On centeredness
Things I learned from being bad at clay and horses and also playing the piano
It’s April! (How is it April already?) Later this month, you’ll be able to hear one of my new recordings on your streaming platform of choice: Florence Price’s Fantasie nègre No. 2, the first work by Price I ever learned and performed. Here’s a sneak peek of the main theme:
Let's get started, but before we do, let's set the mood with a lil music (this is from my recording of her Fantasie nègre No. 2, coming out later this month. I also have a recording of her Fantasie nègre No. 1 coming out in September. Shhhh you didn't hear this from me)
— 🎹 sharon su (@doodlyroses.com) 2025-04-09T20:25:51.481Z
Note: I usually upload these videos to Youtube for purposes of embedding in this newsletter, but Youtube today is not &$#@ing working and won't process a video that's all of 26 seconds. For now I'm embedding a Bluesky video, and will update the web version of this post when Youtube gets itself together.
In other April news, April 9 of this week was Florence Price’s 138th birthday. To celebrate, I wrote one of my Classic Sharon Threads™ over on Bluesky, where I talked a bit about her life, the multifaceted nature of her musical style, the amount of work scholars and performers have put into promoting her music, and the complicated nature of continuing her legacy in a flawed system. If you liked the threads I used to do on Twitter, or you just like learning things, please check it out.
(Psst, I'm also working on a talk based on themes covered in the thread + my work doing manuscript and score editing on Price's Fantasie nègre No. 1, so if you're interested in bringing that talk to your institution, feel free to drop me a line.)
Clay and other thoughts
If you want to feel like a god, do ceramics.
[is immediately smote for blasphemy]
There is really nothing that makes you feel like the creator of the world (in any belief system) like using your hands and imagination to mold three-dimensional objects out of shapeless clay. I dabbled in ceramics growing up—kids’ workshops, high school art, a course at the community college, a string of weekend classes where I didn’t make anything of note but the teacher begged me to let her make a plaster mold of my face for her own sculptures because, in her eyes, I had “a perfect face.”
A perfect face! Take that, Aphrodite!
[is immediately smote for hubris]
I never got any good at ceramics—the shelves of gloppily glazed figurines and off-kilter bowls still faithfully on display in my parents’ house is proof of that—but I loved the work so much and I can still feel the cool density of the clay, the resistance of pulling a taut wire through a fresh block, the creaminess of slip. By far my favorite activity was throwing at the potter’s wheel. (“Throwing” is the term for using the wheel; it does not involve actually chucking clay through the air like a baseball, unless you get frustrated enough to do so.)
The first step of making something—say, a bowl or vase—at the wheel is to center your clay. The wheel spins so fast that if the lump of clay isn’t perfectly balanced in the exact center, any attempt to manipulate its shape will make it comically lopsided and, if you keep pushing, centrifugal force will kick in and part or all of it can fly off the wheel.
Before the clay is centered, the feeling of it in your hands on a spinning potter’s wheel is something akin to violence. It smacks your palms, lurches to the side, and yearns so ecstatically to explode into pure chaos that keeping it contained makes you feel like an ancient god trying to imprison a supernatural enemy.
You cannot judge it by eye, only feeling, and there were times I wasted most of my class period just sitting there trying vainly to center the clay, getting increasingly frustrated trying to iron one wobble out and then creating a new wobble, like three-dimensional whack-a-mole. Sometimes it would take so long that I swore it was making the clay worse somehow, that I was ruining it by contaminating it with my failure.
When I’d finally center my clay, though, it was just the best feeling. One moment the speed of the wheel feels like it’s about to rend your world apart, and then the next moment it’s still spinning but the world has gone quiet and still. Something in the stars has slipped into alignment and the whole universe is now in balance. Everything is still, everything is in control, you are one with the cosmos and the primordial baby lump in your hands is fragile but perfect. Everything is right with the world and you! you did that!
Of course, the point of pottery isn’t to make perfectly centered lumps, it’s to make something out of those lumps. Centering is not the finish line, it’s just the start to creation.
From what I can tell so far, there are two ways to tackle a physically difficult task: you can drill it repeatedly, or you can find the alignment in your body that makes it easier. When I started working with my primary piano teacher in college, I knew nothing about the latter option; I was accustomed to brute forcing my way through everything, because I was a teenager who had never known wrist pain. Struggling to play a fast passage at tempo? Just drill it really hard a thousand times. Can’t make a big leap across the piano? Just drill it really hard a thousand times.
My teacher had a way of guiding me into alignment that felt, to my naive self at the time, like sheer wizardry. I’d bring a Liszt showpiece into my lesson, feeling like I’d maxed out on my ability to play it, and he’d show me how angling my arm outward or sloping my wrist differently just unlocked new abilities in my fingers. He’d demonstrate, say, a large rotational gesture with the arm, I’d try it, and like my magic my fingers would just toss out the notes like scattering rice, with a fluency that no amount of drilling could accomplish.
Or I’d struggle to articulate fast-oscillating notes between stubborn fingers, and he’d show me how changing my fingering so the keys rotated across an invisible axis in my relaxed hand made the notes pop out like light. I was astonished every time at my own latent abilities, like an ignorant peasant witnessing a magic trick.
