Lessons in the Language of Sound

As a musical illiterate who used to think “legato” referred exclusively to a diplomat from Italy, I stand in awe of people who know their way around half notes and quarter notes, melody and counterpoint, crescendo and diminuendo (a short man from Italy?).

Somehow I contrived to avoid even the most rudimentary musical education. The inability to read words is said to be a kind of exile, and my musical illiteracy often has left me feeling similarly banished.

How exactly are people transformed from being like me to being like, oh, conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen?

In search of clues, I recently took myself to two San Fernando Valley music teachers who work different ends of the music-education spectrum. The idea was simply to watch them go about their work of making people like me extinct.

Janet Harms’ Encino living room, which overlooks a scenic swath of Valley floor, contains three pianos. For half the week, when Harms is teaching, the rest of the room’s furniture is pushed together behind a short, hand-painted screen.

In a row of tiny chairs facing Harms sat Lacey, Alexandra, Rowena, Melissa, Stephanie and Miranda, who range in age from 5 to 7 1/2. They tilted their faces and squirmed. They tugged at their leotards and bicycle shorts.

Harms, a 30-year veteran of teaching music to the distractible young, held up cards imprinted with symbols. The girls clapped and chanted nonsense sounds and note names to the rhythms that the markings indicated--”Tee-tieree-tieree- tee-quarter-two-eighths- quarter-quarter- tieree-rest-quarter. . . .”

There was a slight commotion from the Stephanie-Miranda end of the row. “Mrs. Harms, Miranda’s hitting me, and I wasn’t even smiling, and she’s laughing laughs, too,” Stephanie complained.

“Miranda, you have to keep your hands to yourself,” Harms admonished.

Next the children scrambled onto the thick rug for a round of “rhythm bingo,” in which Harms holds up a symbol, and the players place a chip over any matching symbol printed on their bingo cards. In time Lacey filled her card and shouted, “Bingo!” then correctly clapped and chanted back the symbols her chips had covered.

“Mrs. Harms,” called Miranda, “Stephanie is. . . . “

“Honey, we don’t have time for this. Do you want to play music games or do you want to talk about how Stephanie is?”

Miranda thought about it for a moment. “I want to talk about how Stephanie is.”

Harms sighed.

It was time for a little piano work. One at a time, the girls came to the keyboard. Harms arranged their shoulders square and molded their hands so that only their forefingers protruded to poke out notes.

Harms plinked out a three-note question, singing “How-are-you?” to which each girl answered, with three notes, “I-am-fine.”

Before their hourlong lesson was over, the girls worked on how written notes skip up and down the musical staff and on recognizing what differently valued notes--whole, half, etc.--sound like when played on the piano.

Afterward, they each received an M & M for their good work.

The teacher explained her methods.

“They’re not reading notes. They’re learning by rote at this point,” said Harms, who teaches children as young as 3. “Everything they see is musically correct, but it’s not necessarily explained. They internalize these rhythms without necessarily understanding them. That will come later.”

Over at Rosemary Carswell’s house in Canoga Park, it was already later, much, much later.

Fifteen-year-old Shirley Kim sat at one of two shiny, black baby grands in the practice room. Her head nodded profoundly, her shoulders rolled like a swimmer’s, her fingers arched and struck snake-like as they buried themselves in Chopin’s leaping Etude, Opus 25, No. 1.

Nearby, Carswell sat at a card table set with a mug of finely sharpened pencils, points up, and a glass of ice water. As Shirley played, Carswell watched intently and made pencil notations in a loose-leaf notebook.

“Try practicing it slowly,” Carswell said as the last measure of the etude dissipated into the walls and ceiling. “Then, turn around and speed it up, and still try for more legato line. Rivers and rushes aren’t going to help this, and staccato practice isn’t going to help it, either. What’s the loudest dynamic mark in it?”

Shirley checked her sheet music. “Forte,” she said.

“Not fortissimo, and you’re at fortissimo. Part of it is nerves. When you’re nervous about something, you cannot make the soft tones. You get much more aggressive, and your muscles tense up. You lose the sense of legato.”

Shirley, a high school sophomore, is a prodigy. She’s been practicing piano 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 hours a day, seven days a week, getting ready for an important recital. Her casual teenager’s dress--old, black sweater, blue jeans, shoeless white sweat socks--belied the ferocious concentration with which she filled the room.

For two hours, she worked over the etude, Bartok’s Dance Suite, Beethoven’s 32 Variations and Chopin’s furious Scherzo in B minor. She played sometimes flawlessly and sometimes uncertainly, repeating one phrase of the Beethoven 60 times until she began to draw from it the shape her teacher sought.

Carswell alternately sat, stood and walked around her student, tossing her head in sympathy with the music. She flicked Shirley’s leg when she wanted a lighter touch on the pedals. She reached past her to demonstrate precise technique on the keyboard.

“There were about 10 places where you were too loud, so find places to be soft,” she said. “Make your left hand find the G sharp when your right hand is on the F sharp. . . . The ideas are really very good, and it’s going to be OK.”

Music education, after a long period of neglect, is enjoying something of a renaissance, as educators divine the connection between musical training and general suppleness of mind.

“It’s a national trend,” said Don Dustin, director of performing arts for the Los Angeles Unified School District, which employs 410 music educators, up from recent years. “People are realizing that the arts are not only valuable intrinsically but also for what they offer in reinforcing other subject areas.”

Watching the lessons, it was apparent to even a musical ignoramus--maybe especially to a musical ignoramus--that music is a language, “the speech of the soul,” as it has been called.

As with any language, rewards flow to those who, starting with the equivalent of “da-da” and “ma-ma,” work to become sublimely eloquent.

Shirley Kim’s reward, her teacher thinks, will one day be admission to the prestigious Juilliard or Eastman music schools. Better, even, than M & Ms.