Interpretation

People who are new to or unfamiliar with classical music are often perplexed about the fact that the same pieces of music sounds differently when played by different musicians. It would seem that playing the same notes in the same rhythm should produce identical sounds, unlike jazz, where the notes themselves may be changed by the musicians' improvisation. However, most of you reading this will know that this is far from the case. Just a few factors that make the differences from one performer to another are tempo, dynamics, phrasing, and touch, as applied to the whole piece or any given section.

Tempo (speed) and dynamics (loud vs. soft and all the gradations between) are fairly self-explanatory. Phrasing and touch are not so obvious. Phrasing could be thought of as the same way you might speak: where you put commas or periods, where you breathe or pause between sentence clauses; how you inflect it (whether your voice goes up or down; which words, if any, you emphasize with an accent or stress); and nuances of timing (lingering briefly on a word or speeding up on others); in other words, how you "shape" your phrase or sentence. Touch could be described as a quality of the tones, whether sharp and crisp, smooth and connected, for two examples.

If we don't use these tools, our rendition of the piece of music will sound stiff and mechanical, which is, in fact, the very sound often associated with a beginner or someone who has no emotional connection to the music. But even a moderately experienced player will use these tools to some extent in their playing.

The question is how to decide if, when, and how to use the tools. And a deeper question is: who, or what inside us, is actually doing the "deciding...."

Many people will begin a new piece (let's just say a big piece, such as a Beethoven Sonata) and try to develop/decide their "concept" of it. What is the composer trying to say, they may ask themselves? Is there a story behind the piece, are there certain emotions the composer is trying to evoke, and other questions such as these. Once they decide their "concept," they may use that to decide on specifics as those mentioned: tempos, dynamics, etc.
Or so they THINK.....

To me, this approach completely misses the point. Victor Hugo said "Music expresses what words cannot, and what cannot remain silent."  Music reaches so deep into our souls that it goes beyond what words and ideas can express. To me, to try to decide cerebrally what a piece of music is about is as bizarre and trying to decide what a mountain is "about." We may know what geological process created the mountain, but this is not what makes the sight of it beautiful to us, or makes it fill us with awe and inspiration.

Where does that leave us? We can't just play mechanically, but perhaps we can't really "decide" on our interpretation of the piece. What I propose is that it's something quite different: our bodies (how we move) and our "ears" (how we hear) decide for us.

Here's an example: when a 5-year-old beginning piano student plays "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," he or she most likely plays it very stiffly, with no nuance or phrasing, in other words, what we might call "unmusically." Yet to the ears of that 5-year old, it sounds perfectly normal, even great! He or she cannot tell it is unmusical. Why? Because their ears have not been trained yet to hear the difference between smooth and clunky. Equally as important, their bodies (in particular their hands and arms) cannot yet feel the difference between smooth and clunky. If they have a good teacher (!), they will gradually learn to tell the difference, and will begin to play differently, more musically. (Some never do learn that and eventually quit playing the piano.) The key point here is that both the body and ear have to be exposed to new sensations, new movements, and new subtleties of sound, so as to be able to tell the difference. (I should mention that there are those amazing prodigies, who, even at a young age, seem to "get" music to such a degree that they play musically very early on, but these are still rare exceptions in the world as a whole. We have no way to explain how they seem to be "musically mature" without a great deal of experience.)

Whether thinking about the 5-year-old or the experienced and talented professional, I believe it is our bodies and ears that decide our interpretation for us. A brilliant "concept" of a piece will not help you if you move in a jerky or clumsy way. You will not achieve the interpretation you desire if you don't have the physical tools to create it. You also cannot manifest your concept if your ears are not fine-tuned enough to hear differences and subtleties of tone, touch, and phrasing. You may think you are "the decider," but in the actual moment of playing, your body and your ear take over.

