Just Stay

Thoughts on intonation and life

By Zara Lawler

“Just stay!” said one of the youngest members of the Suzuki Flute Ensemble in our final rehearsal before the closing concert of the 2024 SAA Conference. We were talking through the various things we wanted to remember for a successful performance, and I asked, “And what are we going to do on the last note of Mary in the New World?”

Staying in tune on a long note with a diminuendo is a particular challenge for flute players and we had a big discussion about it in an earlier rehearsal. With students and teachers in the ensemble from several states and two countries, and young players from Books One to Thirteen and beyond, it was fun and instructive to have discussions in rehearsals, rather than me just telling them what to do. Suggestions for staying in tune included keeping your air moving fast, moving your head up and/or rolling the flute out a bit, but my favorite suggestion was to use your ears to focus on where the pitch should be and then to “just stay” there.

“Just stay” became our rallying cry for how to keep the final note of Mary in the New World in tune.

The flute may seem like a fixed pitch instrument, since we have keys that determine what note we are playing. However, with the many variables of air speed, air direction, embouchure (lip) shape, how the flute itself is adjusted, and whether it is cold or warm, the flute is actually like a string instrument with flexible pitch . . . and all flutists have to learn to listen for pitch and adjust to what they hear. Letting our ears guide our playing is one of the key principles of the Suzuki approach, encapsulated in the word audiation. Audiation is the ability to imagine a sound in our heads, just like imagination is the ability to create a picture in our heads.

I learned about audiation at my first SAA conference in 2018. I was co-director of the Flute Ensemble that year, along with teacher trainer Rebecca Paluzzi. I will never forget watching her lead the first rehearsal. She did NOT start by having the kids tune, which seemed like a bold move! They played through one of the pieces, and checked a few rhythm and note spots. After about twenty minutes, she said, “Now that we are warmed up, I think it’s time we tune.”

She had one of the most experienced young flutists (a sixteen-year-old in Book Ten) play his A, and instead of tuning each flutist individually, Rebecca had the whole ensemble sing the A, which they did, perfectly in tune. The student played the A again, and again the ensemble sang it. The third time, she had them just imagine singing the A in their heads. Then she had them imagine that A coming out of their own flutes. Then she had them finger the A on their flutes, but not play it—they imagined it again.  

I need to pause here to say that at this point in the rehearsal, I was on the edge of my seat, just dying to know what would happen next. The students had been imagining As for about 5 minutes . . . and in the intense conference-center air conditioning, their flutes had been getting colder and colder. I really had no idea what to expect when Rebecca allowed them to finally play their flutes.

But out came the most beautifully in-tune A I had ever heard! It was like watching a slow-motion magic trick. As Rebecca pointed out in a later conversation, however, it was not magic; it was audiation.

It felt like a full circle moment for me to use audiation as a tool in our Flute Ensemble rehearsals this year. We used our power of audiation to both find an in-tune final chord for Mary in the New World, and then used that same power to “just stay” in tune as well, letting our ears guide any physical adjustment to the pitch.

The idea that a mere two words could encapsulate several big concepts (not only audiation, but all the physical ways we flutists get and stay in tune) was delightful, and it reminded me of a teaching principle I learned from another flute Teacher Trainer, Wendy Stern. In one of my upper book trainings with her, she taught that having shorthand code words and phrases for big concepts is a valuable teaching and learning tool. It helps us and our students to avoid getting caught in lengthy explanations when a few words or even a physical gesture will do. So, I was quite happy to latch on to the concept of “just stay” when it came up in our rehearsals in Louisville.

Since coming home, I have found “just stay” to be useful to me as a teacher and a Suzuki parent for more than just thinking about intonation. When a student is not ready to move on to the next piece of repertoire, or the next flute skill, I tell myself “just stay.” We can always review previous pieces and just stay at their current skill level until they are really ready to move on. This is especially useful when feeling pressure from parents and myself to keep kids moving on to the next thing.

At the moment, I have a few Book One students who can play high notes fine with me in their lessons, but come back the next week unable to do them on their own. I confess, after more than one lesson like, this I was despairing a bit; am I a terrible teacher? Are they terrible kids? Will we ever move past Lightly Row?! But then I thought of “just stay,” and we are now quite happily staying in our lower octave pieces and making them more beautiful every week. And in so doing, we have time to solve various little embouchure and air problems that I had missed previously.

And isn’t happily “just staying” one of the main ideas behind review? When we allow our students to just stay on a piece through review, they get to feel what it is like to really play music, to really communicate their beautiful hearts through their beautiful tone, instead of always feeling like they are at the edge, or even past the edge, of their own competence.

As a cello parent, I have found the idea of “just stay” to be even more useful on an emotional level. Practicing an instrument is hard work, and in our household, big feelings have a tendency to surface during cello practice. As a Suzuki teacher with years of experience, my first instinct has been to try and “solve” my daughter’s big feelings by solving her practice issue, coaching her to play slower, or to play a smaller chunk, etc. Now, sometimes I just stay. I stay with her while she works it out for herself, whether working out the feelings or working out the music, or both at the same time. When I can just stay and be present while she does her work, we both feel good about the result. And “just stay” works well as an inner rallying cry for me to remember that my job is mostly to be present with her. Her job is to practice the cello, my job is to just stay. Just staying isn’t always easy, especially when I want to run screaming from the room, but I’m learning to make adjustments to my attitude, just as flutists subtly adjust their pitch, so that I can just stay.

Long before I became a Suzuki flute teacher or parent, I came across the phrase “The main obstacle to progress is thinking we should be further along the path than we are.” It struck me then as a deep life truth, and I love thinking about it now as both a teacher and a parent. Maybe an obstacle to our students’ and kids’ progress is our grownup idea that they should be further along than they are, that they should be able to play high notes, that they should be on to a more advanced piece, that they should be able to handle their feelings! And we teachers and parents also often think we should be further along ourselves! Shouldn’t we have solved these problems for our kids already? Gotten that promotion? Written and sent that email already?

What if, instead of thinking of what we should have done, we allow our young people and ourselves to just stay?

Ground-breaking flutist Zara Lawler made her concerto debut with the Houston Symphony and her recital debut at New York’s Merkin Concert Hall. She is known for creating and directing large-scale works including the US premiere of Il Cerchio Tagliato dei Suoni, Salvatore Sciarrino’s work for 104 flutists, directed by Zara at the Guggenheim Museum, a Flute Jamboree directed by Zara at the Kennedy Center, and E Pluribus Flutum for 60 dancing flutists performed in New York’s Central Park. She teaches at Manhattan School of Music Precollege, Silver Music, The Allen-Stevenson School, and privately, and has done her Suzuki training at the Great Lakes, Eastern Tennessee and Lake Sylvia Institutes. Zara studied at Juilliard, and writes a blog on practice techniques at www.thepracticenotebook.com, and more about her work can be found at www.zaralawler.com