The desire for happiness is woven into the very fabric of our nature and left unimpeded, we will effortlessly rise to happiness like bubbles to the surface from the depths. Music can be both an incredible source of happiness as well as the means to attain it, but who can be happy practicing and playing the same old things again and again in the same old way without showing any progress? Unproductive practice impedes process—traps the bubbles and keep them from rising.
One’s practice should resemble a spiral—an upward spiral—not a turning around and around in the same circle. But how to transform the circle into a spiral and create a happy, healthy, and sustainable musical life? To raise the level of one’s music, the level of one’s practice must be raised. To raise the level of one’s practice, the level of one’s thinking must be raised. And to raise the level of one’s thinking, the level of the questions one asks oneself about one’s work must also be raised. These questions are more important than answers. Questions have energy. Answers kill questions. The right questions lead to a productive practice. But what constitutes a right question?
The question must be the right question at the right time. What kind of curtains will we hang in the living room window is a legitimate question but should not be given priority over those questions regarding the foundation of the house that is yet to be built. On the other hand, questioning the efficacy of the foundation is not an appropriate question to ask after the house has been framed. Everything must happen in its right order and its right time.
For example, a student wants to learn a new piece. Maybe she has heard it before, maybe she has not. She begins to read through the piece, taking care to not go too fast, to play the correct notes in the right rhythms, and to use the best fingerings for both the right and the left hands. After a few reads of the piece, she isolates and begins to work on some of the more difficult sections of the piece.
That’s good, but there are some fundamental questions she may have failed to ask that could facilitate her work. For example, are we looking at a piece diatonic common practice music, and, if so, what is the key? Not all music is diatonic. Renaissance music derives from a modal system while much of the music of the 20th century may be atonal, modal, diatonic but not necessarily diatonic common practice, i.e., not written within the bounds of the compositional practices which began in the High Baroque period and evolved through the Classical Romantic Periods. If the music is diatonic common practice, then some follow-up questions might be, am I familiar with the scale that is the resource of this music? What are the chords and chord progressions I might anticipate finding in this piece? What about phrase lengths and cadences common to this kind of music?
Why are these questions important? Because if we are not understanding what it is that we are reading, then our reading is rote reading—essentially note by note—but if we are understanding what we are reading, then we are reading with comprehension and this comprehension facilitates both the reading and all the further work on the piece. When we do a thoughtful read, we are not only reading the notes, but we are also beginning to understand what the notes are saying. It is like the difference between reading just letters and words as opposed to learning the story that is being told.
Questions must be specific. For a practice to be productive we need to know not only what to do, but why we are doing it. Take the student who decides, or is asked, to play a piece that he has been working on. He begins to play the piece, but the problem is that there is no context to the playing. Without context, without knowing why I am doing something, without knowing what I am trying to accomplish, there is no purpose behind my action and without purpose there cannot be force. A dress rehearsal, for example, should be approached differently than, say, working on rhythm or tempo in a piece. In the case of the former, one would not stop in the middle of the piece to work on a mistake, while in the case of the latter, it would not be productive to just play through the piece without stopping to work on specific areas of the piece. In other words, the why of one’s work orients and shapes the work itself.
Another example of asking the right question at the right time is the student who just cannot seem to get a certain passage correct. She plays it over and over, sometimes slower, and sometimes in tempo, yet it just does not get any better. Working hard is not automatically working smart. Practice, in the sense of repetition, does not make perfect, it makes permanent. What she needs to do is to stop playing and ask herself if there might be a better way to execute the passage. Are there other ways to finger the piece? Both the right and the left-hand fingering should be considered. I often tell my students; good fingerings can render a difficult passage playable and musical, but awkward fingerings can render a relatively simple passage virtually unplayable. When your practice begins to feel like one of those bad dreams in which you are running as fast as you can but are going nowhere, you are being told that your practice is not productive. An unproductive practice is an unhappy practice, which is to say that the bubbles of happiness have gotten trapped in old and dysfunctional habits of thought and patterns of work. The good news is that by asking the right questions we can initiate a process that replaces these dysfunctional habits and patterns with productive ones.
(To be continued.)
