Verily Verily, piano is serious stuff!
I have been told by my fantastic teacher that I need to be perfectly happy during lessons. This was followed up by saying that I need to be happy all the time, and that God will take care of things. (related to tension release that I am slowly learning against all my habits)
Wow.
Er.. okay, suddenly I feel happy! :D Kind of a hard thing though, I am rather prone to extremes I fear. But if being happy helps piano, okay, haaaaaappppppppppy! I think though, in general, it's easy not to be happy, because as an emotional ish culture, we tend to perform based on feelings. So often if (I at least) don't feel a certain way, good luck doing it! Not a happy tendency.
But daisies are happy!
So is eating octopi! It's very squishy!
I wonder what being happy is? When is it okay to be sad, and how is it juxtaposed with joy?
I do know that my Schubert, Mendelssohn and Bach are coming right along though! :) I was going to just end at that sentence, but now I feel piano happy. There is such a strong effort, and concentration needed to really make it sound good, and that is so fun! I shall admit sometimes it's insanely frustrating, but that's when you breath *in*, *out*. :)
Also, I have discovered if I spend an hour warming up on scales and Hanon, I have a lot less pain when doing harder work, and it sounds a lot better. So that's been helpful!
Sorry this is so disjointed, with final draft term papers due Friday, I hate having to use topic clinchers here too!
Enjoy the epic Bronte esque weather!
And when I figure out how to download pictures off the camera, I shall post pretty pictures I have taken, until then I shall console myself with colored fonts. :)
Sunday, November 11, 2007
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4 comments:
Well, the trick about being truly happy is that you can't just make yourself be it. It's like being an excellent piano player. You can't just will yourself to be one. It takes practice. Same for being happy: You can't just decide to be happy now. You have to work on other things (the virtues, for example) and then happiness comes along by itself.
(Of course, I'm sure your piano teacher knows that you will play much better if you're relaxed, breathing in and out and all that.)
So if you can't make yourself happy now, what can you do? Work at becoming virtuous. Of course, the person who is serious about becoming virtuous is not solemn all the time. Why? Because wittiness and levity are virtues, too. So its work, but it's pleasant work. The trick about working at virtue is that we're always both farther along and further behind than we think we are.
As for what happiness is in itself: Take the total experience you have of playing a piano piece as beautifully as you can (I'm sure you've had this experience) -- then expand that experience over a lifetime. That's a picture of how good true happiness can be.
With apologies for the didacticism.
I think the trick to happiness is recognizing its importance--or moreover, its lack thereof. If you read Ecclesiastes, the poet mentions "a time for..." a lot of things. ("Happiness" is not actually enumerated as such, but we can use "dancing" and "laughing" as functional substitutes, in this case I think). I think it speaks volumes that there is no more time for the positive emotions and experiences than for those we generally consider to be negative, or at least more difficult.
To quote Shadowlands, "I don't think God particularly wants us to be happy..." I don't think God dislikes our happiness or even discourages it. But I think His priority is His glory and our sanctification, which may or may not involve happiness at any given moment. If He can more profoundly work in a situation of sorrow, then I think that it will not be His priority to bring us out of that state and in to one of "happiness."
Happiness is an emotion. It is excited by any number of things, from the very superficial to the peripherally important. It took (or rather takes) me a long time to realize that emotions do have value in Christendom. The trick is in internalizing that they're temporal, and only of value insofar as God can achieve His purpose through them. The second we give them greater importance, our priorities suffer great misalignment.
Abiding Joy is a different thing altogether. It can coexist with sorrow, anger, etc, but happiness cannot. It comes from the Holy Spirit and we understand it more with a persistent pursuit of Holiness. It is not excited by temporary things, but by the very character and glory of God.
Loving this new opportunity to get to know you more,
Jane Eyre Jen
Whoa...I just wrote an essay on this! (or at least attempted to...:P)
I think good burglar and jen have very excellent thoughts on this matter, though. Except that I think your piano teacher is slightly wrong in saying that you need to be happy to help your piano; mayhap I shall boldly counter her in saying that perhaps peace, both with and through God, is what is more needed?
That was really incoherent, and probably not very helpful. :/ So I shall reiterate that quote in the beginning of my Term paper:
"There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life--happiness, freedom, and peace of mind--are always attained by giving them to someone else".
-Peyton Conway March
Thank you Mr. March! *pats hypothetical head* :)
wow. Obviously I should make sure I post very seriously and profoundly in the future, I should blog the comments on these blogs. ;)Thank you all for the wise comments!
In address to Blarney anyways,
Firstly, what she said was a lot better than what I posted, I wasn't so much writing a serious post, so I didn't go into detail.
But I have a tendency to be nervous and tense, so when I am happy (in a non deep sense) I play much better piano. I am not so good at explaining it over blog though. :P
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