Madeline Bruser: Transcript

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Madeline Bruser:

What is communication and why is it scary sometimes to speak up? How can we access something that's deeper than self-consciousness? And so that's what this is, is actually shifts your focus from self-consciousness. "What are they going to think of me? Oh my God." To generosity. What can I give to these people? Everybody has that ability within themselves to make that shift. I have never taught it to anybody who could not make that shift. And it takes six or seven minutes.

Leah Roseman:

Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. I'm so honored that Madeline Bruser has agreed to be featured as a guest on this series. When I first read her book, The Art of Practicing more than 20 years ago, it helped to transform my experience as a performer and teacher and on many aspects of my life. Although Madeline's teaching is aimed primarily at classical pianists and other musicians, I find that much of what she talks about will resonate for everybody trying to get in touch with their emotions, their connection to beauty and meaning, and their experience of being in their bodies.

If you happen to be listening to this when it is first released, you should check out Madeline's free interactive workshop on May 11th at 1:00 PM Eastern. The website is linked to this episode in the description, and you can sign up there. If the topics we address in this conversation are of interest to you, you'll be interested that many of these important issues have come up with past guests and upcoming guests. Feel free to reach out to me through my website leahroseman.com, if you want suggestions for episodes you've missed, or if you want to sign up for my podcast newsletter in which you'll get access to sneak peeks for upcoming episodes.

Hi Madeline, thanks so much for joining me here today.

Madeline Bruser:

Oh, you're so welcome. I really appreciate this opportunity to share some fantastic techniques with musicians.

Leah Roseman:

And we'll talk about it, but I think a lot of what you're sharing is applicable to people who aren't performers as well. I think there's a greater-

Madeline Bruser:

Oh, I hear from them.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Madeline Bruser:

Definitely.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. So, if I can just say this book of yours, The Art of Practicing. This is maybe the fourth copy I've bought because I keep giving it away to people, and it was a pleasure rereading it. I hadn't read it in maybe 20 years, and it resonated with me even more now that I'm older and I've done some more work. So, could we actually start with the book, because many people may know you from that, and what motivated you to write it?

Madeline Bruser:

What motivated me to write it is that I had discovered so many things that could completely transform people's playing. I was thinking about this in preparing for this interview, and some of it I actually discovered as a student when I was at Indiana University in a very kind of ivory tower situation. It was just trees and going through the trees from the dorm to the practice room and back. And that was my life for two years. And I was also studying with Menahem Pressler, who was very focused on genuineness, creativity, spontaneity, being an artist. And so, in those two years, after those two years with him, I felt like I'd become an artist. I knew what an artist was, and I spent a lot of time in the practice room kind of just exploring things. It was not a very competitive environment, and it was very conducive.

I was 17 when I went there, and some of the things that are in the book, I actually discovered in those practice rooms, like I realized. So, we're studying ear training, but I'm not applying it to the music I'm playing. I got curious, can I sing the left hand while I play the right hand of a Bach partita, and I mentioned this in the book, and I spent the whole week doing that for that piece. I really only heard about half of the notes in the left hand. I knew I didn't hear them because I couldn't sing them. So, I worked on it, and it completely transformed the piece. And I maintained that kind of practicing for quite a while after that. Actually, I would say my whole time there, and when I switched schools, it kind of dissolved in the different atmosphere. When I was in New York City, I was at Juilliard.

It was wonderful to be there. I loved my friends. It was a real tribe experience and I needed that. But I forgot about some of the things that I had discovered when my mind was in a very quiet place, and I didn't discover them again until 10 years after I left Indiana. So, this was seven years after I left Juilliard, when I started meditation practice. And that, of course, quieted my mind down and I became more in touch with my listening and how my hands felt at the piano and all these things.

Leah Roseman:

It might be interesting to talk about the fact that when you did this meditation for the first time, it was as a result of a crisis and that you stopped-

Madeline Bruser:

Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

You stopped playing for a while.

Madeline Bruser:

So, I played the worst audition in my life at 29, and it was kind of a lot of pressure because I was trying to take my career to the next level. And many people suggested I play in New York debut, so I needed funding for that. So, there was a Rockefeller grant audition, and it was held at the San Francisco Opera House. I was living in the Bay Area at that time, and I prepared. I was very well-prepared, but the night before, I couldn't sleep worrying about memory lapses primarily and freaking out. And I tried everything. I ran up and down my driveway to try to wear myself out so I could sleep. I stood up and I spun around in circles to get dizzy thinking. Then I could sleep. Nothing worked. And I woke up with this terribly strained neck and I had to take codeine to go to the auditions.

I get there and I got through all the repertoire. There were no memory lapses, but these very bizarre mistakes happened. And I think it's partly because of where the audition was. It was on the stage of the San Francisco Opera House. And as a little girl, I had gone there for concerts. I heard Leon Fleisher there when I was seven years old. So, to me, this was a venerable place where the world's greatest artists performed. And there I was on this stage with a 3000-seat empty hall except for a few judges in row eight or something. And I walked out, and I just didn't belong there. I knew I did not belong there. And so, I got through it, but that was it. I wasn't accepted until the final round, and I said, I have to figure this out. I have to find a way.

I know I was prepared. Why can't I relax? Why can't I find the relaxation and confidence I need to play in an important situation and take my career to the next level? And I had started meditating a year before, and it didn't take, I tried it for a couple of days because some friends had recommended it for some reason, and to me, it just didn't do anything for me. But there was a little bell in my head saying, why don't you try that again? So, I did, and I went to the meditation center in Berkeley where I was living in 40 minutes every evening. I was just doing it and I was loving it. I felt like I was coming home. So, it was the right time, and it is something that people can't really do it if they don't feel interested or ready. But I was very ready at that point.

I was desperate. But also, it just felt so good to just sit there and let my mind relax. And I felt like I was more in my body, and it was great. And I didn't want to practice the piano. I didn't touch the instrument for two months, but I was having a wonderful time. I was reading women's magazines and making curtains for my apartment and going to restaurants and ordering three desserts, and then being too embarrassed to have more. I would go to another restaurant and have two more desserts, and then I would buy some cookies on the way home. So, I gained 10 pounds. I had to lose that, but it was a level of relaxation I had never allowed myself in my life. I was always a high-achieving kid and typical passionate musician. I want to go for it. And I just had never heard of anything besides practicing every day of the year and the whole thing.

And I kind of worried a little like, am I going to want to go back to the piano after this? But after two months, I was ready to go back, and I sat on the bench, and I could not believe what was happening. It was a totally altered experience. I just sort of sat there and I looked at the scores. I said, "Well, what do I want to look at? Do I want to play some big chords and have that feeling, or do I want to explore some phrasing over here?" And I just trusted myself. And I really think that's the essence of what meditation does for people or I'm speaking about mindfulness meditation in particular. Because it connects you to who you really are and gets you out of the concepts in your head. Well, I'm a musician. I'm supposed to practice six hours a day.

But instead like, "Okay, I'm this person who's feeling relaxed right now. What am I really interested in exploring in this piece of music?" So, I was actually getting back to that kind of exploratory relaxed state that I was at in as a student at Indiana, only it was much more intense because it was constant at that point. And I started singing the left hand and playing the right hand again. And I started listening for the sound that was actually coming out of the piano instead of the sound that was in my head. And I started noticing how my hands felt with more acuity. It was just that my perceptions became sharper and clearer because my mind had unwound, and it wasn't cluttering my natural awareness. So, that changed everything and then after that, my performing changed, and my teaching completely changed.

Leah Roseman:

Before we get to that, I just wanted to touch on what you said because it resonated with me. I remember a moment when I heard my violin sound coming as it sounded, but not everyone can relate to that. Can you just elaborate on that a little bit?

