Resisting the Race

my search for slowness

We live in an era of speed, with more information available at our fingertips than ever before. The pressure to do more and become more at an astronomical pace is pervasive, something that I have had to consciously resist in my teaching practice and in life.

In an effort to resist the race from concept to concept, level to level, I have an ongoing goal to add more slow and exploratory student-centered ways to my teaching repertoire. Students remember new topics when they are actively involved, and my teacher burnout level stays the lowest when I spend my time creating learning experiences rather than simply telling students what I want them to know.

Three topics consistently pinged on my “this is not working!” radar over the past few years: a sure sign that my lesson planning needed more thoughtful preparation of concepts. Using the metronome, making clefs and landmark notes more memorable, and fielding questions about how a piano works are three topics that I have re-worked my approach to, favoring a slower and more careful way of introducing them to students—and it’s working!

Preparing for the Metronome

Different uses for the metronome is an entire blog topic of its own, but my short philosophy about metronomes revolves around a single idea: the metronome validates what a student knows about steady beat but does not develop steady beat. With that in mind, I ensure that students are able to do a variety of movement and chanting activities that require them to keep the macrobeat and microbeat both alone and simultaneously before they ever see a metronome. I also have students tap the macrobeat while I tap its different divisions. Then, it’s time to think carefully about the student’s first experience with the metronome.

First, we take our time exploring what a metronome can do. It’s so often the outwardly simple things that involve more than meets the eye. Of course, the metronome keeps a beat. But where do the numbers come from? Which beat or note value does the click represent, and why? Do we only use the metronome to keep a beat? How do we actually listen to the metronome while playing? I never introduce the metronome without anticipating the questions students will ask and what they will naturally want to experiment with. Some discussion points and activities that are worth the time include:

• 60 BPM chimes exactly with the second hand on a clock; we set the metronome to that speed and watch the analog clock on the wall in my studio. We experiment with doubling that number (120 BPM), then cutting it in half (60BPM) and talk about what we observe. I want this to hint at the idea that the metronome can be set to the half note, eighth note, or other divisions and elongations of the beat. The sound can represent more than one thing!

• We tap common rhythmic patterns with the metronome set to adagio, andante, and allegro.

• We play a familiar piece with the metronome set to the quarter note at a comfortable tempo, then experiment with playing the same piece much slower and a bit faster than usual, still with the quarter note as the beat. As a stepping stone to playing with the metronome set to the whole note, half note, eighth note, and so on, I simply tap those values on their shoulder while they play.

• We tap rhythms from already-completed sight-reading cards with the metronome set to a comfortable tempo while counting aloud, then try this process with new sight-reading material.

We repeat variations of these activities for several weeks, taking the time to build students’ self-efficacy before students are assigned metronome work in at-home practice. The more confident students are in their ability, the more likely they are to practice it at home!

Exploring How a Clef Actually Works

I did not fully understand the underlying purpose of a clef until year one of music school. Suddenly, I had to read, sight-sing, and complete music theory assignments in new clefs (alto and tenor clefs) that I didn’t even know existed! This changed the way I thought about reading music and became a lasting influence on my pedagogy, especially when it comes to sequencing music-reading concepts and skills.

A clef assigns pitch and letter name meaning to the lines and spaces on the staff, assigning a particular pitch to one line or space and, by association, all the other lines and spaces (including ledger lines). To ingrain this in a creative way, students have been designing their own clefs—and it’s a deep-dive activity that I have found to be more than worth the time.

A clef in which middle C aligns with the handle on a saber.

A clef in which the high A (A5) line goes through the pistil of a flower.

This activity has resulted in so many “aha!” moments—even in students who have been reading on the staff for quite some time—that I plan to continue using it every time I introduce clefs. Student-designed clefs would also add a wonderful layer of complexity to our next sight-reading card swap, where students notate sight-reading exercises for each other.

Exploring What’s Inside the Piano
Students are naturally curious about how things work, including what’s inside of the piano and the pedals—and they ask a lot of questions about what each part does. It’s easy to feel rushed when students have a lot of questions. There is a lingering feeling of urgency to get straight to the music and spend as much time playing the instrument as possible, a remnant from my own experiences as a student and teacher in training. Rather than working against this curiosity, spending the time to lay a foundational understanding of how a piano works is worth it.

Allowing students to explore how an acoustic piano makes a sound very early in the lesson experience has become a cornerstone of my teaching philosophy. We take a peek at what’s inside the instrument; I open the lid and ask students to make as many observations as they can about the strings, hammers, dampers, pins, and anything else they notice. Students have been fascinated by the model piano action I invested in last year. Seeing the action from multiple angles and being able to feel all the parts helps students understand how their physical actions work together with the piano’s parts.

