There are too many things in life that I love which made me take the decision not to travel 200 days every year just playing concerts. I have a cat, Lila, that can’t stay by herself. I have a wonderful girlfriend and two kids that need my attention and help. We had a puppy called Gita, which recently was hit by a car and died, that we miss a lot and we all are waiting for the right moment to take care about a new puppy. That’ll be another reason not to travel too much.
Gita
Fortunately I also love teaching and that makes me able to stay in the same place, to have a house where my whole family can stay together taking care of each other.
I had a few teachers in my life that made a big impression on me. They helped me a lot to develop my technique and gave a good deal of inspiration. This gave me the basic structures to become a pianist, but after I finished my diploma examination I still not had the feeling of trusting myself in many layers of my musicality. Therefore I moved to live by a fjord in the west of Norway. There I could experiment with my musicality, doing whatever I wanted. I could conduct, arrange music, compose and play all sorts of music. I was not part of the official music world. I lived in my own dimension where I created my own thoughts about music.
One of my first insights there was that it was not enough to practice eight hours every day. I needed to work with myself from inside to be able to express the meaning of the music I studied. What you usually study in the conservatory, and also with me, is technique, history around the composers, pitch and syntax of music. That is great knowledge, but not enough to express music from your inside.
On the way to find my own musical expression and the balance and trust in myself that I needed in different situations as a musician, such as teaching and concerts, I received a lot of help from consultations on psychomotoric development. This helped me to digest all the information I gathered during my life. From that, I have worked out my own philosophy around teaching.
Lila
Teaching music can be a magic situation. The fact that most instrumental teaching is an interaction between the teacher and only one student makes it different from other teaching situations. Since the teacher can give all his attention to only one person the interaction can be very personal if the student trust the teacher. The teacher is then able to help the student to dig deeper inside in order to learn how to find his own expression, how to trust it and develop it. And if they desire to walk that way, it’s something they can explore for the rest of their life if they take the decision and make the necessary effort to grow also as human beings.
The music most classical instrumentalists play today has survived centuries and thus proved its qualities and abilities to grow with the time. You can even spend a lifetime studying the same masterpiece finding new ways of playing it all the time, but there has been created rules for how to play the music written down by Mozart, Beethoven and other masters. How can that possibly work with something that grows with time? The musicians that we want to listen to and that we admire are instrumentalists that have the ability to bring out the eternity of this music. The interpretation of a piece following a recipe can for that reason only be the beginning of the process.
In my teaching I therefore try to find what is unique in every student and then helping them to be conscious about this quality until they are on the right way to walk towards their own expression. This is like scrolling of the layers of an onion until you arrive at the core. For the teacher it’s necessary to put away his ego since it’s important to nourish the seed inside of the student and to take care and support its growth. The teacher may inspire, show solutions and work in any way he wants but at last the student only needs to keep the information that makes his seed evolve.
“Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work.”
Søren Kirkegaard
There can be many ways to help a student to “clean” all the information he receives and to make it his own property. One can e.g. use a more dynamic way to approach a new piece. A pianist needs to coordinate three senses in order to be able to learn a piece of music. He uses the vision to learn the tones and the score of the music, feeling to transform what he sees to a movement and the hearing to hear the result. There may be different obstacles that prevent a student from organizing all three in a successful way. There might e.g. be a difficulty to look the score and the fingers at the same time. Then it can help to slow down the tempo so much that the student is able to orientate himself on the keys without let go of the score until he is confident with the piece or even has learnt it by heart. This makes the student not just memorize the tones but also includes the whole body to learn also the movements and feelings. Another problem can be that the student in a physical performance of a passage, has difficulties to really hear the result because of its technical difficulty. Here the teacher should bring back the focus to the musical expression and form so that the student can balance the relation between the physical feeling and the hearing. These are just a few examples to show that the student doesn’t need to lose his expression on the way to learn a new piece.
“One man may practice daily on a musical instrument and fail to make any progress, while another shows daily improvement. Perhaps the nature of the talent that is the accepted explanation for this divergence of achievement derives from the fact that the second student observes what he is doing while he plays while the first one only repeats and memorizes and relies on the assumption that sufficient repetition of a bad performance will somehow bring about musical perfection.”
Moshe Feldenkrais
This is where the psychomotoric development helped me. Because when I started to look at the conversation that was going on in my mind while trying to practice I found out that it was quite judging and destructive. This constrained both my musical and technical development. This was a striking discovery for me. And now, when I teach in the university I meet far too many students that are stuck in the same kind of destructiveness. Since I took the choice to work myself out of this damaging pitfall I easily can detect any kind of similar withering with someone else. From there it’s just to make the student conscious about it and that very often awaken the urge to remove the condition.
The nice thing with this way is that it’s a way to learn how to practice. Because practice is what all musicians do all the time. When you’re eventually on the right way you can develop your practicing technique in whatever way you like and find the path that suits you the best. You will also be able to teach this since it’s a conscious development.
Did I mention that I have a Siberian dwarf hamster too?
Pompom