Madeline Bruser:

Well, now I teach a technique that's actually going to go into in-depth in my upcoming free interactive workshop. But it's called the Body and Sound Awareness Technique. And it's a deliberate mindfulness practice where you get out of your head and you pay attention, you focus on how the sound is actually affecting you. And the reality is that sound is in air and it is penetrating our system, but if we are not feeling... What it actually does from moment to moment, if we're thinking of the phrase has to go up and down and it has to do this, and my teacher said that, or I heard about this, or I think this.

But if we're not actually noticing what the sound is doing to us as a human being - we are our first audience, that's the thing. And if we're not allowing ourselves the pleasure and the joy and the delight of receiving this glorious music that was written, we're really denying ourselves what our birthright is as artists, as musicians. So, I'm really glad to hear you had that experience. That's wonderful. And how did you feel when you had that experience?

Leah Roseman:

It was later in my career. I mean, I'm sure I had it before, but I was getting a coaching from a colleague and they said, "Why don't you just enjoy the beautiful sound coming out of your violin?" And it hit me really hard because I realized in that moment, I really wasn't. And just, it was like a switch kind of went on, and I almost felt embarrassed that I had been so closed in.

Madeline Bruser:

Well, that's how we're trained. I mean, we're trained to have ideas and not trust or open up to actual perceptions. So, it's not that there's anything wrong with the ideas, but there's a great imbalance if we don't learn to trust what we're perceiving, what we're hearing, what we're feeling, and to get the music in our body, which is where it really lives. And if it doesn't live in our body, then it's not going to go out from our body to our audience's body. They're going to just sit there, ho-hum or, "Oh, isn't she excellent or something?" But if you are actually filled with the vibrancy of this incredible stuff, it's going to immediately go out to them. They're going to pick it up instantly, and they're going to feel it with you. That's a real performance. So, I'm so delighted to hear that you had that experience. It's great.

Leah Roseman:

Now, in terms of your life's purpose, as you made this quite a big switch from being really focused on being a piano soloist to being a very special kind of teacher, I don't really understand why you felt you had to give up the performing.

Madeline Bruser:

That's a great question. And I've been asked this a number of times, of course, and to some extent I don't understand either. But I think the reality is that we're often not who we think we are. It's not that I regret ever having a performing career. I mean, I'm thrilled that I had a performing career. It meant the world to me. And if I hadn't had it, I wouldn't be able to teach performers. But something opened up in my mind on a completely different level, and I think this is what meditation does, and this is after eight years of meditation. So, including very intensive programs where I was sitting all day with a group for a month and going to a three-month program with study and practice alternating and lot of stuff. And it took eight years for it to sink into my system so strongly that my posture at the piano began to be my posture on the meditation cushion.

And it was a spring of 1985 when a couple of two or three heartbreaking experiences happened that spring, my cat died and a romance fell apart, and I forget the other one. And I was just devastated. And I sat there on my meditation cushion for two hours at a time feeling drenched in pain, but I knew that I had to feel it in order to get through it. Anything we want to heal, we have to go through it to heal it. And one day around that time, I'm sitting down to practice and I'm noticing that instead of swaying around at the piano like I did for many years and leaning over and doing all that stuff, I was sitting like I was meditating and what was moving and very freely were my arms and hands. And I also wasn't dropping my wrist low like I did before. Thank goodness could have had an injury from that. And it was just shocking.

So, that week, I asked all my students to sit like that, and they instantly played a hundred percent better. And I remember this so vividly. I stood there in the room looking at the student, sitting at the piano, and it was like light bulbs flashing in front of my face. Oh my God, I don't need to go hitting my head against the wall to get a world-famous performing career touring around. I want to teach this. This is so important. This is totally transforming people on the spot and that was it. And there were other factors in my life, and I think many musicians could identify this at the time, I was 37 when I changed my posture and started shifting to teaching. That's my primary focus. I wasn't married and I had stuff I knew I needed to work through, and I wanted to balance my personal life with my professional life.

And it's easy, if you're any kind of artist, visual artist, musician, actor, dancer, whatever, it means so much to you. And it's such an open channel. It's like you can receive magic somehow, go out there, give it to your audience, and you're connected to something very powerful and human and profound. And so, it can be very satisfying and rewarding, but at a certain point in your life, you might wonder as I did well, "Hey, wouldn't it be great if a man could be my best friend instead of this big black Steinway?" And so, I just started focusing on that as well, and my life completely changed. And it was important because for women, your late 30s, if you want to have a baby, which I did, it was the clock ticking. So, all of these things combined. But I think the primary thing really was that I felt, "Oh my God, I have discovered gold and look what it's doing for these people, and I have to teach this. People need this"

And when I started giving the seminars, which began in my living room on The Art of Practicing, I invited all kinds of people, not just pianists. And a trombonist asked me to work with him. And I said, "Well, I don't know anything about your instrument, but I'll try." And it was like I could see right away when he slid the slide, he was leaning his whole body forward. I said, "You don't need to do that. Stand like this. Slide." Immediately was so much easier and he got a better sound. And the other thing I could see, and I do totally credit meditation practice for this, is that his lip area was not really, he wasn't tuned into the sensations here. And so, his sound was inconsistent and there were problems. I said, "Can you tune into what it feels like here to blow the instrument."

And so, then the harpist, the violist, the oboist it started like that, not like I did a whole lot of it. And I'm always very careful to tell everybody that it's very important to have an expert teacher for technique for your instrument. Nevertheless, for example, last year, a trumpet player in Denmark, very successful trumpet player in Denmark, contacted me and wanted about seven lessons. And he wrote a master's thesis on the project, and it was transformative for him. And it wasn't just the posture. I think he kind of had that, but there was all the listening things and also the rhythmic grouping, which is really powerful, which I also want to mention later today.

Leah Roseman:

Oh, yeah.

Madeline Bruser:

So, that's how it happened.

Leah Roseman:

So, Madeline, before we get more into this work, it would be a really nice place to share the video of you playing Chopin from a while ago.

Madeline Bruser:

Oh, sure.

Leah Roseman:

So, if you could speak to when that performance was recorded and what it means.

Madeline Bruser:

It was recorded a year after this whole shift happened. And I didn't want to perform anymore. I wanted to give seminars at colleges. But this musician friend of mine said, "Well, you're going to have to play. You're going to have to submit a recording of your playing." So, I made this recording, and it turned out to be... And it was a wonderful filmmaker friend of mine who did the video really, really well. And so, I did it for that purpose, and I'm very grateful to have it now. So, I was 38 at the time, and I'm not 100% crazy about it, but I do feel very good about it.

Leah Roseman:

And now here is Madeline Bruser performing Chopin Fantaisie Impromptu.

Leah Roseman:

Well, thanks so much for sharing. That's so beautiful and inspiring.

Madeline Bruser:

You're welcome.

Leah Roseman:

So, you had mentioned rhythmic grouping and that whole way you talk about rhythmic vitality in the book, it's hard to talk about rhythm and you do it so well. If you could just go into that a little bit.

Madeline Bruser:

I have some pictures actually right here. So this is the thing, it's really not often taught. I discovered most of it in one of those practice rooms at Indiana. I got bits and pieces of it from a couple of piano teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area, but not the whole thing. But I developed it so that I can teach it to people and really make a huge difference in their playing. Probably, still is taught at the Curtis Institute, but I know in the mid-20th century, it was taught by Marcel Moyse, who's a flutist. And Marcel, he was the flutist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Yeah, Tabuteau at Curtis. And then, one of the faculty members of The Art of Practicing Institute, which I formed about 20 years ago, trumpeter, Stephen Burns. He learned it at this Paris Conservatory, from Pierre Thibaud, who was a trumpeter. And so, Stephen was at the Paris Conservatory for six or eight years and he knows rhythmic grouping inside out. He's really brilliant with it. And he said it made absolutely huge difference in his playing.