Here is the point which I want to stress and which I believe is quite revolutionary: we "hear" the way we play, and we play the way we "hear." If you hear music in a note-wise, mechanical way,you will play that way, and if you play note-wise and mechanically, your ears will be continually exposed to that sound. The body and the ear respond to each other. It can be a vicious cycle, unless there is intervention (yes, a good teacher) who helps break the cycle. In my teaching I approach it from both the physical and the ear standpoints, but I find it is easier to start with the physical. I have specially designed work on physical movements, or technique, which gives the student a different physical experience. Once they have absorbed that experience and can duplicate it on their own, they will want to play that way, because it is more pleasurable and just feels more "right." Then they notice how it also sounds better. The ears now want to hear that more pleasing sound, so the body responds by trying to produce it. And so a new much better cycle is created, and progress is made.

The body and the ear are inextricably linked for the musician. You cannot, or at least should not, develop one without the other. This is why you should never play mechanical exercises, or play without 100% emotional involvement and listening. If your technique advances past the level of your ear, you may be dazzling in that way, but the playing will sound hollow and will not move your listeners. If your ear develops but your technique does not, you will not be able to produce the sounds you may hear in your head.

If you achieve a high level of mastery in your body and your ear, you are now free to respond, emotionally, to the beauty of the music. You do not force your interpretation on the music, you allow the music to come though you. Each performance is a creative act as you respond to what you are hearing. You let the beauty of the music wash over you and through you. You let your body take over and you are just the listener.

The music is already beautiful; you don't have to "do" anything to it to make it beautiful. You just have to get out of the way.

The Music Lesson

I just finished reading a wonderful little book entitled The Music Lesson, by Victor Wooten.

The author is a jazz bass guitarist. Although the book describes some of his experiences as they relate to playing jazz and improvising, the principles apply, I believe, to any kind of music.

He opens by saying that he had been a musician for a long time -- no, actually he had played the guitar for long time, which is different than being a musician. (See my earlier post titled Pianist or Musician?).
He goes on to describe his frustrations with playing, with "practicing," and with the struggles of earning a living playing music.

One day, out of nowhere, a mysterious character arrives at his door. Michael, the visitor, begins to "teach" the author about Music, although he often says he cannot teach anything but can only show. The style of teaching is like that of a Zen master, or of Don Juan in the Carlos Casteneda books (for those of you old enough to remember those), that is, having the student discover the lessons through experiences.

The first "lesson" is on what Michael calls "the groove." He says "You should never lose the groove in order to find a note." This idea is close to my own teaching and philosophy, in that I always try to have my students feel the music first, and not let "the notes" become too important. For many pianists, the struggle to find and play the notes actually becomes an obstacle to playing well, to playing from the heart. I believe that the musical architecture and the emotional content should be first priority, with the notes falling in place more gradually, as the piece is internalized. "If you stopped playing notes, music would still exist," to quote Michael. "Fewer notes, more music," (to quote myself).

The lessons also cover Articulation, Technique, Emotion, Dynamics, Rhythm/Tempo, Tone, Phrasing, Space/Rest, and Listening.

I loved the chapter on Space/Rest. To paraphrase, we must learn to hear the empty space from which music arises. I find it quite true that many pianists almost cannot bear to have space, or rests, in the music. It's like wanting to talk constantly and never breathe or have a silence. When I teach rhythm I try to have my students become aware of the empty space. If you stop to think about it, you will realize that what we call rhythm is actually the time/space between the notes. If this were not so, there would be no rhythm, and music would just be a jumble of notes. This spaciousness is also important in the method of learning that I call Outlining (see previous posts on this subject). The student/player needs to learn to enjoy the empty spaces into which the notes will fall, naturally, when we are ready. Without space, there can be no music.

Many of the lessons seem to have little to do with music, such as listening, where Michael takes his student into the woods to listen to the calls of the birds and frogs. This may sound trite at first, but when we do this we realize how little we really listen during most of our daily activities.

Some may find the book too "Zen," too "new age." Yet I feel it absolutely goes to the heart of what we must learn, or better put, become aware of, if we want to truly be musicians. Did you know that Music means the Mother Science? (Mu = mother, sci=science.) The book is largely about the power of music. We don't "create" music when we play it, we "channel" it.

