Can we think about practice in a different way?

Can we think about practice in a different way?

                Let’s start by asking the obvious question: What is practice? Lots of music teachers will be happy to tell you what practice isn’t. Practice is more than sitting in a room playing your instrument.  Effective practice requires direction and focus. It requires identifying what’s not working and why.  Put another way, practice is solving problems.

It makes sense that the more time we allocate to solving problems in a piece or technique, the more problems we’ll solve.  This tends to be our default approach to practice, but it isn’t always the most efficient.  Imagine a violinist is working on her intonation while playing two octave scales.  She notices that she plays three notes in her A major scale slightly out of tune, so goes back and plays each with a drone, one at a time.  Three problems, three solutions.  She goes on to play an E major scale. This time two notes are out of tune. Once more, drone goes on and the notes are isolated one at a time.  Now we have five problems and five solutions.  Her intonation is fixed, but just going through her scales might eat up all her practice time. 

What if we thought about her problem slightly differently? Instead of having to solve five problems, can we reduce them down to one? Rather than think of her scale practice note by note, let’s zoom out and look at it as a larger structure. Regardless of key, she isn’t able to play a major scale fully in tune.  This time, instead of isolating each note, she sings a major scale over a drone to get used to the sound and intonation, then puts on a metronome to make sure she is moving her bow and left hand at the same speed between each note. By reframing the problem, she finds a more efficient solution and saves practice time.

                Can we zoom out even further? Let’s think about what occurs in the physical act of playing an instrument, this time from the perspective of a bowed double bass.  We play the bass (primarily) with our two arms.  The right arm moves the bow to the left and to the right, and into the string or out of the string. The left arm moves up or down vertically on one string, horizontally across the different strings, and the left hand expands and contracts between different positions.  Everything played on the double bass involves moving the body along these parameters. As a result, we can reduce all practice related to the physical navigation of the instrument to two questions: “How should I move?” and “What is stopping me from moving in the correct way?” We can then think of our ear, mindset, or general posture as either enabling or inhibiting these movements.

Although we readily accept the premise that we will lose a skill if we don’t continually use it, we tend to apply this belief asymmetrically.  For example, we tend to believe that once a person learns to ride a bike they’ll never forget how, even if they go twenty years without riding one.  Once the skill is mastered, it’s mastered it for life. This process of physical acquisition is so widely accepted that we even refer to similar situations as “like riding a bike.” In music, however, it’s taken for granted that even a player that’s mastered a difficult passage must check in with it at regular intervals lest they lose the ability executing it on stage.  

                Again, this makes intuitive sense. When we stop practicing a particular piece or passage, we lose familiarity with it.  This lack of familiarity leads to uncertainty.  When we are no longer sure how to move or what comes next, errors occur. A typical solution is to drill the passage over and over until it once again feels routine. But drilling a passage is a physical process, and familiarity and uncertainty all describe our mental experience while playing.  By drilling a passage to remove our uncertainty, we are solving a mental problem with a physical solution. While it may temporarily remove uncertainty from one passage, it won’t stop it from cropping up elsewhere. Instead, we need to understand what is truly going wrong. Our relative familiarity and confidence with a passage or piece has no effect on our ability to physically play a passage.  Afterall, our minds do not play our instruments, our bodies do.  Think of how often we might zone out while playing a passage in a long rehearsal.  Or how when experiencing a state of flow, we think about nothing.  But our minds can interfere with our physical ability.  This might happen during a large shift, or a rapid bit of passagework; By trying to insert conscious control into the playing of our instruments, we impede the ability of our bodies to move freely and create tension that disrupts the successful execution of a passage.  When we experience uncertainty, we can start to believe that our mind can and must know exactly what and how is going to happen in order to play it successfully. But just like our bodies know how to ride a bike, they know how to play a previously mastered passage.  To this end, how much of our routine practice is just a way to calm our minds down? An elaborate form of self-soothing.

                To be sure, there is a level of physical dexterity that our bodies need to maintain. Callouses, joints, posture, all need to remain in playing shape to avoid injury. But this doesn’t need to be accomplished through practice, we just need to play.