making my sensibly best way through many very different sorts of hours, playing it by ear. Which all began in Austin, that way.

Back to picking out melodies. In terms of the weekend seminar were nearing the end of a first two hour session the intro schtick, then note naming, the scales, chord types, (with enough sneak-previews that you know most of the movie). And were now at my typical picking-out-melodies place in the agenda. And we need some details, to finally move toward the heart of this whole story, or at least some of its major organs. For four centuries in the musical system based on the major scale, these chords - the combinations of voices that keep melodies company - havent only been designated by 119

dots on the five-line musical staff, but, alternatively, by their names. A harmony, the chords for a song, be it a Bach chorale or a Gershwin ballad, can be represented as a string of chord symbols: /F D7 /Gm7 C7 /F D7 /Gm7 C7 /

written between bar lines that define the borders of measures, groups of accented beats, four so often the number in typical tunes that one seldom bothers to notate that, or does so with just a little space between the symbols, as above. Four chords are each given two beats in the first two measures and then these measures are repeated, we could say. Merely for your general edification, since in a truly sane world youd know this like you know what red, yellow and green lights mean: C7 (said C seventh) means a C dominant chord, 1, 3, 5, b7 notes of a C scale: C, E, G, Bb. The letter by itself, just an F, for instance, means the major chord (1,3,5 of that scale, i.e., F, A, C). And m7 stands for the minor seventh, 1, 3b, 5, b7, notes of the scale, so that Gm7 is G Bb D F, those positions on a G scale (and remember, 12 different starting places, and thus C7, Db7, D7, etc., C, Db, D, etc., Cm7, Dbm7, Dm7 etc., 36 chords in all). So you now get the gist should I suggest that a remark like G minor seventh, C seventh, F is sane musician talk. This string, by the way, is an exceedingly common chord progression. Generically seen in equivalent translation for all twelve starting places, it depicts much of the essence of nearly all tune (and much classical) harmony. But you cant, 120

neednt, and shouldnt think about any of that, now. If ever. And youll see why later, having to do with the total irrelevance of knowing anything chord progressions for getting them into your hands, so you can play by ear. Playing chords by distributing their notes between the two hands, along with a handful of color tones whose makeup depends mostly on which century were talking about, two of which I just hinted at - ninths which are quite old and flatted ninths which are younger - putting this together is all left to the musicians discretion. As one might suppose, theres an absolutely enormous similarity in all tunes, as in classes of ordinary utterances of every kind, so the number of actual physical variations isnt staggering, such commonalities of course being what makes it possible, once playing a few dozen tunes very well, to then quickly learn to play hundreds. Just as with words and sentences. To produce a chord from left to right - C, E, G, in that order within one octave as a C major chord - is to play it in root position, the root being the first note of the scale on which its built, 1 in these formulae, C in this example. And I do sincerely apologize for, and will very soon forever stop overwhelming you so with terminological talk. Youll perhaps forgivingly appreciate that excessive reassurances in respect to even the simplest of matters - this after already holding you for a fourth of my book! - are habituated residues reflecting years of addressing the general public, a truly terrifying percentage of whose current members in the western world, with the atrophy of most necessity, are 121

massively anxious and often in downright denial about the capacity to learn and excel at absolutely anything new, however easy it is to nonetheless unequivocally show that such capacities exist for almost anyone. I had my hands full. Root position chords are compacted clusters that are too rugged to be musical when placed in a lower octave, on the left side of the keyboard where most find that their left hands are more useful. Not starting at Middle C, but one or two Cs below that. Play C, E, G down low, in order like that. Its a growling bunch of bass sounds with the purity of an auto crash. So, as Dick Powell said, in order to use the whole piano and not just the upper half of it, which would be a real waste, in solo song playing one thins out a low left hand, but nearly always plays the chords root as the bottom note, usually with the left pinkie. And then you follow simple procedures. Having these symbols, and rules about how to select and order possible tones beneath an uppermost melody note, one then fine tunes the tunes tones from the chord chart blueprint. Like the good home builder can transform a rough architectural sketch into attractive accommodations. Prospective students would often ask Do you teach by the chord method?, with an intonation suspecting some sort of new-fangled gimmick, invented in Oshkosh in the Twenties. So I needed to remind them that Bach played by the chord method, that arranging the voices of a chord to achieve a nice sound was arguably a more musical activity than the reproduction of a fully specified score, and that long before the relatively precise performance of music entirely com122