I loved this book. It was humorous and lighthearted, yet with a profound message. I hope you will read it, and put it into practice in your daily lives.

Mastery

I've just finished reading a wonderful little book whose message parallels my own philosophy. The book is Mastery by George Leonard. Mr. Leonard is an aikido (Japanese martial art/spiritual practice) master and uses aikido for many of his examples. But the philosophy applies to any area of life that one wishes to attain mastery, from sports, to the arts, to virtually any task, any job, any career, and, perhaps most importantly, to personal relationships.

We would all probably agree that our society tempts us with instant gratification at every turn. Even more problematic is that we seem to expect constant and rapid successions of greater and greater rewards -- the next promotion, the bigger house or car. Movies, products advertised on TV, new technologies, even some "inspirational" speakers, promise that the excitement of the next experience around the corner will surpass anything and everything experienced previously. If our lives don't go from one peak experience to another we may feel we are missing out, or that there is something wrong with us. We are told to have goals, to write them down, to do everything to achieve our goals in the quickest possible time, and once they are achieved, to set new, even more ambitious goals. We are always living for the future and are rarely in the present.

But most lifelong pursuits don't pan out like that. Every athlete or musician or novelist who attains any degree of mastery knows that there are long hours in the gym, at the piano, or at the desk, doing largely the same things we did the day before. While we would like to see the improvements, the new levels of mastery, come fast and furiously, the opposite is usually true: there are periods, sometimes long ones, where we seem to be on a plateau. It feels like we repeat the same practice day after day, work on the same techniques, but the mastery of it eludes us. Then, often unexpectedly, we wake up one day and find we are able to do the new skill with ease. We are elated. A breakthrough!

And then comes another plateau.

My students all experience this, as do I. We work on a piece of music, using the best possible methods of practice we know, yet for days, maybe weeks, it seems to go nowhere, to be stuck. One is tempted to give up, or at least move on to a different piece. But if you truly love the music, and the experience of playing the instrument, you will just keep going, practicing it again, day after day. We need to come to realize that we will have greater peace, greater satisfaction, if we practice for the sake of practice, and not get obsessed with goals. Of course there are milestones along the way -- learning a piece by memory, playing it for a group of friends, playing a concert or recital. But even after the triumphant recital, the path of learning and mastery resumes. There is no end to that path -- it goes on forever.

If we are only working towards goals, we may feel a great deal of frustration when the improvements don't come according to the schedule we desire. And we are missing out on an important element of mastery and self-development, which is to not only accept, but to embrace, the plateau. This was, for me, the best take-away from the book -- to love the plateau. Of course I would love to sight-read through a Chopin Etude and master the technique in a day or a week, but I know this won't likely happen. Instead, I just enjoy my daily "visits" with it. For quite a long time now I have accepted the plateau; now I will see if I can learn to love it.

Our piano practice needs to have the highest level of energy, alertness, awareness, and listening that we can muster. We need to make sure we are not just going through the motions because we think we are on a plateau. But see if you can take the attitude that you are on a life-long path of mastery; you may experience greater joy and satisfaction. Be grateful you are on the path, not just looking at it from the sidelines.

Here is my favorite passage from the book:
"Goals and contingencies... exist in the future and the past, beyond the pale of the sensory realm. Practice, the path of mastery, exists only in the present. You can see it, hear it, smell it, feel it. To love the plateau is to love the eternal now, to enjoy the inevitable spurts of progress and the fruits of accomplishments, then serenely to accept the new plateau that waits just beyond them. To love the plateau is to love what is most essential and enduring in your life."

Poly-rhythms

Poly-rhythms (also called cross-rhythms) are two differently-based rhythms being played simultaneously. The most common poly-rhythm is a duple-based versus and triple-based (normal eighth notes or sixteenth notes versus triplets, for example). Other poly-rhythms you might encounter are five against two, five against six, etc. In Chopin and Debussy, for example, virtually every type of poly-rhythm you can imagine is to be found, which is one of the elements giving this type of music its free and flexible sound and feel. But you'll certainly find it, albeit less often, in Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. And most great jazz pianists use poly-rhythms in their improvisations.

