1
Introduction
It hardly needs stating that the ways in which people experience music have changed throughout the centuries. Some ways of hearing live music have been at court, a concert hall, salon, or buying a score and playing it yourself at home. Exposure to recorded music has been through listening to the radio, 78s, 45s, LPs, cassettes, CDs, MP3s, and ubiquitous distribution channels on the internet.
Courts, cassettes, and crackly 78s are gone, but there are still concert halls, recitals, and people making music at home, although the latter is surely rarer than it once was. Despite the ease of creating music with samples and virtual instruments, classical musicians make music with real instruments in performance settings. It takes years of study and practice to do this with fluency and artistry. Those involved in working to master an instrumental discipline, studying, interpreting, and performing concert literature at the highest level do most of this work behind the closed door of the practice and teaching studio.
The level of technique required to master an instrumental discipline may have expanded over time, often in response to compositional innovations, an increased awareness of how to use ourselves better, or in response to changes in the instrument itself, but what goes on behind the studio doors of master musiciansâthe tenets of high-level practice that I explore in this bookâhas scarcely changed. Great artists of the past were aware that there were ways of working that could help them assimilate material quickly; attend to technical and artistic refinements; recognize and solve problems; and prevent their ears, aesthetic senses, and imaginations from growing dull. These artistsâlike many todayâmay not have known why these practices worked, but their writings, or writings about them, reveal ways of working that anticipated later neurological, psychological, and physiological research.
These legendary musicians also pointed out practices they saw as hindering studentsâ technical and artistic development. These faulty practices usually centered around a reliance on imitation and mindless repetition at the expense of solid foundational work and learning to recognize and reduce problems to their basic level.
The essential problem of teaching and practice is that good teachers try to have their students fulfill as many of the criteria of the advanced, fast, or complicated version of something as they acquire the skill and knowledge of the elementary, slow, or simple version of the thing. This isnât possible all the time, but skilled teachers are attuned to this and are adept at recognizing when it is possible. Students of these skilled teachers donât need to know these advanced criteria, but they have been prepared to meet these criteria in the future. Those teaching themselves wonât have an awareness of these advanced criteria, only their product, which isnât the same thing.
Although I want the ideas explored in this book to be of immediate and practical value to students and teachers as they design, or redesign, their practice, it may not be possible for an inexperienced student to make use of this material right away without expert guidance. I explore tenets of practice in terms of their practical value, but I also explore the concepts that corroborate these tenets, which can lead one to more polished and refined ways of working in the future. The application of concepts to particular situations is âknow-howâ; first-hand knowledge of the concepts themselves requires cultivated thought.
Cultivated thought about practice can help students understand the differences between the limits of a skill thatâs undeveloped because not enough time has been spent on it, the limits of a skill thatâs undeveloped because of the way in which one has been working, or the limits of a skill that is undeveloped because of the constraints of the central nervous system. To the inexperienced ear and eye, these limits appear the same, but learning how to work better can help one override certain constraints of the central nervous system and is a distinctive feature of exceptional skill. When these differences are not understood, progress can become stalled and practice increasingly futile. When practice is viewed simply as know-how, it can become a confining checklist that reveals nothing of its origin, its value, or its purpose. By drawing parallels between the practices of legendary performers of the past and modern research, I hope to remove the opacity of how one develops the skill to create compelling artistic interpretations.
An approach such as this is cultivated and practical: cultivated because it opens a path to spacious thinking about practice; practical because practices are validated by their efficacy, as demonstrated by the outstanding careers and pedagogical successes of those from whom I draw. Too often, though, students confuse efficacy for expediency. In music study, the expedient should be linked to the highest levels of artistry. It takes years to grasp the boundlessness of artistic possibilities, and itâs easy for oneâs concept of expediency to be shaped only by the short-term. Unless one is well-schooled in the existing knowledge, techniques, and artistic accomplishments within oneâs field, oneâs sense of expediency runs the risk of being shaped by vision that is unimaginative and derivative.