posed by others was considered a legitimate occupation, all musicians could and did work with chord symbols as a shorthand that allows and requires considerable arranging, by one whod thus be better thought of as a composing-player. Bach and Mozart used chord charts as much as Brubeck and Monk (along with Beethoven, Bartok, Bassie, and Mendelssohn, Mahler and Mercer). But then theres also a melody, a succession of particularly placed-paced moves whose mere alphabet numeration, say, as D, F#, G, D, E, B, A, F#.....would be inadequate as a means of reference in itself, only one reason being that the relatively close proximity of two different Ds, F#s, Gs, Ds, Es, etc. leaves the upward or downward direction of each next destination unspecified, so using that notation presupposes one already knows the tune well enough to make such determinations, and its thus of limited use. Obviously you cant play a melody you dont know anymore than you can recite a new poem without a text or recording, and although I handed out a half page sketch on how to read a melody on a sheet of music (and a business card will do), so they could learn unfamiliar tunes, in having students learn to pick out melodies I was teaching them to play songs they already knew. Once able to do that, theyd be able learn new tunes more easily, which isnt to say, in the usual pedagogic way, that doing one prepares you for the other, since, as is nearly always the case for most such alternatives, it works just as 123

well in the other direction too. A purely personal aside. It always struck me that being able to find a known melody on a piano was as salient a general skill in our modern age of leisure as being able to fingerpaint or compute the hypotenuse of a right triangle. This is especially true for keyboard instruments and the vibraphone, where in contrast to virtually all other instruments the production of a pure musical tone is pretty unproblematic. If youve got a finger and can push a lever down, and a hand that can strike a mallet on a bar, youll get a pretty nice musical tone on a keyboard and vibes, while being able to tighten your lips and pretending to spit through them doesnt mean youll even get a toot out of a trumpet, and just because youve got an arm that can move a bow across the string of a violin or cello, without considerable caretaking practice at doing that very precisely just so, for quite some time youll make Jack Bennys imitations of a horrible fiddle seem like Yasha Heifitz by comparison. Leaving nuances aside, in relation to other instruments the piano is an automatic tone generator, theres this massive majority of ordinary people throughout the world who can accurately enough hum a great many melodies, and many millions of pianos and keyboard are all over the place, the overwhelming majority silently waiting since shortly after birth to someday, somehow, someway make some music. Out of mere respect for the incredible amount of nonautomated but truely delicate human labor that goes into building the things, we all ought handle them, at least a little 124

in passing, and with at least a touch of insight. Those who think in such ways tell us that the largest portion of the brain is that which controls the hands, that there are more nerve cells on the tips of the fingers than anywhere but in the retina. And a piano is the sole implement using both hands in simultaneously and serially moving each independent digit, while both thumbs engage in rotational movement. Our bodys perfect equipmental manifestation: a keyboard. Not the one Im typing on, for thumbs just hang here, only one of them regularly providing mere nothingness. The musical one. Our alter-body. Nerves best friends. I told them they needed to learn to find known melodies at the keyboard. And I then offered a very plausible explanation to warrant one general preparatory exercise which is probably relatively useless, and then specified a thoroughly absurd specific technique for them to use. Sensible but probably poor advice on certain general preparations, and a ridiculous routine, whose strict pursuit, as with the on-time-perfectly rule, produces perfectly psychotic behavior. Thinking back on the hundreds of hours I talked about how to become facile at picking out melodies, the only thing of truly indubitable value that I ever said, and this discussion took up a good half-hour out of eight, around $7.50s worth of advice that couldve at least paid for a moderately decent hamburger, was that the best way to become good at picking out melodies is to keep trying. 125

But I didnt just say that. Among other things, like all good piano teachers I naturally told them to practice their scales. Anyone who knows anything about the piano, and other instruments too, knows you simply must practice your scales. Thinking of the world prior to the appearance of Bill Gates and company - if we can so expand our memory - there are no other very particularly arranged places that human fingers all around the globe have more specifically followed than the twelve major scales on a piano. Every bit as precisely laid out as Microsoft XP Professional, and without electricity, but requiring use of all the hands digits and not just a goosestepping index one - before we were all reduced to that, the musical keyboard united opposably-thumbed humans everywhere in first putting those thumbs on Cs, first fingers then on Ds, middle ones on Es, and then taking these thumbs and passing them under these fingers to play Fs with them, so all the others then easily march right up the white notes until pinkies settle on the next Cs. A universal course of human actions more precisely choreographed than those involving the ability to walk, with finely detailed constraints on the precise targets for every next place, as a worldwide and truly unified movement. A relevant question becomes: while walking usually gets us somewhere, to where does this international procession lead? Does it really bring us closer to the land of music, or, might it turn out, in what would clearly be among the more extraordinary of recent human follies, to get us nowhere we couldnt have just as well reached otherwise, 126

