Validation and Gratification

This afternoon (Friday), after a long week of teaching – I wasn’t sure I had the energy to go back to the school building and teach an extra piano lesson to Saritha, one of my 11th graders who needed a make-up lesson. My headache almost convinced me to cancel and take what I would refer to as a ‘well-deserved’ nap.

I thought about Saritha’s last lesson. We had worked for one solid hour on just three measures of music. It was a lesson that would have made me cry, had I been in her shoes….and I HAVE been in her shoes. Any musician can recall at least one lesson where their frustration at the page of music and at themselves brought them to tears. I would say it’s a rite of passage for any student. Saritha hadn’t cried, although her brow was perpetually wrinkled as the metronome kept clicking and we kept trying over and over and over. As her teacher, I felt two conflicting feelings. First, I wanted to ease her pain and move on to an easier section…why, I asked myself, does she come to my piano lessons after all – to express her feelings and reduce stress through music? Or to hold herself to perfection’s standards and want to pull her hair out in the process? But secondly, my eyes were nearly tearing up themselves as I realized what I was experiencing – in front of me sat a student who didn’t want to move on to an easier section. She had gotten to that stage of being a pianist where you no longer wish you were NOT practicing and instead out and playing with your friends….you knew the value of a hard practice session. You knew that the music you were working on was worth it. You knew that even if you wanted to cry, you’d get through it.

So thinking about where we left off in our last lesson, I decided that my nap could wait and I headed to the school building. Saritha is the definition of soft-spoken. Her voice is soft, her smile is gentle, and she reserves most of her words for before and after lesson – though even then, I rarely get more than a shy smile and a nearly inaudible “Thanks, Allegra” on her way out. So you can imagine my surprise when I walked in the music room and Saritha said “I got it.” She already had the metronome on and was poised to play those same three bars we had toiled over. And there it was – she had it perfectly. I was ecstatic for her, and started to say something about how amazed I was and she quietly interrupted me and began to tell me about how she had worked again on this passage alone in her practice time and it was from this very passage that she first “learned to concentrate.” She told me how her mind wanders a lot naturally, and having to work on this piece of music taught her how to truly focus. Then she went on to tell me about how she applied her newly found concentration skills in her Economics class. She said she prepared so well for her quiz and she’s pretty sure she’ll get a perfect score. I was speechless. Not only was I so proud of her and shared in her joy as a fellow pianist, but I let myself have a quiet moment of validation and gratification in my heart of hearts. THIS is it. THIS is why I’m halfway across the world trying to teach piano in rural India. I always fight my nagging question – “How is teaching piano going to REALLY help these children from destitute circumstances succeed in school and in life?” and Saritha is my answer.

Apparently, it’s possible for an afternoon to get EVEN BETTER than that. After our piano lesson which lasted an hour and 15 minutes (they’re usually 30 mins) – my other piano students came into the music room for our weekly Theory Class which is another name for My-Favorite-Class-of-All-Time. Today, I had planned, we would talk about Dominant Seventh chords. For those of you non-music readers out there – these chords are awesome. I STILL remember when I first learned about them. They’re chords whose whole purpose in life is to make music satisfying to listen to. They are built of harmonies that in their very nature lead us to yearn for other harmonies. Tension and release. It’s all about tension and release – dissonance to consonance. So we all worked at the chalkboard, learning which notes in the dominant seventh chord are the notes that cause us to wish for a resolution. Then we went to the keyboard to pick out a few dominant sevenths and figure out which chords they resolve to. Kumar got to the piano bench and I had Shashi pick a key. He picked E-flat major. So we recapped – we’re going to figure out what dominant seventh chord leads to E-flat major. We counted up the scale to B-flat (the dominant of E-flat) and then built a seventh chord on B-flat. Then the class picked out the two notes that together form a dissonance that leads us to yearn for resolution – the leading tone and the fourth. Kumar played his B-flat dominant seventh chord loudly and clearly and was all set to resolve it to the E-flat chord when he accidently played the wrong chord instead. The whole class erupted in a mixture of laughter and pleading – the PERFECT reaction to a dominant seventh chord that isn’t properly resolved. Desperately yearning for the right chord, I saw a jumble of hands poking at Kumar’s hand trying to help him find the correct chord. When he found it, we all let out a sigh of relief.

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about – you can imagine my anxiety over this lesson plan. Are they going to understand the whole “dominant” and “seventh” thing? And the “leading tone” and “fourth” that have to “resolve” to the “tonic”? They did!!! So much so, that when I had Shashi bring out a piece he’s being working on with me (Solfieggetto, by C.P.E Bach) – to play a section that is a whole line of dominant sevenths resolving to other dominant sevenths resolving to still more dominant sevenths (leading the listener to expect resolution but never receiving it until the very end of the string of dominant sevenths) - Nikhil laughed and said “what a sly fellow” (referring to how clever it was of the composer to keep writing dominant sevenths and make the listener hold out for the resolution.)

Again, I ask myself – how am I so lucky to be the piano teacher here? What more could I possibly ask for?

Saritha stayed after class to clarify a question she had about dominant sevenths. I explained it to her and then showed her my favorite thing about a dominant seventh chord – when it resolves to a chord you don’t expect it to: the minor sixth chord. It’s one of the most beautiful chord progressions out there and when I played it for her, her face lit up. Then she said in her quiet, sweet voice: “Music is so cool.”