Rolling, Rolling, Rolling (Pianos)

None of us remember our first memories as babies, but many of us remember our first music lessons, as musical babies.  I remember my first lesson as a child, but one of my “first lessons” as an adult I will also never forget!  It was my first lesson as a masters student.  I only knew my teacher as an international performer whose hand I had the privilege of shaking after a concert (I had no idea at the time he would become my teacher), and from an awkward and scary introduction at my new school where we decided on my lesson time.  At that lesson, I felt like a musical baby as I nervously fumbled my way through half-learned pieces I had(n’t) learned over the summer.  I think I got off easy with merely a disappointed grunt from him.  The worst part was that halfway through one piece, the grand piano started to roll away from me on the laminate floor!  Since he didn’t notice the piano but certainly did hear the change in my playing as I tried both to play piano and keep it from rolling away, I came off as even more incompetent!  It is impressive how a nerve-wracking situation like that can get burned into one’s brain forever.

In a more general way, I also remember times during my masters when I had the feeling of having played a passage very well in practice and then totally flubbing it up in my lesson.  Then I’d have to meekly sit through a lecture on how I wasn’t prepared or play some exercises to improve the passages that I knew I could play if only I’d had a second shot.  I think a lot of young students have similar experiences.  Whether a teacher responds positively or negatively to the excuse that “I could play it just fine at home!” is pretty much beside the point that in performance – and often in life – you don’t get a second shot.  Part of learning to be a musician and a human being is to get it right the first time.  I don’t mean never make mistakes, but rather don’t repeat the mistakes you have corrected nor create mistakes where there weren’t any to begin with.

The solution to this problem is Simon Horsey’s last practice habit: Review.

Without Review, Your Hard-Earned Foundations Are Crumbling!

Reviewing is hard because it requires discipline.  In the moment, you might believe that the hard passage you are learning is more important than the hard passage you conquered yesterday, but guess what?  The hard passage you conquered yesterday is crumbling if you don’t reinforce it today, tomorrow, the next day, etc.  What I’m saying is explained very nicely in this graph:

Horsey puts it well when he calls review a time-saving device.  It might seem like wasting time when you are playing spots you don’t have trouble with (red line) but look what happens if you don’t (blue line)!  It’s hard to imagine making any progress if everything you learn is treated like that blue line – which leads to being frustrated, bored and “done” with lessons.

What the French Can Teach Us About Practicing

What does following the red line look like in real life?  Going back to Habit 3, you have to start with your goals.  What did you accomplish yesterday?  Whatever it is, your goal is to accomplish it again today, but in less time.  Play yesterday’s passages through again and work them up to an acceptable level.  That’s step one.  Step two is to practice today’s passages – you will be reviewing them tomorrow.  But before you stop practicing for the day, you should play yesterday’s and today’s goals.  That’s step three.  Like this:

Does that sound repetitive?  It should.  The French word for “practice” is “repetition.”  But try to wrap your mind around this saying: by repeating, you don’t have to repeat as much.  That’s because you get better and better, you learn to be more effective and more efficient.  This saves you time and gives you the ability to learn more and harder stuff.  That is called progress or maturity.

One of the most interesting points Horsey makes is that your first practice session should take place immediately after your lesson.  Somehow we have a tradition (perhaps a bad habit) of purposely not practising on the day of our lesson.  This is seen as a kind of reward for putting the effort in at the lesson.  The graph above, however, suggests that if you wait 1 day to start reviewing something new, you are already down to 75% in your ability to do what you learned yesterday.  It will take you 10 days to get back to 90% (by reviewing alone, let’s not forget the other practice techniques which help improvement) – in other words, you potentially guarantee you will be worse off at your next lesson simply by not reviewing immediately after your prior one!  What kind of a reward is that?

Tying It All Together

If you look carefully at the graph you will notice that the red line flatlines at 90%.  To me, this suggests what happens when a person reviews what they learned but does not do anything else.  So to end this commentary on Horsey’s 5 practice habits, I will *review* the last 4:

1. Get all the notes right all the time.  Play with accuracy.  Slow down, stop, work it out and mark your music for 100% accuracy.  Every time.
2. Slow practice.  Slow is the key to fast.  Use a metronome.
3. Clear practice targets.  Set your goals, plan to achieve them, and critique your success.
4. Plan practice by event.  Plan for success – you can’t have a good practice session if you skip most of your sessions!

Finally, Review.

There are many ways to practice, many lists and many advice articles.  Each one, I’m sure, has its merit.  This list covers the bases very well and when you get right down to it is pretty common-sense and simple.  If this is the first time you’ve thought about practicing – welcome!  You are on an exciting road and will probably achieve your dreams sooner than those of us who dallied around for a bunch of years.  If you’re like me and good practicing habits take, well, “practice” to hone – never give up!  Performances are not a journey, they are a destination; however, learning to practise is definitely a journey (marked by performances).

