Hi, all.

I am deep into practice and preparation for a concert this weekend in NYC.  If you’re around, I’d love to see you there.  You can find details here.  It is going to be quite the extravaganza, with music of Bach combined with dance and martial arts from Brazil.  Really!

If you want to read some more thoughts on practicing right now, I’d like to direct you to Gerald Klickstein’s insightful and beautifully written blog, The Musician’s Way.  I particularly recommend his post “The Ultimate Practice Shortcut.”

I’ll be back with a new post soon–stay tuned for Memorizing a Whole Program and my Interpretation Tricks.

Hello, readers!

This is just a quick post to invite you to check out my other blog, written with my duo partner, marimbist Paul Fadoul.

We have a new website, and you can read our blog here.  We write a lot about what our duo is up to, and you might particularly enjoy our satirical video series, Notes “on” Performance .  Here’s a sample:

People occasionally ask if I practice what I preach here in the blog.  The answer is that, yes, I really do practice this way, and that my tips and suggestions are born of many years of experience and effort to find the most efficient and effective ways to learn music.

There is one exception, however:  taking breaks.

You may remember an article on What to do on Breaks in which I suggested that the only thing to do on breaks is nothing.  Of all the things I suggest on my blog, this is the one that I have had the most trouble actually implementing.  I manage it when I am really under a lot of time pressure, but when I am doing more routine daily practicing, I have found it almost impossible to resist the urge to read a magazine or check my email on breaks.

That is, until recently when I had a cool experience with this blog that has changed my approach.

Remember that game, Operator? (also known in some regions as Telephone?) You whisper something in your friend’s ear, and they whisper it to the next person, and at then end it has become gibberish.  It was sort of like that, only better.

A percussionist friend, Greg Jukes, recently mentioned to me that he has really enjoyed reading my blog.  I asked him if there was anything that he found particularly helpful, and he said, “That thing about taking breaks—where you set a timer for 5 minutes, lie on the floor and let your mind go blank.”

Now, that’s not quite what I suggested in my post about breaks.  I suggested just not doing anything. But Greg had heard it in his own way — just like in the game Operator– and added the timer and “let your mind go blank.”

At the time, I just nodded and smiled and accepted it as a compliment, but what I was thinking was, “Hmm, that sounds like a good idea.  Maybe I should try that!”

So, his re-transmission of my original message has made a huge difference in how I take breaks.  I tried Greg’s method, and it’s awesome!  Now I look forward to my breaks as a delightful vacation from the pressures of work. I set my timer for five minutes, and then pretend to take a nap, only I don’t fall asleep.*

Give it a try.  Allow yourself five minutes of blank time, and see if it helps keep your active practice time engaged and effective.

[Regular readers may think I have some fixation with time limits, but I find that using them is a singularly powerful tool for enabling the self-discipline necessary to practice effectively.]

*FYI:  Pretending to take a nap is actually an “official” meditation technique from Meditation Made Easy by Lorin Roche.

Credit where credit is due:  Phone photo is by aussiegall, timer photo is by pasukaru

Greg Jukes also has a cool ensemble:  The Fourth Wall

I talk a lot about using a metronome to practice–but how do you practice musical gestures that aren’t metronomic, like accelerations and ritards?  Today, we have a guest post on that very topic from the wonderful flutist Linda Chatterton.

Hi, I am delighted to be your guest blogger for the day! Many thanks to Zara for inviting me.

Zara asked me to write a bit about how to learn music that doesn’t lend itself well to strict metronome practice. For example, in Edie Hill’s Harvest Moon and Tide from “This Floating World” the flutist is asked to evoke the rising and falling of tidal waters:

When faced with a passage like this, you need to do two things: present the music that makes logical sense to you and the listener, and capture the musical gesture.

For the first, know that we process music in “chunks.” When we hear a piece of music, we naturally want to group notes into phrases, phrases into sections, sections into pieces. This is similar to language (letters into words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and before you know it you have made your way through War and Peace.)

In the passage above, the natural grouping, in my mind, is 4 notes + 4 notes + 5 notes.  (This also helps with the acceleration into the e-flat dotted quarter note, because you will naturally play the five-note group a little faster that the four-note groups.)

When I started learning the piece, I practiced it with that rhythmic framework in mind; within those groupings, I made sure the notes were technically even – no finger glitches or rhythmic stumbles.

Once that was done, I went on to step two: capturing the musical gesture. Edie has made it easy to do this, as she is both a very gifted composer and gave really clear indication what the music should feel like. So I (literally) played around with the phrase, experimenting with the pace and the acceleration, until I found something that I liked. And I generally keep it like that, through many performances of the piece. But I have to add that, having performed Harvest Moon and Tide at least a hundred times, I am so comfortable with the piece that I do tweak the phrases in performances depending on my mood. These differences are very subtle, but they serve to keep the music sounding spontaneous without sacrificing either the composer’s intent or the technical parameters.