I’ve honed the language I use to discuss interacting with the piano mechanism: we don’t “press” the keys, we “strike” them to engage the machine inside; we don’t “hold” down a key, we “leave” our finger on the key, because once a sound is made, we can’t alter it, etc. These concepts are more easily understood, even by the tiniest of learners, when they can see and feel what I’m talking about.

Taking Time to Save Time?

The longer I teach, the more strongly I believe that slowness is one of the most powerful choices we can make, in the music world and otherwise. Taking time to explore, question, and interact with foundational concepts is an investment in lasting progress, ultimately allowing us to use time more efficiently in the future.

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Further Reading
A Long, Slow Look (on the blog)
In Praise of Slowness by Carl Honore

A Long, Slow Look

Using the practice of slow looking to tell musical stories

What is slow looking?

The phrase “slow looking” simply means taking intentional time to look closely at something. In her book Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation, Shari Tishman elaborates: “The term slow looking uses the vernacular of the visual, but it is important to emphasize that learning through prolonged observation can occur through all the senses” (Tishman 2). Unlike mindfulness, a state of being that also draws our focus to the present moment, we slow look with the intent to gain knowledge. Tishman’s book, bolstered by findings from her educational research, walks us through slow looking strategies and the positive impact slow looking makes in educational settings. Slow looking goes hand-in-hand with discovery learning, the process of learning through exploration and inquiry. Discovery learning is more engaging than a teacher explaining new concepts, and students better remember content when they construct an individualized understanding of the material.

Slow Looking in Action

Art is a natural setting for slow looking. Practice on the artwork below. You might ask yourself the following questions:

• What do I see? What do I think about what I see? How do I feel about what I see?

• What did I notice first? What did I notice after looking for a while?

• What words come to mind as I look?

• What more would I like to know about the artwork?

• Do small parts create the big picture?

• Does this remind me of something else?

• How do I think this artwork was created? Were elements added in a certain order?

Ruth Asawa, Desert Plant, 1965

Using Slow Looking as a Springboard for musical Improvisation

In a musical context, slow looking helps us understand the elements of music, their functions, and their purposes. Students train their brains to notice the layers and details that comprise a tapestry of sound. Slow looking lends itself well to two activities that have been met with enthusiasm in my studio: telling a story through music and improvising or composing new music using ideas from an existing piece. I’ve found that combining these two activities is an effective way to encourage students not only to listen slowly but also to improvise with less inhibition. By placing parameters—like improvising using rhythmic or tonal patterns we discovered through slow looking—students can improvise with clarity and confidence.

Part One: Introduction to a new piece

To encourage students to think about character and mood, perform a piece with the title hidden and have them guess what it might be about. Students use the practice of slow looking to find patterns and identify how the elements of music (e.g. melody, harmony, form, texture, dynamics) are at play in a given piece.

Next, we compare the title they brainstormed with the original title. It’s amazing how well students capture the essence of a piece! For example, “Floating,” “Dreaming,” “Soaring,” “Kite Flying,” and “Skating” are all common titles students give to “Gliding” by Elvina Truman Pearce. After thinking about the title, we learn the piece as the composer intended. Learning by rote is a natural opportunity for slow looking because listening is a crucial part of the learning process.

Part Two: Use the Title to Create a New Story

These are real-life examples from a recent lesson in which we studied “Gliding” by Elvina Truman Pearce. We slow listened to the piece to identify patterns and other characteristics, then learned to play it. In the following lesson, we did a creative activity.

I started by asking the following questions:

• Who or what is gliding?

• Where are they going? Why?

My student decided that Link from the Legend of Zelda was using his glider to travel to Kakariko Village to see Impa (another game character).

Then, I elaborated with these questions:

• Are they close, or in the distance?

• Does anything happen along the way?

• When in the music do they arrive at their destination?

The observations the student made through slow looking appeared in many of his answers. For example, he decided that Link was far in the distance because the piece started softly and that the dotted half-notes in measures 5-6 (see below) sounded like the giant footsteps of monsters.

Finally, we thought about what musical aspects we might change to fit the story. This is what the student added:

• he played mm. 5-6 loudly to signify the monsters

• he added a ritardando in the last measure to show that Link was slowing down and landing gracefully

Part Three: Use Patterns to Improvise and Compose

These are the patterns this particular student identified:

• The melody alternates between the CDE group on the white keys and a group of three black keys.

• C’s, D’s, and E’s (white keys) are played as single notes while the black keys are struck together.

• The melody always goes up.

• Each phrase sounds like one upward line.

• The hands work together to create the melody. Each hand is equally important.

The student then began improvising music by experimenting with note groups. I find that students are naturally inclined to create an “opposite” version of the piece they deconstruct. For example, this student began by playing the same melodic and rhythmic patterns but in a descending motion. From there, he more freely improvised using those patterns as inspiration.

