Month: May 2015

I am a working musician. I seriously thank my lucky stars for this fact on a regular basis. But it creates a challenge with this program in that there are days in the summer in particular when I’m already playing the piano for 4-5 hours on a given day (mostly ballet classes). If I’m going to add 2-3 hours of practicing on top of that… I think it will be very important to have a pretty conscious focus on injury prevention, and I hope that a focus on some fundamental techniques may improve overall playing ability at the same time.

I don’t currently have the benefit of a private teacher (with a wife in grad school and the aforementioned salary of a working musician, there’s no available money for that), so I have to figure this out largely on my own. I’m going to try working through “Mastering Piano Technique” by Seymour Fink. I’ve never looked at this before, and I don’t have a great sense yet of how it jibes or doesn’t with my college teachers. Before college, I don’t think I had any conception of how to use my wrist effectively, so getting that mechanism to work freely (and how that movement was applied to a musical need) was probably the biggest technical achievement of that time. I also read Effortless Mastery, which was a big influence and I spent a lot of time playing the left hand of Bill Evans Peace Piece and through that, discovered some things on my own about arm carriage.

Fink advocates for 10 basic piano motions that are to be first practiced away from the instrument. He talks about the importance of taking your time with these, and I get why. They are dense, complicated motions, similar in some aspects to some of the fundamental motions that I’ve seen taught by Bill Evans (the dancer), who I have had the gift of accompanying this last semester. It’s pretty clear to see the transference between piano technique and dance technique, especially if you’re watching a great pedagogue. Actually, ballet classes have also been very eye opening for this as well, as they have a number of very clear basic motions that are practiced over and over and over but are the obvious building blocks of the larger motions, which are then the building blocks of an expressive vocabulary. There’s another project/book – what pianists can learn from dance pedagogy! Someone who had a mastery of Seymour Fink’s techniques could easily just do a group class twice a week that taught, clarified, and drilled these movements. Holy crap, even better, you get a great dancer to help you choreograph these movements in interesting and musical ways, and then have one pianist each class accompany the others.

Alas, I find out, not but 4 hours later that, like most great ideas, it’s been done! At least partially. I guess it, or something pretty similar, is in the curriculum at the Longy School of Music right here in Boston.

This book by Alan Fraser, “The Craft of Piano Playing” also seems very promising. I just did some reading about his techniques and then did about a 20 minute exercise where you move your spine in a variety of ways while sitting, and I swear my playing was 20% more fluid and beautiful right after.

Fraser is big into this guy Moche Feldenkrais (great name!) who has also been very influential in Alexander Technique and for a lot of modern dance. I’ll be taking a three day Feldenkrais dance class in about a month. This could be a really great new area for me.

Again, with the caveat that I am a decent amateur runner and a professional (for what that’s worth) pianist, learning a piece of music is so much more nuanced than running a race. As one example: I can’t pick which section of music to work on if I haven’t played through and come to a general understanding of the piece as a whole. So I’m fearing that my training/practice program has to be much more tailored and specific, which might detract from the simplicity and lack of choice that I was striving for.

Focused, productive practice for 25 minutes is really easy for me. I get a lot done, and, also, I feel like I haven’t gotten nearly enough done! But I kind of love that I’m limiting myself for the first week. I know that I have plenty of scheduled hours, so the consistency and the excitement for each practice session is really pretty thrilling. Doing two days of an hour and a half would actually be easier than 6 days of a half hour each, but less productive. Working up to 6 days of 2-3 hours will be great though. See, each practice session I’ve started working on what I was scheduled to do, but then very quickly realize something else that really would be productive work. I’ve kept to the schedule, (actually, I did cheat one day and did some extra work), but I’m definitely struggling with ideas of flexibility vs. consistency/no choices.

With age and lots of teaching, I’ve gotten extremely good at figuring out efficient and effective ways to practice. What I need is to couple the excitement of having a clear and useful idea, with the action to realize it.

What are the ways that people who get great at things fit the work into their life? It’s definitely a cliche, but you get out of college and life in the real world is busy! I mean, on the other hand, everyone’s “real world” is different. Your “real world” is different if you have kids or not, or if you own a house or not, or if your wife is in a heavy graduate program… And of course I have biases and blinders and therefore can’t think of all the things that could make my “real world” a lot tougher than it is now. What if my health was an issue? I am committed to this program, and won’t accept any of this as excuses for myself, but I think it’s only realistic to analyze why I might fail and where I have failed in the past.

“I think a lot about this relationship between cynicism and hope. And critical thinking without hope is cynicism. But hope without critical thinking is naïveté. And I I try to live in this place between the two to try to build a life there because finding fault and feeling hopeless about improving our situation produces resignation of which cynicism is a symptom and against which it is the sort of futile self-protection mechanism.”

or

Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. In between my life flows.

Ok, back to the work:

What is the balance between working harder and making more space for work?

When you make more space for work, is it by neglecting some things, or getting someone else to do them, or simplifying so that those tasks aren’t there?

Some of the things that one could neglect could also be undercutting your learning. Sleep. Nutrition. Order. How do you decide whether or not it’s important for your office to be clean, both for the sake of a clear head for work and for a general ability to function in society! Or your lawn mowed… Things you neglect can also pile up into much larger problems.

Efficiencies seem to be a key, though sometimes it seems like they require a lot of effort and they may not have a clear result until after you’ve actually put them into practice. Would it be better to spend a half hour each day meditating, running, doing two loads of laundry, or tracking my budget? All of those seem like consistent efficient effort would make my life better, and possibly make my practicing more efficient, or I could ignore all of those and practice more! The best efficiencies are ones you can justifiably get paid for.

I would suspect that most people aren’t so conscious of these questions, and probably a lot of people who get great at things either luck into or unconsciously get into situations that work for them.

That comment by my theory professor on “is not motivated by external factors” has stuck with me in a deep way. I wish I could decide to focus better. I wish I could decide to focus on my wife and family better.

It is common practice among musicians to basically set up that kind of cycle. One of my earliest teachers told me that he simply put all the material he would be working on in a regular order on one side of the piano and moved it to the other side when it was done. Same thing every day. Am I risking missing consistent development by not having a daily routine?

Reason this failed: I set too high a goal. I took on too big/hard a program and didn’t have the initial skill, number of weeks, or number of hours per day to do it right without neglecting my children (my wife is tough, she can deal), or being absolutely terrible at my job, or injuring myself.

Reason this failed: I didn’t eat and sleep well, so I lacked focus and then felt a need to prioritize “balance” and relaxed too much.

Reason this failed: By sticking with my strict plan each day it didn’t leave me room to react to the deficiencies in my playing that I was hearing right then and there, and I did work that was planned rather than work that was needed.

Reason this failed: I strayed from the plans too much and followed impulses, not getting the real benefit of the weekly consistency.

Reason this failed: I wrote a lot about why it would fail and they became self fulfilling prophecies and easily found excuses!

A friend just told me: “Show your work, not your plan.” Eek. Cut me to the core.

This is a blog chronicling my attempts to take distance running training programs and adapt them for practicing piano. You can read an introduction to the project here and see my current program here. You can sign up on the left to get an email whenever this gets updated.