I'll confess up front that this isn't a blog post about travels in the UK. It is a blog post about the chances I've had since moving here to share my hammered dulcimer with Elise and Charis.
The hammered dulcimer has been much more present in our home in England. It sits in the front living room instead of the guest bedroom in the basement (where I had to move it a couple years ago when Clare got mobile). I've been able to play it more frequently as a result; both in the evenings after the girls go to bed, and during the day when they are around. Because I've been playing more, I've also spent more time looking for dulcimer music. I made a playlist on YouTube a couple months ago. Part of my morning routine for a while included listening to it, which meant that the girls would get to (have to) listen to it as well when they joined me downstairs. A few weeks ago, Elise and Charis both started asking if I would teach them to play the dulcimer.
The chance to teach them was interesting for me on several different levels. When I talk with people about the hammered dulcimer, it's not uncommon for them to interpret from my description that the dulcimer is a difficult instrument to play. The notes go from low to high on all three bridges, but the low and high notes vary depending on the bridge. Some notes are available on all three bridges (e.g., the A above middle C), and some notes are only available on one bridge (e.g., middle C, F-natural above middle C, or B-flat above middle C). You can play the same note in 2, sometimes 3 different locations depending on which bridge you use. So you have to choose which location you choose to play the note based on the other notes in the tune. It's my fault for articulating this in an intimidating way, because people have said "Oh, I don't think I could memorize so many different locations."
My response is that you don't have to memorize every string to note relationship, which would be 66 notes on my dulcimer. All you have to do is learn the patterns that the strings are laid out on. For instance, you play a do-re-mi scale by starting on a black pair of strings, playing each pair of string to the next higher black pair, come back to your starting point but on the left side of the bridge, and play each pair of white strings up the left side of the bridge to the black ones again. My dulcimer has 8 black pairs of strings. So to play it, you need to learn which note each black pair of strings corresponds with. That reduces your memorization load from 66 notes to 8. Once you know the pattern, it becomes really easy to figure out where on the dulcimer you want to be.
This approach to learning an instrument has worked well for me. Now I get a chance to try it out on my daughters. I was also interested to see how the girls approached an instrument they've seen me play, but which they haven't done much on. Charis, in particular, likes to be sure that she knows something solid before she'll do it in front of another person (this kid steadfastly refused to mimic words when I read to her at bedtime, and then suddenly started talking over the span of a few days). It takes work for our family to internalize the whole concept of practicing so you learn something instead of doing it perfectly right away. I sympathize with her as both a recovering perfectionist and as someone who works in an industry that's permeated with the "do it right the first time or you're a buffoon" ideology.
I started by explaining how to play the octave scale from black string to black strings across a bridge. Being a good systems engineer, I drew something that almost looked like a block diagram. Then I showed them the do-re-mi scale.
No luck. To their credit, they didn't freeze, nor did they throw the diagram back in my face with accompanying words about what a bad idea it was (remember my ideological brainwashing about getting it right the first time). But it was clear that the approach didn't work with either daughter. So for round 2, I kept the octave relationship. Instead of putting the diagram on a piece of paper on the music stand, I put it on a paper that went under the strings at the top of the treble bridge. Then instead of giving them music to play, I just asked them to find numbers. Play the 1. Now play the 4. Play the 8. You get the idea.
Somewhat to my surprise, and much to my delight, the concept clicked. We moved on to Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. They both know this song on the piano, so the learning task was to translate the sound they know should be there onto the dulcimer. Here's what the instructions look like.
Part of the reason for using numbers instead of notes goes back to the idea of patterns. We started on the C above middle C because that's where I could fit the paper around the bridge. But nothing about the song requires playing it there. So they can learn the song, and then play it from any black pair of strings at the beginning of an octave. Some day I might tell them that this is called transposing. And maybe on a different day I'll tell them that doing this can help them be comfortable playing music from memory instead of from sheet music. But those are meta-learning objectives they don't need to know about until they read this blog and find out I had an ulterior motive.
Once again, to my delight, the approach clicked for both girls. Charis was able to the song with appropriate rhythm using a hammer in her right hand. Elise took it a step further by playing the notes on the left side of the bridge (anything 5 through 8) with her left hammer. They were both able to move on and begin playing other songs that are more complicated. Here's a clip of Charis playing Jump Up, which is a Dan Zanes song that is staple of our family singing times.
And here's Clare accompanying me on Amazing Grace.
I enjoyed going through this with the girls. I've grown to love the sound of the dulcimer. It was a treat to hear them making music on it. I'm thrilled that the apparent complexity didn't turn into a frozen sense of "It's too hard; I can't do it!" It was fun to watch them climb the learning curve from educational music (Twinkle, Twinkle) to personally selected music (Jump Up and Kesh Jig). And it gave me an excuse to further explore a couple different lines of thought I've been pondering for a while now. As a instrumentalist, I'm terrible at improvising because I freeze when someone says "Here's a chord chart. Play and have fun." I've circled around this notion of patterns as an entry point to improvising for a while. I also see it in the systems engineering discipline world of my day job, which is grappling with the problem of how to discipline and repeatability (patterns) while still encouraging innovation and new ways of thinking (transposing and improvisation). Some day I might pull those thoughts together coherently enough for a conference paper. Until then, I'll enjoy playing hammered dulcimer with my girls.