The benefits of taking a slow look

Through her research on slow looking, Tishman identified four themes that appeared in students’ slow looking practices. Seeing with fresh eyes (interacting with the familiar as if newly discovered), exploring perspective (looking at things from multiple viewpoints), noticing detail (allowing observations to unfold from broad to specific) are three themes that deal with how students observed their surroundings. A fourth theme was philosophical well-being—students reported that slow looking reminded them of the important things in life. Students also noted that experiencing nature at a slow pace promoted a sense of well-being.

““When you look for a while, you become aware of how a thing might look to somebody else; you also become aware of your own lens...students come to an understanding of the multi-perspectival nature of knowing things in our world.” ”

— Shari Tishman

Perhaps most importantly, slow looking intensifies the extramusical qualities that music lessons instill: an appreciation of beauty, an awareness of oneself and others, the ability to problem-solve thoughtfully and deliberately, and a willingness to slow down and see the goodness that surrounds us.

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More Resources

Tishman, S. (2018). Slow looking: The art and practice of learning through observation. Routledge. 

Thinking Strategies that Support Slow Looking

The Art of Slow Looking in the Classroom

Out of Eden

Project Zero

In Praise of Slow by Carl Honore

Slow Looking by Peter Clothier

Slow Looking How-Tos by the National Museum of Women in the Arts

Untitled Goose Game and the Magic of Reactive Soundtracks

It’s a lovely morning in the village, and you’re a horrible goose.

That is, in a nutshell, the premise of Untitled Goose Game, a “slapstick-stealth-sandbox” puzzle game released by House House in 2019. The player assumes the role of a goose, who uses its limited physical abilities and the manipulation of objects within its world to unlock achievements—all of which involve pestering unsuspecting townspeople.

Le honk.

While the gameplay is relatively straightforward, Untitled Goose Game’s dynamic soundtrack offers an interesting take on music and mood. Rather than composing an original soundtrack, the game developers borrowed selections from Claude Debussy’s Préludes (which are now in the public domain). Elements of urgency, surprise, movement, and mischief are infused into the existing music by altering its tempo, pulse, volume, and register. Composer Dan Golding describes the creative process in an interview with Paul Dougherty of Zoneout:

There are two performances of every Prélude on the soundtrack – one version that is similar to how you’d typically hear the music performed, and another which is slower and has lower energy. Both of these performances are chopped up into about 300 to 400 short fragments, each between one and three seconds long, that are queued to trigger in order.

The game then chooses which of the two versions to trigger depending on what the player is doing. And if the player is doing nothing, the soundtrack remains silent.

The game is comprised of five settings within an English village, each featuring a Prélude: The Garden (Minstrels*), High Street (Les Collines de Anacapri), the Back Gardens (Hommage à S. Pickwick, Esq. P. P. M. P. C.), The Pub (Le serenade interrompue), and the Model Village (Feux d’Artifice).

The differences between the original Préludes and their modified versions are most pronounced upon entering each world, when the goings on in the game are still relatively low-energy. Minstrels, for example, has a sense of ambiguity achieved by exaggerating Debussy’s instructions to hold back (cédez, which translates literally as “give up”) after each four-bar phrase. Golding expands upon this by hesitating between each 5-1 movement in the bass line (Example 1), momentarily denying our ears resolution.

Example 1 Minstrels

Similarly, when comparing the standard Les collines d’Anacapri to its in-game counterpart, the most obvious adaptation is the tempo, which Golding has dramatically reduced. The register has been altered, too. The opening figures have been raised an octave in some instances and lowered by an octave in others. The cumulative result is a contemplative mood reflective of a sleepy village yet to endure the goose’s undoing.

Example 2 Les collines d’Anacapri: changes made to register in Golding’s low-energy interpretation are marked in red.

The phrasing in Golding’s low-energy interpretation is, in places, nearly inverse of the original. The first climax (m. 21) is treated as more of an afterthought than a point of arrival, trailing away in both pulse and volume (not unlike a distracted goose). The dotted-sixteenth thirty-second motive (seen in m. 17 and throughout the piece), on the other hand, is voiced more emphatically than is typical, lending a sense of playful clumsiness (also not unlike a distracted goose).

Example 3 Hommage à S. Pickwick, Esq. P. P. M. P. C.: m. 17 shows the dotted-sixteenth thirty-second note motive that recurs throughout the piece; Debussy’s instructions for the climax in m. 21.

