Piano Bee

“Bee” refers to a community social gathering at which friends and neighbors can join together to help in a single activity: sewing, quilting, barn raising, or in the case of our studio of music students – piano performance.

We believe in traditional performances too, but we hope to put the horse before the cart. We begin sharing our piano work by engaging the audience as our co-conspirators in success.  While we normally would attempt to do our “bee” in the spring, this year it has been postponed until June.  I wonder if our delay parallels our city’s delay of visible spring after an uncharacteristically severe winter. In any case, if you prefer the idea of a very formal recital we present something more along those lines in the fall as our “Harvest Party”. That is not at all what a “Piano Bee” attempts to deliver.

I worry that students are not traditionally taught about the body’s reaction to performance situations (much as they are often not taught about their brain’s reaction to teaching/learning).  Being a great piano student is certainly not the same as being a great piano performer, and not being able to enjoy performing is a major factor in students wishing to end their studies.  So, around here we quite purposefully create an opportunity to focus specifically on how we experience and manage adrenalin.  We take some of the focus off of the completeness or difficulty level of our performed pieces and we instead focus on returning to the performance stage multiple times. We practice balancing the gift and curse of the disconcerting fizzy-sparkling sensation within us that only a real audience can seem to invoke. We patiently teach our amygdalas to weather the adrenalin storm of a recital.  Because around here, we learn piano as a lifelong venture.  We won’t be defeated by adrenalin.