Category Archives: musings

In my last few blogs I have looked at a number of aspects of music practice with the hope of getting the the very core of the issue – namely, that if it is productive and fulfilling, a child is much more likely to enjoy it. Once that stage is reached, we’re in business. In reality, however, parents know that it’s not necessarily as easy as that! At this point I must put my hand up and acknowledge that I have four sons, three of whom are excellent musicians – so I do have experience on both sides of the equation.

In terms of encouraging our children to practise, there is one thing which I believe can have a significant impact which is, quite simply, to take an interest. My parents spent many hours just sitting in the same room when I practised as a child – sometimes reading the paper, sometimes just listening, and sometimes helping when asked – and I was always hugely encouraged by the fact that they took such an interest in what I was doing. I have known many ‘non-musicial’ parents of pupils who have done the same, and who have in fact learned a great deal as a result of entering into the learning process with their child. The “I’m not a musician so I can’t help them, I just leave them to get on with it” approach will rarely encourage a child to succeed, and will actually tend to make practice feel even more isolating.

All children are different of course, and they also change, sometimes very rapidly! There may be times when the last thing our child needs is their parent interfering, or wanting to hear them play – or even worse, sing! We need to be sensitive to this, but at the same time we also need to keep that avenue open for when they are ready to share with us again.

If a child doesn’t want to practise, they will come up with the excuses, we know that! Some may be genuine, of course, but many stem from the fact that they just don’t enjoy it; which brings us back to the initial point – can they see that their practising makes a difference? Do they feel empowered? And the answer to this question, in mind my at least, lies principally with just one person: their teacher.

I’ve just looked up the difference between an instructor and a teacher, and found the following:

An instructor shows you how to do something. A teacher leads you down a path of understanding, opening doors along the way and pointing you down new paths which you never knew existed.

My instinct is that it is my responsibility, as the teacher, both to show them how to practise effectively, and also to inspire them to want to do this. I suspect that I fail quite a lot of the time – it’s not an easy thing to do, and it requires huge patience and commitment. But this is my always my principal aim. Along the way we will learn all of the other things – technique, musicianship, hopefully a few pieces too – but all of these come alongside a deep desire simply to be a musician and to enjoy all that this entails, and including the process of getting there … which we call practice!

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One of the major struggles in learning a musical instrument is the whole business of practice. Personally, I love practising, but there is no avoiding the fact that a lot of children really don’t. So whilst I don’t claim to have all the answers, looking at some of the issues surrounding practice might give a few insights into how it might be turned into a fulfilling and enjoyable enterprise.

Task = Time?
It’s not personal!
Practice makes permanent
Slow is easy
motivaton
A little and often…

The more I think about it, the more I realise that good practising is largely about good thinking – and if there is a common theme in my previous posts on practice, it is in my concern that students do not consider carefully enough what it is that they are actually trying to achieve, or how they are trying to achieve it. I often tell them that if I can teach them to think, then they should be able to take on the other stuff themselves, like playing the piano for instance! I can offer them some hints on that too, of course, but nothing beats a little curiosity when it comes to quality learning.

Slow practice is so helpful, vital really, because it helps us to order our thinking. How often do we hear our pupils wading through a passage [I’m thinking particularly of pianists but I’m sure it must apply elsewhere] with little else in mind other than getting to the other side? Not unlike someone hacking through the jungle with a machete, and with about as much finesse! The problem is, there is just far too much information to process, and with music, this issue is compounded by the fact that this processing has to be done in real time.

One of the ways in which I convey this to my pupils is to ask them to answer some easy sums: 2 x 4, 11 – 8, 13+9 etc. Initially I give them time to answer, but after a few, I suddenly up the pace and literally bombard them with sums as quickly as I can think of them – and I haven’t found anyone yet who can keep up! I then point back to the music and remind them how much more complex this stuff is in comparison to simple arithmetic; decyphering a strange language of dots and lines, co-ordinating our fingers with accuracy, constantly assessing the resulting sounds with our ears, and all of this in real time otherwise there is no pulse – and arguably therefore no music. It can also help at this stage to point out that playing music is one of, if not the most intellectually demanding things which they are likely to be engaged in. It isn’t easy, and so not being able to play a piece of music perfectly after just a few readings is not due to any inadequacy on their part. I also point out that I still practise in this way myself.

