They’re here!  The winter holidays, filled with family visits, parties and gatherings, travel, chocolate, new toys, a surprising amount of stress, and hopefully, more chocolate.

Many of these things can mean major interruptions in your practice routine.  If you’ve been away at music school, you may suddenly find yourself back at home with people who want to see you, not hear your scales from behind closed doors.  For professionals, you may have gigs sprinkled randomly throughout the season, interspersed with long travel days and social obligations that trump professional considerations.

Practicing over vacation, while everyone else is playing with new toys, can be a real challenge.  Here are a few strategies that I’ve employed over the years to make practicing work over the holidays.

1. Let your family know ahead of time that you will be practicing. The delicate balancing act of family and practice is a LOT easier if my family knows about it ahead of time, and knows why it’s important. If you have a concert or audition coming up, let them know!
2. Get creative about where you practice. I remember several Christmas vacations spent practicing in my grandparents’ basement.  It was not the most pleasant place to play, but it was the only spot that was quiet and that I could call my own for a few hours a day.  Find your own private practice spot.
3. Get creative about when you practice. It’s a tough discipline, but sometimes getting up early is a great way to get in some quality time on your instrument before family madness is in full swing.  (Especially if you can practice somewhere far away from sleepers, like the basement!)
4. Plan ahead. Decide ahead of time what you are going to practice, when, and how much.  At the end of each practice session, make a plan for the next day’s work, and write it in your practice notebook.  Then when you drag yourself away from the Playstation tomorrow, all you have to do is follow your own directions, not reassess your practice needs.
5. Be reasonable with your goals. Winter break is NOT the time to up your practice routine from 3 hours a day to 5. Let’s be real, people!
6. Practice big ideas. Winter break often means an interruption in your normal lesson schedule, if you are a student.  Maybe you have 2 or more weeks between lessons instead of just one.  That makes it a good time to spend some focused effort on big ideas that your teacher has been working on–like changing your posture or your embourchure.
7. Practice a new piece of music you’ve been wanting to play, or a piece you really love. Make sure you have a compelling reason to take yourself away from family activities:  music that you love, or music that you haven’t been able to find time for during the school year.  I’m going to be working on Edie Hill’s This Floating World and I can’t wait!
8. Find time to enjoy casual chamber music with family or friends. Normally, I would say that playing duets with your dad doesn’t count as practicing, but over the holidays, it’s a great way to keep your chops up, and to reconnect with the reason you became a musician in the first place.
   

   portrait of the author as a young flutist (in fifth grade, playing Christmas carols with my father)

9. Perform for your family. This one is especially good for younger musicians, and music school students. Just make sure you choose your pieces carefully.  As an enthusiastic student, I once played some weird “new” music for my partly tone-deaf grandmother, and she stopped me in the middle of it, saying it was so loud, it made her stomach hurt!  I should have stuck with the Ave Maria…
10. Give yourself some external motivation. Bart Feller, principal flute of the New Jersey Symphony, just mentioned to me that he is headlining the Kentucky Flute Fair in January, and that not only is he looking forward to the Fair itself, but to having a reason to stay in shape over the break.  Everyone needs external motivation, and a performance or audition scheduled for early January is a great reason to practice over the holidays.
11. Cut yourself some slack. It is vacation after all, and we all need a break from time to time.  If you want a break, but you have to keep practicing (because you have an audition in early January…), schedule some off days, and stick to them. Enjoy them, even!  You might find that a day or two of rest improves your playing. It’s a phenomenon my colleagues and I call The Magic of Gestation, and will be the subject of it’s own post next year sometime.
12. Eat lots of chocolate. I’m pretty sure there are studies that show this helps with your music performance…

Happy New Year!

Photo credits:  Snow crystal:  elif ayse;  Me & my father playing together:  my grandfather.

It’s that time of year again, the beginning of the school year.  Time for new backpacks, new notebooks, and new projects. And for many of us, it’s time to get back into practicing after a summer hiatus.

I always find getting back into playing shape after a break rather arduous.  Inertia is a powerful obstacle, and when I’ve gotten out of the habit of practicing it is hard to get back on many levels:  I don’t sound good, I don’t feel good, and I don’t think good neither!

With that in mind, and hopefully with better grammar, I’ve compiled a list of tips for getting back into shape.  They deal with the musical, physical, and psychological aspects of the process.  Many of the tips, as you might expect, are gentle reminders of good, basic practice technique.  A few of them (see No’s 4 through 6) are just the opposite of what I usually prescribe, and only apply for those first few practice sessions after a break.

1. Know that all your skills will come back.  The first few practice sessions after a break are ALWAYS tricky (for me, day 3 is the worst), but trust me and your past experience: you’ll get back to where you were before.
2. External motivation always trumps inertia, so give yourself a reason to get back into practicing. If you are a student, schedule a lesson.  If you are a professional, find yourself a low-stakes gig (like playing at a retirement home or for friends in a salon setting).
3. Make sure you do your physical warm-ups.  This is so important, it warrants two exclamation points!!  Jumping right back into practice after a break is an easy way to get hurt, and physical warm-ups go a long way toward preventing injury.
4. Speaking of preventing injury, make your first few practice sessions shorter than normal.  For example, my normal warm-up routine (stretches, long tones, scales, etc) takes 50 minutes to an hour.  After a hiatus, I do a “best-of” version that takes just under 30 minutes:  stretches, condensed long-tones, and my two favorite scale patterns.
5. Play something you like, not something you love.  For me, one of the main obstacles to getting back into practicing is how bad I sound, so playing a piece of music that I have a big emotional investment in feels too discouraging.
6. Don’t practice the hardest part first.  Ordinarily, that’s a great way to practice a piece, but not for your first few sessions back.  It can be disheartening, and can lead to the kind of poor practice technique that leads to injury. For me, this means no memorization work—it’s just too challenging right off the bat.
7. Have you been thinking about something you’d like to change in your playing? Now is a good time to start experimenting with it.  Just remember tip No. 8:
8. Go easy on yourself! The first few days back from a break are NOT the time to be berating yourself for lack of discipline, and they are definitely not the time to try and judge whether or not you are “talented” or “a good flutist.”  They are exactly the time to do whatever corny thing you can think of to make it nicer to get over the hump:  give your self a gold star in your notebook, take yourself out to ice cream after day 3, practice in your pajamas while lying in bed, whatever it takes!

In a manual transmission car, first gear has only one function: to overcome inertia and take the car from still to moving.  The first few days of practice after a break are like first gear.  Their only function is to get you back at your instrument, and start you getting back into playing shape.  Don’t expect to solve any big problems on those few days, and don’t expect to learn volumes of music either.  Just getting over inertia is enough. You can shift into high gear in a few days.

Photo credits: School girls by zedzap, Gear stick by johnmarchan