Naturally, players of single-line instruments never have to worry about poly-rhythms, as long as they can play their own line and not be thrown off by a hearing a different rhythm in other instruments playing alongside. But pianists have to learn to master this challenge since poly-rhythms will need to be played between the two hands.

Over the years I have heard and read a great deal of advice from teachers regarding how to learn to master poly-rhythms. Most of it involves what I would call the "cheater" approach: find the common denominator, go slowly, and just make sure each hand's part comes out mathematically where it should. For example, two against three would mean you divide in 6 "beats" and play one hand on the 1st and 4th, the other hand on the 1st, 3rd and 5th. In this example you'd be hearing notes on beats 1,3,4 and 5, which could also sound exactly like a quarter, two-eighths, quarter. It's metrically correct but doesn't sound the way the poly-rhythm is meant to sound. Many people can eventually learn to do it this way. However, you are not really training yourself to hear the two lines of music independently; you are hearing them combined together. This is a problem if you have to play one line very softly and one louder: if you only can really hear them combined together you can't play them at different dynamic levels. It's also a problem because you can't do any rubato (nuances of time) which is essential in music, especially the kind of music where you are most likely to find these rhythms (again, Chopin and Debussy are two great examples). The "cheater" approach would be next to impossible in unusual rhythms such as two against five (which I am encountering now in learning  Debussy's L'isle Joyeuse). The "cheater" method will not result in beautiful, fluid, melodic lines.

Instead, you have to take the path that may take a bit longer initially but will have more musical, and long-lasting, results, which is learning to "hear in stereo," as I like to call it. When you can truly hear the rhythms independently, your brain will essentially get re-wired to be able to play them and you'll never lose the ability. Here's the process:

Start out by tapping with your hands on a table or the closed lid of the piano. Tap what I will call the "unit," which is essentially a beat, in both hands (they are doing identical rhythms at this point). Then divide one hand, let's say the left hand, into normal eighth notes, so it is dividing the beat into two, while the right hand continues with just the beat. Then return to the unit/beat for a few times, and then have the right hand divide in three (triplets) while the left hand continues with just the beat. Keep alternating which hand divides, and returning to the unit/beat in between often to keep reinforcing the unit, which helps you hear how to divide it. Keep alternating, back and forth, until it starts to become easy. At first you may even have trouble doing this step, as one hand will unconsciously want to imitate or fit in with the other hand. Don't try to use a metronome or "cheat" in any way. Just keep doing the process using your own listening skills. It's like the proverbial rubbing your stomach while patting your head (which I have my students do!). At first you can't but eventually the brain figures out how to do it. It's really all about what is happening in the brain.

When you can alternate successfully, then you just let the hands try it together. The process could be like this:

•           the unit (hands together)
•           RH divides (LH does unit)
•           unit
•           LH divides (RH does unit)
•           RH divides (now you're skipping the step of reinforcing the unit)
•           LH divides
•           RH and LH together, each in their own rhythm

When this begins to work for you, switch hands (do threes in the hand that did twos before and vice-versa).

After tapping becomes easier you can try it on some notes. For example, if the RH is doing triplets, playing the notes C-D-E-F will give you a triplet, ending on the next new beat (which will be F). You must always end on the next beat, so you have a full unit to divide. The LH, doing eighth notes, will do C-D-E, giving you one beat, ending on the next new beat (which will be E). Do the same process you did with tapping, letting the hands alternate as to which one divides, and put them together in the end. The notes themselves may have some dissonance but just listen for the rhythm and don't worry about the notes. Then reverse the hands, as you did with the tapping. 

Chopin wrote several Etudes for the purpose of mastering this technique. The Opus Posthumous Etude in A-flat is a great one. But I must emphasize the importance of mastering poly-rhythms with the tapping or with simple notes before you attempt a whole composition. If you play this etude, or any similar piece, with the "cheater" method, it will sound very stiff and ungainly.

