Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Reflection by Andrew Eales
Running across the fields, the sun shining on the horizon, the world is ours. Until we run out of breath, that is. As Ian Bogost puts it,
“Play cultivates humility, for it requires us to treat things as they are rather than as we wish them to be.”
Bogost’s book Play Anything (2016) is a rich feast of insight. Even so, the above statement stopped me in my tracks when I first read it, and you may want to take a moment to read again and ponder his point.
The Secret of Contentment
Let’s start with a bucket and spade. My efforts at building sandcastles as a child, and later in life as dad to two wonderful children, were never hugely successful. They were, if anything, a levelling reminder of my limitations when it comes to making stuff.
But even had my labours culminated in an edifice worthy of Sir Christopher Wren, the sandcastle would still have been swept away by the incoming tide, barely witnessed, a reminder that our greatest successes are transitory and best enjoyed in the moment.
Nevertheless, PLAY leaves an indelible stamp in our memories. My recollections of building sandcastles are happy ones, undiminished by any misplaced sense of ‘failure’ or inadequacy. And this strikingly illustrates the difference in our experience of activities we engage with as PLAY and those where a more competitive attitude kicks in.
PLAY elevates the ordinary, transforming it into something extraordinary, and genuinely special. Through PLAY, we can create our own magical souvenirs of unforgettable moments, experienced deep within the folds of the mundane, as fleeting in our experience as a sandcastle, but as enduring in our hearts as the ocean, land and sky that framed our seaside escapade.
Watch the news any day of the week, and you might wonder whether humankind’s downfall will come about because of our self-importance, greed and over reach. But PLAY can yet be our redemption.
Through PLAY, we can reappraise our lives and rediscover true wonder in place of self-importance. We reach for the stars, but remember our feet are firmly on the ground. We observe with curiosity and enjoyment, rather than striving to take possession of what is not rightly ours. We chance upon solutions to problems which we have as yet barely identified.
PLAY offers us perhaps our most radical and empowered avenue for learning. The lessons we glean from inquisitive moments of ‘just messing about’, doodling and idling, can sometimes impact us far more powerfully than our formal education in its many forms.
What about playing the piano?
Here too we have the ability to reject the competitive, ego-driven pursuit of certificates and trophies, and instead espouse an educational approach that is fuelled by PLAY, and brimming with awe and fascination for the immense and truly astonishing piano repertoire.
Admittedly, I have not always followed this better pathway myself. But with maturity, and having worked with and supported thousands of students and players over these past three decades, I have become ever more convinced that we desperately need to put the PLAY back into playing the piano.
Because as Bogost goes on to say,
“If we let it, PLAY can be the secret to contentment.
Not because it provides happiness or pleasure, although it certainly can, but because it helps us pursue a greater respect for the things, people, and situations around us.”
Approaching our piano journey with a spirit of PLAY, a doorway opens to the greater respect for music that it undeniably deserves. And in doing so we can all indeed find greater contentment at the piano.
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