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To: Carolyn who wrote (2793)	4/7/2005 10:45:58 PM
From: SI Bob	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 4895

Shhhh... I've been trying to get her to practice less. Practice makes perfect, but over-practice can get in the way. Something I learned at a "Train the trainer" event this past weekend (for the driving schools at which I instruct) really applies here and I've shared it with her. There are 4 levels of competence: Unconscious Incompetence Conscious Incompetence Conscious Competence Unconscious Competence At the training session, they used a first time road-course driver as an example of the first. We all know how to drive. We arrive at a race track often believing ourselves good drivers. We don't know we're incompetent, until we make the first step up the ladder; realizing how good we aren't Then there's the advanced driver, who drives really well and really is focused on it. Then there's the instructor-level driver who doesn't have to really think about it. He just does it. She reached a point of Unconscious Competence with her solo which meant not only that she could play it without giving it a lot of thought, but if she started thinking too much about it, thought would get in the way and take her down a notch in competence. And that was happening for a while. This time, though, her chops had simply phoned it in. Musically and technically, she was just fine. But there were perhaps 20-40 notes (this song is mostly 16th notes and very fast) she simply didn't play. Instead, she was only able to blow air through the horn. Awful case of cottonmouth. Personally, I don't think it was nervousness so much as the fact that we had Chinese a couple of evenings ago and she really never did get completely rehydrated. I've been drinking a lot of water and I'm still parched. I've never seen her so inconsolable. She was crying her eyes out as soon as she got out of the room. To her credit, though her first mistakes happened just a few measures in, she kept going, and walked out of the room professionally before losing it. She finally started drying her eyes a bit when her band director told her "No, you didn't play it perfectly. But you know what? It was still pretty darned good!" By her standards it was awful. By our standards. We both blew it. Her chops just weren't along for the ride at all, and the piano I was playing, though new, had the heaviest action I've ever felt. Terribly sluggish. Took massive effort to get the keys down, and they were slow coming back up, which is pretty tough to deal with when playing something so aggressively fast. To use an analogy, though I'm not the Michael Schumacher of piano playing, it's like Michael arriving at one track and using his normal car, then arriving at another and he's got to drive a Corvette, then at another he's got to drive a Hyundai. This piano was a Hyundai when it came to performance. The kind you'd rent for a beginning student. Not the kind you'd expect someone to play a difficult piece on. At least we get to go to State now. And at State, they don't mess around when it comes to the pianos being provided. Oh, and the poor thing had to suck it up and go right back in 10 minutes later and play her trio. She couldn't hit her high notes in it. Just air. It was obvious she was totally shot. The trio got a 2. They might've gotten a one, but for about 20 measures the second trumpet player was wrestling with a stuck first valve. I think the judge would've overlooked her not hitting the high notes since she'd just finished an aggressive piece with a lot of high notes in it. Although I told her afterwards that if she has any doubts about the high notes, it's far better to drop down an octave than to risk having nothing come out of the horn. Judges are very unforgiving when it comes to the kind of equipment failure that's a sign of the instrument being neglected, though. They're more forgiving when it's obvious you know the piece you're playing and you left your chops at home. And the fact that her mistakes NEVER caused her to miss a beat or a cue (even cues it was difficult for me to get right because of the equipment I was working with) bought her a LOT of leeway. It turned out the pieces are assigned 4-digit numbers with the first digit being a 1 through 5, with 1 being the most difficult and 5 being the easiest, and she was one of the few whose song started with a 1. And when a sophomore plays one of the most difficult pieces on the list of pieces they're allowed to play, they're cut a bit of slack for that, too.