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On Teaching

December 3, 2014
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Spring break

This month’s column is, in a way, a lark or a diversion. It is a winter visit from next spring or from last summer. I am writing about, of all things, my golf game. I am doing this not really—or not entirely—as a break from writing about organ teaching, but because I believe that I have learned a lot about teaching, as well as about my own playing and performing, from my involvement with golf—an involvement that means a lot to me: nearly as much as my involvement with music. My forty-year golf project has served as one of my best teachers, alongside my “official” music teachers, my students, and my colleagues. These are a few brief thoughts—a column’s worth, among many more—about some of the ways in which it has done that.

I should start by describing a little bit what I am like as a golfer—how “good” or “bad” I am. I do this in part so that it will be clear that when I talk about working on my golf game I am not in any danger of bragging: I am by no means very accomplished at golf. Even though I have been playing pretty seriously for decades, my best nine-hole score ever is 43, and I’ve only done that once or twice. During my best seasons, I have had scores right around 50—again for nine holes, which is half the full-length golf round of eighteen holes. (My best ever eighteen-hole score is 92.) Scoring in the upper thirties for nine holes or less than 80 for eighteen would usually be considered quite good, and someone who can do that fairly regularly is probably considered quite a good golfer. I have never accomplished either of those things. However, I have hit a lot of really good golf shots. In fact, some of them have been, for those who care about such things, quite beautiful. I have also hit a lot of really bad shots: more of those than of the good ones, in fact. 

I have a caveat: nothing that I write about my golf game, or any conclusions or lessons that I seem to be trying to draw from meditating on my golf game, is meant in the slightest to imply that anyone else should do anything in particular. I certainly don’t think that a person must play golf in order to develop as a teacher or as a musician. Not everyone likes golf, or would like it. And there are an infinite number of other activities that can be rewarding and challenging and that can inform aspects of a person’s life and work in way similar to what I am writing about here. However, I wouldn’t even assert that everyone—or anyone—should do anything analogous—that “everyone should have a hobby,” or anything like that. I am simply writing about an ongoing and complex experience of my own, and I am doing so because it occurred to me one day recently while on the golf course that it would be interesting to do so. 

 

Mental vs. physical

The first analogy between golf and music-making is that both are physical skills that are fundamentally mental. In music this is most true for keyboard playing, since with keyboard instruments the task is laid out for you in a concrete and specific way by the presence of the keys. (As Bach said, “There is nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right notes at the right time and the instrument plays itself.” That is, there is no need to create intonation or sonority with one’s own body.) The task of playing is, like the task of executing a golf shot, a set of physical gestures. In both cases, those gestures can be intricate, and the timing of them has to be right. In both cases this whole package can seem difficult. However, the difficulty is one of focus and concentration—once you basically know what to do—rather than this being physically difficult. (As, for example, the skills involved in gymnastics or figure skating or opera singing or violin playing might be—or, in another way, lifting weights or wrestling.) 

A short paragraph is not enough to discuss this thoroughly, as it applies to organ playing or other keyboard playing, or as it applies to golf. The point for now is that there is a balance between the need for physical skill or ability and the need to be in an appropriate mental state to execute that skill. This balance feels remarkably similar as it applies to playing a passage on organ or harpsichord and as it applies to executing a golf swing. 

This includes the basic question of how much it is possible to think consciously while playing/swinging, and the question of timing, not in this case the physical timing of gestures, but the timing of thoughts that lie behind those gestures. In making a golf swing this is essentially a one-part, or one-time, timing question. The swing is a thing that happens once, rather quickly. It contains a natural pause—after you have raised the club back over your head, and before you have brought it down to the ball—when you can briefly remember what you need to do to continue and complete the swing. Once the swing is over you can fully let go of concentration. It is a challenge not to let the conscious thought process cause hesitation during the brief period of the swing itself. In playing a piece at a keyboard instrument, those moments of possible conscious thought—with their attendant dangers, in particular the danger that the thought will introduce hesitation or distraction—are recurrent. They dovetail and overlap, and it is not safe to let go of concentration at any time during a piece. So, for me, the conscious and instant concentration during the golf swing is sort of a laboratory for working in isolation on a mental tool that I apply, in an ongoing way, at the keyboard. 

The need for physical relaxation while doing something difficult that also requires intense focus is uncannily similar in making a golf swing and in playing organ or harpsichord. The consequences of losing that relaxation are partly analogous, partly different. In the golf swing, a small amount of physical tension that develops during a swing will almost certainly lead to a really bad shot. Probably most or nearly all of the bad shots that I ever hit have this as their cause. (The tension literally pulls the golf club out of the path along which you think you are swinging it. So the club can’t hit the ball squarely.) In keyboard playing, physical tension causes a host of problems, including changing the feeling of a gesture in such a way that the hand (or foot) comes down in the wrong place, but also including slight changes to rhythm and, in some cases, the creation of a bad sonority. Again, with the golf swing, this relaxation has to be maintained through one gesture that takes a second or so. In playing at a keyboard, the relaxation has to be maintained longer. So the golf swing is a simplified but intense drill for what is needed while playing music. It is also a drill in which the consequences of getting it wrong are painfully obvious: a golf ball that bounces into the woods, or dribbles along the ground!