and even, perhaps, taking us somewhat around in circles. While that clearly wasnt my question then, and I even now raise it with genuinely serious fears of colleaguial fury, it has become a perfectly sensible issue as I think back upon how I (and others) had rationalized the whole business of practicing ones scales, your scales - like making sure to eat your breakfast. Theyre to become possessions, consumed. But their truly nutritional rather than mostly ritual value? This actually turns into a very big puzzle. Like carbohydrates vs. fat. And there are surely a great many neighbors out there who justifiably deserve a decent description of their singular importance. (A pharmacist-favored joke comes back to mind, thinking of the issue of scales: The old lady goes to the doctor with a sore foot. Soak it in hot water every day. She does. But it gets worse. Her maid says, Not hot water! Soak it in ice. She goes back to her doctor. It still hurts, and my maid said to soak it in ice. And he says, Well my maid said hot water!) Having so raised such a seriously heretical issue hints at possible opinions, but the importance of the topic requires that I offer mine, about the basic routinizing role of scale practices for teaching and learning, with those adequately relevant details to which theyre responsible. Here, first of all, is the gist of what I said, because I believed it, to a considerable number of people:
Since melodies of songs are laid out along the paths of major scales, usually staying along one scale for most of the tune, though sometimes moving to one or two others, the best preparation for picking out melodies is to learn to move about on these scales readily. When I set

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down on a particular note and attempt to pick out a song melody beginning there, and any song can begin on any note of course, my hand quickly orients itself to movements along a particular path, and after finding the first and second notes, say, I can readily sense along which scale the other notes probably lay, my hands establish that scale as a background from which the figure of this particular sequence can be more quickly drawn. If you just hunt and peck around at random its like looking for a fuse box in a dark cellar. But if your hands understand the scales, you more rapidly find your way by moving along the melodys possible path.

Its a nice story, it sounds rather plausible, and I thought it made good enough sense. But thinking of it since, while Id hardly suggest that following a regime of rigourous scale drills would be no melodic use, the over-simplification in my glib gloss of what the hand does makes the advice both too much for, and yet not at all enough equal to the task of successfully picking out melodies. On closer examination it becomes quite unclear as to why and to whom it could ever be sensibly offered. Lets first realize that the ability to find a melody at the keyboard is hardly an either/or proposition. There are extremes. Take me, and many others like me, thousands weve guessed. If one calls out the name of well known tune, especially from the thirties, forties or fifties, for instance, standards from that golden era of songwriting as many of us aging folks like to insist, though it matters not if you agree - call out such a tune, in my case, and within a second or two I can tell and say, with considerable confidence, whether I can do the song or not. Just as fast, I can say, with equal confidence, Im not sure if I can do the bridge, or any this or that part of it. And if I say I can do it, within no more than 128

twenty seconds of very quick rehearsal I can typically then perform the full song, nearly errorlessly, and with nice full chords all the way through. If you had a few drinks youd applaud. That isnt to congratulate myself. Thousands have thousands of tunes at hand like this. By the way, since having a tune at hand or in mind implies that a piece has some fully constituted existence within our bodies, Id say its safer to say that thousands have acquired the keyboard facilities to readily enact the massive number of melodies that millions can hum. Better to say we can do them, than that we have, or know them. As for just a single note melody line? It rarely takes but a few seconds of orientation to then assuredly play them pretty perfectly. At the far other end of this heuristically rough spectrum is someone who cant even get to second base. First base isnt a big issue, for we may start any song on any note at all, and restricted to the arena from about a few notes below middle C to an octave, say, above it - roughly encompassing average adult vocal ranges - one can blindfoldedly strike any single key in this domain and make the song begin there in a good enough place for much singing. Any song may be made to start anywhere on this welltempered keyboard which so kindly enables us to adjust tones and tunes to each others ranges. Then, given some particular starting point, the first altogether essential step before anything in the slightest bit musical can get underway at all, as youd well expect, is finding the second note of the 129

