I first came upon this quote in the “Spiritual Warmups” section of Paula Robison’s Flute Warmups Book.  I have often though of it since, when I am hit with a case of I-Don’t-Wanna-Practice Syndrome:

Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.

I’m sorry I don’t have more time this week for a longer post, but since that quote pretty much says it all (after all, Einstein was a genius), I’ll leave it at that for now.

There are two main processes that need to happen while you practice, and they are:

Experiment, then rehearse.

First, experiment. Try out different things and different ways of playing. This method applies to to musical/interpretational questions like: Does this sound better a bit louder? Does the poignancy of this phrase come through more effectively if I diminuendo on the last note? It addresses technical ones as well, such as: If I move my embouchure this way will the pitch be better? If I concentrate on my left ring finger, will the notes come out more clearly?

When you find the way you want it to go, rehearse it that way. Play it over and over (4 to 7 times is a good rule) the way you’ve decided upon. I like to call this stage “putting the ‘re-‘ in rehearsal.”

It sounds nice to call these processes “stages,” and you might think that implies you will always do them in that order. In reality, however, it’s rarely that organized. You will probably find that you will sometimes experiment, then rehearse, then experiment some more, then re-rehearse.

This is one of my favorite things about practicing: the sense of discovery I experience as an interpretation emerges out of my experiments. I also find that using this method leads to a certain amount of confidence in my own interpretation, knowing that I’ve tried things several different ways and chosen the one that seems the best. And the repeated opportunity to experiment is one of the things I enjoy about all the repetition involved in practicing technically challenging passages.

This technique is of course related to the principle of being willing to sound bad. That’s why I like the experiment stage to be explicitly stated as such: it makes it easier to be willing to sound bad if you can say, “well, it was just an experiment.”

So give it a try the next time you practice. Think of yourself as “in the lab,” instead of on stage. Take advantage of the fact that, in music, practice is not a performance. In the lab, it’s just you tinkering away with your interpretation. Give yourself the freedom to experiment, and then, once you’ve found what you like, enjoy the repetition of it.

Credit where credit is due: I heard this idea in a lecture at the Banff Centre for the Arts given by Froydis Ree Wekre, fabulous Norwegian horn player and teacher.

The picture is by:  Alejandro Hernandez

Here’s a trick for working on certain difficult technical passages. I say “certain” because this only works for passages that begin and end on the same note – as I will demonstrate later in this post. But first, the trick:

It’s simple–just take the passage, and make it into a loop. Play it through, and when you get to the end, that is the same as the beginning, just keep going like a tape loop.

Here is a phrase that I’ve been working on recently that works well this way. It’s from Judith Sainte Croix’s beautiful and mysterious piece for solo alto flute, Arctic Wind, written for and premiered by Andrew Bolowtosky, and I will be performing it in March (see end of post for details):

My goal was to get it to quarter note equals 92, so you can see that the 32nd note passage would be very fast. It conveniently ends just like it begins, so I was able to practice it as a loop, playing bar 58 over and over, like so:

I practiced it using Metronome Trick No. 1, and at each tempo level repeated the loop at least 4 times.

Making a loop is effective for two reasons. First, it takes the passage out of context, and makes it an abstract unit. This makes it easier for your brain to conquer. As you repeat the unit, it creates a particular neural pathway (maybe this one was called Arctic Wind, bar 58), and because you are looping it, this neural pathway gets super-strong, even stronger than it would be just repeating it in the context of the phrase. Looping a passage out of context relieves some of the anxiety associated with its difficulty, making it easier for your brain to focus on how to play it, rather than how daunting the task is.

The second reason is that playing something several times in a loop is harder than playing it once by itself. It’s kind of like when baseball players get warmed up by swinging several bats at once. Once you’ve mastered the phrase as a loop, it’ll seem easy-peasy in context.

Sometimes a tricky phrase is too tricky for this trick! Check out this passage from Righteous Babe by Randall Woolf:

You could loop it, repeating bar 100 a number of times before going on to 101. However, the goal tempo of this passage is quarter equals 96. Only a bit faster than the Sainte Croix, but even more difficult for two reasons:
1. The fingerings are very awkward (flutists, give it a try, you’ll see what I mean!)
2. There are no slower notes in the loop, like the dotted eighths in the Sainte Croix) where you can get a break.

So, I did eventually practice this as a loop, but not before practicing it just two quarters at a time, and then 4:

You may be wondering why bother to loop it if you can play it all 4 beats already … Since this is one of the most technically difficult passages of the piece, I wanted to feel extra confident that I had it down, and looping it gave me that peace of mind.