 

Relaxation and velocity

Related to the need for relaxation as such is the relationship between relaxation and velocity. There are benefits to a golf swing’s being fast. That is true both because a faster swing makes more powerful contact with the ball and sends it farther, and because in some cases the actual shape and direction of the shot—independent of the distance—can be right only if the club comes through the ball quickly. At the keyboard, we sometimes need to play fast: fast enough that it is a challenge. The first requirement for being able to execute a fast golf swing—or a fast keyboard passage or trill, for example—is that the physical gesture remain as relaxed as possible. And since there is a natural (if subconscious) correlation in our minds between the ideas “fast” and “strong,” and since it is very easy for “strong” to shade over into “tense,” it takes some doing to remember that lightness and relaxation lead to greater possibilities for speed: tension is a roadblock that slows things down. For me, the process of learning how to feel light and relaxed standing over a golf ball and how to recognize that that lightness actually gives me full access to the amount of swing speed that my body can create has been a helpful supplement to the work that I have done at the keyboard itself. 

This also applies to the role of breathing in the shaping of physical gesture, or in creating the conditions that allow a physical gesture to take place with relaxation and appropriate speed. There is always time to remember to breathe properly before initiating a golf swing. (You are always able to decide when you begin your golf swing yourself: there’s no clock, and no other player doing something to which you respond.) There is less time to remember to breathe properly once the swing has started, but it is possible to learn how to plan on doing so. Both of these elements are present in the act of playing a keyboard instrument.

So, in ways that include the ones that I have described, these two physical acts—physical skills—seem to have a lot of analogies to one another in the kind of mental work that they involve and in how the mental work relates to the physical act itself. There are also various interesting psychological or motivational connections or analogies. 

One of these concerns honesty. Golf occupies an odd position as regards honesty. On the one hand, the idea that golfers cheat is sort of legendary or axiomatic. There are jokes about it; it comes up in fiction and in commercials. At the same time, there is a tradition in golf of some of the purest and least self-interested honesty that is found anywhere. It is well known that golfers call penalties on themselves: that is, if they have accidentally moved a ball, or done something else that should be penalized according to the rules, but have done so where no one else can possibly have seen them, they report this themselves to their playing partners or competitors, or to officials, if it is an “official” situation, and accept the penalty. In many competition sports, players are expected to try to convince the officials that whatever they just did was whatever would have been to their—or their team’s—advantage. An outfielder who has just barely not caught a ball may try to signal to the umpire that he has caught it, or a base-stealer who was clearly thrown out will try to assume a posture and demeanor that makes him look safe. This is a bit like a system of courtroom advocacy, where each side’s job is to present their own case and the authority makes the judgment. But in golf, there is nothing at stake for anyone else. What is at stake for you is that you really, honestly know and acknowledge what you really, honestly just did. (And there is no authority.) If I, for example, swing at a ball that is partially buried in vegetation, and actually miss it, then, if I don’t count that stroke, I still know that I took it. As I look myself in the mirror later that day, saying proudly “I only took four strokes on that hard hole,” then, if I am not counting that missed shot, whatever I say, I know that I really got a 5. 

This kind of honesty that is really accuracy—honesty with yourself, for your own sake—comes up in practicing. You know whether you are practicing slowly enough; you know whether you have really gone over that passage enough times; you know whether the passage that you just played accurately really felt uneasy just below the surface; you know whether you just practiced a passage enough times in a row, but with different fingerings, so that the times through cancelled each other out. If you—or I—let these things slide, then we are only cheating ourselves—and we know that we are.

I have always been my own golf teacher. Or, more accurately, I have mostly tried to teach myself golf and to work on my swing and my game myself, with some input from people with whom I play. I have never put myself in the hands of a teacher. Why not? I have never been sure why not. It’s partly the high cost of golf lessons, partly just that I love being out on the golf course, and, when my schedule allows me to do something golf-like I always want to be out there playing. However, it is also something more than that. I like the challenge and satisfaction of analyzing the physical and mental aspects of something like the golf swing for myself: something about which I am not an expert, still less any sort of authority, but as to which I want to feel some autonomy and ownership. I would probably shoot lower scores if I went to a good teacher and did what that teacher told me. But I wouldn’t find it as deeply satisfying.

What does this tell me about my own work as a teacher? Again, I’m not sure. Not that I should dismiss all of my students and tell them that they would find their musical study more satisfying if they did it on their own. If they wanted to approach it that way—if it happened to fill that role for them, as golf does for me—then they wouldn’t be looking for lessons. However, it does remind me to respect my students’ need to feel involved in the process, to take as much ownership of the learning process as they can take and want to take, not just to sit back and do something that I tell them to do. In fact, this leads me to encourage (but not force) students in that direction, since I believe that many people come to lessons scared to direct their own work as much as they in fact could. 

 

Creating beauty

So, what is a “beautiful” golf shot? There is always a practical goal with a golf shot: to get the ball to some spot that has been chosen as best for rolling the ball into the hole in as few strokes as possible. A beautiful shot presumably has done a good job of achieving that goal. But for me it is more than that: it has to feel right—relaxed, focused, appropriately fast and strong; it has to sound right—a club striking a ball in the right way has a metallic, musical pinging sound; the shot has to have a pleasing shape. In fact, the shape of a well-struck golf shot was one of my own first models for what I wanted out of harpsichord sound: starting crisply, rising, curving, eventually falling—it’s a surprisingly close analogy. I do occasionally hit such shots, though not many. I hit more that are serviceable, that send the ball pretty much to where I wanted to send it, but without the pleasing shape. The beautiful shots are almost random, but not quite: I do know what I am trying to do, and I do know that when I do it, it is because I have succeeded at something quite hard. That is satisfying indeed. This also tells me something about my students. As they work on becoming “better,” on getting closer to achieving what they want with their playing, they can, along the way, do things with music that are as beautiful and as effective as what a more advanced or accomplished player would do—perhaps not as often as that player might do it. If they understand what they have done to make that happen, then they have learned something and can feel very good about it. 

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