The Piano Didn’t Roll Away For Long

One final anecdote about my days in a masters program.  I did finally succeed at improving my practice habits and the memory that reminds me of that is this.  I was warming up before a performance and I could tell that all the spots I had worked on properly were going to go well.  And they did!  But there was this one part I had not put the kind of attention on and I knew it.  Lo and behold, that part did not go so well in performance.  But the point is that I knew beforehand where I would do well and where I wouldn’t.  This is so much better than feeling like performances are completely random as to whether they will go well or not.  I felt in control of my playing, and as a result less nervous and much more excited about sharing beautiful music with others!  Cultivating good practice habits are worth it!

Happy Practicing!

Make Beautiful Music – Throw Out the Stopwatch!

To recap, I am commenting on Simon Horsey’s free ebook How to Practice: 5 Habits to Help Make Your Music Practice More Efficient and Effective.  Habit 4 is called “Plan Practice By Event” and he makes some excellent points against the common practice of using a clock or (worse!) a timer to make sure practicing gets done.  Why?  Horsey’s argument is this: “It is easy to become frustrated if we are late starting, it encourages concentrating on the clock instead of practice targets, it means that no matter how much progress is being made towards a goal we feel we should be stopping at the end of the session.”  It seems there is no benefit to using a clock or a timer – neither for sitting down to practice (because it makes us think constantly about getting back up) nor for accomplishing practice targets (because it suggests that the job will get done merely by putting the time in).

Sleeping on the Job

The “learning by osmosis” joke is a great illustration of why practicing by the clock doesn’t work.  Sleeping on your homework doesn’t count as “studying” and playing your instrument while the timer runs down doesn’t count as “practising.”  Another illustration comes from an episode in my life.  This weekend, I had to prepare dinner for some guests.  I needed to marinate the meat, prepare the stuffing, cut the vegetables and clean the house.  If I missed any of these tasks, the dinner “experience” would not be the best I could offer my guests.  At least, this was the standard I set myself (it could be that my guests just wanted full bellies regardless of what they put in them, but I doubt it!).  I like this comparison to music practice because it highlights the element of a deadline.  Practicing goals need to be accomplished by the weekly music lesson, and pieces need to be in tip-top shape by the time of the performance.  It is very rare that these deadlines are flexible.  My dinner guests were arriving at 7:00 and if I told them I wasn’t ready yet they probably would have left and eaten somewhere else instead.  There wouldn’t have been much point in inviting them over for dinner.

Imagine what would happen if my guests arrived and I had said, “Dinner’s not ready yet, but don’t worry, I spent over 3 hours cooking so that means I did my job.”  Imagine us sitting down to a meal of raw meat and uncut vegetables and everyone being pleased with that because, after all, I had spent 3 hours in the kitchen doing… “something.”  This is what happens when a student shows up for his lesson believing that he is prepared merely because he did 6 days of 30-minute practice sessions.  No, your practice time doesn’t matter, what matters is what you accomplish during it.

What Really Happened in the Kitchen

I love Simon Horsey’s suggestion to practice by “event.”  What he means by that is to think about your day in terms of its events, not its “clock.”  Plan to practice after you come home from soccer practice (whenever that is) rather than 6:00, for example.  Because what happens if your soccer goes overtime or there’s a traffic jam and you don’t get home until 6:15?  Will you only practice until 6:30, or go overtime until 6:45, or just skip it altogether because you’d have to start late?  As you can see, it keeps you thinking about “time” rather than on goals.  Horsey has good ideas on what are useful “events” to think about: when you get home from school, after dinner, after your favourite TV show is over, after your morning routine, etc.  He suggests doing a week-by-week practice budge – much like adults should do a month-by-month financial budget – rather than having a one-plan-fits-all approach that denies the fact that our schedules vary week-to-week.  Remember, “life happens” so set yourself up for success with a reality check.

Without even thinking about Horsey’s suggestions, I naturally used this concept to prepare the dinner for my guests.  I have to admit I wasn’t super motivated on Saturday night to think about cooking for Sunday, but I knew it was my only opportunity (you can’t marinate meat overnight if you don’t start the night before!).  So I made myself a promise: I’m going to watch some TV shows on DVD and in between episodes, I will accomplish one task.  So I watched an episode, then I chopped vegetables.  A second episode, and I prepared the meat.  A third episode and I made stuffing.  I had a lazy evening just like I wanted to have, and got my chores done, too!  If I had said I will cook from 5:00-7:00 I may not have gotten everything done and without working in some recreation (it was the weekend after all!) I would have felt a little miserable, too.