So, the next time you are faced with a particularly difficult passage that happens to end the way it begins, give this method a try. Become a live-action tape loop in your practice, and enjoy increased confidence and success in your performance.

Note: If you’re in the New York area and you’d like to hear Arctic Wind and Righteous Babe, please come to one of the following performances:
• 7 March 2009, 7pm, South Nyack Recital Series
• 15 March 2009, 3pm, Rockland Conservatory of Music Faculty Recital

Another note: The reel-to-reel photo is from:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/fridgemonkey/3294979647/

So, if you’ve read my entry on why you should listen to me, you might remember that I alluded to some embarrassing moments when I was learning these practice techniques.  Here, both to satisfy your curiosity and to illustrate the point that a metronome only works if you listen to it, are two of those stories.

Picture this: the young Zara Lawler, in her first semester of music school, studying with the renowned flutist Carol Wincenc at Indiana University (now the Jacobs School of Music).  I was so psyched to be there!  I practiced all day, tried to play like the grad students, was early for my lessons, and called my teacher “Ms. Wincenc” – I felt much too shy to call her “Carol” like everyone else did.  Basically, I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Ms. Wincenc assigned me an etude a week from Andersen Op. 15.  I worked really hard on them, but always found them very difficult.  At one lesson, we had the following exchange:

Ms. Wincenc:  Did you practice this etude with a metronome?
Me:  Yes, of course.
Ms. Wincenc:  Then why doesn’t it sound like you did?

While that might sound harsh, it was an “a-ha” moment for me.  I knew right away what had gone wrong: I had been practicing with the metronome on, but not listening to it.  It’s amazing that it’s even possible to ignore something as insistent as a metronome, yet, that’s exactly what I had been doing.

Story number two takes place earlier in my schooling, while I was at the BUTI Flute Institute, the summer after my senior year in high school.  I was again eager to do my best, in my bright-eyed and bushy-tailed way, in master classes all day long with Doriot Anthony Dwyer and Leone Buyse (then principal and associate principal flutes of the Boston Symphony, people).

So there I was, in front of the class, playing a different Andersen etude.  This one was running 16th notes in ¾ time:

(click on this link for the first few bars of Andersen Op 15 No 1, played as written in three-four)

Ms. Buyse (of course I called her “Ms. Buyse!”) stopped me and said it sounded like I was playing in 6/8, not ¾. Here’s the same section of music, played in 6/8—I’m sure you can hear the difference:

(click here for the same passage played in six-eight)

So I started again, and she stopped me again, and said it STILL sounded like 6/8.  I tried a third time, and she stopped me a third time — you can see how this is getting embarrassing, right?  Well it gets worse, because eighties fashion plays a key role in this story:

I was wearing a Swatch.  Remember Swatches? If you’ve ever seen one, you’ve probably noticed how loud they tick.  Well, the Swatch in question was ticking out seconds, which I was hearing as dotted quarter = 60, exactly the tempo that you would play this in 6/8.

Here is that same passage again, but with a metronome on, so you can really hear the effect (it’s really too bad I don’t have the Swatch anymore, so I can’t use it as the second metronome. Heh. )

(click here for Andersen Op 15, No 1 in three-four, with metronome)

(click here to hear it in six-eight, with the metronome)

So it was the opposite problem of the first story.  At IU, I was working with a metronome but not listening to it.  At BUTI, I was listening to a metronome without realizing it. But the moral of both these stories is the same:  a metronome only works if you listen to it.  It is not enough to just have it on in the same room with you.  You must learn to listen to it, and play with it. Losing the 80s fashion doesn’t hurt either, though I hear it’s coming back.

[Note:  The videos in this entry were shot by the multi-talented Mary Dicken.  The Swatch photo is from http://www.flickr.com/photos/zoonabar/363501100/]

A few words of inspiration on hanging in there through the early stages of creative work (practicing music counts) from the host of NPR’s This American Life:

This ties in a bit with being willing to sound bad, and knowing that a period of sucking as you develop a new creative skill is totally normal.  Enjoy!

Practicing an instrument is both like and not like playing video games. Discuss.

Practicing an instrument is like playing video games:

1. When you first begin, you must start at the lowest level.
2. The more you do it, the better you get.
3. If the video game in question is Pong, it sounds like this:

Practicing an instrument is not like playing video games:

1. You get to choose what section of the music you practice.
2. You can practice that section however many times you want—you are not forced to move on to the next level.
3. When practicing an instrument, your goal is to be able to perform on that instrument (there are two stages, performance and practice).  Playing a video game is both performance and practice simultaneously*.

1:  Choose your small section.