melody, given any first one. Choose a first note at will. All others are then determined because a melody is a series of definite pitches, each in relation to the other. The task is to find them. For our coming discussion you might, but certainly neednt, keep one nonintuitive yet easily demonstrated and contextually relevant fact very vaguely in mind: if all the melody notes of a song are also found on one and only one of the twelve scales, which isnt too uncommon in simple tunes, choosing some first note only eliminates five scale paths, and thus an opening tone isnt really of much help for knowing just which scale the melodys notes share. Stating things mathematically this way is in no way meant to suggest that a calculating mentality or procedure is even the least bit involved in a melody search. Back to this and more concerning it, soon. At one end of this skills spectrum is the musician who nearly instantly decides, upon hearing its name, whether theres enough confidence to reenact a song, and then quickly sets about having it play itself again for all our benefit. And at the other end is the chap or gal who can no more take a first sound of a tune and then find the next one on the keyboard, than youd hope to come upon a friend by wandering randomly around town because you knew they had business to do in Manhattan that day, yet not the faintest idea of where on the island. After a few efforts, whether tried before or not, the vast overwhelming majority of people soon find that they fall somewhere well in between, which, by the way, is more than 130

adequate enough for getting started to learn a first song. In now yet another bad-faith, typically teacher-like instance of taking a full blown facility and treating it as a relevant beginners concern - like with my rattling off the names of scale note positions - I was (incorrectly!) describing the relevance of scale play for a melody finding facility that had grown for sixty years, hardly from just, or even mostly, and (actually only seldomly ever) playing scales! And my students first task was to learn to play a song, not win playthat-tune contests. Far worse things can happen in life than needing a full twenty minutes to first find an old melody in a new place. This set aside for now, consider, first, for just a moment in order to dispense with one issue, that those at the non-musical extreme never really fully even get to first base. For they nearly all display a luckily quite surmountable inability, which might better be called a reluctance, to sing a first note thats been struck. Even to hum it softly. If you really wont hum a tone thats sounded on the piano, and use that as the first tone in a search for second - were not speaking of a roundedly breathing professional voice, but a singing-in-the shower-humming-along-with-the-radio one if you cant bring yourself to hum a first tone of a melody, your finger may be on first base but the rest of you is somewhere else altogether. People cant find a melodys notes on a keyboard until they learn to use their mouths to produce a sequence of 131

matchable tones. This isnt to say that when picking out a melody you must sing aloud, or even noticeably hum to yourself. But if, with your shower voice, you cant sing along with the successive notes youre trying to play, youd be mostly unlike to find them, or to know whether you did should you just happen to land on some. Ive known hundreds whove been most unfortunately led to consider themselves tone deaf. It takes ten seconds to see all that this ever means. Strike a note somewhere in the mid-range of the piano and ask such a one to sing it. They dont sing. Its rare that they sing some other tone. They almost always utter non-tonal sounds. A sung tone involves sustaining a sound in a specifically acquired way. If youve learned to make sounds this way, to hum recognizeably genuine tones, you can match them with those on a musical instrument (and considerably easier, by the way, with a piano than a violin, say). The so-called tone deaf simply havent learned to comfortably use their mouths and all that other stuff that goes along with them to make tones, and this manifests itself as a reluctance: repressed little grunts, halted shallow groans, whispers, soft snarls, painfully quick sighs, slightly anguished squeals, little near-hums that quickly fall down the hill, truncated gasps of slightly tonal material always rapidly terminated by nervously twitching tongues. The angst of trying undermines the effort by distorting the very sound it seeks. Under pressure, these victims of some sort of childhood abuse, poor things, often open their mouths to vocalize 132

a tone and cant even get any air to come out. I had a little routine with the tone deaf. A good magic act does wonders to hold an audience. Id generally ask students to raise your hand if you simply cant carry a tune in a bucket, as they say, and maybe four or five out of a hundred would go up. Often, to not take up group time, Id simply refer them to a little essay on picking out a melody in the manual, which explained the therapy. But there were many occasions - if the figure was over a half dozen for instance, or there was time to spare, or with a particularly well spirited group where sprinklings of shyness quickly turned to neighborly chuckling and noodling without much embarrassment - now and then Id pose this challenge:
You. You cant carry a tune? No way. Not at all? Not at all. They told me to open my mouth and make believe. Youre sure? Ask anyone. My husband! My kids! Im the family joke. Ill make a deal with you. Come up front here, and Ill get you to sing a melody for the class, to carry a tune. If you can do it, Ill give you a refund for the weekends tuition, and Ill even give you a refund if you cant do it.

