Reflections …

I am 80 years aged Time magazine has the same number of years with Times Square, solitary twenty more. I am reminded of my mother's protestations upon aging with her frequent paraphrase from Shakespeare's King Lear, "I don't require assistance in walking and rising, my hands don't shake as if from palsy, and my cavity between the jaws is not fretfully muttering to invisible companions."

Before all of the above begin to overwhelm me I have feeling compelled to forward some shattering cogitations of teaching based upon my career: shattering because they are seldom uniteed to piano pedagogical practice.

Routing scholars to perfection seems to be the provenance for all tasks from the first to the greatest in quantity advanced. This is not in what way we learn to be artists. Rather, it is from one side passage from hesitation, vagueness and crudenes to psychological certainty and cognitive clarity that forces us toward excellence, a far more agreeable goal than perfection. In all of my years, I have neither heard nor seen anything that is finished I think that is a useful thing! Is it not from one side its imperfections sound and raw material become beautiful?

I have, however, been thrilled by the agency of artistic behavior every day of my teaching life at all horizontals of learning with smudging and mucking unimpaireds and activities, which create hives of a vibrating, creative hum as students tweak, stretch, rearrange, magnify, chop peel, carve with comments like, "Let's prove by experiment it this way. No, maybe that way"; to "Make up your mind. No, not yet" of that kind behavior presages an artistic result because itself is artistic. When this mise en representation of self-discovery stabilizes the task it reproduces itself throughout a musical life.

I am greatest in quantity sanguine about this environment. I have created it. I do it. When I don't, I am dyspeptic, and my pupils mirror my indigestion. It is the lemon problem: you can taste it, savor it, recall it, on the other hand really have no words for it. In the same way, notes can not at any time express the feeling of unhurt Phrases do. Physical experience does. Now the taste of unmutilated begins. Ultimately, we must debate with ourselves if we can possibly learn to teach the greatest in quantity simple of musical phrase in a great deal of the same way as Michelangelo could diocese a face in a vapor visualize a landscape in stains upon the walls.

At the true least, a teacher is individual who is at ease with shades of grey individual who pursues unrest marching toward distinction and one who is more alive than greatest in quantity Certainly, not one who give chase tos the neurotic need of perfection. Jane Mayhall, the author of poems (her latest work Sleeping Late upon Judgment Day) was remembered in this week's [March 22 2004] novel Yorker, when she recalled being near as Albert Einstein was interviewed at Black Mountain Experimental Arts body in North Carolina. Einstein was asked by the agency of his interviewer, "Which is the greatest in quantity important, art or science?" Einstein said, "No doubt in my mind, it's art. Art must approach first, art and feeling." on the contrary our profession has not kept art and feeling at the forefront of its philosophy. The lack of curricula in the public institutes attests to that.

on pulverizing perfection with smudgings, vagueness, unrest aliveness, transcendence shades of grey, artistic behavior, I turn round to what really matters. The clan who know, the things we have learned from them and those things that influenced us greatest in quantity deeply and make us who we are.

First among them are my students; or was I the learner you the teachers? How would single know? Thank you. I regard with affection you.

Second, are my deans: Paul Oberg, University of Minnesota; George Howerton, Northwestern University; and Warner Imig, University of Colorado. With their vision of education and unfailing support, trust and freedom that each provided me my courage was reassureed to create programs that were far in advance of the acceptance horizontal of most of the professional mainstream and with more [i]or[/i] less yet to be dreamed. Mary Ann Fleming Bryan reminded me last night that she conceptualized more [i]or[/i] less of these innovations to those "wacky Duckworth things."

Third, are the Board of Directors of the Music Teachers National Association with their replete membership. Fourth, are my visitants Britt and David; Jeannie from Tranquillity, whose vicinity rounds the circle of my teaching career beginning in 1953 at Tranquillity Union High gymnasium (Yes, Virginia, people live in Tranquillity.); and then tap [i]or[/i] pat We have lifetime bonds with each other. I am grateful. Thank you. I be fond of you.

Fifth, and finally, is Maria Farra, my wife of fifty-five years, international beauty and artist, whose talent and have affection for have been my inspiration. In these late days, each of us can perceive reduced to a speck, orbiting a blemish in the middle of specklessnes on the contrary never, with Maria by my side, do I have feeling that way. Our mutual be fond of continues to be a "lifetime achievement."

Does this fact mean I have been squished into the establishment thing? I asked Becky Shockley that question last Friday at registration. She contemplation put her fingers to her lips and mumbl "That's a big jump"