When practicing music, one of your most important jobs is crafting an interpretation.

Sounds very nice, but how do you go about it?  A lot of the time, an interpretation develops organically, as a musician studies a work of music, experiments with different ways of playing it, thinks about how she would like it to sound, and makes decisions accordingly.

Sometimes, though, that organic process needs to be kick-started.  Many people have noted that learning about other art forms can enhance your musical interpretation (for example, see Paula Robison’s interpretive guide to Frank Martin’s Ballade)  While I do recommend that approach, it requires that you leave your instrument and head to the library, museum or internet.

I think that it’s important to have a repertoire of ways to get the creative juices flowing in the practice room.  Here are a few tricks that I’ve developed and learned over the years:

1. Play as if you’re a movie soundtrack. Even the most abstract or dull music can sound deeply meaningful when it’s in an emotionally packed movie.  Picture yourself as Helena Bonham Carter in A Room with a View*, tempestuously playing the piano, and see what comes up musically. 

2. Imagine it as a conversation. This is a trick from Paula Robison, and it works best if you can practice with a friend.  You play the first phrase, he plays the next, then you play, then he plays…etc.  It can instantly transform a narrative into a dialogue (and it’s fun too).  Then, when you are back on your own, just imagine that you are two people having that same conversation.

3. WWID? What would I do? If you are stuck on something in a piece that seems weird—like you really don’t know what the composer was thinking when she changed the rhythm of this one passage—change it to what you would have done if you were the composer.  Then compare the two versions—yours and the composer’s—and see if that reveals anything about the composer’s intentions.

4. Start with your favorite part of the music, and work your way forwards and backwards from there.  What’s the best way to build up to your favorite part?  What’s the best way to recover from it?**

5. What is the craziest or silliest way you can play it? Play the phrase at the wrong tempo, or change tempo half way through.  Try it with extreme dynamic shifts.  Try to be as schmaltzy as possible, then try to be as deadpan as possible.  You will often find a grain of truth in the crazy versions, which can then become the basis of your “real” interpretation. 

6. Free association. Just asking yourself “What does this remind me of?” is often enough to engage your imagination.

7. What’s the story? This is a slightly more elaborate version of free association.  Let free association set the scene, and then create a narrative to go with the music.

8. Pretend you’re a musician you admire. How would your teacher play this?  James Galway?  Richard Goode?  Jon Bon Jovi?

9.  That Old Song and Dance. Even if you can’t do it very well, singing or dancing a phrase is sure to help you get an idea of how you really want it to sound.

10. If all else fails, just keep playing it until you get an idea.

The common theme running here is engaging the imagination. You can use any of the above techniques as gateways to your own musical creativity.

*Or Denzel Washington in Mo’ Better Blues, or what’s his name in Tout les Matins du Monde, or Wilhelmenia Fernandez in Diva…! It doesn’t even have to be a movie about music. Leave a comment below with a movie that has inspired your playing.

**I learned this “trick” from coach Nancy Garniez.  She has even more interpretation ideas up her sleeve.  Check them out here.

Photo credit:  Hamed Saber

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.

1.  Do a thorough physical warm-up. Physical warm-ups not only prevent injury, they make your practice more efficient. If you start practicing without doing a warm-up first, your body is going to be trying to do two things at once:  warming itself up to the task of playing and learning the new skill you are practicing.  Eventually, you will probably accomplish both those tasks, but you’d be able to do it faster and easier if you did them one at a time.  You can find my suggestions on physical warm-ups by clicking on “Physical Warm-ups” on the Categories tab at the right.

2.  Incorporate mental practice into your routine. Study after study has shown that some form of mental practice, separate from physical practice, enhances any skill you are trying to develop, whether it’s playing a sport or playing an instrument.  Why not experiment with one of the following techniques, even for just a few minutes a day?

• Visualization: Imagine yourself playing beautifully in your upcoming concert or audition.
• Score study: Notice how the piano part fits with yours.  Look for melodic and harmonic patterns.  Apply some of that stuff you learned in theory class to your own music!
• Memorization: Try beginning the memorization process away from your instrument. Study the music phrase by phrase as you would if you were practicing with the instrument.
• Practice the thought process you use while playing the piece. Page through the score while reminding yourself of the various things you need to think and do while playing the piece (make sure not to play this phrase too loudly, match the pitch of the horn on this note, use this long rest to relax the shoulders, etc).

3.    Practice the hard parts first. (after having done a good warm-up of course!) Jump into the deep end! When you practice the most challenging part of a piece of music, you are not only getting better at the piece, you’re getting better at your instrument.  So mastering the hard parts of a piece first will make the easy parts even easier, and therefore take even less time to practice.

4.    Be ruthless when isolating the problem spots. Sometimes the main obstacle to playing a difficult passage can be narrowed down to a single interval.  Tedious though it may seem to practice just two notes, it is way MORE efficient (and way LESS tedious) than slogging through an entire phrase over and over again.

5.    Close the door. Having a private space in which to practice can have a profound impact on your ability to concentrate. While you’re at it, you could also try turning off the phone and putting the computer to sleep.  If you don’t have a room in which to practice (for example, if you practice in your family’s living room), you can still find a way to metaphorically close the door—face your music stand away from the hall where people might be walking by or away from your sister sitting on the couch…

6.    Plan and take breaks. Give yourself a time limit and stick to it.  If you’ll be practicing for an hour, take a 5-minute break after half an hour.  You’ll come back refreshed, and your second half-hour of work will be more productive than it would have been if you had just plowed through.  Pilots are required to take breaks, and musicians should be too! For more on breaks, see this post.

7.    Keep a log. Think today about what you need to practice tomorrow and write it down.  It’ll save you the time of idly playing through your piece at your next session, trying to remember which spot you thought needed attention. I saved this one for last, since technically, it won’t improve your practicing until tomorrow.  For more on the value of keeping a practice notebook, check out my first and second posts.  And be sure to read the comments, as readers have posted some interesting ideas on the topic.

Photo credits: Stretch is by That Guy Who’s Going Places;  Clock is by inocuo;  Notebook is by *spudballoo*

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/