If the concept of dividing the beat is unclear to you, read my post entitled "Rhythm"(October 2010) and see how I approach learning rhythm. 

I believe that if the brain and ear (the auditory cortex) can "hear" it, the hands can play it. Skip the cheater method and try this elegant approach.

Warming Up

Pianists often ask if they should warm up their muscles before playing or practicing. Traditional teaching often has students playing scales or other "finger exercises" before starting to play their pieces. I disagree with that approach. Read my posts on exercises and you'll see why. To summarize here: we need to be using our whole physical mechanism -- hands, arms, torso -- not just fingers. We do many activities during the day that use our hands and arms and we do not generally warm up before them. If you are using your body properly, rather than putting all the strain on the the smallest muscles (the fingers), you do not need to do warm-up exercises.

If the weather is cold or you are in a cold room and your hands are physically cold, then yes, you should actually warm them up (run under warm water, hold over a heat source, or put on gloves for a short while). But doing scales or exercises when the hands are literally cold would be the worst thing for them.

I have what I believe is a far better method of "warming up" or getting ready for playing. I call it "energizing." I'll describe it here and you can try it for yourself, but I feel it's most effective if you have a teacher actually leading you through it, because it involves a fair amount of imagery work.

Here it is:

Sit at the piano and close your eyes (keep eyes closed during the entire process that follows). Become aware of your torso, especially the shoulders, and let them drop and relax completely. Become aware of your buttocks and legs and let everything relax. Let your face and jaw relax. (If you've every done yoga or other such disciplines, this will all be familiar to you.)

Now let your arms just float up to a comfortable place, somewhere around mid-chest level. Let them just feel suspended in the air. Move the arms around slightly to make sure you aren't holding them tighter than necessary.

Put your attention on the space between your pointer and index fingers (2nd and 3rd). Put the attention on this space in both hands simultaneously. See if you can "feel" the air space between them. Or you can imagine a wedge of some very light foam between them. Or you imagine tiny electrical currents passing between them. Whatever imagery works for you. If it is working, you will start to feel a tingling sensation in the fingers. You are becoming aware of the energy coursing through them.

Now do the same thing, again in both hands at once, with the index and ring fingers (3rd and 4th). Take your time, see if you feel the energy before moving on to the next fingers. Use the same imagery for the ring finger and pinky (4th and 5th), and then the thumb and pointer (1st and 2nd). Your hands will feel electric with sensation.

Lastly, imagine a current of air under the palms, like a current of air a bird might soar on. Let your arms move gently around in space as if floating on this current of air.

Open your eyes but try to keep the sensation going. You can immediately go to playing any piece of your choice, or you can just improvise a simple melody and/or chords. Something lighter is preferable at first versus something that starts immediately with loud or demanding passages. If the imagery has worked for you, you will feel a heightened sense of touch. Your hands and arms will seem to know exactly how much pressure to apply to get the exact sound you want. After this energizing process, try playing as soft as you possibly can, and see if you don't get a very precise yet soft sound that may elude you at other times.

If this doesn't work for you the first time you try it, don't give up. It make take a few times to sensitize yourself. Try it again every time you sit down to play. I've never encountered anyone who doesn't get something from it. The more you do it, the less time it takes to start getting the "buzz" in your hands.

If you feel tense at any time during your practice session, or you feel you are not getting the sound you want, stop and repeat this energizing process.

In the age in which we live, when so much more is known about the body and the mind-body connection, and there are so many wonderful methods of achieving greater body awareness (yoga, tai chi, Qi gong, Feldenkreiss, Alexander Technique, to name a few), it seems such a waste to be using such old-school, brute force methods such as scales or Hanon or Czerny to warm up. The energizing process I've described here will help give you a physical and mental alertness, without tension, that is necessary for playing that is fluid and beautiful, and that will not cause any strain or injury.

