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

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

In my last post, I suggested starting each practice session with the question, “How do I want this to sound?”  It’s a simple idea, and it has given me lots of inspiration since I was inspired by Jean Ferrandis at the New York Flute Club Flute Fair (see previous post).

This psychic stance, starting from “how I want it to sound” has been very refreshing for me. I think most of my previous practice would start with “how it sounds now” and be focused on trying to make it sound “better.”

Starting with “how do I want it to sound” gives me so many more options, and so much more joy as I work.

It’s also cool as someone who is no longer a “new player.”  I’ve been playing the flute for 30 years now, and pursuing the sound I want, and what I want to share with the audience, is a lot more interesting than just making a piece sound “good.”

Thinking about “how I want it to sound” has been very illuminating, giving me a new perspective on a range of pieces. I recently performed the following works on a recital: one piece I know very well and have performed many times (the Poulenc Sonata), one piece that is new to me but that many flutists have performed and has a ‘history’ (CPE Bach’s Sonata in A Minor for solo flute) and two pieces that are new to me, and relatively recently written (both by Anthony Newman ).

For the old chestnut, the Poulenc, asking myself how I want it to sound has re-opened my imagination, giving me a new and refreshed sense of discovery about the piece…and a new level of confidence in my own interpretation.

For the two Newman pieces, this approach has helped me to get deeper into the process of interpretation sooner than I usually do with new works.  With these new pieces, not only do I start with “how do I want it to sound” but I keep coming back to that question and refining my answer as I learn the pieces better and better.

The CPE Bach falls somewhere in between. I have only just been learning it this year, so in some senses it’s a new piece.  But there are many recordings out there, and it gets taught in master classes*, and so there are lots of opinions about this piece floating in the ether of the flute world (yes, all you non-flutists, there is an “ether of the flute world” and it does have opinions floating in it). Those opinions can feel like a standard to which I must aspire…maybe not so much “how I can play” it, but “how I should play it.”  The Ferrandis approach, however, helps me to move past the “should.”

All of which adds to a better experience not only while practicing, but while performing.

*In fact, it’s the piece that was being played in the Ferrandis class I heard, as well as the subject of Paula Robison’s class this year at Diller-Quaille.

Photo Credit:  Mel B.

Greetings, all, and happy spring!

Thanks to all who have been reading, and sending in questions and comments.  I intend to post some more reader-inspired articles from time to time.  So, if you have a question, feel free to email it, or add it as a comment to a post.  I will try my best to reply (though as Richard, today’s question author, can attest, it may take a while).

Below is Richard’s email on a very interesting topic:  adjusting to a new instrument.  He has kindly accepted my request to post his email and my response.

Hi Zara,

I came across your website while trying to answer a question for myself.  I recently got a good flute – a Muramatsu DS – and am finding that it is teaching me a lot.  I’ve never had a good flute so it is quite eye-opening.  I can find a great sound on every note, but it seems I don’t get to the point of the sound being fairly consistently good until I’ve played for 45 minutes or so.  I think the flute may be forcing me to work my embouchure in ways that my previous flute did not. It rewards me for the work – eventually  – with a great sound – but I think I’m also fatiguing my embouchure – over practicing a bit.  Oddly enough it’s feels more like it’s my lower lip – not my upper lip – that gets fatigued.   My lower lip seems to not be able to hold the position it needs to get a good sound.

Does any of this sound familiar?  Is it possible to over practice and fatigue the embouchure?  Thanks for any advice you might have, particularly how I can get to the point where I can practice 2 – 3 hours and just be fine.

Richard

P.S. – If you have CDs I can buy please let me know.

Dear Richard,

Thank you for your email and question.  I want to apologize for taking so long to get back to you by way of saying, yes, that does sound familiar.  In fact, I spent part of the month of January over-practicing myself!  Hence the decreased time for keeping up with my blog and for writing thoughtful replies to good questions like yours.  Sigh.

First of all, congratulations on your new flute!  A good instrument can be a good teacher, as you are finding out.  I’m guessing that some of your frustration is due to a phenomenon that I haven’t covered in my blog yet:  your brain is ahead of your body.  Now that you have a new flute, and you hear yourself sounding so much better than you have in the past, your brain has made a cognitive leap, and decided that you should sound that good, or even better, all the time.  And trust me, with your drive and willingness to work, you will.

The problem is that it takes your body a lot longer to learn a new skill than it takes your brain to set a new standard.  Your ear hears yourself sound even marginally better on your Muramatsu, and instantly your brain gets all sorts of grand ideas about how you should sound all the time.  It might take your body weeks or months to learn how to sound that way—not only to figure out what the various muscles of your embouchure need to do, but to develop the strength to do them consistently.  In the meantime, though, your lips are straining to achieve that sound all the time, and getting fatigued in the process.

If you have friends who play brass instruments, you’ve probably heard from them about how over-practicing can really harm their “chops” and compromise the quality of their sound.  The same is definitely true for flute players.  I think, though, that because our embouchure is, by definition, more gentle (we don’t buzz, we are not squashing our entire embouchure against the mouth piece, the air pressure we use is so much less, etc), we can generally go much longer than brass players before this happens, and that’s why you don’t hear about it for flute players so often.

This is one of the reasons I stick by the 30-Minute Rule .  Even on days that I practice 4 hours, I take breaks every 30 minutes, because without them, my sound starts to suffer, because my lips (and brain) start to get overtired.

Every once in a while I break the 30-Minute Rule, and I always notice that my sound gets worse, and I start to go a little crazy. This January I was trying to learn some new pieces for a recital, so I kept saying to myself, “Well, I’ll just practice a few more minutes, since I REALLY need to learn this music…”  And after a few sessions like that, I find myself thinking, “Wow, why do I sound so bad?  With all this practicing, I should be sounding great.”  Then I remember the 30-Minute Rule, and get back to it, and suddenly I sound better again.

So, when you say that you’d like to be able to play 2 to 3 hours at a time, I counsel you strongly to integrate breaks into those hours.  If you think about it, a professional orchestral flutist not only has breaks written into her contract, but she isn’t playing for every moment of the rehearsal.  There are rests written into the score; the conductor takes time to work with the strings alone; etc. You need to build that same kind of rest time into your practice routine.

Try sticking to the 30-Minute Rule, and working regular breaks into your practice time.  Try taking the long view, and trusting that your physical abilities will develop over time to match your new instrument’s potential.  If after another couple of weeks you are still feeling this same frustration, particularly that it takes you so long to get to the point of feeling warmed up, then it may be that you need a better warm up routine, or some other fix.

Hang in there, and enjoy your new instrument.

Sincerely,

Zara

PS.  At the moment, I don’t have any CD’s for purchase, but I hope to have one in the next year.  I’ll keep you posted.  In the mean time, you might enjoy this webcast of a recent concert.

Photo Credit:  D Sharon Pruitt

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.

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/