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

The Art and Science of Performing

You’ve worked out the music, overlooked no detail regarding the notes, the rhythms, the fingerings, the history, and the analysis of the piece. You have worked hard to ‘get the music under your fingers.’ Now, is the opportunity for you to share your vision of the music with yourself and others.

But for many, this sharing is an experience fraught with anxiety, misconceptions, fear, unrealistic expectations, in short, all manner of dysfunction. Would it help to label the experience demonstrating one’s work?  Of, course, merely changing the label on the jar doesn’t change what’s in the jar, but words do have power and thinking about a problem in a different way may lead to new possibilities… 

One cannot demonstrate work that has not been done, but one should be able to demonstrate work that has been done, though the ability to demonstrate that work does not come automatically. One step in the process is the practice of demonstrating one’s work, but here too, practice does not make perfect; practice makes permanent. I often remind my students, in order change the level of one’s work, one has to change the level of one’s practice; to change the level of one’s practice, one has to change the level of one’s thoughts; and to change the level of one’s thoughts, one has to change the questions one is asking…

Performers often employ meditation and relaxation techniques like deep breathing and body awareness to help calm their nerves and improve their focus; some use psychological conditioning to shape a more positive mental attitude, and no doubt, these methods can be and have been effective, but it has been my experience that these techniques often miss something important—the heart of the problem—a deeper question regarding the science of situation.

Solving this problem begins with understanding the changing roles of the mind’s relationship to the body. When one is working out a piece of music the relationship between the mind and the body is akin to that of teacher and student. The mind as teacher decides that it wants to play a piece of music. It then needs to understand all that needs to be known about how that music should sound. Then, it needs to translate all of that information into specific positions and movements in time that the body can understand—because the body is unable to directly understand the language of the mind—its concepts and ideas.  

Positions and movements are the language of the body—get the body to do something a few times and it begins to remember. Once this is accomplished, the mind must relinquish its role as teacher and take on the role of conductor, but therein lies the problem, because the mind, having become habituated to and identified with its role as teacher, often finds it all but impossible to give up this role.

During a performance, a world-class conductor of a world-class orchestra never wonders if or whether the orchestra can play the music; instead, the conductor’s only concern is with communicating to the orchestra in the moment  what it needs to do to in order to express the conductor’s vision of the music. It’s like the difference between learning how to drive a car and actually driving it. A competent driver does not continue to consider how to turn or brake or accelerate, the driver leaves that to the body while it concerns itself with the exigencies of the journey at hand. But in performance, if the mind begins to consider mistakes and mishaps, or starts to worry about what comes next, or how to do it, it is reverting to its role as teacher…

Of course it’s easy to say, “don’t think about your mistakes while playing, don’t worry or second guess yourself,” but this is easier said than done; because it is the nature of the mind to go to whatever it is told not to— tell it to not think about blue elephants and automatically, that is exactly what it will begin to do. And so, the more successful solution would be to deflect the mind, to get it to think about something else, like say, red elephants—because the more the mind becomes concentrated on red elephants, the less it will thinks about blue elephants. In this case, the red elephant is the musician’s vision and expression of the music.

So, the blue elephant is the state of the mind as teacher and the red elephant represents the state of the mind as conductor. Let’s examine what a conductor does. At first glance it may appear that the conductor’s actions/movements are in response to the orchestra, but, though simultaneous response is an important aspect of his role, his primary attention is to his vision—his musical vision—of the work he is conducting. In other words, the conductor must relate his inner world—his musical vision—to his outer world—the orchestra—and do it in the moment.

This relationship—this balance—of the conductor’s inner and the outer worlds is an act of attention that can be illustrated by a double arrow. One arrow of attention is pointed at the orchestra from his musical vision, while simultaneously, the second arrow of attention is pointed at the conductor’s musical vision from the orchestra, and this relationship is exactly what the soloist must achieve in performance—a relationship between his body as orchestra and his mind as conductor.

But to achieve this balance takes practice—the practice of sharing—and a fair amount of self-study as well—the study of one’s attention. It is work, but it is work that I have personally found to be very rewarding on many different levels. This I say, not as someone who has achieved the goal—perhaps some final goal can never be perfectly achieved—but as someone engaged in a musical and personal journey that becomes more and more interesting and enlightening with every step.

It is a journey that is different for everyone, but I would characterize it as a journey of love—and sharing love is what love life and music is all about. I have witnessed this love—this sharing—in the performances of the great maestro of the guitar, Andre Segovia. There was something different that I observed when we, the audience, left the concert hall at the end of his performances. Unlike many other concerts, I noticed that we were all generally much quieter and smiling a whole lot more.

Why? I believe that it had something to do with Segovia’s discipline, both as a musician and as a human being. I believe that his work was never about dominating the music, but about serving it. He mastered the music by serving it with love; it was a mastery in servitude, and when something is mastered through service and not the violence of domination, it is felt by all who are in the presence of it as something very unique and very special.

But, regarding this love manifested as disciplined service, what more can be said?

“For when the subject turned to love, pen broke and paper tore.” – The great mystical poet, Rumi.

So perhaps it would be best leave it here, because, as Rumi also said, “the tale of love, must be heard from love itself, for like the mirror, it is both mute and expressive!”

© Copyright, Michael Kovitz 2018