Which to choose? Whatever you need to practice—you can start with the hardest part, start at the end of the piece, alternate between easy and hard sections.  I like to start with the hardest part, because once mastered, it makes every thing else seem even easier.

How small? However small it needs to be for you to learn it.  In some cases, maybe a slow movement, it can be as long as a phrase.  In many fast passages, though, a whole phrase is too long.  I often just practice two bars at a time, sometimes just one, and yes, even less than one.

This is so important!  You cannot practice the whole piece at once**.  In order to efficiently and effectively learn a piece of music, you must break it up into small sections.  Your brain and your body can only learn so much at once.

When you are practicing small sections, you are creating and strengthening neural pathways in the brain that allow your body (and, at best, your soul) to perform that “dedicated series of acts” that Martha Graham wrote about.  Those neural pathways are best created one tiny bit at a time.

2:   Keep practicing even after you’ve “got it.”

In a video game, as soon as you successfully get through a level once, you are immediately advanced to the next level (woohoo! up from the dungeon!).  In music practice, one success is not enough—now that you know how to play it, repeat it 4 to 7 times so that you will be sure to be successful in performance.

3:  Number 2 above is only possible because in music we separate performance and practice. And we’ll talk more about that in a later entry.

It’s surprisingly easy, when practicing music, to forget that we are in the driver’s seat.  Sometimes, we think of the music as a beautiful, organic whole, and we want to just play it that way. Sometimes we think of it as a daunting, huge task that we will never be able to achieve.  Sometimes it seems like a magical force beyond our control.  Any of those ideas can stop us from practicing in an effective way.  But just remember, it’s not a like a video game because you are in control of what parts you play when, how many times you play them, and you don’t have to try and do the whole thing every time.

*OK, OK, some recent video games, like Guitar Hero, sort of let you practice, but the point here is that in music practice, YOU are in control.  In video games, the video game is always in control.

**In fact, you can’t even perform the whole piece at once.  In performance, you play every small section, in succession, without stopping, but you are still only playing it small section by small section.

I started writing this blog last fall, and publishing it in December, as is probably obvious  to you if you are reading this now.  This week, I was going to post an entry on how practicing is like and not like playing video games, but since something incredible happened this weekend, you’ll have to wait to hear about video games and music practice.

It all started with the first draft of my entry on Metronome Trick No. 1. (but as you will read, it goes back even further in time than that…) Here is a paragraph that I cut from the final entry about that metronome trick:

I learned this technique the weekend I auditioned for Eastman.  I was staying with a friend of mine from high school, and his roommate, a violinist named (I think!) Tom, told me about it.  I forget the exact context of the conversation, but what I do remember is that he made it sound like no other practice technique was worth bothering with, because this one was so superior.

So, did I make an effort to track down the identity of the mystery violinist so that he could be properly credited and included in my entry?  No, I did not.  I confess it just seemed easier to cut the paragraph from the article.

But the small world of music did the job for me.  I spent the last few days at the very awesome Chamber Music America Conference where I was talking to the cool flutist Laura Barron. When she casually mentioned that she had just run into a violinist friend from Eastman 20 years ago named Tom, I did not immediately leap on that tidbit of information (I didn’t want to appear crazy, after all.)  I bided my time, and later in the conversation I asked if she knew my friend from high school, the composer Brian Schachter, with whom I had stayed lo those many years ago.  When she said she did, I knew it had to be the same Tom.

Sure enough, I got to meet him later at the conference and solved the mystery of his moniker: it turns out his last name is Stone, and he plays with the Cypress Quartet. When I told him the story, he said, “Yeah, that sounds like me.  I had pretty strong opinions when I was a teenager.”

me, contemplating the small world we live in, writing this entry on the plane after the conference.

I cannot tell you how cool it was to re-meet someone who inadvertently had such a big effect on me.  That was the only conversation I had with Tom when I was there for my audition, but I was so green, so wanting to be in music school, and to know all the things people like Tom knew, that it had a huge effect on me.  He said it with such force and conviction — I wanted to feel that confident about playing and practicing!  He just swept into the room, anointed me with his wisdom and swept out – and didn’t even know how much he affected me.

And what a pearl of wisdom it is, people.  Metronome Trick No. 1 has been my main way of practicing ever since.  Probably 75% of my practice time is spent going up two and down one on ye olde metronome.  And there he was at the conference:  Mystery Tom, from the mists of time!  Talking to me!

So, thank you, Tom Stone, for having strong opinions when you were a teenager, and for being at the CMA Conference. And thank you, world, for twice giving me information that I needed.

So I want to talk about a key principle in good music practice:  in order to sound good, you must be willing to sound bad.

