“Yeah, right!” I muttered to my dad, kicking the piano bench yet again.
“I hate practicing scales for hours every day. I HATE it! I KNOW how to play scales… I play them ALL the TIME! Why can’t I just do what you do and play what I want?”
I was ten. My dad, in addition to being a cable car dispatcher, was a musician. He had been a jazz pianist in the 1960’s, but the really cool stuff he did was on the weekends. Every Friday and Saturday night we’d go to the Avenue Theater in San Francisco, where my dad would accompany silent movies on The Mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ. He’d sit down on the bench of that organ, keep an eye on the silver screen directly over his head, and play music that perfectly complimented the film and reflected the emotions on the screen… without any advance notice, in real time. By the end of the film, he had played the perfect score… and he made it up as he went along! As far as I was concerned, it was magic… and I wanted to be able to do it, too!
So, as soon as I could keep my balance and reach the keys, my dad started me on piano lessons. I was probably four years old. And at first, it was fun! I learned the notes, learned how to read music, and soon was working my way through volume after volume of John Thompson’s red music books while amassing an impressive collection of cat stickers for each song performed to satisfaction. (My piano teacher liked cat stickers.) I was quite content.
And then, my dad added a new book to the mix. A tan book I would loathe with every ounce of my being. “The Virtuoso Pianist,” by Louis Hannon. It was “Hannon” for short. As in, “Jeannel, did you do your Hannon?” or “Jeannel, you are not leaving that piano bench until you spend another hour on your Hannon!” You see, The Hannon was a book full of nothing but scale exercises. Page after page, volume after volume of scale exercises! So I moved from playing pretty little songs to playing redundant scale runs over and over and over again. You can tell from the candid camera moment my mom captured, I just LOVED me some Hannon! (Not.)
Under this new practice regimen, instead of remaining a magician in my eyes, my dad transformed into a tyrant… a despot forcing young girls (me) to slave away at the keyboard for hours at a time, torturing them with… more Hannon!
Which pretty much brings us up to the time of our conversation. And my dad breaking out of his tyranny for just a moment to talk with me about why I had to practice my scales. “The practice will set you free… to improvise.” I, as noted above, was skeptical. He continued:
“Being able to improvise means that you have got to know the fundamentals of your craft. No… it’s more than just knowing them… you’ve got to know them deep in your bones, and trust that you have that deep knowledge. Your body has to be able to play those scales without thinking… because once you no longer have to think about playing the specific notes or getting your fingers in the right place, it frees you up to create… to improvise. And you can do it, because you’ve built the body knowledge to support it… so your mind is free to imagine, explore, play, create. And THAT’s how I do what I do. So if you want to be able to do what I do, you’ll have to practice!”
And with that, he got up and left the room. You could feel the unspoken “so there!” hanging in his wake.
Rats! I turned back to the piano: Dah da da da dah da da da Dah da da da dah da da da…
Fast forward thirty years. The Avenue Theater has become an Armenian church, an arm injury put an end to my piano for the last decade or so, my dad passed away three years ago. And… I’m finally improvising those accompaniments like he did. Only instead of accompanying films on an organ, I’m accompanying group processes through graphic facilitation and recording. It wasn’t until just recently that I made that connection.
I have to admit that my dad was right: the practice DOES set you free.
Working visually, anything you need to draw can basically be made from a handful of basic elements: dot, line, triangle, square, rectangle, arrow, spiral, star and circle. The key is to practice drawing those basic shapes until you don’t have to think when you draw them – you simply do it.
Because when I don’t have to think about how to draw something – when I can trust that I have a basic set of shapes to draw from, that those are enough to create anything I need, and that I CAN draw them – I can be in the moment of the group process.
Instead of thinking about how I’d visually represent an idea (light bulb), or action (hollow arrow), or frustration (person with a dark squiggle coming up from her head)… I can instead focus my energy on listening deeply to the group, picking out the important content, seeing the patterns that emerge from this new piece of information, translating it into a visual, and capturing it on the paper in the moment. I get to create my own magic for groups!
My dad worked his magic through a keyboard. I work my magic through a pen… thank Hannon!
10/03/10 11:06 p.m.
Postscript – I’m currently reading a great book entitled Visual Meetings, by David Sibbert. Imagine my surprise when, after writing this post, I picked up the book and got to the part in the book where David describes almost the exact same experience! He wanted to learn how to be a jazz pianist and asked the music store clerk for his advice. What did that clerk say? “Practice your scales!” and tossed him a copy of the Hannon! Was that music store clerk my dad? If it was in San Francisco or Sausalito in the 1960s… who knows? (It certainly sounded like something he would have said!)
So David, from this newly-discovered place of common experience, this one’s for you! ; )
Dah da da da dah da da da Dah da da da dah da da da Dah da da da dah da da da Dah da da da dah da da da Dah da da da dah da da da Dah da da da dah da da da…
I cannot wait to see what you draw forth,