The other image which I like to use is from the film The Matrix, where the characters exist in a world outside the realms of time. They have so much time that they are able, with ease, to dodge a bullet or a punch fired from close range. This is where we want to be when we play, where we have as much time as we need to react to every minute detail of information coming our way! The Matrix is make-believe (at the moment!) but nevertheless we can replicate it – by practising very slowly!! By slowing down real time, what we are doing is extending the amount of time that we have to think, such that our thinking can be ordered and we can be in complete control. When we find this point – and it may be really very slow – we might observe that slow is indeed rather boring, but also perhaps strangely satisfying because we have complete control and nothing escapes us. Slow is easy. We can then begin the process of very gradually speeding up again, gradually compressing our newly ordered thinking time into a smaller and smaller space, until we can play right up to tempo.

Once we are back up to speed we may well find that, paradoxically, we don’t have to think at all! Those countless repetitions have hard-wired our ordered thoughts into our brain so effectively that ‘it just happens!’

A word of caution, lifted directly from a friend’s blog, and quoting the eminent pianist and teacher Philip Fowke directly:

Practising slowly, though essential at all stages, does need an antidote. There can be a danger of practising to play slowly.

As with everything, it is essential that the student learns to assess at all times what they are doing and why. Practising slowly because ‘we have been told to’ is dangerous ground; rather, an understanding of when slow practice is useful, and when it is simply a waste of time, is something which we need to guide our pupils in if they are to make the most valuable use of their practice time.

Practice part 5: motivation
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Some of the first things which I learned about practice is that there are two techniques in particular which really help – practising slowly, and repeating things over and over again. Both of these are good news (if a little boring) and we should do a lot of them. In fact, used in the correct way, these techniques are invaluable; but used in the wrong way, repetition can actually send us even further in the wrong direction.

It is imperative that children are taught why they are instructed to follow the numerous guidelines which we give them, so that they have an understanding of what they are doing. Why should pianists played with curved fingers? Why, when ‘the notes are difficult enough thanks’, do I have to use the fingerings which my teacher says I should use? Telling is not teaching. In my experience, it is no more difficult or time-consuming to ask a child a question as a means of provoking them to work out an answer for themselves, than it is simply to give them the answer. The difference is that, with the understanding gained, they are empowered – they can use what they have learned and apply it to new problems. Developing an enquiring mind is vital if our students are to take control of their own learning. At the very least, we need to ensure that they understand why; careless generalisations don’t help, specifics do.

So, why is repeating something over and over again a useful tool in our practice kit? The answer, of course, is that it can help to secure that passage in our memory; our fingers remember the patterns, our ears remember the sounds, and the music becomes more and more familiar to us.

However, we have missed out a vital stage in our explanation; what we haven’t helped our pupil to understand is that before we start this process, we need to have the notes right! Repeating something over and over again doesn’t get it right in itself, it helps to cement in place what we already have right. I do think that some children just hear the first part – repeat – and don’t stop to think about what it is that they are actually doing.

This might also go some way to explaining why repetition is such a fickle friend! When we first encounter a new piece, repetition does indeed help us to become more familiar with it, and initially we can sense that each time we play through we are gaining a little in fluency; this feels good. However, if this is the only practice technique at our disposal, we will soon hit problems; the same mistakes keep cropping up (or even worse, different ones each time!) and no matter how often we repeat the passage, it seems to have stopped getting better. At some point in an apparently seamless process, repetition has ceased to be helpful and is now busy hard-wiring a whole load of problems instead.