The Journey Is About the Destination

My cooking example works because I knew exactly what my goal was – the meal I had planned – and I knew the specific tasks – chop vegetables, prepare the meat, make stuffing.  It is one thing to retire your practicing timer, but if you don’t have practicing goals how will you know when to stop practising?  Refer to Habit 3 below for my commentary on Horsey’s ideas on practicing goals.

Remember, what matters in practicing is the same as in cooking: it’s the end product that matters.  It sounds anti-philosophical to say the journey is not important, but at least in the performing arts the journey is irrelevant if there is no destination.

Stay tuned for Habit 5, and Happy Practicing!

There are just so many benefits to music education and most people have heard the gamut:

• There are cognitive benefits, resulting in smarter children and adults who can earn more in their careers and have more work options;
• There are social benefits, resulting in well-rounded personalities that are able to get farther in life;
• There are therapeutic benefits for students with physical, mental or emotional impairments;
• There are philosophical/spiritual/aesthetic benefits resulting in people more in tune with themselves and the world.

I could go on, but the point I want to make is that at a certain point we don’t need these explanations.  When we see a video such as the one above, with kids racing through a complicated, upbeat melody with perfect solfege, kids responding so intelligently to a watch-and-repeat exercise, kids with bright eyes that are learning to be creative, kids with great smiles and obvious energy put to an edifying use, and parents looking on with joy and wonder at what their kids can do….  There is no fact sheet, study or opinion piece that can add to or detract from that.

It is unfortunate that many people don’t see the significance of a quality music education.  It is an uphill battle to try and make a convincing argument because such people literally don’t know what they (and others) are missing.  We need music programs in public schools, if even just to show others what they are missing by not having them!  (Analyze that statement as you will!)

Chilliwack Academy of Music is proud to be partnering to help bring music lessons to the schools.  Currently, we have assisted in placing volunteers to lead and play piano for 30-minute singing classes at Central Elementary school.  We also, through generous funding from 89.5 The Hawk, offer select spots in our kids choir “Tayosei” to be filled at no cost to students chosen by their principals for their interest in participating and their financial need.  Both of these initiatives are relatively new and we don’t think they can replace the essential need for actual music curricula for all students.  But it’s what we can do, right here and right now.

Please send me your comments for more information on either of these programs.

Last summer, the Chilliwack Academy of Music launched a ukulele program for adults called Uke Club.  The idea was to encourage families to learn music together by spending one evening a week in a ukulele class.  “We decided to run it as a drop-in class,” says Academy Principal Graham Yates.  “We had no idea if it would run or be a complete failure.  It was a risk.”  But the class was a hit, not with families, but with groups of adult friends and couples.  “One night we packed 26 people into a small classroom,” Yates continues.  “That’s when I knew we’d hit on something good, something worth nurturing.”  Several of the participants bought their own instruments during the course of the series of classes (they had previously borrowed from the Academy’s stock) and showed them off proudly to their fellow students.  Many were sorry when the classes ended and wanted to know what was next.  One participant even signed up for private ukulele lessons last fall, the Academy’s first and so far only student devoted to that instrument.

As a result of the summer program, the Academy now offers beginning ukulele group classes periodically throughout the year in two levels: four weeks of Level 1 lead into four more weeks of Level 2.  But after eight weeks – then what?  The solution: “Uke Club 3.0” – a self-directed weekly gathering of ukulele enthusiasts that will test run this month.

“Uke Club 3.0 is different from any class we’ve offered.  We’ve chosen to take it out of the classroom and into the coffee shop to help establish the right atmosphere,” Yates explains.  The “class” will meet Wednesdays at 7 pm in the meeting room at Decades Coffee Club.  The first meeting is January 11, but if you miss it, don’t worry.  “Participants can buy punch cards so that they can drop in whenever it is convenient for them, rather than have to pay a tuition fee and risk losing out if they can’t make every class.  It’s also not the kind of class where learning progresses in a straight line.  It’s an example of group learning: you can pick up a tip from someone who’s more advanced, and share one with someone who’s still a beginner.  We’ve also kept the cost low –  $30 for 6 classes – to encourage commitment, cover the rent, but keep it affordable.”

Rod Swanson, who teaches the classroom version of Uke Club and compiled the “official” Uke Club Songbook, may drop by from time to time as a mentor.  But the idea is that people who are at least a little bit competent on the instrument (either through their own experience or by taking Uke Club Levels 1 and 2) will set the pace.  “Maybe one week someone will bring in a chord chart they’d like to share and someone else will teach a strumming pattern they picked up on You Tube.  People can also work on perfecting the songs they began learning in the Levels and start adding to the official Uke Club repertoire.”  Ultimately, Yates says, he’d like to form out of Uke Club a thriving ukulele band in Chilliwack that can give performances and continue to attract adults who struggled with music lessons in the past or never had time to learn.