And then, another faculty member, Kirk Ferguson, who is a trombonist, he learned it from Leo Potts. And there is a brass or wind method called the LSP, Lindeman-Sobel Potts method, which includes rhythmic grouping, and they teach it slightly differently, but it's the same thing. And Kirk said that the year that he learned that, he got into the super finals for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, principle trumpet position, the semi-finals for the Boston Symphony, second trumpet. And then, he got his job as assistant principal... Not trumpet, trombone, sorry. He got his job as the assistant principal trombonist in the Milwaukee Symphony where he is now. And he says his playing just went like that when he learned rhythmic grouping.

And what it does is it connects you to natural momentum and away from this false idea that we have to count like one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. And if you count like that, and if you try to dance a waltz like that, you are going to feel dead. I mean, you just can't, have to go one, two, three, one. So, this picture shows how rhythmic grouping is really like waves. So, the crest of the wave in a three-beat bar or in a triplet, it's on the two. So, two, three, one. The wave ebbs on one and then it starts getting ready, two, three, one, two, three, one, like that. And if you have four, and let's say this is 16th note, so we're taught (singing), and it's very, very boring. But if you go, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, so (singing). And jazz musicians instinctively get this.

And there's also a jazz musician named Hal Galper. I still need to get his book. It's called Forward Motion. And it's the same idea, one, and two, and three. And I have people at lessons standing up and getting this in their body by going one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, so that the whole body feels it. And as soon as they sit down, they have it. I also had a student make a photocopy of a piece, write out the bar lines and draw them right after the downbeat, and he got it. So, in other words, what it looks like on the page can be very deceiving and we need to understand how it really works. And it takes a long time for people to get it, because all their life they've been doing it the other way.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Madeline Bruser:

So, have you worked with that?

Leah Roseman:

I feel like when I studied Baroque violin with Stanley Ritchie, we addressed this. I just feel like I absorbed it in different ways over my career and I can't really point... Maybe certain conductors have talked that way.

Madeline Bruser:

That's great.

Leah Roseman:

I certainly feel like it's been part of my way of thinking about rhythm and certainly, listening to different styles of music a lot, different traditional music and jazz and so on helps me as a classical musician.

Madeline Bruser:

Great. I'm so glad to hear that. That's fantastic. I know certain conductors have it and there's a conductor named Andrew Megill in New York. A student of mine was in the chorus for the Messiah with him. And so, he had them rehearse and dotted with him. So, (singing). So, they were really on a horse, so that when they did the written rhythm, (singing) it was alive. And it does take that kind of thing. And I have people practicing this by literally stopping two, three, one, two, three, one. It doesn't mean that the two is louder, but it's the rhythmic emphasis. It's where the most rhythmic energy is. And once you practice hearing those stops, then you can go through the phrase without stopping, but feeling those groups instead of what it looks like.

And what's really interesting, and this is how I discovered part of it in Indiana, is that when you stop on the downbeat, there can be a very interesting new harmony there. And that's an opportunity to let the sound of the instrument come in and to really absorb the change that's happening so that the music is dancing in your body.

Leah Roseman:

In terms of your training, as a pianist, was it always easy for you to hear the colors of chords, if you know what I mean?

Madeline Bruser:

Well, color was a word I really started hearing almost every single lesson with Menahem Pressler. He was crazy about color. He still is, I'm sure. And somebody I went to school with, like me, was asked to contribute to a book about him, and she said he would just say something while she was playing like, "Silver." And then she said, "And I could do it." But he was very like the childlike artist kind of person, and he lived in a magical world. And it was great to talk about color and hear about color. And when I teach Ravel, for instance, to my students, it's so helpful for them because we focus so much on the color, then they go back to Beethoven or whoever and they're hearing colors, and this is so important.

Leah Roseman:

But I want to make a distinction between tone color in terms of mood and character and harmonic color, because you're playing a harmonic instrument, and I'm a violinist, so it's mostly linear.

Madeline Bruser:

Well, I've taught a lot of non-pianists and I always ask them to go to their keyboard and block out the chords and sing the line that they are playing, and it totally changes everything, because they have to do what we have to do, which is just to hear more than one thing at a time. It makes me think about Bobby McFerrin had the orchestra sing their parts. That's brilliant. It's fun also. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

That just happened to my orchestra with a conductor last week.

Madeline Bruser:

Oh, really?

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Madeline Bruser:

Who's the conductor?

Leah Roseman:

Jessica Cottis, she's a wonderful Australian conductor based in England.

Madeline Bruser:

Great. I'm so glad to hear that.

Leah Roseman:

And we did it. We didn't resist.

Madeline Bruser:

And so, you had a good time doing it?

Leah Roseman:

Actually, yes, it was-

Madeline Bruser:

That's great.

Leah Roseman:

... it was fun.

Madeline Bruser:

Fantastic.

Leah Roseman:

If we could talk about how we hear ourselves, and go back to when you were 18 and you got a special gift from your family. I found the story very moving.

Madeline Bruser:

Yeah, when I was 18, I was at Indiana for my second year, and my family for my 18th birthday sent me a small tape recorder. So, of course, we didn't have iPhones, we didn't have computers, but it was a mini reel to reel... So, the reels are that big. And I still have a reel that I mentioned in the book about my family sending me a little cassette of each of them wishing me a happy birthday. And so, my father played Chopin Nocturne. He's a wonderful amateur pianist, totally self-taught. My sister played the flute and he accompanied her. They got the dog to bark web prompted by the doorbell. And my grandfather, who was originally from Ukraine, which was part of Russia at the time, read a passage from Doctor Zhivago, and all I remember was, "Art is like life, it is organic." And it went really right in. Grandparents are a connection to something so long ago.

I remember being in front of our house and he was working in the yard or something and I said, "Well, it's getting dirty here." He says, "That's not dirt, it's earth." And that kind of influence is important. And so, art is organic like life, that I use that in that chapter about rhythm because music needs to feel like life and we need to maximize our aliveness as performers. And if we maximize our aliveness when we're practicing, we are having a wonderful experience instead of forcing ourselves to do four repetitions of this or whatever.

Leah Roseman:

Nowadays, it's so easy for people to record themselves, but people maybe still don't do it enough because they're afraid of what they might hear. They're not in love with their own playing, would you say?

Madeline Bruser:

Well, yes. I mean, I did record my practicing. They wanted me to be my own teacher. So, that was the idea. And I think that fit in with how I was experiencing my time there. But people are afraid of anything that shows them who they are. And we are not supposed to be perfect as if it was possible in the first place, anyway. There's a famous quote from Baryshnikov, I assume it's genuine. I've seen it on Facebook a few times. "It's not about being perfect. There's an obsession with technique that can kill your best impulses, and it's much better to be vulnerable." And then he says something like, "Trust me." Of course, we trust Baryshnikov. And I think, the culture right now is at this kind of place where we're ready to be more and more and more vulnerable, and real, and communicative, and trusting of ourselves, and trusting of the kind of communication we can have with people. But it's still a kind of crisis people have about performing.

I think the pandemic really changed people because they appreciated the opportunity to perform after that. A student of mine is actually the lead guitar in a well-known band. And they played Madison Square Garden, 30,000 people, this sort of thing. And he told me that after the pandemic, when they got to perform for a live audience again, he said, "They wouldn't have cared if we were terrible. They were going to love us no matter what." And it changes the mindset of the performer and this is really good. And so, I'm actually working on a second book about performing that. I'm not sure how long it's going to take me to finish it, but I interviewed 50 performers, actors and dancers, as well as musicians. And the things they said, it's all about vulnerability and being real, and that's what your audience wants. And if you can get used to that place where it's scary, but it's so real, it's so alive. I mean, that's why we do this anyway, that's why we want to be on.

