Preparation for a competition (or concert or exam) involves a whole mix of interesting things, such as: choosing and arranging the pieces on your program; organizing the logistics of harp transportation; shopping for fancy dresses and shoes; setting up rehearsals and practice performances, etc. Due of the extent and variety of the Israel program, I have had the opportunity to come up with creative ideas for how to prepare that go far beyond this list. But before I get into any of that, let's just be clear on one thing. None of it happens without hours and hours of just sitting and practicing.
Sitting and practicing is the staple in the schedule of any performing musician. To the outside observer, this looks quite boring, and the excuse “sorry, I can't go out, I have to practice” becomes old fast. This routine makes it hard to have “friends” in the normal sense of the term as “people to hang out with in your free time”, but that's a story for another day. What other musicians know is that if you're doing it right then practicing is not boring at all, nor is it ever the same.
First of all, if you are really going to practice, then you better get the sitting part down just right, or else you won't be able to play to the best of your ability and you may actually hurt yourself. Harpists have to sit, hold their arms out in front of themselves, and support a 35-kilo instrument leaning back against them, while also changing pedals. There's a glorious amount of physics and anatomy involved in mapping out all the force vectors that go into holding this position. My exploration of posture began toward the end of my years at the University of Illinois, as I started comparing thoughts with friends and thinking consciously about spinal bones balancing over my hips and such. At the Ecole Normale de Musique our harp studio had actual physiotherapy masterclasses in which we would be critiqued on our position at the harp. I've been fortunate enough never to injure myself by playing, but I remember having to deal with a small amount of right-shoulder pain when I was preparing a different competition in Hungary, two years ago. This time I am proud to announce victory, as I have absolutely no pain anywhere after playing 5+ hours each day. (I just get tired.)
As for the actual practicing itself – learning pieces, drilling passages, memorizing music – I barely know where to start talking about this. I feel like I could write a whole book on the art of practicing! I am convinced that everything depends on what you do with your practice time, how efficiently you work, how you concentrate. I had an idea once that if we really wanted to be helpful to young, upcoming musicians we should have competitions not just for performing but also competitions for practicing. Competitors would come and practice in front of a jury, and they would judge you based on how efficiently and intelligently you managed your time. Even just imagining participating in such a competition is a productive thought experiment that can shed light on your practice regime.
For me, practicing my harp is the art of knowing myself and understanding how my mind learns and remembers things. Through experience, I have become closely familiar with what I have to do to teach my fingers a piece, though I am constantly amazed that it works and that I do actually learn and improve. Often I feel that after beating away at a hard passage I haven't made very much progress on it, but as long as I just spend the time and concentration on it, then when I come back later, it will have improved.
On the one hand, this is because learning just takes time. Here's a visual analogy by way of illustration. Somebody once pointed out to me that you don't actually see all of what you look at. (I think this was in relation to the reliability of eye-witness accounts, in a psychology class.) When you're out, trying looking in some random direction and then close your eyes and try to recreate in your mind all the details of the scene before you. Unless you really were to spend time studying that scene, there will be lots of fuzzy parts to your mind's-eye version of it. Painters know all about this, I imagine, but the phenomenon in music is the same. In order to create that whole mental file I have on the piece, I have to look at it again and again to make sure I've really “seen all the details of the scene”. I have to test myself by painting it all by memory and then checking my work with the original, to make sure I'm not missing anything without realizing it.
On the other hand, the human ability to learn is impressive. More specifically, I have come to worship the power of learning by doing. Actually reaching out with your own hands and doing something is so much more real than reading or hearing somebody lecture. It is truly amazing the way the things that you do soak down into the deepest fibers of your being and stay. The effect is all the more amplified if you repeat the same thing over and over. This is the magic that enables performers to achieve the feats that they do. This almost supernatural power, however, can work against you if you don't use it intelligently. You have to constantly make sure that the correct way of playing the piece is what sinks in, and not the sloppy, unconcentrated way. Making mistakes while you practice is horribly detrimental to learning the piece correctly; the mistakes stay with you too.
Practicing can become a very personal thing for musicians. It is truly a form of meditation, alone-time specially set aside, a comforting routine. In these last few weeks before I get on that plane for Tel Aviv, I am ramping up my practice efficiency as high as I can get it, and my time at the harp every day is what keeps me calm in the face of an approaching deadline. Getting frustrated is bad for efficiency, so I don't get frustrated. Self-doubt is also anti-productive, so I ignore it. Besides, if I let these things sink into those magical inner fibers where I store all the neurological files I have on my pieces, then they'll just come out and slap me around while I'm trying to give a good performance in Israel. Out of logical necessity, I've been forced into a glowing state of hyper-optimism and confidence! It's fun. It wouldn't be possible any other way.
3 comments:
Wow, five hours a day. Actually that's less than I would imagine for a professional musician. I guess you have to spend most of your waking hours doing other activities that pay the bills. And then all your "free time" is spent practicing, with no time left over for friends?
But once you're a professional performing musician, I imagine you would have more time for practicing and more time for friends.
As a computer programmer, I appreciate the ability to sit still for a long time and work. But I think there is a lot to my job that makes it less stressful (at the cost of being less glamorous) than your job.
Wow, five hours a day. Actually that's less than I would imagine for a professional musician. I guess you have to spend most of your waking hours doing other activities that pay the bills. And then all your "free time" is spent practicing, with no time left over for friends?
But once you're a professional performing musician, I imagine you would have more time for practicing and more time for friends.
As a computer programmer, I appreciate the ability to sit still for a long time and work. But I think there is a lot to my job that makes it less stressful (at the cost of being less glamorous) than your job.
I would love to be able to sit for hours at the harp and work the way people can at desks, but practicing is a relatively strenuous activity, and I just can't seem to sustain it for longer than 6 hours a day. This summer, every time I reached 6 hours, I would experience this overwhelming sense of exhaustion, like I was sick. 5 hours seems to be just right for the moment. I'm sure how much you can endure depends on your level of intensity during practice and your personal strength. Some people practice 8 hours a day, and the rest of us look in awe from a distance and wonder how on earth they do it and if they're maybe a little too obsessed. But not even the craziest musician can keep the kind of practice hours I see my dad keep at the computer, for example.
Also, as I alluded to at the beginning of this post, there is more to it than just sitting and practicing. (Up until now I've also been a student, so I've had other music classes to worry about.) Otherwise, I spend time coordinating things and doing administrative work for myself over email; I have to maintain my harp, put markings in my music and work out page turns; if necessary I have rehearsals with other musicians; and then I can't forget to spend time listening to music and going to concerts (that's more crucial than it may seem). When I actually earn money it's from teaching my private students. It would be really nice if "professional harpist" were a job where eventually you could fully concentrate on plucking the strings, but it's not like being a rock star; it's more like being a one-man enterprise (unless you are hired by an orchestra or a school or something corporate like that). For example, I also spend chunks of my time researching and brainstorming about business strategy and creative direction and artistic integrity. I'm trying to be well-rounded.
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