Le serenade interrompue: A Deep Dive

Le serenade interrompue, aside from a relaxed tempo, remains relatively unchanged until measure 62, when a caesura is added before a syncopated melody begins. Meant to imitate a Spanish guitar—Debussy’s instructions state quasi guitarra, or “like a guitar”—the texture and articulation suggest strumming (mm. 21-23) and plucking (the ostinato beginning in m. 25). However, when performed under tempo with a heavier articulation, the ostinato becomes bumbling and pervasive (again, not unlike a distracted goose).

Example 4 Le serenade interrompue, with a strummed texture in the first system and a plucked texture in the next system.

This Prélude is perhaps the most overtly programmatic of those used in the game’s soundtrack. It tells the story of one lover serenading another—but with interruptions that come not only through abrupt, brief changes in harmony and dynamics (mm. 46-49), but also through prolonged changes in style (mm. 80-84, and again in mm. 87-89). The longer “interruption” passages sound like background music within the musical world: yet another thing with which the guitarist must compete. In the context of the game, another layer of storytelling is added through the interrupting goose. Even without modifications, Le serenade interrompue tells a story.

Example 5 Le serenade interrompue: The harmony changes abruptly from an acoustic collection (-3) to unrelated half-diminished chords, which might be interpreted a few different ways (that is beyond the scope of this blog post). Nonetheless, measures 46-47 are a clear interruption—not only through harmony, but also through volume and texture.

Example 6 Le serenade interrompue: Measures 80-84, clearly in D major, feature a march-like style not seen in any other section of the piece—the guitarist is competing with other music within his world. His sentiment toward this more prolonged interruption shows in mm. 85-86, marked Rageur (furious). Golding’s interpretation places this interruption two octaves higher.

While exploring the individual alterations to each piece is interesting, it’s the instantaneous change in affect enabled by the juxtaposition of the altered and original versions that make the magic of the soundtrack. The player never hears the same combination of versions twice during gameplay.

Though Debussy’s Préludes seem to have been chosen for the soundtrack by chance, the way Debussy handles titling the compositions makes them a striking fit for a reactive soundtrack. Although Debussy gives interpretive instructions on the score—sometimes using standard musical terminology, but sometimes using descriptive phrases unique to a particular Prélude—no title is revealed until the end of the piece. This allows the listener to subjectively submerse themselves in the melodic, harmonic, textural, and even timbral elements that Debussy combines to create a soundscape. What we ultimately find to be titled Le serenade interrompue (“The Interrupted Serenade”) may have evoked different images for different listeners.

What does a terrible goose have to do with piano pedagogy?

I have always found movie and video game soundtracks to be of pedagogical value, especially if they are already of particular interest to students. What can we learn from reactive soundtracks? These are some thoughts that came to mind as I compared the Untitled Goose Game soundtrack to standard performances of the Préludes:

• What effect does register, specifically, have on mood? Could students create a sense of atmosphere using only one pitch in different registers? This might be a great starting point for students who are overwhelmed by improvising.

• What elements do composers manipulate to create different moods?

• How would the mood of a piece change if we played certain elements—dynamics, articulations, tempo markings—oppositely? Taking a trip to what my young students and I call “Opposite Land” can also be a good way to make students more sensitive to a piece’s intended markings.

• How do we know what a piece could be about without using the title as an influence?

It’s worth noting that we can give any piece the “Debussy treatment” by covering its title and having students imagine what the piece might be about—then compare their title to the original one. We can also turn any piece into the soundtrack to a story we create ourselves. Sonata-Allegro form, with themes of contrasting affect in the exposition and harmonic exploration in the development, lends itself especially well to storytelling. In smaller-scale teaching pieces like sonatinas (or other forms that don’t typically have imaginative titles) we might:

• Associate dynamic levels or major/minor sonorities with a particular character.

• Imagine different characters for the right and left hands.

• Use formal sections to guide the story.

Storytelling through music is a topic of its own, but I found it impossible to discuss a reactive soundtrack (music to fit an ever-changing story) without at least touching upon the pedagogical tool of narrative (creating a story to fit music).

Although the soundtrack to Untitled Goose Game happens to be classical, I hope that this blog post provokes some thought about the value of video game music—in the Western classical tradition or otherwise—and its potential as a creative tool.

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* Debussy’s Minstrels alludes to minstrelsy (defined by Oxford Languages as the form of entertainment associated with minstrel shows, featuring songs, dances, and formulaic comic routines based on stereotyped depictions of Black Americans and typically performed by white actors with blackened faces). This is no doubt problematic, and it’s necessary to discuss how to handle repertoire like this. An obvious option is to boil the piece down to its technical components and select a different piece with similar pedagogical concepts. Another option for Debussy’s music, specifically, is to give the student power over the piece by having them listen to it and create their own title. Since Debussy placed the title of each Prélude at the end, taking such liberty is not only appropriate, but encouraged. I usually choose the former.