“Making music is such a gift.  You might think you’re giving it to yourself, but then realize you are actually giving to others.  You don’t have to be a guitar-type person to pick up the ukulele, either.  I’m a classical pianist, and I’ve become quite fanatic about this class and about the uke I bought last summer.”  He has taken ukulele hero Jake Shimabukuro’s quote to heart: “If everyone played the ukulele, the world would be a better place.”

More information about ukulele programs, Uke Club Levels and Uke Club 3.0 are available at the Chilliwack Academy of Music registration desk in the Cultural Centre, by calling 604.792.0790, or by visiting www.chilliwackmusic.com.

Have Clear Goals

Today’s habit is about setting clear targets, or goals, and achieving them during each practice session. How often do you hear even well established musicians ask each other, “How much do you practice per day?” It’s a question that makes me cringe. Imagine, for example, a real estate agent measuring the number of minutes he’s with a client every day, or a chef how many minutes she spends cooking – and using the answer to show how good they were at their job! Instead, they should be interested in how many properties he sells, and how much diners love eating her food. For musicians, it’s not about how many minutes you spend practicing that counts, it’s whether you can play music or not.

I used to tell my students that if they accomplished my weekly instructions in, say, 2 days, they could stop practising for the rest of the week. (They never believed me, but I was being honest!) After all, why “practise” when you can “do”? If the goal of practicing is to play well, the goal of productive practicing is to practice the least amount necessary so you can spend the most time actually making music.

The 5-Minute-A-Day Virtuoso

The key to effective, goal-oriented practice is being prepared. If you put the time in up-front to prepare for your practice session, it will become easier and easier to knock off your goals, one by one. Here’s an example of how efficiency works in an office: One of my jobs is to remind donors to make their annual donations, which benefit our community outreach programs. I used to do everything from scratch: load the letterhead template, write down the names of donors I needed to send a letter to, copy and paste each address onto each letter, search the pre-composed letter for words that need changing depending on who I’m writing to, etc., etc. Then, one day this summer, I created an address list, mail merged it onto the letter document, made it so the date would auto-update… It took several hours to work out all the kinks, but the result is that now I can not only prepare 10 letters in ten minutes (including stuffing the envelopes), but I can even add personal touches like a short, hand-written message to each recipient (which I had no time for before)! My goals were clear: don’t waste unnecessary time writing letters, and make it easy to send letters so I won’t avoid doing it. Practicers, here are your big goals: don’t waste your life practicing, and make your practice sessions enjoyable so you won’t avoid doing it.

“Be Prepared!”

It is hard to establish goals. It takes mental energy, and it would be easier to just start playing. So here’s a tip: read your teacher’s notes from your last lesson. Those are your goals for the week. Then, download this handy chart . Write all the goals in the box at the top, then – “divide and conquer” – split them up over each day of the week that you plan to practise. Plan to spend more time working on difficult goals, and less time accomplishing easy ones.

What are Clear Goals? Bad, Better and Best

The following are not clear goals. When you catch yourself thinking these things, you are preparing yourself for time-wasting practice:

“Practice for 30 minutes.”

“Work on the Mozart.”

“Play through my pieces over and over until I get them right.”

Here are better ones. If you try to accomplish these, you are on the right track:

“Play all of the hard parts in all my pieces, so I know where they are and how hard or easy they really are.”

“Play through the Mozart so I can hear how it sounds and maybe how long it is.”

“Play through my pieces and make notes in my book about which ones (which parts) need the most work. Make a plan for how to tackle each kind of problem with a good solution.”

The best goals are really clear: they name a specific spot, a specific problem, a specific solution, and how to measure when the goal is met.

“Play the Seven Stages of Misery for my top 3 hardest spots every day. Every time I come to practice, I will decide which hard spots are my top 3 hardest at this moment. The day before my lesson, I will play the Seven Stages of Misery for all of my hardest spots for the week to see how I’ve done – if I they have improved, great; if not, I will ask my teacher for help.”

“Work on the second theme in the Mozart because I always start with the first theme so the second gets neglected. I’m never happy with it because I can’t put the emotion into it that it needs, so I will just play the melody and sway my body or sing along until I feel the way it should go. Then I’ll stop swaying or singing and see if the melody has improved. I’ll try this for two days, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll try something simpler like dividing it into smaller sections.”

“There’s a spot where the tempo changes and then changes back again, and I always end up at the wrong speed by the end. I will set my metronome to the first speed, play, ignore the metronome during the second speed, then realign myself with the metronome when the first speed comes back. I’ll use this crutch for 2 days, then on the third I will use the metronome only to get my speed, turn it off, then turn it on when I’ve finished the passage to check if I got back to the right speed.”

