A Taste of Our Wedding

Our wedding cake was simple, but really good. I went to the bakery with my friend and wedding coordinator that summer to sample cake flavors and choose out a design. Jonathan was working so he didn't go with us. I ended up picking a simple cake flavor combination. Wedding cake flavored cake (which is essentially an almond white cake) with a raspberry cream filling and vanilla buttercream on top. It was a really nice combination.

At our wedding, we ate about one bite a piece - just enough to capture a photo for the memories.

What a great picture, our one bite each of cake.
We've both put on some weight since then....

Our cake.

I had left very detailed instructions regarding every aspect of the wedding I could think about and where each piece was going. The one aspect I forgot to leave detailed instructions for? The cake. For having over 200 people at the reception dinner, we had a lot of cake leftover, which I didn't imagine would happen. And nobody had any idea where the leftover cake went. Oh well.

I've often thought about our cake and how nice the flavors complemented each other and how nice it would be to be able to have a taste of our wedding cake again. I decided Valentine's Day would be a nice time to surprise my husband and make this happen.

I called the bakery where our wedding cake was from to see how much they charged for custom cupcakes. Although not terribly priced for custom cupcakes, the minimum order was a dozen and I wasn't interested in spending that much money for so many more than I really needed. I contemplated just buying some nice cupcakes or a cake from another bakery, but that wasn't quite the surprise I wanted. So in the end, I looked up some recipes and made my own.

Now here's where I probably broke an important rule of baking - I didn't make a test batch first. My trial run....was also my final run.

I don't consider myself amateur in the kitchen, but I am definitely not an iron chef who can whip together surprise ingredients and know it will taste marvelous.

After tasting the raspberry frosting I made intended for the filling, I deemed it on the sweet side already and decided not to make extra vanilla frosting for the top and just to decorate the top with the raspberry frosting.

I've also never decorated anything before with piped icing, so this was quite an adventure for me as well. I bought the tip and watched one Youtube video on how to pipe roses. It...isn't gourmet bakery worthy, but I'll say for having zero experience and zero practice, they turned out exceptionally well.

My version of our wedding cake flavored cupcakes. Some of them actually look like roses!

I'm glad we were able to taste a glimpse of our wedding cake today, literally. To be honest neither of us really actually remember what our wedding cake tastes like, so it was just a nice sweet treat with sentimental value. I think I'll make it again. 

But I actually get a taste of our wedding everyday when we laugh at each other's goofiness, when we hold hands, and when we just stare at each other and soak in all the little nuances of freckles and features and remember why we wanted to spend forever together. What we have is more than just a taste of a wedding. It's a taste of joy.

Your Biggest Competition

One of the hardest aspects of life is to prevent external influences from changing your opinions. There are some instances where this is actually a good thing. Like when all your friends are telling you to stop smoking or to drink less or to stop playing computer games for a few hours to spend with your girlfriend (haha). These are all good examples of external influences. I'm talking about the external influences that cause us to go from positive thinking to negative thinking.

I will never forget my very last competition as a young pianist. I was 17 and somehow conveniently forgot to tell my dad I had a competition on a Saturday because I just figured my dad wouldn't be doing anything and had time to drive me down to Dallas to compete. Well, it was about 4 hours before my performance time, and my dad told me not to compete that day if I wasn't comfortable driving. I knew I wasn't going to do that because I had worked so hard.

I looked up directions on Google Maps on how to drive to Dallas taking all local roads because I was too scared to take the highway. I didn't want to add extra stress to my day, but I wanted to compete. So I drove myself. I gave myself ample time, drove slowly, and made it to the church. I performed well enough to land myself a spot in the finals, requiring a second performance, this time open-audience. I was used to competitions at this time in my life so playing for others didn't phase me. I ended up placing 3rd and earned myself my final trophy among my collection of musical accolades. I drove home very satisfied and proud of myself for having driven myself all the way down and back.