What to do if a passage still sounds awkward to your ear despite everything? In that case, I would record myself using different note groupings, if that’s the issue. If it’s a musical issue in that something doesn’t “feel” right, again, I would record myself, experimenting with different patterns of acceleration/ritard/rubato, maybe different dynamics, different phrasing, whatever. Play around with it and then listen to the results. Many times what I thought sounded one way to myself as the performer sounded different when I was the listener. If we take away our instrument and just simply listen to the music and trust our own musical instincts, we’ll find the phrasing that feels right to us.

You can check out Linda’s performance of Harvest Moon and Tide from “This Floating World” by Edie Hill at

Or hear her live:

• Wednesday, October 27, at 8:00 pm, Williams College, Williamstown, MA
• November 11-13, Texas tour including:  Texas Women’s University, the University of North Texas and as a guest artist with the Texas Flute Society
• Tuesday, November 16, at 7:00 pm Schmitt Music, Burnsville, MN, talk on overcoming performance anxiety and attaining peak performance, “It Sounded Better at Home!” sponsored by Yamaha Flutes.

Linda’s website is www.lindachatterton.com – bio, sound clips, her own blog, concert schedule, and more!

My marimba partner, Paul Fadoul, and I just got to spend 5 days in beautiful Putney, Vermont, in a residency hosted by the Yellow Barn Music School. It was so beautiful and peaceful there–it was like being at a music spa.

I made a video comparing the experience of practicing in New York City with practicing in Vermont:

How about you?  Any experiences practicing in beautiful locations?  Did the beauty of the place change your experience of practicing?  Did it have any lasting effects?

You can read more about our time at Yellow Barn here.

Let’s face it, sometimes you have to practice when you really don’t want to.  Like during the summer, when everyone else seems to be out romping on the beach, but you have to get ready for an audition when school starts back up again.

As many professional and young musicians know, it can be easier on your psyche if you allow yourself to whine about it, just a little.  Try it right now; say “I have to practice,” in a nasally whiney voice.

Everybody has to do it from time to time, so to that end, I am instituting The Whine Rack, videos of musicians whining about having to practice.  I hope to accumulate a nice collection of them, from friends and readers, famous and obscure, young, old, and in-between.

Please send yours. No need to get fancy, just you, saying “I have to practice,” in the best whine you can muster.  You can post them to my YouTube channel.

To get you started, the above video is a little montage of me and some of my colleagues from the New York Summer Mahler Project.  And if whining doesn’t work for you, at least you’ll realize that you are not alone.  Please check out the websites for the featured musicians:

Eric Lamb:  http://fluteaddict.weebly.com/

Andrew Roitstein:  www.toomaiquintet.com

Roberta Michel:  http://robertamichel.com/

Enjoy!

(And please send your whining video, too!)

I was going through some old notes and quotes the other day, and came across this one from East of Eden, which I think is a nice follow-up for Process, not Progress.

In human affairs of danger and delicacy successful conclusion is sharply limited by hurry.  So often men trip by being in a rush.  If one were properly to perform a difficult and subtle act, he should first inspect the end to be achieved and then, once he had accepted the end as desirable, he should forget it completely and concentrate soley on the means.  By this method he would not be moved to false action by anxiety or hurry or fear.  Very few people learn this.

Nicely said, don’t you think?

Photo credit:  Memotions

Remember the Reverse Volleyball Stretch?  It’s really a stretch that opens and relaxes the muscles of your chest.  It’s great for musicians of all kinds because we all spend so much time (and muscle tension), hunched over our instruments.

I think counteracting our habitual closing of the chest is so important, I’ve recently added another chest opener to my routine.  I particularly like this one as a post-practice warm-down.

When you are careful to work on small sections, but the piece you are learning is really long, do you get worried that you’ll never learn it all? How do you keep yourself from COMPLETELY FREAKING OUT when you have a lot to learn?

In my experience, there is solace (and better yet, long-term benefit) in the idea of process, not progress.

I heard that phrase from my teacher, Carol Wincenc, when I was first learning a lot of music from memory.  Process, not progress is a particularly useful mantra for memorization, but over the years, I have found it to have many other applications, both for the day-to-day measuring of work and for long-term satisfaction and mastery in music.

To demonstrate this principle in the day-to-day, I’d like to use a sports analogy.  If you are a runner, you have a choice of how to tally up your training.  You can measure how much time you spend running, or you can measure how many miles you have run.  Similarly, you can measure how many minutes you spend practicing, or how far you have gotten in a piece. In order to value process over progress in music, I suggest that you practice for time (10 minutes of thoughtful work on this phrase) not “distance” (I’m going to practice till I nail this phrase, dammit!). You can use it on a larger scale as well:  “I’ll practice each piece for thirty minutes a day,” rather than “I’ll practice until I’ve mastered these pieces.”

In your daily practice, process not progress allows you to make wise choices about what and how to practice, and can make some decisions, like taking a break when you need one, or sticking to your small section, all the more easy. Taking a break becomes as much a part of the process of good practice as playing your instrument. Focusing on process can help you battle the temptation to bite off a big chunk of music instead of a small section.