Coaching vs. Teaching

When I was a student at Manhattan School of Music, I had a teacher who had been a fairly famous pianist at one time. A student was considered, by most people I encountered, to be very lucky to have the chance to study with him. He was a kind and wonderful Austrian gentleman and certainly a very accomplished pianist, and for a time, at least, I adored him. But he didn't know how to teach (something I only realized towards the end of my four years with him, unfortunately). I'm not sure he really enjoyed teaching but he did it out of necessity as his own career in concertizing had waned. Possibly he enjoyed his few most talented and advanced students (I was not one of them!) who already played so well, that all he felt he had to do was help them with "finishing touches."  (The problem I noticed, however, with his students as well as students of other teachers, was that the students tended to start playing too similarly to their teachers, instead of finding their own styles or interpretations. We could often identify who the student studied with just from hearing his or her playing.)

What I needed, however, was a real teacher, someone who could help me with technical challenges. When I played I had fatigue and pain, and I did not believe that was just something to get used to or "muscle through." If I stopped practicing a piece for a week I could no longer play it. These and many other issues continued to plague me after years of lessons.
Many pianists who are quite accomplished do not necessarily know exactly how they do what they do, especially in the realm of technique, and therefore cannot help others. (Like athletes, they may have an innate physical talent that enable them to accomplish certain feats somewhat effortlessly.) In fact, much of the instruction I was given on technique I now know to be quite wrong, or at least wrong for me. There is not just one way of doing things; a lot may depend on the size of your hands, your particular body type and musculature, and other factors. (Even things like fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscles, a factor in many sports, may play a role.)
During the lessons he sat several feet behind me so he could not even see what my hands and arms were doing. How could he possibly help me with technique if he didn't even see what I was doing? He had a one-size-fits-all answer to technique: hours and hours of particular technical exercises. Those exercises caused me pain and fatigue and did not increase my technique in the long run. Yet he had no other solutions for me.
If I had been at the point where my technique was more advanced, perhaps I could have benefited from his vast knowledge of the piano literature. He could have possibly helped me with "interpretation" of my pieces. This is what I would call "coaching," essentially fine-tuning an otherwise high level of playing.

Thankfully, after I graduated from the conservatory, I found what I had been seeking: a real teacher. His name was Joseph Prostakoff. He didn't concertize (he said he couldn't deal with the nerves) but his first love was teaching. He had mostly advanced students and mostly students like me -- pianists who knew that what they had learned was not necessarily right for them and who were seeking something completely different. (Several well-known pianists who had significant physical problems and even injuries had gone to Prostakoff to learn new ways of playing.) It's not an exaggeration to say that I learned how to play the piano all over again, from the very basics of how to use my body, arms, hands, and fingers, right down to the physics of how the sounds are produced. He sat next to his students at the piano and his eyes and ears were on "high alert" to pick up the slightest unnecessary tension or strain in our bodies, the rhythm off by a fraction of a second (due to improper technique), the minutest variation in dynamics which was not intentional (again due to improper technique). And most important, he had a vast array of ways to deal with all of these problems. He always said he did not teach interpretation; instead, he wanted to give the me the tools to say what I had to say through the piano. I remember after we had worked on a particular passage, and I had played it with a freedom of technique and phrasing and a beauty and power I had not had previously, he winked and said: "You see, it's not because you understand Beethoven any better, but because you changed what you did physically." He was not against thinking about or exploring different interpretations, but what he made me realize is that you can't just slap "interpretation" (especially if it is not authentically your own) onto a faulty basic structure, like a coat of paint to hide the flaws underneath.

This is what I would consider to be real teaching. It would be finding the way to play which physically enables you to achieve the sounds you want. (If you've read my posts on technique, exercises, and so on, you'll see this is why I advocate never playing mechanically; it trains you to use technique and movements that don't produce the sounds you ultimately want.) It does not matter how brilliant your "concept" of a piece is, if you don't have the tools to physically produce those sounds.