Leah Roseman:

Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I'm an independent podcaster who does all the many jobs required to produce the series, and there are a lot of costs I bear as well. Please consider either buying me a virtual coffee as a tip or becoming a monthly supporter, starting at $3 Canadian, which is close to $2 US or 2 euros, and getting access to unique perks. The link is in the description. Now, back to the episode.

Your husband's an actor and he's done some of the same teaching you do related to the art of practicing. I was looking at some of the workshops he'd done. I found it very interesting.

Madeline Bruser:

Oh yeah, he's done a program called Meditation for Actors, and he's taught it at a few different places, and he's gearing up to get back into that after our move last year. Yeah, I mean, it's totally transformative for actors, especially the Performing Beyond Fear exercise, I have to say, which I developed in 2006, and which by the way, will be taught in the free interactive workshop that's coming up. That exercise, there's nothing like it, actually. But Stanislavski, who was a very, very transformative figure in the education of actors, the training of actors, was a meditator. Alan Arkin meditates, Alan Bersten meditates, Peter Coyote and Richard Gear, and there's a reason. k.d. lang, the singer, is a serious meditator, and all of them have said, "When I started doing meditation, my performing completely opened up."

Leah Roseman:

This exercise, which I was hoping we could talk about Performing Beyond Fear. I did it again today, and it is very different every time, but it's not a meditation, it's reflection.

Madeline Bruser:

Well, originally, I called it The Contemplation, and I taught it at first at a 2006 program that was called the Meditation for Musicians Retreat in Vermont, which it was at a meditation center for six years. And then, fortunately, we started doing it at a university music department in Pennsylvania. And it was a whole great thing. But I called it The Contemplation, then six of us in New York sat down at dinner at a restaurant and said, "Well, let's figure out a name for this thing." And people were throwing around names and I said, "I know. We're going to call it Performing Beyond Fear, a self-empowering exercise for musicians." But I shortened it to the Performing Beyond Fear exercise. And it isn't just for musicians or even other performing artists.

Somebody I know had to give a fundraising pitch at a board of directors meeting, and she learned this from me a couple of days in advance of that meeting. Totally considers herself a non-spiritual person, but she said, "I like the way I felt doing this exercise." And so, in the middle of the meeting, she kind of went there and she did it. And then, when it was time for her to give her a pitch, she gave it, and she emails me right away, "You won't believe this. We just got a $1 million pledge."

So, there's something to it. And people have done it for business interviews and whatever. Because it's about what does it really mean to you to communicate something to another person that is going to change the relationship, or you, or them. What is communication? And why is it scary sometimes to speak up? And how can we access something that's deeper than self-consciousness? And so, that's what this is. It actually shifts your focus from self consciousness. "What are they going to think of me? Oh my God." To generosity, "What can I give to these people?" And everybody has that ability within themselves to make that shift. I have never taught it to anybody who could not make that shift. And it takes six or seven minutes. I just encourage people to go there, to go to the power that's inside of the vulnerability. You cannot get to your power if you don't open up and be vulnerable, just you can't, it's no way.

Leah Roseman:

So, when people click on your website, which will be linked in the description of this episode, it'll take them to that exercise. And actually, it's linked to the album on Bandcamp, which I got. And in there, there's actually reflections from some of the participants, which I found interesting to listen to as well, and definitely resonated with me. And one of the things I found interesting, because I've done this exercise many times since then, it's like a weird stream of consciousness in terms of, especially the idea of lineage that it's not at all just the people you've studied with, but pieces you've heard... Especially, I've been a performer for so long, just all the many people I've performed with who've inspired me. And it extends out so far. And I find it's this incredibly beautiful web that gives you strength.

Madeline Bruser:

Yeah, it's like what I said about my grandfather. And I think the older we get, the more we value what we inherited from parents, teachers, grandparents, whoever. And the lineage includes whoever invented your instrument or all kinds of things. And it's whatever comes into your head at the moment, and that's only part of the exercise. So, lineage, I think, for all of us, as human beings, lineage is a terribly important thing. It grounds us in who we really are, what our life really means, what we really want from it, what direction we want to go in.

For example, my grandparents all escaped persecution in Ukraine as teenagers, and they went to Canada. And they had to start a whole new life, they didn't know the language, it's all this stuff. So, that means, whenever I reflect on them, there's bravery, there's real guts and courage. And then, they did it. And then their kids ended up going to the US where I was born. But fortunately, I knew all my grandparents as a kid. I don't know. This stuff is just... And now, we have a daughter who's 25, and the older she gets, the more she appreciates us. And it's really powerful. And the thing is, right at this point in my life, I recently turned 75, my focus is on the legacy I need to leave. And I have no idea, the ripple effect of it, but I just know I have to do what I can. So, it's all like we are actually part of the lineage, we've inherited a lot.

Leah Roseman:

And in terms of one of the other strands of this exercise, in terms of appreciating the care and time you've put into learning it is what you do, let's say you're not even a performer, but you're whatever it is that you do, you're a scientist, I think it really applies. But then, a lot of us have this burden of perfectionism sitting on our shoulder saying, "You're not good enough. You're never prepared enough." How do you talk to your students about working on that.

Madeline Bruser:

With a lot of sympathy. We've all been there and we all have tendencies to give into messages from inner demons at times and feel like, "I'm not good enough for this or that," or "These kind of people aren't going to like me because..." It's just tapes, running. I don't know. I just point them in the direction of what's underneath it. And like it says in my book, "The real reason people feel bad about not playing as well as they wanted to play is that they care." And that is the best thing. So, it's so important to appreciate how much you care because that's your heart. And we are not particularly educated in music schools to focus on our heart, but hopefully, we have a warm, loving teacher who helps us do that. But you can actually train yourself to open your heart more, not only to yourself, which is the starting place actually, but to other people and to then, of course, to the music, you have to start by opening to yourself.

Leah Roseman:

And when people can invite the audience in, I think that was a big change for me when I started to be able to do that, not feel like I needed to block them out in order to deal with nerves, but welcome them.

Madeline Bruser:

Why do they show up? You think they're there because they want to sit there and check out a lot of boxes. "Well, she played a wrong note in bar 82, and she did this. She doesn't seem..." Nobody's sitting there doing that. They want to experience beauty, and joy, and life, and awe. That's why they're there. They want to have a beautiful experience. But of course, if we've had a lot of judgment in our past, particularly I think as little kids or from abusive teachers or whatever, it can be damaging, and it can be hard to get past that. And so, I think, everybody needs a teacher who can counteract the effects of all those messages. And I think, community, is incredibly essential, which was really what was so great about the summer programs that we taught. And of course, the pandemic kind of put an end, and I'm not sure, maybe they'll, they'll start again.

But you spend a week with people, and every morning, after your meditation hours, you have two hours of meditation, different kinds of meditation, and then there's a one-hour discussion group. And everybody can just talk. Somebody comes from a foreign country, says, "The sexism at the auditions for my instrument is so horrendous. It's really upsetting." And she's just burst into tears. And then she gets all the support from other people or whatever it is. Or, "My teacher said this. I feel like I don't belong among musicians," and all these things. Everybody has messages that shouldn't really be there. And so, when you find out that people care, and they've had similar experiences and similar bad messages is extremely helpful. So, all the online teaching I do with groups, same thing.

Leah Roseman:

I know you were going to spend a few minutes maybe showing some things at the piano.

Madeline Bruser:

Yes. I just want to kind of tell three stories about problems that people have presented to me at lessons or programs. I had this student. Let's call her Carol. She had an injury, her hand and forearm, and her problem was that she was holding fingers above the keys. 99% of people who come to me don't realize that they're doing this and don't know how to fix it. Maybe they've had a teacher who told them not to do it, but they didn't guide them in a methodical way.

