When starting to learn something new, especially when it’s violin or guitar, it can be hard to stay dedicated, to want to overcome the barrier that prevents most emerging musicians from keeping with guitar or violin and becoming good at that instrument. But think—it only takes about sixty hours of violin or guitar lessons before you become good enough to feel comfortable playing, knowing that if you keep up at this rate you’ll be able to play pretty much anything within a few more months of dedicated practice.
Guitar inspiration
It’s before this point of sixty hours that you have to find yourself inspired somehow, and that’s where listening to other music comes in. It can be hard to be inspired by violin music if you’re unfamiliar with classical in general, or to find pleasure in guitar if you don’t really like the blues. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn to like the kind of music you’re learning to play. The key to excelling at at the guitar is to think about how you’re spending your time, and to recognize that you’re learning, and that it takes time to get good, even if it is difficult. But once you get over that initial barrier, that first hurdle, you can play better and more widely. So if nothing else, just counting down your sixty hours of practice can be motivation enough when starting out. That’s roughly four months of practice at half an hour a day.
Music lessons as a noble practice
Above all, remember that the way you’re spending your time, learning guitar or violin, is a noble effort. When you have a great teacher from the Manhattan, someone who’s practiced for years and performed onstage, you can rest assured that what you’re doing will pay off; even if you aren’t a natural. Because experiencing difficulty in learning something new makes you a stronger, better person, especially if you stick with it and get to the point where you can play pretty much anything you want.
The rapidly changing Upper East Side
When I’m on the Upper East Side, I’m surrounded by culture. All of the museums, the park, the old brownstones, it’s no wonder I chose from this neighborhood. Though over the past few years, I’ve started to notice a shift in the establishments in the neighborhood, a tendency toward a more avant-garde styling. Maybe it’s because of the 2nd Avenue subway, or maybe it’s because now the Upper East Side is cheaper than many parts of North Brooklyn, but there’s change in the air, especially with regard to art and music.
It makes sense that the Upper East Side is finally getting an influx of artists. New York is the Paris of the 21st century, slightly past its Golden Age, but still a premier place for bohemians; you could draw the analogy that with such an influx of artists, the Upper East Side is like Montmartre of a hundred years ago.
Piano lessons a hundred years ago
In the 1890s, Erik Satie befriended Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy, two of the greatest Impressionist composers, soon after Satie composed his famous Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes. As you probably know, Impressionism was already an established painting style so that the paintings of Manet and Monet were quickly giving way to the Post-Impressionism of Cezanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. Music typically follows behind painting and writing in its move toward new movements so it took another twenty years for these composers to incorporate the Impressionistic style into their work.
In the 1910s Satie was enrolled in Vincent d’Indy’s Schola Cantorum de Paris, studying counterpoint in his daily piano lessons. This was not Satie’s last foray into the baroque, either: in 1923, the Beaumont fete, known as the Bal Baroque, used Satie’s music as well as Picasso’s costumes to commemorate the ancien regime and the new restoration of an organ. Satie’s music is also called neoclassicism, for how it draws on order, rhythm and contrapuntal technique. The pared down instrumental forces in this musical style are a reaction against the Romanticism of the 19th century, whose absolute music lacked a musical narrative; while much of the neoclassicists’, such as Stravinsky’s and Satie’s music represented a story.
Although classical music is very different today than it was a hundred years ago, we have not lost our ties to tradition. While certain elements are rejected as stodgy, others are borrowed from older eras for being ahead of their time. The Upper East Side is a great place to feel history as well as the advancement of a new era, and that’s why Upper East Side piano lessons are the best in the city right now.