Continuing
on from last week's post, the next key to effect practice it to remain focused
and organized. There is a natural
progression within the study of musical performance. Some skills and concepts are prerequisites
for the study of other skills. A good
teacher will help you to organize your studies into a logical and practical format. As students of musical performance we need to
recognize where we are in our skill/understanding level, where we need to be
and what we need to do to get there.
Have A Plan
It is
easy to get lost in minutes or hours of meaningless practice when we approach
our sessions without a plan. A practice
plan usually is centered around a musical piece (or pieces) that we are
studying and the concepts that we are currently striving to master within that
piece. We should start with warm-ups
that develop tone, dexterity and flexibility.
Incorporating warm-ups that are related to the difficult concepts of the
main piece helps to center our practice.
Finding warm-ups that relate to the focus concepts of the piece is surprisingly
easy, but implementing that focus while playing the warm-ups is often difficult
to remember.
Scales,
for example, can be used to reinforce tone, intonation, knowledge of key
signature, dexterity and many other skills.
However, scales can easily turn into rote exercises that we run through
thoughtlessly. To maintain effectiveness
we must concentrate on the desired skill and deliberately develop it while
playing the scales.
Keeping A Journal
Keeping a journal is a huge aid in maintaining focus. Seeing the warm-ups and practice goals written
down helps us to remember what we did last session and what we should do
now. We can monitor our progress in each
area of practice and easily determine when a concept is mastered. Within the piece, we can remember which
sections we were focusing on last time and keep a record of further progress.
Work In Sections
Breaking the piece into
sections gives us a logical format for progressing to completion. The human brain retains small chunks of
information much more effectively than large strings of data. This is the reason why we separate seven
digit phone numbers into a group of three and a group of four digits. Separating a musical piece into sections aids
us in developing a clear practice strategy for mastering the piece. The progress within each section can be
monitored within one's journal. Smaller
sections can be eventually combined into larger sections until the piece is
finally performed as a whole.
When
studying a piece of music in this way it is important to understand the form
and musical patterns contained within the music. All music is composed of patterns. This is the fundamental element that causes
music to be so memorable. Breaking the
piece into sections that correspond to the musical patterns will aid us in
understanding, learning and remembering the music. While practicing this way we will often find
patterns that repeat throughout the music.
Identifying these repeated patterns will further aid in efficiency.
Tempo
Another
key to effective practice is the carful monitoring of tempo. We will perform whatever we practice. Many people (including myself at times)
practice difficult passages at a tempo that is too fast. This prevents them from achieving true mastery
of the passage. It is important to
practice difficult passages at a slow enough tempo to allow yourself to achieve
mastery of the passage. It is easier to
play the pitches, rhythms, dynamics, articulations, etc. correctly at a slow
tempo and then gradually increase the tempo.
Once those other elements are practiced incorrectly, the mistake becomes
ingrained in our mind and is difficult to remove. Journaling metronome settings helps to
achieve this gradual increase.
Section Size
The
other variable (beside tempo) that can be manipulated while practicing is
section size. Difficult passages are
already examples of this, since they are isolated sections within a larger
section of the piece. Isolating these
passages in our practice helps to gain mastery more efficiently since repetition
is not wasted on measures that we have already mastered. Breaking these passages down into smaller
sections can make them more accessible (or digestible). Once mastered, these smaller sections can be
combine into larger ones, and then the entire passage. The correct combination of tempo variation
and section size can make any passage learnable.
Balancing Practice And Performance
Many of
the things mentioned above (sectional work, tempo, ...) pertain to learning new
pieces of music. We must also practice
performing in order to become good performers.
Once we have learned the sections of a piece of music, brought them up
to performance tempo and combined them, we need to practice performing the
piece straight through. This step is
where most beginning students start.
They play through every piece without breaking it up and employing the
practice strategies we have discussed.
However, one can also error on the other side of things and get caught
up with focusing only on sectional work.
It is important to work toward an end goal and take the time to apply the
final polish to our performance. Playing
through a piece (after it has been correctly rehearsed) presents its own
problems of flow, continuity and endurance.
Once these elements are mastered, the piece is ready for public performance.
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