I want to be a functional pianist (and other things I want)

If you read this post all the way through I am going to both a) solve for education and b) analyze each of the Queens' songs in SIX, I hope at least one of those items interests you, so here we go:

Larry and I spent much of the weekend taking the idea of "what school could be" to its logical conclusion. We began with a kind of expanded Montessori, the idea that there could be a building with a bunch of rooms in it, and each of the rooms could have an expert practitioner, and kids could go from room to room and learn about whatever interested them.

And of course there would also be a kitchen, and some kids would be very interested in learning about food; there would be a store, and some kids would be very interested in learning about procurement and budgeting and other kids (probably younger kids) would want to organize and stack the boxes; there would be a creche, first for the sake of the parents and second because many kids are very interested in learning how to care for babies.

And there would be a gymnasium and a garden and a stage and a library, and the way kids would learn to read wouldn't have anything to do with sitting still and memorizing phonics, because phonics are only the second-best method of learning how to read. The best method is by dragging a book out of a stack and looking at it, and then having a parent or a librarian or an excited five-year-old (who just learned how to read) offer to read the book to you.

And then the next day you either pick a different book or come back to the book you already found, because pretty soon you're going to find a book you like so much that you want it read aloud to you over and over again, something about ballerinas or dump trucks, probably, and sound-sight-meaning make connections in your mind and BOOM, YOU'RE A READER.

And the next thing you're probably going to want to do is read that book to someone else, first to an interested adult and then to a two-year-old who is just as excited about ballerinas or dump trucks as you are, and so the technology gets passed along.

(And yes, obviously being able to read one book does not make you a fluent reader, you may just have memorized the text, but it'll get you to the next text and so on. You don't need me to explain how this works – or how it compounds.)

(Also, please take a second to consider the ideas represented by ballerinas and dump trucks. One is an integrated aesthetic physical mastery that also tells a story, and the other is an integrated technologic commandable instrument that also serves a purpose.)

So we built this school, mentally and in conversation, and we expanded it to include both adults and children, all are welcome, everyone can learn, and we realized that for this school to work, it would have to be a university. Maybe a city.

"Because you'd need somebody in the math room working at the absolute frontier of mathematics," I said, "and people could poke their heads in, kids and adults, and most of them would be bored or uninterested and they'd go into another room, but a few people would be interested and they'd want to figure out how to participate."

"And the person working at the absolute frontier of mathematics would have to stop what they're doing to teach them?"

"No," I said. "The person who wanted to learn would have to figure out the prerequisites on their own. They'd go to the library, for starters, and they'd start talking to other people to see who else was interested and what else they knew."

"Because the ultimate goal –"

"Would be to be so close to the frontier of mathematics that they could enter the room and assist the expert."

"Which brings us back to one-on-one teaching and learning."

"We should have known," I said. "Because the first thing we did was imagine a room in which a five-year-old read a book to a two-year-old."

The next thing Larry and I did was talk about the situations in which one-to-many worked, e.g. sports teams and orchestras and theater companies, and of course all of those people receive individual coaching as well, sooooooo.

And then we started talking about what we could do in a music room, if we turned our piano teaching program into just the music room part of this ideal school, what would that look like?

"Well, first of all," I said, "the only people giving the recitals would be the teachers."

"Or anyone who had learned something to the point at which it could be shared," Larry said.

You don't need me to explain that one of the reasons people find classical music boring is because it is being played, often poorly, by people who are bored. Making a recital a joyous celebration of discovery and sharing would change the dynamic of the experience, and it would also prevent children from spending ten years going through annual recital-shaped motions that neither they nor their audience enjoy.

"And of course people say that you need to teach kids how to do recitals so they can practice walking onto the stage and bowing," I said, "and a lot of people say the walking on the stage is what the kid is actually learning and the rest doesn't really matter, but the truth is that when a young person is ready to play a recital, in the old-school I am transitioning from apprentice to master sense –"

"You can teach them how to walk onto the stage in five seconds," Larry said.

Larry also came up with a very good and interesting idea of how music could be taught both dyadically and at scale, but since that is his idea and not mine I am not going to share it here.

(I don't know if you've figured it out yet, but Larry is one of the most brilliant people I've ever met [he says the same thing about me] and so he has at least as many ideas as I do and nearly as many projects, and they are his to share whenever he chooses.)

Instead, I am going to deal with the gigantic PROBLEM ON THE TABLE, which is that if I am a piano teacher I must give a piano recital, and the truth is that I don't want to.

Larry wants to learn how to master the greatest piano masterworks and he wants to learn how to teach other people to master the masterworks, both of which have to do with the projects he may tell you about later.

