Embedded Files
Three Tips for Coming Back from Time Off
August 6, 2023
It’s that time of year when everyone is returning from vacation, myself included! In past years, one of my biggest mistakes was not coming back to the instrument mindfully. This video discusses some of the mistakes I’ve made in the past, and some tips for returning to the instrument in a healthy way.
Covid Recovery as a Low Brass Player
August 6, 2023
I recently had the unfortunate experience of going through Covid-19 for the first time. I decided to turn my Covid recovery into an experiment to measure how my lungs were progressing during the weeks after testing positive. This video details how I used Michael Davis's 20-Minute Warm up book to track my progress and eventually get back to 100%. Everyone's experience is different, but this is mine! I'd love to hear yours as well.
December 9, 2022
This week’s topic is a practice tip to help you work on tricky passages that are holding back your progress as you practice an etude/solo/excerpt, etc. It’s a way to re-contextualize the passage that helps both with mastery and with mental flexibility.
Performance Practice Followup!
October 3, 2022
Here’s a little followup to last week’s video on practicing performance mindfulness. The inspiration for this comes from Noa Kageyama’s Bulletproof Musician blog post entitled “When is the Optimal Time to Start Performance Practice?”
Practicing Performance Mindfulness
September 26, 2022
This video blog is a follow-up to its predecessor, “The Tuba in My Head.” This is an explanation of how I prepare for mindful performance in the weeks leading up to a recital.
June 2, 2022
I recently had the opportunity to give a solo recital at the International Women’s Brass Conference in Denton, Texas, and the recital went pretty well. This may not seem like a momentous announcement, but I have realized that, for me, it is. I have spent some time reflecting on how far I’ve come, particularly in my ability to put mindfulness principles in action during high-pressure live performances.
My performance anxiety began when my physical playing difficulties began to manifest. Sure, I got nervous when performing in college, but never to the point that it crippled me. I mostly thought of it as a type of fuel for my performance. My teachers always focused on developing my musicianship, which grew into a strength for me. But tuba teachers are sometimes hesitant to assess a player’s embouchure and ask them to change it. Partly this is because it’s hard to see what’s going on, but in my case I think it was because my embouchure worked … until it didn’t.
I always played with a kind of “upstream” setup, which is what happened naturally when I first approached the instrument (I started in 7th grade). I had a kind of underbite when playing, pointing the air upward in the mouthpiece. As I began to play F tuba and encountered solo music that demanded higher and higher notes, I developed a habit of moving my face upward in the mouthpiece and applying pressure. For a long time, it worked, but it was unreliable. Toby Hanks, who I studied with for my Master’s degree, was the first teacher to tell me that something about my embouchure looked wrong. Again, he didn’t tell me exactly what to do or not to do, but he did tell me that for higher range notes I should have more of my facial muscles in the mouthpiece so that they wouldn’t have to work as hard. He suggested a more “downstream” shape to the embouchure—blowing downward in the mouthpiece. This is something that is suggested by many method books, but for some reason it hadn’t come up in my tuba study before then.
At this point I decided to try to change the way I was playing high range notes, both because of Toby’s suggestion and because I had seemingly reached the edge of my capabilities doing it my original way. What followed were several frustrating years of adjustments. Just at the moment when I should have been most confident in my abilities as a musician—doing Master’s and Artist Diploma recitals at Yale—I suddenly took ten steps backward physically. I was second-guessing and overthinking everything. I had to plan for new endurance limits and embouchure shift points. I couldn’t rely on myself to do perform the way I had in the past. After a while of committing to this change I couldn’t even comfortably go back to my old way of doing things because I was no longer accustomed to playing with a high degree of pressure.
I continued to try to adjust to this new technique after leaving Yale but I didn’t really have anyone to guide me. I began teaching college students shortly after completing my Artist Diploma, which probably increased my focus on technique. I could get by doing what I needed to do (freelancing, the occasional faculty recital), but I was never comfortable. The fear of walking on stage and having the instrument completely refuse to cooperate with me was very real. I lost a ton of my confidence as a player, and I was mentally at my worst during recital situations.
After years of this struggle I reached a breaking point. My approach to building endurance and technique had always been to practice as many hours as humanly possible, but all that practice didn’t seem to be helping. If anything, it was demoralizing that I still had the same inconsistencies after so much work. I was still really struggling with the “old way/new way” concept, and trying to make my technique as consistent as possible. I finally reached out for help to my undergraduate teacher, Dr. Ross Walter.
He listened patiently on the phone to my very detailed description of how I was struggling with my embouchure—how certain notes seemed to work both ways, but I couldn’t figure out how to approach notes that were in my “discomfort zone,” which was right on the edge of where I shifted my embouchure. And then he asked me a question that should have been obvious, but completely surprised me. He said “Well, which way sounds better?”
I suddenly realized that in all of my focus on technique, and on exactly what I put into the instrument and how, I had managed to completely ignore the most important part of the equation: the sound that comes out of my bell. I had been thinking in binaries like “old way/new way” and “right way/wrong way” instead of looking at my technique as an ever-evolving work in progress. When Ross finally asked me that pivotal question it broke me out of the tunnel vision I had developed, and I was able to find the solution almost immediately.
Part of my issue was that once Toby suggested to me that I might need to adjust my embouchure, I became stuck with the mindset that something was wrong with me. I was forever trying to fix myself, yet not always considering the full picture in the scope of my entire playing career. I did what felt best when I first started playing tuba, and changed when I needed to change. The solutions I found after grad school may not have even worked for me at age 18. Since that conversation with Ross I have tried to let my technique adjust to create the sound I want. The sound itself is my primary objective. I try to live by the words of another teacher of mine, Andrew Hitz: “Play along with the sound of the tuba in your head.”
