Doing the Chicken Dance

chicken dance 1. (noun) the wrong way to play scales.

When students start working on scales, this usually marks the transition from playing straight out of piano methods books to playing “real” music by “real” composers who have been dead a “real” long time.  And an important physical change can be addressed when starting scales alternative zu word kostenlosen.

In the piano methods books, all five fingers are stationary.  They sit over five keys and never move for the entire song.  If they move, they move as a group.  Or, occiasionally, the pinky or thumb needs to move down or up a key, at various places through the song.  Students’ hands generally reach into the keyboard straight on from the body… kind of like a zombie (and in fact, for comic relief at this point I sometimes pull out my zombie impression) video aus youtube herunterladen.

This kind of hand position really obviously is the beginning of very interesing (and bad) technique when children start working on scales.  When their fingers are going straight into the keys, it presents an awkward hand position for when they need to cross a finger over their thumb, or pass their thumb under a finger.  Elbows start to flap in the breeze as they try to rotate their hands enough to allow their fingers to move.  What ends up happening is the kids look like they are starting to do the chicken dance logo erstellen kostenlos download chip.

chicken dance 2. (verb) a form of stress relief.

Sometimes, kids get frustrated.  Sometimes, they even get angry and upset.  Sometimes, we need to take a break.  I did this once in an extreme situation where a student had played the same passage at least five times in a row and had grown increasing frustrated each time she made the same mistake herunterladen. “I GOT IT AT HOME! WHY CAN’T I GET IT NOW?” Her eyes were shiny with tears waiting to erupt from them.

I silenced her and told her to take a breath.  Deeply in, and slowly out.  And another one.  And another one.  And then, the most absurd thing that came to mind icloud pictures folder. “DO THE CHICKEN DANCE!”  I sang the song.  I did the dance.  And my student started to laugh.  Crisis averted.

Sometimes, we get so focused we are too focused.  All we can see is what we are working on, and more dangerously, our immediate short coming.  We are only focused on the mistake that we can’t fix.  We get upset, we tense our bodies – very quickly – and we just continue to twist up, both mentally and physically.  To zoom out just as quickly, I often do the chicken dance (don’t tell the copywrite holders, Im sure by now I owe them thousands, although they should let me off the hook because it’s a private performance, and not-for-profit) magix soundpool download for free. It works because it’s so absurd, so shocking, so unexpected, and SO FUN, that it snaps the student backwards to a point where they can allow themselves to relax, get their bearings and start over herunterladen.

Sometimes I like to think this is just good advice for life.  When times get tough, take a deep breath and do the chicken dance.