I told my teacher my results and he was happy for me. He probably told me "Good job" or something along those lines, not too congratulatory but enough to show he was pleased. He took a trip to Hong Kong right after and I had a few weeks off from lessons. After he returned, he asked if I wanted to have a lesson, and instead, I quit, and he was furious. I won't get into the details of why I quit, but he did not respond well. In his angry email to me "subtly" telling me I was making the worst mistake of my life, he said, "To be honest, she could have won the first prize....if she had tried a little bit more harder [sic]." This logical fallacy still makes me angry to think about because it's exactly the kind of thinking that is incorrectly ingrained into the heads of students. How could my teacher say this with such confidence? There is no merit to what he said. He was not the judge of the competition. In fact, he was not even at the competition. We as individuals all have the capability to perform our best performance. However, our best, even in the most perfect way, may not be good enough to win first prize. My teacher didn't even know the backstory about how my dad told me not to compete at all because he couldn't drive me.

Your biggest competition is always yourself, and you should always remember that. I have been the performer who has had memory slips in a competition and still ended up being chosen as one of the top 3. I have been the performer who has performed what I thought was a near-flawless performance and ended up winning nothing. We can only control how much work and effort we put in and our performance during our short five minute window to shine. The rest is someone else's opinion.

Parents, teachers, friends, when you know someone in a competition - your child, friend, or student - don't be like my piano teacher, suddenly changing his perspective because of an external situation. Let your praise be praise and your criticism be constructive. Be kind, be supportive, and know that the student is going to be his or her own toughest competition.

The 5 Musical Processes

Throughout the course of my years learning piano and now teaching it, I've come to find there are a number of stages that one must experience and go through in learning and perfecting a piece (including memorization). Each stage occurs differently and lasts a different length of time for different musicians but they are all experienced in one form or another.This is my own personal break down of how the processes occur and what they mean.

1.Uphill Battle

The first stage is named uphill battle because that can be what it feels like. It involves learning notes and rhythm. For considerably hard pieces, this can be a very tedious process of writing down fingerings and teaching our fingers to memorize the muscle movements necessary in order to play the notes in the proper sequence and rhythm. This is the most laborious aspect of learning music because it involves a lot of separate hand practice and time spent repeating the same things over and over again. It's arguably the least fun and takes the most work. However, it's the most important basis to music. Without notes and rhythm, you have air space.

2.  The First Plateau

The second stage is named the first plateau because once you've learned the notes and rhythm, you feel like you've just completed a great feat and you can rest a while. And for difficult pieces, it's true, you really have. At this point, the notes and rhythm come easily and you can play the piece, but it lacks the stylistic elements in order to bring the music alive. The performance might still be a bit mechanical in places that are still uncomfortable, resulting in an unnatural sound.

3. Rocky Scramble

The third stage is one that some musicians may disagree with me on. I've talked to a few and it does not seem like I am alone, but perhaps it's not consistently experienced by all. I call it the rocky scramble because it's where you start to discover difficulties within the piece that you didn't think were there. You start making mistakes and messing up in places you thought you knew and had learned. It feels a bit like you're backtracking in your growth and learning. This stage can be frustrating because it involves relearning some notes and rhythms, perhaps in a way of rote memorization so that you can resolve the problems.

4. The Second Plateau (Refinement)

The second plateau is where it's easy to get stuck in. It's also named refinement because it's about the fine tuning - you have the piece learned pretty darn well, but it's not perfect. Stylistic elements are beginning to take shape and generally, the piece is enjoyable. There is the occasional slipped finger, wrong note, rhythmic error, a brief memory slip. It's the stage that takes the most work to gain the least amount of advancement, hence, why it's easy to get stuck in. It takes a lot of perseverance to get through this plateau and into perfection. 

5. Perfection

The last stage is precisely what it is - perfection. At this point, the piece comes effortlessly. You melt into the melodies and let the notes and rhythm embody you as the performer. There's no mistakes because you know the precise muscle movements and style to deliver a perfect performance.