Who wouldnt take a deal like that! Most wouldnt. Yet often enough at least one would, and Id bring them up to the front. Mind you, this can be a terrifically traumatic trial, so it took great bravery and/or a really badly balanced checkbook and/or excellent faking.
Ok. Open up your mouth and say aaaah. An aaah, like at the

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doctors. Oh oh. Right there. I see trouble. Thats a terrifically timid Aaaah. Louder please. Make believe the doctors hard of hearing, or far away, or so near-sighted she cant find a thing unless you hold your mouth open for a long time. Come on. A nice long aaaah, not a falling sigh. A spatula aaah.

Once the patient relaxes long enough to gradually give up on gasping, a nice long aaaah generally becomes a tone, and as soon as I could bring a tone deaf person to produce one, their own, a real tone, a long sustained aaaaaah, which was only a matter of a little time and gentleness, then Id find that aaaah at the piano and play it along with them. I can quickly find a keyboard place for an aaaah that stays still in one place long enough to become tonal, unless they are singing in a crack, where with a slight push, hitting this piano sound, along with, before and after their aaaah, asking them to do it again, and again, and hold it, hold it, RELAX AND HOLD IT, louder, longer, again longer... hitting away on a note Id nudge them out of the crack and onto a key. This often took numerous repetitions. My sounding note would bother them, theyd take a breadth, and out would come an entirely different aaaah. And Id say OK, do that one again, but hold it, dont let go, and again, and again, and Id find it. And pretty soon, on every one of over a hundred times I tried this, I was able to achieve a match once wed together coaxed an aaah to keep sounding in one place long enough to become tonally alive. Id match their tone, so wed be in synch, and then Id

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hit another one just a whole step up from the first, and soon they could move up there with me. And Id slowly get them to go back and forth between these two, they following the piano, the piano following them, both close together, again and again continuously, with many errors but increasing accuracy over the course of a moment or two or three. And then Id take them another whole step up or down, and gradually, usually taking a total of five minutes for a first success, going around on these three tones, up and then down two whole steps - gradually theyd be consistently singing these three tones with me, and then with just a little more tweaking Id have them find that they were now doing Frere Jac -ques and Id just let go of the seat of their bicycle so theyd be in sole control of a little strip of melody for a second or two, often for the first time in their lives, and wed get a big applause. Two heroes, one very blushingly rushing back to their seat with a lousy hundred bucks in compensation for the torture. This always made me mad at the people in such peoples pasts who never bothered to take the twenty minutes almost anyone who cares to look at the problem needs in order to see whats obviously involved and how it can be obviously overcome. There isnt a one shot cure, and as likely as not if that person comes back to the piano in five minutes and tries again wed be nowhere close to Frere Jacques, and have to start out all over again. But with a little diligence, such efforts, on a fairly regular basis for a few weeks or so, first with one whos not tone deaf (tone shy) at the piano, 135

aiding the one who is in this way, preparing them then for solo experimentation along with actual melody playing well that soon equips the body for tonal production and, with it, close music listening, and for the tone deaf is equivalent, say, to finally getting a pair of glasses by one who, without them, cant tell a VW from a Greyhound. While theres a long way to go from Frere Jacques to a complex winding tune like Laura, Lush Life, or Bess You is My Woman Now, these are extreme exceptions rather than the rule, posing challenges for even professional pianists who dont play them regularly. In fact, its hardly far at all from the simplest of childrens songs to the typical Tin Pan Alley tune, and if you can handle Jingle Bells you dont have to dream about White Christmas. You can play it. The cure for tonedeafness is a cure for musical blindness, and theres not the slightest reason to state it any fancier than I just did, since anyone can see exactly what I mean. So we easily leave aside the non-existing tone deaf, since theres nothing more to say about them, and back to the relevance of the scales. Melodies can be said to lay out along scale paths. Thats a way of speaking. Whether or not its a good way of speaking, along with the possible implication that scale practice is thus useful for melody finding - thats the issue. Its not whether its true, this melodies can be said to lay along scale paths, anymore than asking if words use letters of the alphabet is true. The point is, whats the point 136

