I got asked to create a short piece for another purpose in my science worklife. I happily accepted and then found myself writing something that was sprawling, quadruple the size it needed to be. And then I wrestled with it, got feedback, beat it some more until it was only slightly longer than it was ideally supposed to be, but acceptable. I’m putting it here first because I find that as soon as I hit “publish” on the blog I find all the mistakes.
I never knew you played piano.
That’s almost always what I hear when someone finds out about the band I play in. It’s not as though I keep this from people, but there’s really no reason why anyone should know that I play piano. On the other hand, why hasn’t anyone imagined that I play jazz piano (however clumsy it can be sometimes)? Tim Herzog from Chemistry plays bass in the same ensemble, and so many others up and down our hallways have musical pursuits, so it’s not like I’m unique.
Piano is my place of retreat to create, celebrate, or frustrate. And although you can’t simply point to a piano to define me, there are countless lessons that I take from the the 88 independent possibilities on a keyboard; and there are countless more as I’ve started to play with a group.
First, there’s beauty in the collective mechanisms of strings and hammers, a real wonder of engineering. Pressing into the keyboard, you hear notes ring out or grind dissonantly with different separations. The difference between an octave and a major seventh is hardly anything and everything at the same time, and this is felt under hand as well as in the ears. It’s both physics and physical, mental and emotive at the same time.
Playing requires all of my concentration, which is ironically therapeutic. At a piano I’m not thinking about email, an exam to write, or how I’m going to approach a piece of research. While I’m at the piano, I’m only at the piano. Others among us use fly fishing, baking, painting, yoga, horse riding, climbing, pottery, knitting, and so many other endeavors in the same way. It’s no small thing to have a break, a place where energies are invested in restorative ways.
My own teaching is informed by my time at the piano. As a chord structure provides an overarching guide, even in jazz and its improvisations, my instruction should be similarly prepared but flexible. And then there’s “growth mindset,” a scholarly and trendy theory in teaching and learning. We know that how we think about the intrinsic flexibility to learn can affect our own personal learning as well as the learning of our students. It wasn’t a surprise to me that Tim shared a recent report about how professors’ perceptions of students’ potential to learn can affect the student outcomes in class. In music and in physics, knowing this reminds me to put faith in the act of practice, and to dedicate myself to more of that (often tedious and frustrating) practice, whether it’s homework or rehearsal.
Working in a group that depends upon one another makes me accountable to others and heightens my responsibility to practice. In the band we have to listen to each other in all ways, during and after performance, musically and otherwise. Even as we take turns being a diva, for the most part we get gears to mesh, and this happens only because we’re mutually responsive and respectful. This influences how I’ve started to think about lab and group work in classrooms: How do we form pairings in projects and problems? What are our collaborative goals in lab? How do we structure individual and group roles in a class so that we construct understandings? In all this, there’s great potential in the experience of the collective, “the band.”
As I’ve likened the ensemble and its chord structures and improvisations to our labs and classrooms, I think of my work with Erik Stern and dancers. I’ve marveled at how dancers rely on one another in multiple contexts, to the point that their degrees depend on each other: a student choreographer needs a student dancer to perform a creation, and then 10 minutes later they reverse roles. It sounds ridiculous to imagine what it would be like if you had to construct your scientific findings, your life’s work, and then rely on a collaborating student to present this to the people who will grade you. It’s terrifying and, I think, worth considering.
I could go on to list “lessons learned” from piano, music, and the arts and how these connect to my scientific existence. But there’s a more salient point. There are so many multiple dimensions that people in the sciences live. I started to list just those that I know about in my colleagues, the guitar players and drumline leaders and welders and writers and … then it was clear that the list wasn’t doing justice to any of the people and their practices. It takes away from the surprise and potential you can start to see in the scientists among us.
Maybe the most important idea is that we each bring a whole person into Tracy Hall, our best selves, and these aren’t all just analytical and objective. We’re surrounded by award-winning teachers, renowned scholars, and community activists because they bring their complete personas to work. Students should bring and celebrate their multidimensional selves, too. For me right now, I’ll take off this stereotypical yet practical lab coat and create interesting problems about conservation of momentum. And then I want to go practice piano; we have a gig on Friday.