Repetition does not fix these problems, so repeating, over and over, a passage which has mistakes in it will actually make it worse. This is an awful realisation, especially when the child genuinely believes that she is doing something which will make it better! And the fact that it does not get better will only reinforce that vicious circle which says ‘It must be me, I’m rubbish, I hate practising.’

The art of practising is complex, and we need to be teaching our children (pupils or offspring!) how to master it. Simply sending them away ‘to practise’ will not do; rather, we need to ensure that they know how to use their time productively so that they can see that it is effective. Taking five minutes to explain why repetition works, and just as importantly, when it doesn’t, might make all the difference in a child’s musical development.

Practice part 4: Slow is easy
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I suspect that one of the main reasons that children do not like practising is, put bluntly, because it makes them feel inadequate. If practice is about improving something, mastering it even, then it goes without saying that before the end result has been achieved, some failures must have occurred along the way. [If we’re realistic, probably quite a lot of failures actually …] Practice is not something which we can do perfectly, even with practice! But we can strive to do it more effectively.

The key is to try to view mistakes in an objective manner, as a problem to be solved. In much the same way as a scientist observes the outcome of an experiment, we need to observe, in as much detail as possible, what happens when we play, and try to identify whatever it is which is causing the mistake. And if at all possible we need to resist the temptation to take it personally if we don’t get it right straight away, but instead to persevere.

If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.          (Thomas Edison)

I believe that this objectivity is often missing to some extent in our pupils’ practice time. In my last blog, task = time?, I raised the issue of children spending time ‘practising’ without actually having specific goals. Without objectives, practice is rarely successful. However, I have lost count of the number of times that a pupil has recounted guiltily (after a few leading questions from me!) that actually what they have done is simply play through their piece a few times. What, I ask myself, is going on in their heads if they think this is actually going to work?! More often than not, of course, they are left at best feeling that their practice was a waste of time, and often it’s worse than that – they are convinced that they are rubbish because they haven’t improved. But of course they haven’t got any better, because they haven’t actually done anything to bring about any improvement!

There is, potentially, a vicious circle here which is all too familiar; after weeks of ineffective practice, the pupil feels totally dejected, they ‘hate the wretched piece which has brought this about’ (even though they loved it when they first heard it) and they ‘hate practising even more than they did before because it’s a waste of time and it doesn’t make any difference because they’re rubbish anyway.’ Needless to say, practice does not move up their list of favourite pastimes.

The solution? – we need to teach our students how to practise effectively, and to encourage them in developing their practice skills. It must not be taken for granted that they know how to do this, and we need to model it for them every lesson if necessary, ensuring at all times that we demonstrate that it is an objective exercise. This is also an empowering exercise; once the pupil realises that they have the skills to self-assess and improve their performance under their own initiative, they will discover that practice can be fulfilling and even exciting – job done!

Practice part 3: Practice makes permanent
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First up, the common but inaccurate assumption that task equals time. In other words, as long as we do the required amount of practice each week, we are on track. But if the amount is measured in time alone, the pupil has entirely missed the point.

Practice without objective is unlikely to be effective.

For example, it is relatively simple to practice for, say, twenty minutes. I open the music to my ‘best’ piece and play it through. Sounds great. Now I move on to the other piece, a more recent acquisition, and start at the beginning – which is the bit that I know best. I carry on and wade through the tricky bit, which is still not very fluent, and although it’s beginning to sound a little more familiar, there are still lots of things going wrong. Watching the clock though, I only have a few minutes left of my allotted time. I ought to do a couple of scales, so let’s start with the ones I know… Nineteen minutes, that’s near enough, and I can tell my teacher/parents, with honesty, that I have practised today. But what did I achieve? Probably very little actually – but if my principal objective was to spend twenty minutes practising, I have succeeded in the task which I set myself.

If a pupil has few objectives beyond fulfilling the allotted time quota, the chances are that their practice time will seem like a pretty futile exercise. With no specific strategies in place to focus on, their practice is unlikely to be effective, and this alone will ensure that being made to spend time practising every day is all the more frustrating.

Practice part 2: It’s not personal!
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