of putting it that way? And the commonsensical one Id offered, as prescribed professional wisdom - if they lie along scale paths then practice scales to get better at handling them - turns out to be as nearly as ill-advised as to suggest one best learn to read by first practicing the letters of the alphabet, up and down and up and down and up and down. Everyday. Some years ago I noticed, for the first time and quite incidentally one day, then spending some hours checking it out until it was clearly consistently so, that whenever I specifically go to the keyboard to pick out a song melody I nearly always immediately aim for a first note with a correctenough finger. A correct-enough finger is a good enough starting place for whats to immediately follow. Examples make this obvious. If I aim to play Over the Rainbow, a song with an almost uniquely large jump between its first and second notes (Some - where, a full octave), Id head straight for Some with my thumb (and we may safely attend to just the right hand for now). Theres a big move from a C to a C, G to G, F to F, wherever. Melodic moves dont often go that far in a single step, much preferring to work their way up or down or both, because its a bit tough of a reach to sing, this octave,

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I assume its altogether obvious that if youre going to strike one note, and then a next which is a good distance up from it, almost exactly at the limit of what the average hand can comfortably reach - then starting on the thumb is a wise move. Of course Im talking about my hand, not the novice melody-seekers. If a hand hasnt handled melodies it rarely moves anywhere wisely. You sense some intimate relations between our music and our bodies when you realize that, in this musical system of repeating bunchs of twelve tones, if two decent enough shower-singers of reasonably differing heights sing together they often sing an octave apart. In this music we regard two notes that are an octave apart as the same. If X, an average-sized man, starts out on a middle C, then Y, an average-sized woman, will likely start on the C above that, and well hear them singing the same note and the same tune. To say that this an obviously acquired sense, since theyre most clearly not singing the same note, is enough said. And of course Im speaking of altogether average grown Xs and Ys out there, singing Happy Birthday, folks who no more need to know anything about octaves than do those decent enough singers at the party who, being quite small at age four, all sing the same C and never give this octave any practical regard (though some might sense a certain shared sameness between tallest and shortest grownups). One telling fact: A note thats an octave higher than an other vibrates precisely twice as fast. Take a string, for instance, and tightly stretch it over an open hole in a very 138

nicely shaped box (preferably made a long time ago in Italy), and make it vibrate just twice as quickly as some other such string (by making the second one just half as long as the first, say, or pulled more tightly, or of a different gauge, and so on), and then call these two sounds an octave apart. Similar sorts of exactly proportional flutterings occur in our throats when we sing, and we may simply stand in awe of our shared ability to each control our vocal folds agility so acutely, with their sounds, and no oscilloscope, as a guide, as to generate exceedingly rapid vibrations with them, now going 205 times a second say, and then instantly stretching out to hit it nearly right smack on button at 410, an octave higher, as one possible Some-where. Surely such precise vocal- fold-control - this in itself implies a nature whose perfection lies in those bodily capacities that creates it, rather than that merely derivative mathematics this body then created to try to express itself. Best of all, the whole perfectly extraordinary setup simply makes for the possibility of music in the first place. Theres all that, and then theres a clearly relevant bodily fact that attests the deepest of wisdom embodied in a keyboard and this musical system, to wit: the comfortable widest reach from the thumbs to the pinkies of spread hands belonging to most people from five-feet-three to five-feet-ten - which means most people on the planet - is this octave. The spread hand has clear sexual overtones. We must note an important exception, the Dutch, the worlds obviously tallest folks, by far, a fact some auxologists 139

attribute to an egalitarian distribution of wealth and, with it, better diets, pre- and post-natal care, and the rest, in appreciation for all of which perhaps Holland could provide us with new sounding keyboard music, whose definitive performance theyd virtually monopolize, or at least establish what would clearly be the World Center for Stride Piano, one cherished solo song style where larger than octave reaches are especially prized. Something like this perhaps, and not just fertile soil for NBA scouts and tulips, with safe places to smoke a joint. (Cannabis apparently does not contain growth hormones, for they consume somewhat less of it than do the tourists from whom they make fortunes, and who dont go home any taller). Most non-Nederlanders put their thumbs on C and their pinkies fairly comfortably reach to the C above it. This is so widely true everywhere beyond the Dutch border that its relatively easy to play melodies with a more or less fixed widespread hand, in octaves and not just as single notes, and thus hardly surprising that this possibility is frequently found throughout scored and improvised piano music. To stay with pleasant metaphors lets simply say that these hand sizes, mathematically perfect vibrations, and the keyboard layout - as related as Pythagoruss propensity for dividing things like strings in half over and over again inextricably reflects his typically two-sided and roughly symmetrical body - together this makes for an altogether congenial musical companionship between men and women. Say Over the Rainbow and Id go for the thumb, Say 140