I’ve had to invent problems here and communicate them, so it’s made my goals look long. You will have to invent your own short hand in order to shorten your goals to a writable length. Just don’t fall back into the habit of writing vague goals that can’t be measured.

Two Out-of-the-Box Examples

Here are two real examples of ways I’ve created goals for myself in the past.
I was hungry, so I was in the kitchen making food. I knew I was avoiding practice because there was a spot in one piece I was sure I was never going to play well. I decided that I would change my practicing plan for the day and focus on that spot – find out why it was hard for me and use my tools to improve it. “If I do nothing else today, as long as I can play that difficult run slowly, accurately and with confidence, I will have accomplished my goal.”

I was learning Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini which was too hard for me (still is, I think!). I photocopied the entire score, cut out the hard parts with scissors, photocopied them onto pages and put those pages in a binder. I put away my score and only practised the parts in the binder until they were easy. Actually, the whole process made me focus so well on those hard parts that I barely needed to use the binder, as I had memorized many of the hard parts just by studying them!

I hope my stories will help you create some interesting stories of your own, and that the effort you put in deciding on your goals will give you encouragement as you measure your progress. It’s much more fun to do that than to swim in a vague sea of practising the same piece over and over the same way and not getting any better at it (or not noticing you are getting better.

Happy Practicing!

There is an anecdote about Rachmaninov (known now as a great composer/pianist, but during his life as a great pianist mostly), that a student overheard him practising a piece so slowly that she couldn’t even tell which famous piece it was (apparently she asked him and it turns out it was Chopin’s Etude in thirds – see video below). If this technique was used to its extreme by one of history’s greatest performing musicians, it is worth our while to learn about it. The Habit of the day is… s-l-o-w practice.

Metronome 101 – Read This!

We are trying to build good habits, so let’s admit that most of us don’t have them yet. So if you are anything like me, your metronome is mostly a decoration rather than a tool. Recently I smartly decided to use it on a piece that I am beginning to polish, and do you know what horrible thing I found out – exactly what I expected! While in my mind I thought I was keeping a steady beat I discovered that was rarely the case. Not only was I often rushing the speed (my usual tendency), but I was also slowing it down in spots. After a long practice session that included giving up in frustration and taking a break, I made some progress toward reigning in the beat.
Unlike Simon Horsey, whose ebook I am using to generate these 5 Habits, I don’t advocate relying on a metronome when practising slowly – but I do stress and agree that we constantly need to check in with our metronome to reinforce an accurate inner pulse. As I discovered above, and re-discover constantly, metronomes aren’t only good for helping us speed a piece up, or even for stopping us from rushing – but also for stopping us from slowing down when we don’t realize it.

Slow Practice is Zen

Most of us want to play fast: we want to hurry and learn the piece, we want to impress our teachers, we kind of don’t want to practice, we figure we will fix mistakes later. These attitudes lead to bad habits that are hard to break as well as an overall impatient sound to our music-making (which is no fun for the audience) – but worst of all it makes us dislike music. Slow practice might sound like a bore at the outset, but it can be an enlightening and enlivening experience when practiced.
There are three huge benefits to practising slowly. Your muscles learn the movements that will help them play fast and accurately later; your mind is more receptive to learning resulting in better memory, attention to detail and large patterns, and expression marks; and your mood is peaceful resulting in better quality practicing that you will enjoy, and resulting in you becoming a sensitive, thoughtful, expressive musician. What’s not to love about that? So do it!

How Slow is Slow Enough?

You probably are not practising slow enough, even when you practise slowly. Ask yourself these questions and if you answer No, slow down.

• Did I play all the right notes (see Habit 1 below)?
• Did I feel in control?

“Control” is an interesting concept. Again turning to George Kochevitsky, when you are in control, your muscles are learning not only when to activate, but – more importantly – when to rest. It is actually the releasing of your fine muscles that leads to fluid and accurate fast playing (not their activation). Muscles that don’t release on time leads to the run-away misfire feeling we get when a fast passage falls apart. The timing of muscle release is learned during slow practice, when the mind is quiet but attuned. That is the key benefit of slow practice, and the key to both musicianship and fast playing. So here’s the third question to ask yourself, now that I’ve explained why it’s connected to control:

• Was my mind at peace? (The opposite is when the mind feels “impatient.”)