I would like to share a video of Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu Op. 66 with you. It's still in the refinement stage, but I have about 10 more months to keep working on it to the perfection stage. It sounds like a lot of time, but I have another 6-8 pieces I need to bring up to perfection at the same time, so it's not as easy as you might think.

I really like this piece. While learning it I found YouTube videos of young children under the age of 10 playing it. I just have to look away and remember that they're on a different path than me and will proceed at their own pace. I'm just very thankful that my own abilities have allowed me to learn and play this piece at all.

This and all my YouTube videos have been simply recorded on a point and shoot camera. No separate audio files.

Dont Touch the Instrument

In my previous post, I started talking about hand positions and Phoebe's creative names. If you missed it, you can go back and catch up here.

The second half of the Friends reference involved Phoebe asking Joey not to touch the guitar until she said he was ready. Joey was very appalled at this technique, retorted with yellow pages of other music schools with children happily holding guitars, and walked off.

Phoebe might be surprised to learn that I heard about a piano pedagogy that does not involve touching a piano for the first 8-12 weeks of learning. This guest speaker was invited to speak and introduced us to this method of teaching that he uses.

First, for the first 8-12 weeks, he doesn't ask his students to play the piano at all. Instead, he takes the time to teach them fundamental basics to promote strong sight-reading skills and music theory. I won't go through the details of how he teaches it, but this is what is expected of his students to master in this "non-playing" stage of their learning, (written in teaching objective style sentences).

1. Students will develop finger muscles through exercises.
2. Students are expected to memorize the letter names of the keys on the piano by recognition.
3. Students are expected to memorize the notation for the 22 most common notes on the staff in both treble and bass clef.
4. Students are expected to understand musical rhythms in multiple time signatures.
5. Students will be able to create small "compositions" of their own using the notes and rhythms they've learned.
6. Students will be able to play notes on the piano in proper rhythms using blunt sticks or the eraser ends of pencils in order to produce the sounds for their compositions.

Objective 6 is basically as close as they get to touching a piano in their first 1-2 months of piano learning. In theory, and hypothetically, this is the perfect way to teach anyone how to learn music and master it quickly. Learn the basics and have a good foundation in music. And then you can pretty much learn and teach yourself any piece of music thereafter.

Obviously it's not completely all-encompassing.  There's sharps, flats, key signatures, accidentals, dynamics, musical styles, and a lot more things that need teaching. But once you nail the rhythms and the notes, it gets much simpler after that in terms of the learning curve.

I think all music majors (who of course, know 15 years in advance that they want to pursue music as their career and means of financial security), should start out this way. However, this technique doesn't work for most people. Why? Because the parents of the children learning to play who are paying the teacher want to see results fast. They want to see their child playing music from day 1 if possible. Most people simply want their children to have a grasp of what playing music means. They don't want to raise musicians.

I personally think this is a fabulous technique for learning the piano. However, I don't teach it. Also because I believe students these days need more than musical proficiency further down the road to motivate them. They want to be able to at any given moment, hop on a piano, play something, and impress someone in some capacity.

This teaching technique also involves a lot of parental involvement and discipline in asking the students to memorize the foundations of music. A lot of parents don't have this time or desire to do so. And young kids lose interest faster than ever nowadays.

There's merit somewhere in the proper context for Phoebe's instructions to Joey. And if you watched the entire clip or are familiar with Friends, you'll agree that Joey should not touch musical instruments. :)

Bear Claw

I've always remembered this episode of Friends where Phoebe teaches Joey how to play guitar. She tells Joey he can't touch a guitar until she says so and teaches him only hand positions with names she made up. I've included the Youtube clip which condenses the segments from the episode into one video.


 


Before, I'd watch it and think, "Yeah, Joey's right. He should go and learn the names of the chords. I have no idea what Phoebe is talking about in her methods." I would assume that most scholarly musicians would watch this and pretentiously turn the other way. However, aside from the comedy, I think Phoebe's musical technique has some validity in the correct context.