Fly Me to the Moon and Id set right out with a little finger - the fourth or pinkie - because its going to go immediately down. If its Jingle Bells Id head straight with my third finger since its going to go up higher and then down lower from the first note, so I cover both directions by taking a hand stance in between. On closer examination I saw further discriminations. Id likely use a fourth finger if an upward move was to be only quite short, relative to slightly longer reaches going down, like with the opening few notes of The Lady is a Tramp, Or the second finger, in a reverse situation, as with Do You Know the Way to San Jose, say. Name a melody and Ill use a correct-enough finger nearly every time, and without being the least bit aware of having strategically doing so. If I hadnt quite accidentally made this as an observation about my melody finding hand, and then gone through trials with hundreds of song titles to test its authenticity, it might go forever unreported as a fact, inconsequentially or not, my strong hunch being that competent melody finders dont know that their best-first-fingers are usually used. As to my awareness, and the possibility that Id indeed quickly reviewed a tunes opening in my imagination prior to reaching for the first notes, seeing how imaginations are unbelievably facile that way - thats neither here nor there. The correct-enough choice was very quickly made with a hand that fits melodies that fit a hand like a glove. But I surely didnt start out going for tunes like this, since family photos reveal me exploring the piano keyboard 141

even before the individual fingers were very finely differentiated, for me and each other, (though, apparently unlike Glenn Gould, for better or worse, this necessity was only apparently stressed after Id learned to walk and handle a spoon). At age three, around shoelace-tying time, the octave was in any case clearly out of the question. Like all kids growing up in households with pianos whose keyboards were still seductively exposed, fists and pokes at eye level or higher came long before individual fingers coming down from above. Yet surely, even then, pounding and poking up here and down there, we were gaining facilities for someday picking out melodies. Perhaps instead of suggesting scale play as a way to become acquainted with the highs, lows and in-betweens of melody places, I shouldve urged a much more natural evolution by having new adult students first get down on their knees before the keyboard. Wearing mittens. Take a look at a hand alongside a keyboard and youll be possibly struck by another of those altogether apparent appearances that are rarely attended:

In addition to being opposable, so it can touch the pads of other fingers while they cant, for better and worse your thumb is far and away your shortest digit, from a point142

ing forward perspective. At least I certainly hope so! Youve probably noticed that. And youve probably noticed that black notes are set quite far back in from the front of a keyboard. It doesnt take Adobe Photoshop to imaginatively superimpose the two and easily see that black notes arent as well positioned for thumbs as the white notes are. The general rule of thumb Keep it away from black keys Remember my reach for the rainbow? The thumb going for Some, before the octave leap to where? I didnt choose C because everyone knows about Cs. And while I can play that song starting on a C, like other Competent Jazz Pianists I can play it just as well starting on any other note. In my small scale investigation of quick melody finding, purposefully randomizing my task by glancing at lists of titles and aiming right for tunes, if a melodys first move was a big jump up, I didnt reach with my thumb for a black note. Effectively aiming for that large a leap, its got to be thumbs first, and if its thumb first, in a quickly-find-that-melody game, Id most confidently head straight for a white note. This isnt to say that I cant play the tune with the thumb starting on a black note, for I certainly can. But that wouldnt be a natural, first, quick-melody-finding finger choice. Actually, possible thinking of Judy Garland, Harold Arlens score for the tune has it start on an E-flat, with such a big octave jump thereby making it more of a ladys tune. If 143

I play it starting there, to accompany a lady or just because I feel like it, Id probably focus just a tiny bit more attentively on my first opening thumb move. I dont in the least bit mind having my thumbs on black notes when Im playing chords (and on a large welltuned Steinway thats putting it altogether politely!), or handing an opening like Some-where starting with a thumbed black spot, or playing octave melodies, and in various other situations where a passage can make that a comfortable place to be. But should my hand come down to just quickly head out for a melody, in this game, it wouldnt lead with its thumb toward a black place anymore than yours would, as a natural first move, when heading toward a number on a touch-tone phone. Thumbs arent our best pokers. They serve another pivotal melodic function - pivoting. In case you havent thought about it, which is altogether possible, those open spaces between the groups of black note bunches

aren't merely fortuitous touches of interior design tossed in to make the overall object look less monotonous. Theyre thumb spaces: 144