Speeding Up

Mr. Horsey correctly identifies the pitfall of slow practicing, easily avoided with a few techniques. That is that when you practice slowly, your body movements tend to be large, but when you play fast your movements need to become compact. So how do you quicken your movements?
The first is to speed up by degrees – this is how most people use their metronome, and it’s a good technique, just not the only one. Another typical and good way is to break the piece down into sections, which can include playing hands separate (for pianists). Kochevitsky demonstrates a problem of perspective that can bog us down. Imagine you had to say the follow words really, really fast:

ANDL ANDL ANDL ANDL ANDL ANDL ANDL

You are probably getting tongue-tied over the odd combination “DL.” Try it this way:

AND LAND LAND LAND LAND LAND LAND L

Easy! Notice that in the first example, you had to say “DL” 7 times, but in re-writing it you only have to say it once. So instead of 7 tricky spots that might cause a train wreck, there is no just one; your practice time has just been cut by 7. You’re welcome. Musically, this exercise could look like this:

I have not indicated on the score how to redistribute the notes for easier learning, but basically don’t follow the written beams, and you will begin to see many ways the notes become easier. For example, starting with the first note, thinking of the notes as groups of three reveals a pleasing pattern: three notes ascending. That’s a lot easier to wrap your head around than the tangle of notes that fall within the beat.

A “Quick” Summation

So there you have it. Practice slowly so you can play fast convincingly, sooner, and without messing up. Try multiple tools to increase your efficiency at speeding up. I think you’ll find, though, as I have, that you won’t need to use them as often as you think because slow practice takes care of a lot of problems you otherwise have to find ways to fix later.

Happy Practicing!

Today I will review his Habit 1: Get All the Notes Right All the Time

Monty Python’s Guide to Practicing

I remember excitedly checking out a book from the library that I considered quite a find: the music book of Monty Python songs.  The first page had instructions for how to play the piano in 3 easy steps:

1. Select the key.
2. Insert the key into the piano to unlock it.
3. Play all the right notes at the right speed in the right order.

Very clever.  But in all seriousness, since most of us don’t bother locking our pianos, steps 1 & 2 don’t apply.  But step 3 is really the trick, isn’t it?  I mean, that’s the whole reason people take music lessons – to learn to do step 3!

Habit 1 might sound like Monty Python’s step 3 – obvious yet seemingly impossible – but I assure you, it is both doable and essential.

One of my colleagues once said, wisely, “It’s impossible to play a wrong note if you’ve never practised one.”  In other words, practising creates habits that your brain and body remember.  When it comes time to perform, either on stage or in front of your teacher, the chance that you will play the right notes is sort of like the average of all of your practice repetitions.  What is your average?

Do You Like to Gamble in the Spotlight?

The following is the worst way to practise: play it over and over until you get it right.  Unfortunately, “play it over and over until I get it right” is probably the answer most students would give if they were asked “How do you practise?” Let’s say you played a difficult passage 100 times practising this way.  That means you played it 99 times wrong and 1 time right, so you have a 99% chance you will play it wrong the next time you play it, which might be your lesson or your recital.  Those are not good odds.

The trick to improving your chances is to limit the times you play the passage wrong, and maximize the times you played it right.  Here’s the goal: learn to play the passage right as quickly (efficiently) as you can, then repeat and repeat and repeat it.  In French, a practice session is literally called a “repetition.”  Make sure you repeat the good, not the bad.

Kids Love Misery (the Game)

Mr. Horsey offers some good tips on how to practice playing the right notes.  I’ll add one that I found effective and entertaining.  It’s a game from The Practice Revolution called “The Seven Stages of Misery.”  I’ve had students really get into it and make their own elaborate play board, but in a pinch, all you need is a piece of paper folded in 8, a pen or pencil and a token (see image).  You play the game by repeating the passage you are trying to improve, then stop.  If you played it 100% correctly, advance your token.  If you made even one mistake, go back one space.  The game ends when you reach “Home” – i.e. when you have practiced the passage correctly seven times more than you did incorrectly.  The genius of the game is that it very obviously shows how “ready” a piece is: it could take hours to complete a game using a passage full of mistakes, or mere seconds using one that needs only minimal review.  (I always told my students they could stop if they got frustrated with the game.  That means they need to simplify the passage rather than bite off more than they can chew.)

Is there Any Merit in Run-Throughs?

I am a sight-reader, which means that I love ploughing through unknown music, mistakes and all, because it gives me pleasure just to get a broad overview of how the music could sound if I practiced it.  The sight-reader’s downfall, though, is that we don’t like having to stop and work out the kinks.  On the other hand, my conducting professor said that a choir or orchestra should always play through a new piece twice before working on sections.  Here’s why: the first time establishes the goal – how the whole piece sounds, and where all the little bits that we will be practising fit together in the finished product.  The second time weeds out the one-time mistakes that happened because no one had heard the piece before – it saves time and energy spent practicing sections that don’t really need it.  I think this is an acceptable policy for private practice, too; however, some people are definitely not sight-readers and so forcing them to play through a whole piece ignoring the mistakes might be more upsetting than helpful.