I often see "Master Classes" offered with some pianist/teacher, and students flock to them (often at very high prices!). Most of these would be what I would call coaching. You could go to one and the teacher might tell you to play a passage louder, while another might tell you to play it softer. One might say you need more rubato and another may say need less. You are receiving their interpretation, which may not sound or feel at all authentic for you. Interpretation is just that: highly individual. There are certainly some pianists and teachers who are so brilliant and so perceptive it would be worth hearing their insights. But don't confuse coaching with teaching. If you are studying with a teacher who tells you to "learn the notes at home" so that the lesson time can be used for "polishing" or "interpretation," you have someone who wants to coach, not teach. If you are studying piano with someone but you feel your playing is not really growing, that you have problems which are not really being solved or even addressed, or you don't quite feel that you are 100% yourself at the piano, you may have a coach when what you need is a teacher.

The Power of Music

In this post, rather than discuss specifics of learning and playing the piano, I want to share two inspirational stories with you. Both illustrate the extraordinary power music plays in our lives.

I recently read the book entitled The Secret Piano, by Zhu Xiao-Mei. It is the true story of a young woman's life in China during the 1970s and 1980s. Zhu Xiao-Mei touched her first piano at the age of three. Her mother played and they had a piano in their tiny apartment in Beijing. The family was already experiencing adversity due to the regime of Mao. It was thought to be bourgeois to own a piano and the family kept the piano a secret. Nevertheless, Western music was still allowed, and Zhu attended the Beijing Conservatory. But soon after, the Cultural Revolution swung into full force. Gradually they were no longer permitted to play Western music. Musical scores were burned. Professors were humiliated, beaten, forced to clean toilets. Some committed suicide. The students, including Zhu, were sent to labor camps far away from their families. At these camps they endured brutal conditions, deprivation, disease, and brainwashing. They were forced to spy and inform on fellow students who did not conform to the Communist ideas. Zhu describes how the lack of any music in their lives was one of the worst forms of deprivation. She and other students tried to find ways to secretly bring music back into their lives. At one point, amazingly, she was able to smuggle her piano, sent from Beijing, into the camp, and hid it in a freezing room, where she would go to play whenever she could. They risked punishment and death, but the need for music to fill the soul-crushing routine of the camps was stronger than their fear. Zhu was in the camps for over five years. Although she survived, her youth had been stolen from her.
As the Cultural Revolution thawed, she was able to return home to her family and found her way back to playing the piano. Eventually she was able to emigrate to the U.S., where she had to clean houses and babysit to make her way. She did whatever she needed, including a marriage of convenience, to allow her to stay in the U.S. and study piano. She longed to see Paris, and decided to move there. Eventually she found friends and influential musicians there who believed in her. She was able to make her first recording, of Bach's Goldberg Variations, to concertize, and to buy her own piano. She still resides in Paris.
The book is a moving account of how her deep love of music and her desire to play, against all odds, kept her alive and sane.

The second story is from a film, for which I have only seen the trailer, entitled Landfill Harmonic.

Cateura, Paraguay, is essentially a city built on top of a landfill. Many residents work as recyclers and scavenge through the landfill in search of sellable goods. In an area where musical instruments would cost more than a house and would be out of reach for all who live there, one man uses his carpentry skills to make full-size cellos and violins from scrap metal and wood. Orchestra director, Luis Szaran, and music teacher, Favio Chavez, have taken these recycled instruments and created The Recycled Orchestra, an entire orchestra made from trash. The film shows how trash can be transformed into beautiful-sounding instruments, but more importantly, it shows how music has transformed the lives of human beings. Music brings hope to the lives of children whose future might otherwise be spiritless. Landfill Harmonic is subtitled "The World Sends Us Garbage. We Send Back Music." It releases in 2014.

Please watch the trailer here:

http://www.landfillharmonicmovie.com/

Both these stories make me reflect on the times when I don't feel like practicing, or I choose to watch TV instead. Or the times when I grumble that I don't play as well as I would like to, or that the pieces are so difficult! I hope I never take for granted the presence of music in my life and the freedom to pursue my life as a musician.