So, she had pain here because, when you lift your fingers, you're using muscles here. Then, when you bend other fingers at the same time, you're using the muscles underneath your forearm. It's called co-contraction. So, her whole forearm was really painful, and she just had to stop playing for a while. So, she came to this five-week program, and the first thing she had to learn how to do was to just, after each note, check that the other four fingers are on the keys and not up anywhere and really put her mind to each one to tell them.

After she did that, next thing was to do a piece like that. So, it's obviously not making music, but then once her fingers were trained to be down, which took her about a week, she pretty much had it practicing just 10 minutes at a time so she could really focus. Then, she worked on getting her arm to support her fingers with the arm weight. If I'm going to move into a short finger on a black key, I'm kind of sliding in like this, which is allowing the arm weight to help the finger put the key down so that you get a sense of flow. She worked with that. So, there was less work for the fingers. That's one story.

Another one is Yumiko. She wanted to play with emotional intensity without physical attention. Like I described how that my posture changed after I started doing meditation ... I used to play ... to get ... because it's so intense and I have to say something. I asked her to focus on her sitting bones being rooted into the bench so she's solid. All right? And then just put her attention at the heart level. What does the music feel like to you? Then, keep the sitting bone focus and the heart focus, and then just let the arm go. Then, she can do ... and have a beautiful sound and feel like she's involved emotionally without this tight thing here. This is an extremely common thing.

Laura came to the summer program three sessions, and she wanted to have power with her arm. Similarly to Yumiko, she was feeling like she had to lean to get power, and she wasn't getting a good sound, and it was too much work. So, same thing, I asked her to focus on three contact points. So, there's the sitting bones on the bench. There's also the feet on the floor. Then, there's the end of the finger bones at the bottom of the keys. So, if you think of an arrow going down like this representing gravity, you're actually getting momentum from the force of gravity by springing from your fingertips with a free arm like this. So, she got minimum effort, maximum power, and she got the sound she wanted.

These are just three things, but they go a really long way. I mean, if somebody really wants to be expressive and have fluidity, you can't get that fluidity without the arm being free. When we do this even with a straight back, we're compromising our range of motion, and range of motion pretty much translates as a range of sound. So, we don't have easy delicacy or easy power like that. Basically, the arm at the piano functions like the bow for the string player. It's the fluidity and the flow or the breath for the wind player or the singer. That's really what it does. When people actually learn to play without looking at their hands, their arm learns all kinds of distances by feel. So, tuning into what the arm feels like and where it's traveling to is super helpful.

I just wanted to show those little bits because they're extremely common and they really go a long way. In terms of this, I had a student who was falling on her thumb, meaning that she didn't have her arm weight balanced on her thumb. She would play on the whole thumb. So, as soon as I said, "Well, notice that the arm is balanced on the end of that finger, it's not how high should your wrist be. It's do I feel the sensation of my arm weight going into the key? So, now you can play the thumb, but your arm weight is still [inaudible 00:56:17]." If you go like this, your arm weight's going into the wrist, and it's not helping anything.

Leah Roseman:

I'm curious. I see so many really quite excellent pianists, but they make me uncomfortable because they're very much hunched over the keys and kind of staring at the keyboard. Do you see this a lot, as well?

Madeline Bruser:

Yep, I see it all the time. Well, I used to be one of them. I mean, slaving over a hot piano is the idea. We all have so many habits in our lives, not just in our music making. So, it can be very foreign, and a lot of people are not ready to consider changing a habit like that. I used to equate it with expressiveness and passion. The reality is, no, the art of practicing is really about balancing activity with receptivity, learning to be less active and more receptive. I was thinking about this in the last couple of days, and it's also less reactive. Here's stormy Beethoven. So, I'm going to get all like this. Well, the storm is supposed to be happening in your body, not in your fists, and it's a tall order to contain the powerful energy of a composer like that.

So, it takes a person who's ready to make a change, open, and also, I never force anything. I say, "Try this. How does it feel? How does it sound?" Very much dialogue with the student so that we co-create the lesson. I'm sure you've seen all manner of things with string instruments, as well, but I really feel encouraged because, in the last couple decades there's so much change. I mean, Fleisher and Graffman went public with piano injuries in 1980. Performing arts medicine was born. Alexander lessons started becoming popular musicians. School started employing Alexander teachers, and then people getting into Feldenkrais, which is incredible body mapping, all these things. So, I think the evolution of music teaching is really happening right now.

Leah Roseman:

I, myself, I've studied different kind of body mapping over the years. I did quite a lot of Alexander and Feldenkrais and Tai chi. I tried different things over the years, but what all those things gave me was this awareness in my daily life away from the instrument that really helped me going back to it. So, I always encourage people to try different things, anything that's going to help you with that awareness.

Madeline Bruser:

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but, again, the thing about meditation, mindfulness practice, is that it's basically a practice of letting the mind relax. When the mind relaxes, the body relaxes. Also, the perception's open, and the intelligence opens. So, it's like all of the habitual mind, I have to practice now. I'm going to practice like crazy, da, da, da, da, da. Whatever the habits are, whether it's overwork or getting excessively caught up in passionate energy and losing your balance with that or whatever it is, meditation relaxes all the habits. Then, you say, "Oh, wait a minute. Maybe I don't have to work that hard. Maybe there's another way to play this phrase. How does it actually sound?" But somebody has to teach you, how can you use your body and ears to create a completely different result?

Leah Roseman:

There's another one of my guests, her episode hasn't been released yet, and she had said to me, "When I became a meditator, I wasn't bored again." She said it better than that, but basically there is always something to notice.

Madeline Bruser:

That's great. That's true. We moved to a very quiet, peaceful suburb of Philadelphia a little over a year ago after being in New York for 43 years. Oh, my God, it's totally different. Just being in the kitchen, well, first of all, instead of looking at a wall, I'm looking at a beautiful garden with a pond and the sun comes in. That's a big difference, but there's not a lot of racket. It's quiet. The trees are taller than the houses. It's this beautiful, natural, healing environment. I just naturally want to go slower. Then, I naturally start enjoying putting the spoon in the dishwasher. Whatever it is, that's our birthright to actually enjoy simple things. The more we can enjoy those simple things, the more we can enjoy playing a single note on our instrument.

Leah Roseman:

You just brought me back to the beginning of the pandemic when we were locked down and I was feeling pretty closed in. It was winter here. I would sometimes have a nature scene just playing on a screen just to have the feeling of being in a lush forest. Then, somebody told me about this app. I think it's called WindowSwap, where people would just have a still image of what's outside their window, and you could just travel virtually into someone else's world. I did this quite a few times. It was quite magical because it was quite random. You'd suddenly be in Barcelona or in wherever, all over the world. People would submit their window, what they were seeing outside their window.

Madeline Bruser:

That's great. Yeah, the internet has opened up the world. It's really true. That's fantastic.

Leah Roseman:

Did you have routines in place before the lockdown that helped you get through that?

Madeline Bruser:

Routines before the lockdown that helped me get through the lockdown?

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Madeline Bruser:

What do you mean?

Leah Roseman:

Well, you're already a meditator. I'm just curious if there were things that anchored you in your life. Many people I spoke to, and I'm one of those people, I knew every day I would write in my journal. I would go for a walk. I would do these certain things no matter what else was going on, even if concerts were canceled and I had to teach suddenly online and all these things were going on. I just had these things I could depend on that kind of help me.

Madeline Bruser:

That's really smart and excellent. I mean, first of all, I was already teaching online, not everybody, but a lot of people in different locations. Then, as soon as the pandemic hit, we had to cancel our in-person summer program. I got together with three faculty members and said, "We're going to do an online program." In four months, it happened, but it was really hard, but that focus was very motivating, and the guys were great. Everybody contributed something. We got this great Zoom control person, and all these rooms were happening, and it was fantastic. We got 60 people from 10 time zones, and it was great. I'll never do it again because it was exhausting, but I was occupied with that.