I want to be what I keep calling a "functional pianist," which is literally to say that I want to use the piano as an instrument that can be used to do other things.

Accompanying, for example. I love accompanying. I also got another organist gig recently, and I love playing that kind of music – the prelude that is meant to set a particular tone, for example, or the postlude that echoes one of the ideas in the reading or lesson.

I also love using the piano to compose, and with the work I'm doing on MELISANDE I get to write for two pianos as played by two characters, and although I understand that my compositional ability won't grow unless I literally feed it music, I tend to pull from other sources in snatches. How did Rachmaninoff structure his Suite No. 2 for Two Pianos, and what can I steal from that? What, precisely, is going on in every measure of the Prologue in INTO THE WOODS?

And then I was asked to play auditions for the local community theater's production of SIX: TEEN EDITION, and I knew that I'd need to prepare not only the SIX Queen songs but also be ready to play stuff like "Satisfied" and "No One Else" and selections from the Unofficial Bridgerton Musical (I keep wanting to write a post titled "Regretfully, Bridgerton" and I still may), and I could find internet-illegal copies of all of these tunes to practice with or, you know, I could figure out the chords on my own because they're not that hard.

Like, Aragon, "No Way," the hook is just I – bVII – bIII – IV – I.

And Boleyn, "Don't Lose Ur Head," is I – VI – IV – V – I (aka "Heart and Soul") with bVII slammed seven times (after an eighth rest) before you bounce back into the verse.

Seymour, "Heart of Stone," is –

okay, I gotta be honest, I have trouble remembering how that one goes –

I think it's also I – VI – IV – V – I????

And then Cleves, "Get Down," has a ton of stuff going on. You can go read Jack Viertel's The Secret Life of the American Musical to learn more about how these kinds of songs work not only on the individual level but also on the show level, Cleves gets to pack more information not only because she has more of a story to tell than Boleyn or Seymour but also because the audience is now prepared to hear it. They've learned the underlying musical language of the show and they're ready to expand upon the framework that has been established.

(Aragon, whose story is at least as interesting as Cleves', gets slighted in the show for the same reasons she gets slighted in life – which is to say, structurally.)

So "Get Down," I guess I have to deliver a chord progression on that one, there's an obvious repeated I – bIII – IV – V, but it isn't just a hook, they stretch it out, speed it up, reverse it, put everything in bIII for a while, keep swinging you back around to the "I'm the Queen of the castle, get down you dirty rascal" motive, the children's song, because they need to give you something to anchor on as they riff.

(This is the entire reason for me to have written this post. They need to give you something to anchor on as they riff. Because that's what I need to be doing in my own composition work.)

And then Howard is Doctor Doom. I – bVII – bVI – V. Arguably it's the introduction of the flat six that pushes us (and the show) towards its crisis, we go from Dorian to Ionian (with an occasional bVIII to remind us that it doesn't end well for Boleyn) to Ionian to Dorian to Aeolian, and I'd actually need to look at the individual notes of each of these pieces to confirm I'm right, remember my goal is to BE WRONG FAST AND FIX ERRORS FASTER, but at this point I'm ready to say that the flat six ruins everything, or at least ruins Howard, which reminds us (as an audience) that these stories and these women are real.

And then Parr brings everyone together. She has the most information of any of the Queens because she essentially has three songs, the last of which becomes a chorus number with the most complicated harmony we've seen, and sure, the hook is baaaaaaaasically I – IV – V – I but she's also the first queen to really sink into inversions and to have the internal notes and their progressions matter as much as the power chords (notice I haven't bothered putting major or minor in front of any of the other analyses, they're either power chords with no functional third or they're octaves) and this is dramaturgically because she is the most integrated of any of the queens, the whole piece works towards integration which is solved in this case not by the one but by the many, not by the single tone but by harmony.

And this is what I want to do when I get into my room in our fictitious school. I want to explain how this works.

I also want to make how it works.

But you already knew that. ❤️

(p.s. okay after listening to the album instead of trying to pull chord progressions out of my head, Aragon is I – bIII – IV – I, the flat seven is present but not in the chord structure, in this way divorced and divorced get to parallel each other which is interesting, also Howard doesn't ever get the descending Doctor Doom progression directly, she also goes up to a flat three, but the flat six is still the crisis.)

(p.p.s. Howard's crisis may be a flat two, not a flat six, I hear the flat six in my head but I'm filling in the fifths myself, the bass is I – bIII – II – bII so the fifth of bII in a power chord is bVI but why did I misremember this when I tried to actively recall it, also this puts us in Phrygian mode???)

(p.p.p.s. this is where I need to go back to the imaginary library in my fictitious school and pick up some for-real prerequisites, there are at least twelve rooms between where I am and where I want to be.)