As I've been able to dedicate longer periods of time to practicing piano, (which I honestly should have as a child before when I actually had more time, relatively), I've discovered something I wish I knew before. There is a feeling of perfection that you can sense as you practice and learn pieces. Yes, the more familiar you are with a piece the smoother you can play it, but there's more. Once you are at the memorization stage, it's no longer about reading sheet music off the stand. It's about feeling the piece and the notes through your fingers, and simultaneously, your hand position.

I've been working on a piece I learned as a teenager of intermediate/advanced difficulty depending on who you ask. I know I learned it years ago at one point, but I honestly never remembered myself having the ability to play it or play it well. After learning it for a few months my teacher must've just passed me on it without my fully having mastered the piece. Having come back after so many years, I had to reteach myself most of the music from scratch. There were sections I remembered from earlier, but most of it I would say was like learning it again for the first time. After hours and months of practice, I began to feel a new sense of "knowing" that I'd never experienced before. The piece was so familiar to me after all the practice that I could feel the different positions my hands and fingers were in to reach all the notes and perform the musical passages.

I don't have names for all the different positions like Phoebe does, and it's not quite the same. With guitar chords, it's one position to play one chord. In piano, it's one hand position for a certain passage in a certain piece in order to keep the fluidity of the piece and musicality. In any given piece, there could be hundreds of different "hand positions."

I have yet to reach the point of being able to play a piece of significant difficulty flawlessly, but I also have to remember that professional concert pianists spend hours upon hours on one piece daily in their practice, for sometimes, years. In time, I can perhaps hope to reach that point.

Next time, I'll expound upon my thoughts on "Don't touch the guitar."

The Big Black Crow

When I was a child, my mother read a Chinese newspaper article to me. The article was about a little girl and how she despised practicing piano. She described its appearance as a black crow with giant white teeth. Eventually, they got rid of the piano and she stopped playing. The day the piano was moved out, she did cartwheels on their front lawn to display her joy that the crow was gone. She reflected back years later about how she wished she hadn't taken lessons with such disdain and that she actually missed her big black crow.

My story is similar. I really disliked practicing as a child. It was so hard to fork up 30 minutes to an hour of time to sit and devote toward practicing. So when I quit lessons, it was such a relief to not feel the pressure to force myself to sit and play. After a few months of hiatus, I realized I found myself choosing to go back and sit and play. Not necessarily for long periods of time. Maybe 10 minutes here and 20 minutes there. But I continued to play, no longer for myself but for others. I continued accompanying at music festivals for friends and through referrals. I continued to play piano at church for Sunday worship.

In college, I even continued to do so to the extent that I would drive home on the weekends solely for the purpose of rehearsing with students or playing at a festival. The money I was spending to drive home sometimes wasn't even made up by the money I earned. But I did it because there was something about it I loved. I loved playing music. I loved hearing the music and how the notes I was playing were flowing together in such a way to make melodies.

My dad never sold our big black crows. Thank goodness. And instead of watching mine be taken away and doing cartwheels on the front lawn, I stood watching it as the movers carefully maneuvered it down the front steps of my dad's house and rolled it into my very own living room while trying not to pass out from fear.

My 7'6" (not so baby) baby. 

I'm not the pianist I used to be, but I've slowly discovered to love the talent I possess. Six years ago, a friend asked me while on break, "Do you play piano a lot in your spare time?" At the time I responded, "Sometimes." I didn't have access to a piano very often, and it didn't occur to me to play when I had the chance. Things always got in the way. Here's what he said next.

"If I were you, I would spend hours playing."

That was the first time it really occurred to me that I had a talent not easily earned. And I've spent the last six years keeping my skills alive however I can. Now, with my piano in my very own living room, I hope I can continue practicing and revive some old classical favorites I used to so easily master.

And I hope that I can share with my own future kids, and that you can share with your children as aspiring musicians, a different story. My big black crow was moved into my own house in my own living room. And I still continue to play on it, (almost) every day.