Then, of course, I was just teaching most people online, although I had a few students in New York. They were coming to my apartment if they'd been vaccinated, but the truth is, Leah, I'm a homebody. Living in New York, I was definitely a homebody. I love the peacefulness of just being in my own home where I've created a lovely environment. I do journal a lot. I've done that since I was 13 years old. I read poetry a lot, and I stay in touch with friends on the phone or on Zoom sometimes and have a great husband. I just live my life.

Of course, I would go to Riverside Park, which was a block away from where we lived, but within a few months, we were on the trail to get out of the city. So many people left New York, the pandemic because of the working from home and being so possible, people got out of there, and we were one of them. I wasn't a performer. I think for you and for all these millions of people who are performers, I can't imagine what it was like because it's not like you can perform on Zoom and be in sync because you can't. I mean, how was that for you to give up performing for a certain time?

Leah Roseman:

I think it was the not knowing, A lot of people said that to me if you knew you wouldn't be able to perform for set time. So, that was difficult, or the fear when we first went back. We weren't vaccinated, and the virus was quite dangerous at that point. So, wearing two masks and keeping distance from people. I mean, I started this YouTube channel, and I was making recordings every day for a long time, and I was doing much more teaching than normal. I had different ways of coping that gave me purpose because we all need purpose in our life. Certainly, I started this podcast later, it was in May of 2021, but that connection with musicians all over talking about important things like this just has continued to be incredibly therapeutic for me and I hope for other people.

Madeline Bruser:

Oh, yeah. I mean, you're doing a fantastic thing. I'm sure everybody's super grateful for it. I am. Podcasts, in general, have totally taken off. It's a real gift, this addition to our lives, but I'm happy for you and all the other musicians who can finally perform in person.

Leah Roseman:

Oh, yeah.

Madeline Bruser:

I mean, what was it like when you started performing in person?

Leah Roseman:

When we first started where I live, it was very limited numbers. So, in a hall that I think we have 2,300 seats, there were I think maybe 200 allowed. So, maybe there were a hundred people all spaced out in masks. It was spooky. They'd be clapping enthusiastically, but it just wasn't the same feeling.

Madeline Bruser:

Yeah, yeah.

Leah Roseman:

Finally, I remember doing some shows that were really full and just the feeling and the energy in the room. It was incredible. If we could just go back something, I'm just curious because I only started journaling for real in my fifties a few years ago, and I found it very, very therapeutic, especially reading back entries. Do you make a point of reading back a year or two ago to see where you're at?

Madeline Bruser:

Just once in a while I get curious and I pick up one of them. I mean, I have notebooks all over. I mean, the basement has a big box. I got rid of a lot when we moved, but I ran out of time because I wanted to recycle, which meant take out the spiral binding. So, I still have too many, but it is interesting. I mean, one thing that's very valuable to me is some notes I took when my daughter was first born and special things about her as she was growing up that have a lot of meaning. I started doing it when I was 13 because my cousin and I, she was the same age, we would complain about our parents to each other all the time. She said, "When I get like that, I just write everything that comes into my head," and then I started doing it. Just that was it.

I think, now, people call it a mindfulness practice, and I do feel that when you write, you can connect to what is it I feel, and what do I want to say? Sometimes, when I wake up in the morning, frequently, typically, when I wake up in the morning, I have a big space before I have to teach or do any work, three hours or something. What did I just dream? What does that mean? Da, da, da, da, da, da. Where am I today? Today, I seem kind of distracted. Then, I can kind of zoom in on what's actually where I am. I think that's really important. It is a mindfulness practice, but everybody's different. Some people don't like to write. They don't care about their feelings and all these details and everything. That's fine, but I have an extremely emotional nature, and I need to corral this stuff so I can make some sense out of myself.

Leah Roseman:

Madeline, in terms of your work as a private teacher, I'm curious, you'd written a little bit in the book, it really resonated with me that you used to think when you were a much younger teacher, they play and then I will give them feedback, and they will improve, and there's just sort of set steps. At a certain point, you let go of that.

Madeline Bruser:

Yeah. When I was 29, I occasionally made a little money from a concert, but basically I was teaching for a living, and I wasn't enjoying it. I thought, "Well, this is bad. I have to find a way to enjoy it." So, I asked a student of mine, she was teaching respiratory therapy in a hospital, "Do you know any good books about teaching?" She recommended this extraordinary book, Freedom to Learn by Carl Rogers. So, I got the book, and I flipped out. I underlined and I put all these asterisks, and I just couldn't believe. It was all about finding out what the student already knows before you try to feed stuff into them. I was really delighted with this book.

Then, three weeks after I had been reading it, it occurred to me in the middle of a lesson that I wasn't applying anything I had read, and the lesson wasn't going well, and the student was 17 years old. I said, "So, what do you think of how you just played?" She just pretty much told me everything I would've told her myself. So, I didn't have to waste my breath. Plus, the main thing was I got to know her and find out how smart she was, and then we could have a conversation, and she could develop that perceptiveness and intelligence because we were talking together, and I could learn from her. I just loved teaching after that.

10-year-old kids could just, "So, what'd you think? How was it?" "Well, my posture was pretty bad at this place, but this was okay, but I had a problem in this phrase here." Again, I would've told her those things. So, what does she need me for? She needs me to add to what she already understands, help her deepen her understanding, and, of course, say things that she didn't think of or notice herself. I mean, that happens all the time, but it's a collaboration.

When I train teachers, I train them to teach that way. For instance, last year, I taught an 18-week advanced piano teacher training program for three people who had been working with me for a while. They were literally teaching each other specific repertoire, six weeks on Mozart sonatas, six weeks on Chopin etudes, and six weeks on Ravel, and they really learned how to do it. It was incredible to see that they would just sit there and trust themselves to say, "I don't know. Let me think about that," and just be real and be with that person so that person could trust them as a real person and as somebody who valued their own thinking and everything. It's called student-centered teaching. A lot of people know about it. I mean, at Teachers College, which is part of Columbia, New York, they teach student-centered teaching.

When we were looking for, I guess, a elementary school for our daughter in New York, we went to Bank Street School, which is really an enlightened school. They were talking about how they taught, and the kids were actually in the room to show it, and they were all at tables instead of desks and sharing a table. The teacher said, "Okay. Today's topic is Indonesia. What do you already know about Indonesia?" It was like respect and appreciation of those people who are your students. It's a totally different experience to teach that way, and it makes me really, really, really happy to be a teacher.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. We talked a little bit about perfectionism and nerves. What are your feelings about people using drugs like beta blockers to help with extreme nerves? Have you counseled people on that?

Madeline Bruser:

I think if they feel they need it, that's what they should do. I've only helped two people get off of them, but there was a cellist at a summer program who, by the end of the week, performed a piece without a beta blocker, which she was really amazed.

Then, Kirk Ferguson talks to people sometimes about how he got off of beta blockers at the end of that program. His story was that, if he had to play a really exposed solo in the orchestra and it was difficult, he would take a beta blocker before the performance. I was like, "Okay, it's okay," but at the end of the summer program, which is just a six-day program, he played a piece on the closing concert. It wasn't a particularly old piece of his repertoire, and it wasn't easy. It was a contemporary piece, but he did it without a beta blocker. He said he played better than he'd ever played it in his life. It's partly because of the performing beyond fear exercise. It's partly because of the community and certain other work that I did with him in the sessions because each person in that program worked with me every other day. So, they had three sessions with me. They were watching everybody else learn stuff, all these different instruments, and talking at lunch and dinner.