This principle is equally important over the long term.  If you put in the time, with a sound process, progress will take care of itself.  Not only will you eventually learn all the notes, but with each passing practice session, you will become a better musician and a better instrumentalist.  If you do the opposite, practicing just for progress (getting all the right notes), process does not take care of itself. In fact, process is often compromised that way:  as you search for a quick way to get through a passage, you limit your ability to get thoroughly into the music, and to fully engage your instrument.  You do not become a good musician that way, only a good player-of-a-certain-piece.

When memorizing, it is very tempting to set concrete goals (I will learn the exposition today, and half the development tomorrow).  The problem is that memorization is so tricky and slippery.  In my experience, it just does not work to set that kind of goal when memorizing.  Successful memorization requires deep attention to small details, and it is impossible to achieve that quality of focus when you are thinking “Gotta learn the whole page…gotta learn the whole page…”

Process, not progress has implications for your performance as well—if you have practiced a process-oriented mindset, you are more able to be in the flow of the moment on stage than if you are fixated on progress.  Music performance is, in a sense, an artful way of carrying your audience through time with you. Process allows you to enjoy that journey—progress rewards only the destination.

PS.  As for completely freaking out, remember that process not progress means not constantly checking your daily work against your long-term goal.  Progress will take care of itself if you focus on the process. Remind yourself any way you need to—write it in your practice notebook, repeat it like a mantra, embroider it on a pillow…

Photo credits:  Runners’ feet by Josiah Mackenzie;  Process surrounded by progress by nattu

Usually, when preparing for a concert, I put in a lot of time practicing, and at some point along the way, I notice that I’m “in shape.”  I can count on my sound being beautiful every day, even at the beginning of my warm-ups.  My body feels relaxed and strong at the same time, and there’s a palpable sense of everything coming together and falling into place.  I don’t mean that I play everything perfectly all the time (I wish!), just that I gain that reliable level of physical confidence with the instrument that means I’m in shape.

I’ve always thought that being in shape was the purely physical result of doing a lot of practice.  I’ve never calculated the hours, but I’ve had that experience enough to expect it after a week or so of regular, intense work, meaning about 2 ½ to 3 hours a day. Recently, however, I had an interesting experience that taught me something new about being in shape.

I had a recital this past January, and began practicing the program in earnest right after Christmas. The days of practice became weeks, and, strangely, I never got that feeling of being in shape.  I was also really struggling to learn the new pieces on the program, even though it wasn’t particularly difficult rep.

At first it was a little mysterious.  As time passed by, though, it became frustrating, and as the recital approached and I kept putting in the hours, I became quite worried. I tried to explain it to myself as a symptom of my flute being a bit overdue for its yearly clean-oil-and-adjust, but troubling questions kept bubbling up in my mind:   Was I losing my touch?  Doing something fundamentally wrong?  Being abandoned by my own talent, or by god?  Were my skills failing with age?

Although my recital went well, it wasn’t until a few weeks later that I figured out what was actually wrong, when I began to try and memorize one of the pieces for my next performance, and I couldn’t do it. Not only did I not feel physically in shape, I also felt like nothing was sticking mentally either.

I had worked for days to memorize a single phrase of the music (This Floating World by Edie Hill). I tried all of the practice tricks and tips I have mentioned here on this blog.  I tried smaller and smaller sections, but to no avail. Finally, I narrowed it down to a string of 7 notes, and I spent 20 minutes on it (breezing right past the 15-Minute Rule in my desperation), and still couldn’t learn it successfully.  Since that’s no more information than a phone number, I began to suspect that something was quite rotten in the state of Denmark (or at least the state of my mind).

Finally I realized that my problems could be related to a medication I was taking.  I had been taking topomirate, a drug designed as an anti-seizure medication, but often prescribed (as in my case) to prevent migraines. I had been taking it since November, gradually increasing the dose as prescribed by my doctor.

Once I thought about it more, I realized that I had actually noticed a couple of cognitive side effects prior to the memorization incident:  I had mysteriously lost my ability to parallel park (up until then a point of pride), and was having difficulty reading non-digital clocks.  I had dismissed both as symptoms of pre-concert stress.

After the memorization incident, however, I immediately began to wean myself of the topomirate.  The first day on the lowered dose, my ability to read clocks was instantly restored, and I knew I was doing the right thing.  Over the next week, my ability to learn new music gradually, but definitely, came back.

Here’s the most interesting thing, though: some time in that first week off the drug, I started feeling in shape again.

I had always thought that feeling in shape was purely physical, but the only thing that had changed was that I was off the meds.  That is, the only thing that had changed was that my brain was working better.

Do you realize what this means?  Being in shape is as much a result of your mental state as it is the result of your physical state. It’s not just how much you go to the “practice gym” that counts, it’s what and how you think while you’re there!

So, what’s the optimal way of thinking to generate that feeling of being in shape?  While I don’t know yet, I will be exploring this in practice and in future posts.  If you have any opinions on the topic or similar experiences, please share them in the comments below. I would love to hear from you – I am sure your thoughts on the subject will spur me on!

Photo credits:  Shutr & digitalbob8