Me every single lesson
I had a hard time understanding the underlying principles of what my teacher was getting at in those years; instead of getting the larger picture about figuring out how to make things easier for my body, I only absorbed the hyper-specific lessons for each passage. All my sheet music from undergrad is littered with incoherent diagrams desperately attempting to transcribe the motions he showed me; there are weird spiral arrows, vectors and slashes pointing in all different directions, blobs drawn around note groupings, and borderline-unhelpful directions like “Elbow! Weight in arm! Stiff pinky! DON’T TENSE UP!”
If only I had remembered what I’d learned at the potter’s wheel: you cannot nudge yourself to centeredness by eye or by rote—you can only feel. And you can’t mold your clay and then find centeredness; you have to start from a place where everything is balanced, and only then can you do more. I continued to brute-force notes into my fingers first, treating bodily alignment as a hack to add at the end.
Several teachers worked on me before I finally got it. I kept being told my sound was “tense,” that I was “working too hard.” At one festival a highly respected pedagogue took one look at me and made a pronouncement that seemed like a non-sequitur.
“You have these nice long slender limbs,” he said—and without intending to I felt myself smiling and accepting the compliment, because to be told you are slender in this society is to be praised—but then he went on, “which puts you at a disadvantage for playing the piano.”
Long slender limbs, a disadvantage? Excuse me???
“You’re all folded up at the piano,” he explained, “so you’re losing energy while you’re playing. You’re working so hard and almost none of it is going into the piano and then you have to work even harder to compensate.”
We made adjustments. I had to push the bench back—back even more—no, even more back, now sit on the edge, that’s it—now lower the bench—even lower—there you go—until my arms weren’t bent so much and my wrists were naturally lowered.
I was a lump of clay that had finally been centered at the wheel, and I could feel it. If I pushed from my shoulders, I could feel the energy going straight into my fingers. I had to unlearn my habit of shoving myself downward into the keys, I had to think in bigger gestures, I could now make upward movements launching off the keyboard that felt natural because I wasn’t trying to yank myself heavenward with my elbows pointed out like a marionette.
That lesson didn’t fix me, of course. I kept reverting back to a lifetime of ingrained habits. I went back to the practice room, lowered and pushed the bench back, and puzzled that I still had trouble playing certain passages.
Centeredness isn’t a permanent state. You can put yourself into alignment, feel the universe coming into balance, and then fall out of it again immediately.
A few weeks ago I learned to canter on a horse. (Yes, we’re on horses now. We were on clay, then we were on piano, and now we’re on horses, please keep up.)
Not me, obviously. Source
(If you are not a lifelong horse girl and didn’t memorize the four gaits when you went to horse camp in fifth grade: horses move in four modes. The first, the walk, is self-explanatory. The next, the trot, is similar to when we jog; it’s extremely bouncy and if as a rider you’re not seated correctly or you’re moving in the incorrect rhythm, being on a trotting horse can feel like someone is repeatedly punching you in the crotch. The third, the canter, shown in the gif above, is similar to humans skipping: the motions are longer and there are points where all four of the horse’s feet are off the ground. The fourth is the gallop.)
There’s no amount of study or counting or judgment-by-eye you can do to sit a canter; you just have to feel it. My trainer called out instructions from the center of the ring: Absorb the motions! Tilt your seat back! Keep giving more leg! Feel like you’re wiping the saddle with your butt! (That one was my favorite.)
“You want to feel like you’re one with the horse,” he yelled, “melt into the horse! MELT!”
I melted.
And for one brief, shining moment, I was back at the potter’s wheel, my clay centered. I was one with the horse. The energy of her hooves launching off the ground absorbed straight into my body, her muscles were my muscles, and I rode her long up-and-down movements like a wave. I felt the wind whooshing in my ears. Everything was right with the world and I was free.
Then two seconds passed, the clay lurched off balance, and all the chaos returned; I fell out of rhythm, I bounced, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. My brain was confused. My legs were confused. The horse was confused.
But I had that moment to hold onto, to cherish the way a faded middle-aged man cherishes the memory of his high school football victory.
The weird paradox of that magical centered feeling is that it’s more magical and obvious if you’re bad at something. I was never a particularly talented ceramicist. I am an extremely beginner equestrian. The visceral feeling of finding centeredness is all the more stark when it’s not your default state, which is why my moments of alignment at the wheel or in the saddle are so memorable, more so than my similar experiences at the piano.
When I practice piano, I’m constantly struggling to figure out if I’m centered or not. I do so much physical compensation so automatically that I can’t always feel it. At this point, my fingers have stretched and compressed and tangled themselves so much my whole life that I can’t tell when something is easy because it’s truly easy, or if it’s easy because my fingers are used to working hard.
At the piano, I can go really hard for a really long time with everything out of balance just because I can. If my body isn’t in the optimal alignment to do such things, there's always brute force and reflex to fall back upon. Advancement is a double-edged sword, because the further you advance in something, the easier it is to forget the basics.
It’s useful, then, to have the experience of an amateur to draw on. When I need to remember what it’s like to feel centered at the piano, I don’t think about those undergraduate lessons where I learned to angle my arm, or that lesson where pushing the bench back made things easier. I think about being a clay-spattered high schooler finding balance on the potter’s wheel. I remember what it’s like to be in the body of a beginner who cannot accomplish anything if things aren’t lining up. When the advanced mindset overcomplicates things, it’s the beginner mindset that saves me. 🎹
Truly a wonderful description and connection to the power of learning.