So, we had the elements that I think people need, which is accurate information about the body, training your mind to really relax so that it opens up, using your ears in a bigger way so that the music's in your body, doing the rhythmic grouping, and having a supportive community. I think without the community, it's not as easy because, when everybody's experiencing it together and you can talk, it's a whole other thing. It's like being on a college campus and sharing the learning experience. It really makes a difference.

Leah Roseman:

And you'd mentioned before, abusive teachers. Now I think in the classical world, unfortunately, there's a lot of what people even just call old school. It's not even what people might even think of overt psychological abuse, but it is in today's terms as we understand it. And I think that's a huge, huge legacy which so many people deal with.

Madeline Bruser:

Yeah, it's very unfortunate. I think it's not just in music teaching. I think it's in the entire evolution of humanity. And so nowadays everybody's talking about healing from trauma and abuse of this and abuse of that. And there have been books written about what happens in the schools and sometimes really people need a really good psychotherapist. I've been looking at different methods to recommend a people for healing from trauma. I personally, for years have used a method for my own stuff called the Healing Code, which I discovered online accidentally several years ago. And it's like a six minute practice where you send healing energy to yourself about a particular issue.

I mean, I've done so much work on myself that I'm pretty familiar with this kind of thing. EMDR is something that really helps a lot of people with healing from trauma, eye movement, desensitization, reprogramming, I mean, it's a very powerful and efficient method for people. There's a method called Hakomi. So here in Philadelphia, we have a friend, an MD named Michael Baime, who's a mindfulness practitioner, and he has started the Mindfulness Center at University of Pennsylvania, which has 30,000 people have been through this program, and he uses this Hakomi method. I said, "Well, what is it?" And we didn't have much time to talk about it. He says, well, he says something to a person and they notice how their body reacts, so he'll say, "You are totally good." And the person noticed that these things happen in their body. Well, that's already part of the healing process.

I think that people do have to heal on the body level because it's where the emotions are and when the memories are in there. But I guess personally, I was very fortunate. Nobody forced me to practice. Nobody was telling me how to practice. I didn't even hear the word practice until I was 12 when a friend of mine at school said, "How much do you practice?" I said, "What's that?" Because I would just go from school and play the piano. I mean, that's how I learned, right? So it was a joyful experience for me. My father did once get tired of hearing the same mistakes over and over in this piece, and he said, "I'm going to stand outside the door and I want you to play this thing three times in a row without mistakes." So I did it and I got so mad at him afterwards he never did it again. I mean, he knew that it was a bad idea, but I had very healthy messages that way. But so many people don't.

There's the student I talked to who at the age of six, played a wrong note in a recital and her parents locked her out of the house in the snow because they felt ashamed of her. I mean, that's just, what can you say? [inaudible 01:18:40] is a famous story also. So there's a lot of it. But I do think that the publicity around this is helping things change, just like the people with the performance related injuries, that's helping it become more public awareness, and there are more professionals there to help and all of that. So I think it's going to take a while. I mean, the whole world is so laden with trauma all the time, that for a person to have a clear path available to them to work through their personal issues, it takes a lot of support.

Leah Roseman:

Well, it's hard with music because we're usually one-on-one and you're at a vulnerable age and the parents probably don't know what's going on. So if this person's getting these very negative punitive messages all the time.

Madeline Bruser:

Oh, from the teacher. Okay. So again, it depends what kind of family it is. I mean, I had one teacher when I was 13 years old who he said at one lesson he said something he really shouldn't have said, and I asked my dad to find me another teacher, and he found me one of the three master teachers in the Bay Area. But the teacher, it was a Chopin Nocturne, I was playing it and I was using pedal. Of course, everybody does that. And he told me, "No, it's supposed to be dry. No pedal. Haven't you ever sat up under the moon at night with your boyfriend? Oh, you probably don't have a boyfriend." That was enough. I told my father, "Get me another teacher. I don't want this anymore." But that was a healthy situation I was growing up in basically. I recently heard about a 17 year old who first got an injury at the age of five. I had never heard of that because the teacher would give silver, bronze or gold stars for how fast you could play a skiff. So this is like, it's still happening, right?

So yeah, teachers, and the thing is, there's another trend now where teachers are afraid to criticize because there's been so much talk about being abusive and hurtful. And so all they do is give compliments, which is really not enough either. You have to give constructive feedback in a kind and helpful way. But that's the thing is that who's really trained as a music teacher. I mean, the piano pedagogy courses I've heard of don't get into the stuff that I get into when I train my teachers and so I think that that field is emerging and developing also because we're learning. So if this doesn't help, what does? And when you think about what a music teacher has to know, and doctors can be sued from malpractice. So if the teacher gives you a technique that causes you an injury, I did hear years ago that a voice student was going to sue her teacher for causing an injury. But I don't know what happened with that.

But really we have to teach them the technical mastery of the instrument. That is an encyclopedia of information right there. And there's a lot of controversy about technique anyway. Then you have to teach them how to connect with the heart and mind of a genius composer and really finely tune their ear to every little moment. And who teaches that? And then because I said the rhythmic grouping, very few people have even heard of it. And then the main thing is you have to be a nice person, you have to treat this person like a human being. And so that means you're good at, you have to be at a certain point in your own development that you're able to basically do that. Not that you never make mistakes, but that your fundamental attitude is one of love and respect.

Leah Roseman:

Beautifully expressed. Are you continuing with your teacher training as well?

Madeline Bruser:

Yeah, this year I'm planning, that was for advanced piano teachers. I'm planning to do an intermediate level of piano teacher training this year. And I'm also starting to design a teacher training for people who have never worked with me. So it'll alternate private lessons and then the next week they'll be a session where they teach one of the other people something that they just learned and then they watched that person teach somebody else and et cetera. And if that happens over a period of several weeks, I think this is doable. And I've thought about it a lot.

About 20 years ago, I taught a course in a New York called Unleashing Natural Piano Technique, and it was a five week program. People had four private lessons and three workshops though there were four participants. So that had seven sessions in five weeks, and they changed hugely. And that's where the person I mentioned who had the problem with her fingers up, she recovered from her injury at the end of those five weeks. They had never worked with me before anyway. And they were learning by watching and doing and absorbing and practicing. And I really think that this is something I need to do too, because I think there's an interest in it and it's an important thing.

Leah Roseman:

One of the things that resonated in your book for me, of course you talk about preparation to the deepest level, but then you do address the issue that for let's say collaborative pianists, maybe they're accompanying a hundred students or people like myself, full-time orchestra musicians, where we just have a conveyor belt of new music coming at us all the time. You can't always be feeling that you are prepared with all the details of the music as you'd like.

Madeline Bruser:

Right. So you tell me how do you do it? Because I don't know. Of course, I've done collaborative piano a little bit in my twenties and stuff, but it was never a major activity of mine. And I've always had tremendous respect for these people because they rise to the occasion, they serve the purpose of that moment to the best of their ability, and they're highly skilled and they put their heart into it. I think that's incredible. But I'm really curious how you actually do it in an orchestra.

Leah Roseman:

Well, I think it's a lot of the same thing that you're going, I mean, you have to apportion your work so you don't get too focused on that one really hard thing and forget about all these other things you need to be prepared with and a more holistic view, I would say. And the older I've gotten, the more I've realized just the listening in the moment in every rehearsal is going to give you more than, I don't know, there's a lot we could get into around that. But what you said about rising to the occasion and just respecting yourself for all the years of preparation and excellence you have, and giving yourself the gift of that respect, if you go in with that feeling, you won't feel overwhelmed because you need to play with ease and you need to have that open awareness. And if you lose those things, then it's a losing battle. Then you'll start to make mistakes left and right, and you won't be able to enjoy the music. And if you don't enjoy the music, then it's just a paycheck, which is not why you are doing all this.