While all digits are necessarily employed on all keys at times, the thumbs basically command these open space regions as pivoting places, and end up spending more time there than do the others, passing under the longer fingers to reach these clearings and gracefully shift the hand higher, and coming down into them as good spots to be while the fingers rotate over them to move the whole hand lower. Thumbs are absolutely pivotal. So they made more space for them. When playing scales, if I may turn to them for a while, one doesnt use thumbs on black notes. Of course a scale isnt a thing, like a white note is, or the crack between two notes. A scale is always some particular way of looking at things, and to do whats called practicing scales is to follow a centuries-old set of quite specific procedures. To practice a scale, first, involves conceiving this array from left to right, whose construction rule you know, with a starting point on the bottom and a stopping or turning around point on the top. When you practice a C scale, you start it on a C and end it on a C. You may play it from bottom to top over one, two, three, four, even seven octaves, 145

but it begins on C at the bottom and stops on a C on top. If you play it for one octave, it starts on one C and ends on the next one, going up: CDEFGABC. You can play it up and then down. You can either repeat the top note or just play it one time, the latter being more usual. So its a highly specified activity. And theres more, much more, within the whole western tradition. When youre playing a scale youre traversing this route from bottom to top and top to bottom, usually with a turnaround that involves playing the top note only once, ascending to and then back down from it. A scale is to be played evenly, which is to say that one is to maintain as strict a steady pulse as is possible from one note to the next. Metronomes are often advised as accompaniment to insure a consistently even beat. A scale is fingered in one and only way, with the same fingers always used on the same notes, whether ascending or descending, and a principle provides a pretty general solution on how to play every scale. As Id say in a seminar:
Consider a C major scale, and the right hand only, which is good enough for our purposes:

We could of course use all of our fingers, including the thumb and finger is a tricky word - and we could play the scale by playing 1 2 3 4 5, then picking up the whole hand up, moving it over, and then playing 1 2 3, say. Then dogs could play the piano. Better to use the thumb to rotate with, since the keyboard was

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designed with this thumb in mind. We could just go up 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2, doing plenty of rotating which uses the thumb, but it seems a pity not to use the other fingers, and with just that option, well lobsters could play the piano. We could try 1 2 3 4 5, 1 2 3, not picking the whole hand up, but turning the thumb under the pinkie. But thats a pretty tricky reach to do comfortably, what with your thumb being shorter as it is, and if it werelonger - well who knows the problems wed have. So turn the thumb under the third finger, and under the fourth finger. If you play a C major scale in one octave, do this

and if you play it over two octaves do this.

Always turning under the third and fourth fingers going up, and bringing the third and the fourth fingers over the thumb, going down. Use the fifth finger only when you end the scale on the top, if the fifth is the next finger. Thinking of just the right hand, as we are and which is good enough, this is the fingering procedure, up and down one or two octaves, which is used on the C, D, E, G, A, and B scales. F presents a different problem:

because its fourth note is black. So, following the general rule of thumb, its fingered 1 2 3 4 1 2 3, 4, ending up on the fourth finger, instead of the fifth (unless you go up farther). All scales that begin on black notes (five) follow this rule: start with the index finger on the first note, then use the fingers in order until you come to the first white place in that scale, which you put your thumb on. Then you follow the 123 1234 123 1234, or 1234 123 1234..pattern for the rest. Its not hard to see that 123 1234 123 1234, or, 1234 123 1234 123 describes the fingerings for all twelve scales, the only exception being the opening moves, starting the five scales beginning on black notes with the

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a 2, instead of 1.

When you practice your scales, you dont just go up and down one of them. In the typically institutionalized world you generally play all twelve of them, up and down over a bunch of octaves (using both hands at the same time, the left having its obviously opposing and orderly fingerings). Sometimes you play them for some moments. There are musicians known to play them for hours each and every day. And many who are known to rarely play them at all. But all of us learned them. It was no more optional than learning to say please and thank you. Please, and Thank You, have significant uses. It gets risky to try getting about much in the world of others without them. But since the performance of scales only produces increased facility in playing them well as their singular and unequivocally demonstrable result, and the sounds of them are enough to drive you crazy, their mandated imposition can be considered just that. An imposition.

now comes the demonstration that scale movements are nonmusical, actually among the worst ways to involve the hand for making music, and their purely ritualized teaching/learning context will be demonstrated and specified. then onto more and more procedures and more and ethnomethodology 148