That might seem counter-intuitive.  I mean, after all, you only practice so that you can sound good, right?  There are lots of layers and implications to this idea, however:

1. In order to find the best way to play something, you have to experiment with lots of ways to play it, and some of them will sound bad—but you can’t know until you hear them.
2. You need to work on the worst aspects of your playing—I’m not saying never play things that sound good, but you need to practice and work on the things that sound bad—so you need to be willing to hear them.
3. An implication for rehearsal is that you are willing to try your colleagues’ (and your own) ideas in real time (as opposed to in your mind), even if you think they will sound bad.
4. For you professionals out there with a big personal stake in Sounding Good, you might also want to take this one step further and try out being willing to sound like a beginner.
5. It means dropping your ego about yourself (‘I always sound good!’), and putting your focus on the music (‘how will it sound if I try it this way?’)

This idea is maybe not so hard for beginners—you expect to sound bad at the beginning, and there’s nowhere to go but up.

For professionals and conservatory students, though, this can be a real stumbling block. We have such an investment in sounding Good with a capital “G.”  Particularly for conservatory students who are practicing in little rooms sandwiched right in among your colleagues, it can be very hard to let yourself sound bad in the experiment stage.

For me, this is never more true than when I am working on a new piccolo piece.  The piccolo is not easy, people! I was working on a beautiful piece by Lowell Liebermann, Forgotten Waltz [it’s available in a flute version on iTunes] a few years ago.  It’s a sweet, nostalgic tune, but very soft and very high, a particularly challenging combination on the piccolo.  I was on tour with Tales & Scales at the time, and we’d all be staying in the same hotel, and I’d usually wait till everyone else was gone out to dinner to practice it, just so that I’d be the only person hearing myself play those screechy high notes!

And honestly, even then, it was hard to bring myself to practice it at all because it sounded so terrible to me…  the notes would crack, or be so loud, and SO out of tune.  Disgusting, really.  But I survived, and eventually could play it.

Now this does not mean you need to try to sound bad, or that the beginning stage of work on each new thing will sound bad, just that you have to be willing to go there.  That small mental openness can make a huge difference.  In fact, I might be go so far as to say that is one of the main differences between people who really excel at their instruments and those who only get to a certain level of skill and never progress to greatness.

After all, you have to start somewhere.  And trust me, you will sound better, but letting go of that attitude of “I always sound good” or “it’s only fun when I sound good” will go a VERY long way to allowing you to sound even better.

photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/katinalynn/212094224/

We don’t become musicians (and this applies to amateurs, beginners and professionals alike) because we want to stay at home and practice.  We become musicians because music is awesome, and playing it is a powerful tool for self-expression. When we play classical music, we  collaborate with the composer (yes, even the dead ones!), expressing our own inner understanding of the music to an audience. In doing so, we can reach a transcendent communicative state between ourselves, the music and its composer, and our audience. Seriously, people, it’s the best!

Practice is what makes that expression possible, and good practice brings our actual performance closer and closer to a true representation of that inner thing we want to express.  This is why we practice: to discover the content of the music and our connection to it and to make sure our playing communicates this to the audience, every time.

Now having said all that, can practicing be fun?  Can you like it?

Good practice isn’t just a question of doing everything in the most efficient (fastest!) way possible, so you can get on with the rest of your life already.  It is mindful, attentive, and ultimately, very interesting.  It offers you the chance to get to know the music and the instrument better, but also to get to know yourself on a very detailed and intimate level.  Admittedly, that might fall a bit short of fun, but that process of discovery will carry you through a lot of practice time over the years.

At its best, I find practicing to be meditative:  the focused repetition and exploration of small ideas, one at time.  It’s kind of like combing my brain.

If you can see practice in this light, you are in good company. Here’s what Martha Graham had to say about practice:

I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing, or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated, precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which come shape of achievement, the sense of one’s being, the satisfaction of spirit. One becomes in some area an athlete of God. Practice means to perform over and over again, in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.*

That’s pretty beautiful and inspiring, right?  You already know you want to play as well and beautifully as possible.  Why not learn to practice as well and beautifully as possible? It can only help your playing and your experience of music.

So stop reading this blog and hop to it!

*Excerpt from “An Athlete of God,” written by Martha Graham. From the book THIS I BELIEVE, edited by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman. Copyright ©2006 by This I Believe, Inc. Reprinted by arrangement with This I Believe, Inc.  To hear Martha Graham reading this essay in its entirety, please visit: http://www.thisibelieve.org/dsp_ShowEssay.php?uid=16583.

**photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/vox_efx/3089694499/

Happy Holidays!

We’ll return next week with more ideas to put into practice.

Note:  this image is from:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/laffy4k/2313538414/