Madeline Bruser:

Right. So it sounds like you're doing a great job of enjoying the music and rising to the occasion with the support of your fellow musicians. And it's got to be pretty high pressure.

Leah Roseman:

It is. And people don't realize, I mean, you're expected to turn up at the first rehearsal with everything at tempo, knowing everything backwards and forwards. That is the expectation in a high level orchestra. And I think what helps a lot of us is just that feeling of being part of a team, supporting your colleagues. I always think about that no matter how, and I had children, and sometimes you're just dealing with all kinds of things in your personal life, and you just have to put that aside. And also there's a freshness in the fact that you're always playing different music, even if it's the 20th time you've played that symphony still, you maybe haven't played it in two years. It's just that feeling of, oh, and this audience is showing up for this program, so let's bring this -

Madeline Bruser:

That's really great. I actually interviewed a dancer from Joffrey Ballet who told me sometimes he had to dance the same thing like 1300 times or something. And he said he would just tell himself, maybe somebody's going to come to this performance who's never even seen dance before. I'm going to do it for them. And actually, he was in the audience once at a performance and at intermission he was in the lobby and this 19 year old guy comes up to him and says, "Excuse me, but Mr. Holder, I saw you dance when I was four years old at the kiddie matinee, and it's because of you that I became a dancer." There you go. That's how it happens. And so he had that strength within him to focus on what really mattered.

And in a way, I'm almost envious of people who have the experience you have where you know, just have to repeatedly find that place in yourself because I think that strengthens you and the team is great. I mean, Kirk Ferguson, who I mentioned who's assistant principal trombone in Milwaukee's Orchestra, he said he chose that orchestra to audition for, partly because he knew that the brass section was really a team and that other orchestras, it's not necessarily such a good team experience. So I get that. And of course, pianists, we're soloists. And so my community is actually my students because we share the same views basically, but also my fellow faculty members. So when we get to do things together so.

Leah Roseman:

Do you think pianists play enough chamber music?

Madeline Bruser:

I don't know what enough is. I mean, I absolutely adore chamber music. I wish I had done more of it. I mean, I did a recital with the cellist. I worked with a violinist a lot and performed the Mozart Kegelstatt Trio in San Francisco, and I performed with a flutist who came over from the Netherlands once in San Francisco. And I love that. There's nothing like it. It's the most glorious, intimate, celebratory experience to make music with another person. And I remember attending Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and watching the musicians smile at each other and signal each other, and it's just a very, very special relationship and experience.

It depends on the person. I always was interested in particular repertoire. So whether it was my own recitals or playing with another musician, it was the repertoire that drew me. So I played with a clarinetist quite a bit in New York, and we also played at Phillips Gallery in Washington. I mean, E Flat Brahms Sonata, it's a viola piece, unbelievable or G Major Brahms Violin Sonata, unbelievable. And I will listen to this stuff just on and on because there's nothing like it. I think also it was great and it was that we were required to be in the chorus as Pianists in music school. And in Indiana we had this fantastic conductor, Fiora Tino. She is amazing. And we did the Mozart C Minor Mass with her. I will never forget it. That's one of the greatest pieces in the literature. Absolutely phenomenal.

And we did the Brahms Requiem. So that was an incredibly glorious experience. I was standing in the middle of a hundred people and big orchestra and the whole thing and then seeing and hearing all the other. So it must be like that to be in the orchestra. The only thing is that in the orchestra you're getting somewhat of a distortion because the instruments closest to you are what you're hearing the most. Because when I've soloed with orchestras, I'm mostly hearing the instruments that are right around the piano. But still, it's amazing.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, it's interesting. My orchestra, we move around quite a bit and sometimes we sit antiphonally. So as a violinist, I've really sat in many, many different places. And when I'm right in front of the winds, it's totally different. But what I meant with my question, do pianists play chamber music enough? I guess what I was thinking is pianists who are serious and they're growing up, I'm wondering if they have an enough opportunity to play with other people because they're so much alone. And the piano solo repertoire is so huge. So I wonder if they get to be the age of 25 and they've rarely played with other people, you know what I mean?

Madeline Bruser:

I think it would be great if chamber music was required on the undergraduate level.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Madeline Bruser:

It was an elective, and I think it would be great if it was required. You learn so much playing with different instruments, and it is a small group and the literature is phenomenal.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. Madeline, did you want to talk a little bit more about your upcoming seminars or future plans?

Madeline Bruser:

Yeah, so this on May 11th, I'm teaching a free interactive workshop. It's actually for all musicians, although the title is aimed at pianists, but almost all of it applies to all musicians. It's called Mindfulness for Pianists, Freeing your Energy for Performance. Some of the things I've been talking about in this conversation, we'll be going into depth with a lot of that, and there are going to be a set of mindfulness exercises that everybody will learn and do on the spot that can clear your mind and open things up.

I will be teaching the Performing Beyond Fear exercise, which we've mentioned, and that will be demonstrated by a volunteer from the group in a before and after. So when I do that, first I describe the exercise, then somebody plays one minute of music, and then we all do the exercise, including that person, and then they play the same minute of music. And it's always really transformed because it's not only for getting past performance anxiety, it's for connecting with your deep communicative energy. And so it cuts through surface stuff to this very profound kind of well of emotional and human power that really immediately goes into the music.

So that's the last demonstration, but there will be a demonstration of how to align your body and get more power out of the piano. Somebody can volunteer for that on the spot, and there will be the body and sound awareness exercise will be taught in a particular way at the piano. Somebody can volunteer for that also. So right from the beginning it's going to be back and forth with the audience, what is mindfulness? And see what people say and what was the effect of this exercise and feedback on the demonstrations that happened, and then a Q&A at the end.

So it's really designed to give people some real tools to develop more competence in their abilities because the whole idea of mindfulness and of the art of practicing is confidence comes from connecting to your natural abilities. So if you really are using your body, your mind, your ears, the way they're meant to be used, you get a much better result. And you can trust that because you did it, it's your natural thing that's coming through that somehow couldn't come through before because of a lot of habits, more confidence in performance, more connection to the instrument, and practicing, feeling more grounded and in command of your instrument and really having the experience of much more expressiveness coming through with less effort.

So that's what's going to be demonstrated and talked about, and people are going to come away with some real tools that they can use before and during their practicing and also right before they go on stage. I love teaching this workshop. It's really great. I mean, you never know what people are going to say. And the first time I did it, the first question came from a trumpeter, which was great. That's on May 11th, which is a Thursday, and it's at 1:00 PM eastern till 2:15. So people can sign up for it on the website, which is artofpracticing.com/free-interactive-workshop. And really looking forward to doing this workshop again.

Leah Roseman:

Wonderful. Great opportunity.

Madeline Bruser:

Well, and then I will be later doing a six week piano masterclass series that's following that. But I'm really focusing, I'm emphasizing this workshop right now. I'm not going to be making the recording available because, partly because, people are going to volunteer for things, and I don't want to have risk that the recording of what they did will go somewhere else. So hopefully people will participate and I'm looking forward to it.

Leah Roseman:

Well, thanks so much for sharing your wisdom and your experience today. It's been really inspiring.

Madeline Bruser:

You're so welcome. Thank you. It's wonderful to get to know you a little bit and hear all these rich and brilliant experiences that you've had. I know so little about being an orchestra musician, and I know you teach also, and it's really great to hear that you've been doing some wonderful things with your practicing and performing.

Leah Roseman:

Well. It's a process.

Madeline Bruser:

It sure is. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Thanks for following the series on your favorite podcast player and sharing your favorite episode with your friends, all of which help find new listeners. I have lots more episodes coming in this season three with a fascinating diversity of musicians and stories and music. Have a great week.