Method books and treatises usually attest to authorsâ predilections for rehashing approaches that already exist or, as may be more common, reveal authors working under the illusion that they have discovered certain âintuitiveâ insights about practice but which gainsay documented research. In many ways, these authors are like the group of blind men who try to describe an elephant by experiencing only one of its parts (trunk, tusks, tail, side) without understanding the whole, and their preoccupation with immediate experience defends them against an outbreak of second thoughts. Although the transmutation of oneâs own learning experience into directives for others often passes for pedagogy, it has served to give both practice and pedagogy a bad name. The best drivers of good practice design are counterintuitive, especially to the self-taught and beginners.
Daniel Coyleâs 2009 book, The Talent Code, went a long way toward explaining why some things work well and others do not. His explanations and discussions of the role of myelin in building skill are especially useful. Coyle draws most of his examples from the world of sports, but one can easily infer how they might be applied to high-level music study.1 I recommend Coyleâs book to those who want to refine their work, find out why their current efforts arenât producing the results they desire, and to those who wish to understand how they can better teach their students.
Although I draw upon Coyleâs work in this book, as well as that of Geoffrey Colvin, author of Talent Is Overrated (2008); Matthew Syed, author of Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success (2010); Peter Brown et al., authors of Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (2014), and Zach Schonbrun, author of The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius (2018), Practicing Music by Design is not a reiteration of their work and related work by others. It turns out that the above authors were unaware of a body of literature that anticipates and confirms the research they draw upon by more than seven or eight decades. Even many of todayâs musicians are unfamiliar with the historical literature at which Iâll be looking.
Coyle, Colvin, Syed, and Schonbrun focus primarily on sports, although there is an occasional mention of the work musicians do. Brown and his coauthors focus more on academic work and how best to study. These authors all refer to psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his work on deliberate practice. Ericsson, who has spent much of his career probing questions related to the acquisition of exceptional skill, introduced the term âdeliberate practiceâ in 1993. Athletes, however, are latecomers to the world of deliberate practice. The first modern Olympics occurred in 1896, a time when many of the artists Iâll discuss were working toward or had achieved an exceptional level of performance. The early modern Olympics were nothing like todayâs Olympics: There were no sports psychologists, physicians specializing in sports medicine, or studies that explored how mental work can enhance physical performance.
There is a lot that musicians and athletes have in common, although comparisons break down when it comes to the nature of their skills. Coyle has a section in his book called âWhy Teaching Soccer is Different from Teaching Violin.â The differences are whether an activity requires âflexible-circuit skillsâ or âconsistent-circuit skillsâ:
Skills like soccer, writing, and comedy are flexible-circuit skills, meaning that they require us to grow vast ivy-vine circuits that we can flick through to navigate an ever-changing set of obstacles. Playing violin, golf, gymnastics, and figure skating, on the other hand, are consistent-circuit skills, depending utterly on a solid foundation of technique that enables us to reliably re-create the fundamentals of an ideal performance. (This is why self-taught violinists, skaters, and gymnasts rarely reach world-class level and why self-taught novelists, comedians, and soccer players do all the time.) The universal rule remains the same: good coaching supports the desired circuit.2
Much of Coyleâs research involved visiting what he called âtalent hotbeds,â places throughout the world that consistently turn out top athletes. Had he been able to go back in time to the turn of the twentieth century and visit the Moscow Imperial Conservatory, or the studios and master classes of teachers like Theodor Leschetizky (1830â1915), he would have recognized these as talent hotbeds as well.
âThe Making of an Expertâ by K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula, and Edward T. Cokel, which was the cover story of the July 2007 issue of the Harvard Business Review, included two comments by violinists Leopold Auer (1845â1930) and Ivan Galamian (1903â1981) within its seven pages to illustrate the authorsâ points. Perhaps because the article was in a business journal, it wasnât obvious that these famous teachers were examples of an untapped wealth of literature by prototypical exponents of deliberate practice.3
The terminology of prototypical deliberate practicers and teachers of deliberate practice from the past may differ from ours, written clarity varies from source to source, and some writings hold a studentâs talentâor lack of itâto account for whether students reach a high level of artistry, but to perceptive musicians the parallels between these historical texts and more recent ones are unmistakable. An unusually large number of musicians from the past have acknowledged that itâs the way in which one works that leads to success.
Iâm a concert guitarist, and I know the technical, procedural, and artistic problems of the guitar best. I occasionally use examples of these problems as proxies for the prob...
