Porridge music
when familiar notes become a deep, dark forest
I love to sit down at the piano and play through my favourite pieces.
There are those I first played years ago in piano lessons, painstakingly learning notes that now feel like second nature, my fingers seeming to know exactly what to do without any input from me.
Other pieces I’ve found along the way, in a second-hand shop, on a movie soundtrack or a playlist. Sometimes I discover something new on the messy shelves of music in my studio, buried beneath the books I use all the time with my students.
It’s comforting playing music I know so well.
Some of these pieces are very much like a form of meditation, my fingers doing the work so my brain can wander where it will. Others require a degree of focus, a different kind of meditation, a reigning in of thoughts so that everything else recedes.
But there are also many times when, annoyingly, frustratingly, nothing goes right.
My fingers fumble, my thoughts intrude like little hammers, and my brain refuses to cooperate. Even the notes I can usually play in my sleep become unfamiliar, the keys beneath my fingers like unwieldy blocks of wood shifting around on the keyboard.
Oh, this is a familiar feeling!
It starts like the beginning of a wave that used to sometimes end, when I was a kid, with me slamming my hands down on the keys in a childish rage.
Porridge music, my mother used to call it, and it’s an oddly fitting name.
The sound of all those notes played at once must have rung through our house and possibly into the neighbours’ houses as well, as did, I’m sure, the ringing silence afterwards. But I always felt much better for it, no matter how much it hurt the ears of everyone in the vicinity.
These days I usually resist the temptation to slam my hands down on the keys, choosing, instead, to go for a walk or make a cup of tea, anything to help me reset so I can try again.
When I tell my students about porridge music they laugh. When I demonstrate they laugh even harder, but I can see they’re also intrigued, because here is the person who they think can play and sing all the notes (all of them!) patently demonstrating that the opposite can also be true.
The creative journey is never straightforward
They think my job is to teach them how to play the notes but, really, there’s so much more to it than that.
I’m here to help them discover the world of music and find their own place in it. I’m here to help them develop the skills and strategies to play and sing and create the music they want.
But I’m also here to show them that this particular journey they’re now on will be anything but straightforward. It’s going to be filled with uncertainty and frustration and risk. They’ll make more mistakes than they ever thought possible but also learn that those mistakes are an integral part of what it means to make music and of what it means to create something.
They’ll have days when it seems like they are right in the heart of the music and others when a song they sang or played the day before now seems as foreign and forbidding as a deep, dark forest.
But there is no musical and creative journey that is not without these days. Risk and uncertainty and frustration and ambiguity are just as much a part of any creative process as joy and wonder and satisfaction.
And just as much a part of what it means to be human.
Plus, now they know about the Porridge Music Strategy.