Mr. Horsey’s Habit focuses on notes, but I would like to adjust the concept slightly, borrowing an idea from George Kochevitsky’s (very dense) book The Art of Piano Playing.  What matters is accomplishing goals which in many cases will be “100% note accuracy” but might instead be “100% rhythm accuracy” (in which case you set your brain to ignore wrong notes and pay attention to right rhythms) or “100% movement accuracy” (in which case you pay attention to the big movements of your body rather than the small movements of your fingers playing notes and rhythms) or “100% feeling accuracy” (in which case you ignore everything except the emotional sound).  In each case you will of course try to play the right notes, rhythms, movements and feelings, but what lets you advance your token is whether you have achieved your intended goal.  And, of course, eventually you want all of these things to come together for that near-perfect performance.

Goal-Oriented Practice

So, in essence, what I’m saying and hopefully adding to Mr. Horsey’s excellent Habit is that effective practice is deeply goal-oriented.  This demands attention – quite the opposite of the outdated attitude that practicing is a finger-exercise where great players can practice while occupying their brain with reading a newspaper.  If the student is too young to maintain that attention, it needs to be the responsibility of the parent to guide the practice session.  Everyone loses attention, though, at which time it is best to stop the practice session, and start it up again after a mental break.  Remember the ultimate goal of practicing is to play well – NOT to spend time practicing!  And in today’s hectic lifestyle, that is very good news.

Happy Practicing!

Note: Since I intend to write a several articles about “practicing” I wanted to alert you to one of my eccentricities as a grammar nerd.  “Practice” and other forms of that word have two spellings: with a “c” and with an “s.”  Usually in American (and Canadian) spelling, we drop the “s” version, but I argue that the 2 versions are not mutually exclusive: “practice” is a noun, and “practise” is a verb.  So just to let you all know that these are not typos.  I have added “practise” to my spell checker – so should you.

To the first point, although religious organizations in North America receive 50% of all donations, and humanitarian causes legitimately have an emotional appeal that gives them the advantage of being the charitable cause of choice – all registered charities from all four branches recognized in Canada as “charitable” are worthy of donors’ consideration.

To the second point, commercialism, I say that educational charities are a beacon of hope for those of us who appreciate the kinds of things that don’t appeal to the masses.  I’m not against commercialism, or letting the market decide what is viable in the cutthroat business world (capitalism), but I am thankful for the projects that would never see the light of day if it were left to for-profit businesses (fuelled by customers’ cash) to fund them.  One of those things is art (especially classical music); another is education.  (Did you know all schools and universities are charities, too?)

What is my point?  Well, as we enter the Christmas season, think of all the charities you might encounter.  Of course there are the humanitarian causes – the Salvation Army kettle campaign, for instance (humanitarian branch).  If you attend church, you may give an offering or send a shoebox full of gifts to a third-world country (religious branch).  You may attend a school play or an orchestra or choir concert (education branch).  Think about how dull life would be without charities, and consider supporting the ones who bring value to your life.

There is much more I would like to add to this discussion, but I think I will save it for another post.  In particular, I would like to share my insight on how to evaluate a charity’s worthiness to handle your donation (avoid scams, but also how the success measurements we are trained to look at don’t really work), and what fundraising really is all about.  Ultimately, I hope to tell you why I believe in the charitable purposes of the Academy and why I believe we are worthy of your support – and what kind of support is the most helpful.  I hope I have whetted your appetite and that you will stay tuned.

“This is what a Honda feels like”

Like a piece of classical music, it follows the tried and true pattern of success: there’s logic near the beginning, restful contemplation in the middle, and an exciting climax at the end. The fact that you can trick yourself into imagining the sounds are mechanical and not man-made adds creativity, interest and shows skill. In the Renaissance spirit, it challenges the accepted wisdom of what humans (composers and performers) can accomplish. Just as importantly, it inspires other creative people to take up the challenge and try their own hand at it. The following are parodies of the original commercial that had me chortling while trying not to draw too much attention to myself at my desk.

“This is what my car feels like”

This one is a little more hard core, but the fact that only two performers pull off all the sounds is worth the risk of slightly offending someone:

“This is what 118-118 feels like”

You might think that these commercials have nothing to do with classical music, but I think they have everything to do with it. I think they are classical music – and the fact I can hold the sheet music to the original is proof enough! At the very least, they remind me to look beyond the notes on the page and the limitations of instruments (whether it is the piano keys, the human voice or whatever) and get to the heart of the music and what music is. It is an expression, an experience, an entertainment.
In a few weeks, we will be celebrating Canada Music Week. The local BCRMTA Branch will be hosting recitals of Canadian Music and we will be hosting our first-ever New Music Concert featuring our students. These would be wonderful ways to experience new musical expressions… that is, short of purchasing a Honda Civic.
And – full disclosure – Yes, I am a proud Honda Civic driver.

