Case Study

Teaching the person as well as the piano

Jonathan (aged 14) clearly enjoyed the piano, and wanted to do well. However, he had a habit of regularly losing concentration that was noticeably affecting his progress – for example, his mind could wander as much as three times during the playing of a scale. He was a particularly fine musician and it didn’t appear that his wayward concentration was in any way deliberate.

Jonathan was a highly sensitive boy who would wring his hands with anxiety when he thought he was being criticised. I decided to use the terminology of ‘floating off’ because this seemed less critical than ‘losing concentration’; and I told him that I had an image of him floating up to the ceiling, rather like the laughing scene in Mary Poppins. He was utterly relieved, simply that someone had spotted this, as if he had really wanted to tell someone but didn’t know how. Over the following few weeks and months, with a lot of support from parents and practising techniques that we planned together, his playing improved dramatically. He had found a key and not only was his piano playing improving but his ensemble work and his school work were improving too.

Six months later Jonathan had started slipping back into his former habit of ‘floating off’. This time we took a different approach. I asked him why he played music. He told me about the enjoyment of playing, how much he loved being on stage, the adrenalin, how he felt afterwards – but it did not feel like we were quite identifying what truly inspired him. I asked whether he felt a sort of ‘magical’ feeling when he was performing - as if that he were perhaps in touch with something bigger than him. He beamed at me and agreed wholeheartedly. We then discussed how good it would be if that could be his motivation, so that instead of needing other people to get him into shape, he was totally self-motivated.

We also discussed the fact that his ‘floating off’ was actually rather similar to the feelings he had when he was performing. So floating off did not have to be ‘problem’ and could be a great resource if used in the right way. Jonathan was in fact trying to find the connection with ‘something bigger than him’ through his floating off, but because he had being doing this unconsciously it was not serving him positively. Something deep had been touched. Jonathan’s face lit up. There was no sign of wringing his hands, and he was eager to start practising straight away!