Learning to Read Music with Comprehension

 

Reading music and understanding music are two quite different things. I’ve known players who read, I’ve known players who understand, and I’ve known players who do both.

Reading music without understanding is like learning to read a book without understanding what you’re reading. For a person such as this, how many books would they be inspired to read?

Understanding music is the most important thing, but without reading, access to new ideas, concepts, pieces, etc., is a lengthier and more difficult process. So why not learn to read music with comprehension?

I believe that the central problem lies in the way reading is usually taught. It can be boiled down to this, “When you see this note it is telling you how to play it on your instrument, i.e., what pitch and how long to hold it.” This is what I call rote reading. Rote reading means that you don’t know what the music is saying or how the music works. It’s like learning to read letters without understand the words, let alone understanding what those words are actually saying. It seems absurd that a person would read a book and not know the story, but that’s exactly what happens with rote reading. Again, I ask the question, for a person such as this, how many books would they be inspired to read?

But what if a person first learns a musical concept, let’s say natural whole steps and half steps, and then is taught how those steps are represented in musical notation, and then how they are created on their instrument? The same process can then apply to intervals, scales, chords, phrases, etc. In every case, the introduction of the musical idea precedes the musical notation. Learning to read music in this way, with comprehension, paves the way to creative and intelligent interpretation and expression as opposed to merely imitating the interpretations and expressions of others.

Andre Segovia once said, What the world does not need is another guitar player. What the world does need are musicians and artists who happen to play the guitar.” Rote reading and rote playing can never transcend the domain of the guitar player, but reading and playing with comprehension is in the domain of the musician and it is the domain of the musician that creates the foundation for the further development and expression of the artist.

“A real artist works at a level beyond both the guitar player and the musician yet embodies the highest attainments of both. Absorbed in the artistic sphere he creates works that are enduring and that assists humanity in its ongoing struggle to free itself from the bondage of ignorance and destructive self-interest. Through his works the artist, absorbed in the artistic sphere, distills the lessons of material life and its aspirations, and shapes them into an expression of life’s universal quest for meaning, fulfillment, and love.” – From Silence to Sound, by Michael Kovitz, Available from the author at fromsilencetosound142@gmail.com

                                                                                                                                  © copyright Michael Kovitz 3/2/21

 

Productive Practice and the Pursuit of Happiness (Part 1.)

 

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.)

 

Productive Practice and the Pursuit of Happiness (Part 2.)

What happens between lessons is every bit as important as what happens in the lesson itself. A student can be very sincere, really want to learn and be better, have a good teacher, practice regularly, and even a lot, but to accomplish one’s aims, goals, and dreams efficiently, productive practice* is essential.

Learning curves will always have their ups and downs, but if practice is productive, the general trend should always show an upward spiral of accomplishment over time and not just  a turning around and around in the same circle.

Unproductive practice is always uncomfortable and feels not unlike those bad dreams of running as hard as one can and yet not going anywhere. Productive practice, on the other hand, always feels lighter, and clearer, and has its own unique kind of joy.

There are no rigid formulas or mechanical methods that will automatically produce productive practice; productive practice is a very personal affair—it is a process that is written in the sand and not carved into stone, yet, there are a few simple suggestions I can offer that may help to create conditions favorable to a productive practice.

Formulate an agenda and a plan for each week. Be very specific. Don’t just say, “I’ll do technique exercises for the first ten minutes;” instead, think about what technical issues you specifically want to address and what studies or exercises you want to use to work on those technical issues.

I often remind my students that mindlessly and mechanically repeating any technical exercise or study will amount to nothing more than a total waste of their time! But those same exercises or studies become invaluable when used as an opportunity to address very specific technical and musical issues. Define your objectives as simply and specifically as possible, for example, playing more on the tip of the fourth finger of the left hand in scales and chords. Continuity is very important in productive practice—students sometimes start things with the best of intentions but don’t follow through.

Control is another important aspect of productive practice; go slow enough so that you can control the placement of the fourth finger every time you use it in the exercise or study you are working with.

In my book, From Silence to Sound, ** the teacher, Alex Kubadi says, “Two should always be present in your practice; your teacher and your student.” The teacher is the mind and the body is the student. The teacher works in the realm of concepts and ideas. The student’s intelligence is in its ability to learn and remember and reproduce specific physical positions and movements in time. An effective teacher is always very clear with regard to what it wants the student to do and how it wants the student to do it.

The job of the teacher is to translate his ideas—his vision—into the language of the body and then to create the right conditions to facilitate the learning of the student. The student—the body—learns by repeating an action a number of times, but the teacher must always keep in mind that practice, in the sense of repetition, does not make perfect, it makes permanent; and that the number of repetitions needed for the student to learn a particular action is in direct proportion to the teacher’s state of attention while guiding the actions of the student.

In the relationship between the teacher and the student, the teacher functions in the domain of the mind—and in that domain, the body is slow. For example, in my mind I can travel from my house to my friend’s house at the speed of thought—much faster than the time it takes for me to physically go to my friend’s house.

But conversely, in the domain of the body, the mind is slow. Once the body learns even a relatively simple action, the mind cannot keep up with it. Think about even the act of walking and all its components of multiple and simultaneous actions regarding the coordination of the feet and the legs and the arms and balance, etc.

Because of the discrepancies between the relative speeds of the mind and the body in the mental and the physical domains, it is essential that the mind establishes and maintains control of the process of work and must never allow the tempo of the work to get out of its control.  Therefore, if one feels that the work is going too fast for to control, that the body is allowed to make the same or random mistakes over and over again, then it is time to stop and think and ask questions that will lead to a better plan of work.

And this leads to one of those little secrets. Speed can be very impressive and its pursuit can become very compelling, but speed is never achieved by trying to go fast. The capacity for speed is acquired through perfection and refinement of positions and movements and the degree to which these positions and movements are programed into the body’s memory—what is generally called muscle memory. That is why refining and perfecting positions and movements at slower tempos, tempos that the teacher can control, leads to the capacity for speed. It could be said, to play fast later, practice slow now.

One further point on the subject; if you allow the body to learn three different ways of the doing the same thing, one of which is preferred over the others, when called upon to reproduce the action, there is only a one in three chance that the body will reproduce the preferred way.

And finally, always review your work weekly. Ask the pointed questions. Remember that being critical is not the same thing as being negative. Negativity has no place in Productive Practice. As the poet once said, “Ours is not a caravan of despair!” Ask questions like; “What progress did I make over the week? Did I meet my expectations? What could I have been better? What could I have done differently, etc.? As with the initial plan, the answers should be very specific and simple. Your review should lead to your next week’s agenda and plan. There is a saying, “A good plan is a plan that works!”

 *&**Because of the initial difficulty to objectively observe and evaluate one’s work, the guidance of an experienced teacher can be useful.  For one on one lessons in Productive Practice, or to purchase copies of the book, From Silence to Sound, please contact Michael Kovitz at FromSilencetoSound142@gmail.com