This series explores the unexpected places your music lessons now could lead you in the future.  The following is my interview with Andrea Davison, Manager of Artistic Operations for the Honens International Piano Competition.

The Honens competition takes place every three years and is a gruelling series of public concerts in Calgary that test the musicians' ability to play as a soloist, with an orchestra as the feature of a concerto, and in a collaborative setting with a few other musicians.  The three competition winners enjoy three years of artist management in an attempt to jumpstart their careers.  Andrea Davison is central to this part of the Honens experience that takes place between the competitions, but she also manages the competitions themselves.  Artists, especially good ones, can be difficult to organize, so when I asked Andrea what she does to manage young artists' careers, she said, jokingly, "I harass them!"  But on a more serious note, she replied:

"A lot of it is simply talking to them about where they see themselves  in five years, what kind of career they want to have, do they want to teach or focus on performing.  Then we look for concert engagements for them to build their reputation and performing experience.  We do a concert tour in Germany, which is eight to ten concert dates within about two weeks.  Lots of the pianists haven’t had the experience of that many performances within that time period, so they find out what kind of stamina you need to be on the road and do a concert every night or every two nights.  So they learn about themselves and what they can realistically take on in terms of workload when later on they are approached to do that kind of thing.    We offer residencies at the Banff Centre in collaborative work, and we record a CD with them.  Part of the prize for the 2012 competition is to record on the Hyperion label, which is a very well respected classical label in the UK.  We present them in debut concerts in significant markets that make strategic sense for their career given their nationality or where they live.  We present them at Carnegie Hall or Wigmore Hall.  And of course, we work to get influential people to come out and hear them.  For example, our 2006 laureate, Hong Xu, gave a debut performance at Wigmore Hall and they’ve since invited him back twice – including a recording for their “Wigmore Live” series.

Graham (GY): And this has happened since his three years’ experience with you, where you set up his debut there?

Andrea (AD): Yes, and it does take some time [to build a career].  Three years is as long as it sounds.  We like to say once you’re a Honens pianist you’re always part of the family.  We continue to support them past the three year commitment.

GY: Now I’d like to talk to you about what it was like for you when you were taking music lessons.  What was it like, what did you think it was going to do for you, how did you like it, and what did you study?

AD: Well, I studied piano – of course!  When I was young, I didn’t think about what I was going to do with it.  It was just something I did.   My mom played piano and organ and my dad played trombone and bass guitar, so music was always a part of my family.  I never questioned it.  It was part of the social fabric of my family: it was what you did when you had free time – you’d go and make music.  I didn’t really decide to pursue it until high school. Then at university I did performance degrees.

GY: How did you switch from performance to artist management and concert presenting?

AD: In a way the transition was really natural for me because when I was finishing my masters degree at the University of Calgary, the Honens Competition was taking place there which was very exciting to be close to as a pianist.  So I decided to volunteer as the music librarian for the 2000 competition.  I organized all the music for the jury and I really enjoyed the experience.  It was great getting to hear all the pianists, and it gave me the chance to learn the hard truth that I was not at this level.  So I had to swallow my ego and go, “okay…”

GY: I think lot of people think that if you do a performance degree and don’t go into performance that you’ve failed somehow.

AD: Oh, and I don’t believe that at all.  Not at all.  So I finished my degree and I did some teaching and some accompanying.  Then a contract position came up at Honens, so I applied and got it.  I was the assistant to “everything.” I don’t even recall what my job title was because I went to work and every day it was something different: I could be updating the website, making programs, who knew?

GY: So not musical things.

AD: No, not musical things, but definitely related to music and making it happen.

GY: But could you have done the job without having been a musician?

AD: It was an important skill.  I would say my musical background makes me better at what I do because I understand what the pianists are going through on stage, and a big part of what I do is to make sure they have the best performing conditions we can offer: making sure they’re comfortable, making sure they have everything they need.  We really treat the competitors as performers: once they’re backstage, it’s their show.  They’re not going to get penalized if they go overtime.

GY: What would you say to a music student, taking piano because it’s part of their family’s social fabric, not thinking about their career at this point – what would you say about the kind of roots they’re laying down right now?

AD: The roots are hopefully just a love for music, for what they are doing.  And being open to the fact that there are many ways to make music happen whether it’s pressing the keys on a piano yourself, or being the person that opens the door for a performer to walk onstage.  It’s all a part of making music.