This (finally) brings us back to the mindfulness in performance aspect that has changed for me in recent years. The old fears about not being able to play on stage when it counts will take a long time to completely die, if they ever do. My method of staying mindful in performance is to focus on that internal tuba sound and to do my best to play along with it. I’ve always had the hearing skills to do this, but I have had to work hard to train myself to focus on that instead of on technique. I try to remind myself before a performance to focus on output, not input, and I often fail at that. But luckily the practice of mindfulness is still just that: a practice. So instead of beating myself up about losing focus, I try to congratulate myself for noticing it and then guide my thoughts back to the tuba in my head.
My thoughts during my recent recital ranged from “OMG that’s Don Little in the back row!” to “I really should have put my hair up because it’s in my face” to “Should I have asked for a different lights setting for this room?” to “I wonder how my recorded track sounds out front…” But for today I’m congratulating myself because I noticed each of these moments and consciously steered my attention back to the tuba in my head. Each of these instances was a helpful reminder of what all musical performances should really be about: the music.
July 17, 2021
Lately I’ve been fascinated with Kintsugi, which is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery. In this process, pieces of broken pottery are painstakingly joined back together using a lacquer that is mixed with gold, silver, or platinum. When the process is finished the resulting piece is more unique and usually more valuable than the original. Here is a look at a few pieces of Kintsugi pottery:
Kintsugi is related to the Japanese philosophy of Wabi-sabi, the aesthetic tradition of embracing the beauty found in imperfections. According to Richard Powell, “Wabi-sabi nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.”* These three principles have their origins in the Buddhist concept of the three marks of existence.
Kintsugi is related to the Japanese philosophy of Wabi-sabi, the aesthetic tradition of embracing the beauty found in imperfections. According to Richard Powell, “Wabi-sabi nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.”* These three principles have their origins in the Buddhist concept of the three marks of existence.
It makes sense that Kintsugi is related to a larger philosophical framework because this process of repair can be a powerful metaphor for human situations we encounter all the time. For example, a long-term relationship will inevitably develop cracks or breaks over time. Are we content to throw those relationships away, or to repair them with scotch tape or cheap glue? Or should we instead give those cracks and breaks our time and attention, repairing them with as much care as possible? If we do, the resulting relationship looks different, but it can be more unique, more beautiful, and longer-lasting because of those repairs.
We can view ourselves individually through the same metaphorical lens. In this case, I will focus on applying the metaphor of Kintsugi to the practice of music. There are four main principles that we can take from Kintsugi directly into the practice room:
1. Don’t throw it away
Anyone who is reading this has probably already been tempted to give up on a piece of music, a skill, or even on the study of music itself. The foundational principle of Kintsugi is to honor and value something that appears broken. Since we don’t all start out with the same teacup or vase, this could mean a variety of things to any given musician. But one important concept to remember is that whatever may be broken is rarely completely irreparable. If we make the conscious decision to repair or rebuild some aspect of our playing in the practice room, that time and attention will be well spent.
2. Embrace imperfections
In the modern musical world, perfection is almost a requirement. This especially applies to recorded music, which is usually engineered to sound completely flawless. It is an impossibly high standard, and one that makes us hyper aware of our own flaws. But the imperfections in our playing are incredibly important, because on the other side of each of our weaknesses is a strength. As a college student I longed for each note attack to sound robotically “perfect.” It took me years to realize that the flip side of that imperfection was my unique musical approach. I’m good at exaggerating musical gestures and phrasing, but the price is that I sometimes take too big of a swing. Although I still practice for consistency, I try to preserve my expressive musical language while doing so. Embracing our weaknesses doesn’t necessarily mean not working on them–it means accepting and striving to maintain whatever makes us ourselves as we improve.
3. Turn weaknesses into strengths
This idea is one that I try to implement in a very specific and literal way in the practice room. Rather than simply glueing and painting over the cracks in a piece of pottery in an effort to make them invisible, practitioners of Kintsugi emphasize those lines with gold. The areas that were originally weak become the highlight of the piece.
When learning a piece of music there will always be passages that are more difficult to put together than others. Instead of simply trying to survive those moments, I challenge myself to turn them into areas of strength. I will memorize them, play them slowly with metronome and tuner, and generally get to know them inside out and upside down. The goal is to reach a point where those tricky areas are not only passable, but are actually the most comfortable and polished moments in the piece. That is easer said than done, of course, but even just aspiring to that level of mastery helps make my practice more focused and productive.
4. Create a unique finished product
Part of what makes Kintsugi pottery so valuable is the fact that no two pieces are alike. Individuality should also be a main goal of our musical development. Audiences have often valued stylistic and musical uniqueness over technical perfection (even if our conservatory training instilled in us the opposite impression). But individuality also extends to what we choose to do. Many musicians are finding that creating their own specialty and following a unique path allows for a more personalized, less “cookie-cutter” experience. In this way, like Kintsugi, value comes from what is uniquely our own instead of the elements we share with everyone else.
Mindfulness is all about deciding where and how we direct our attention and focus. I often enter into a practice session with the goal of fixing something specific. But reimagining my approach using the metaphor of Kintsugi has given me a different perspective on mistakes, imperfections, and on my own individuality as a musician. I like the idea that the painstaking work we do is not to make us like everyone else, but is instead to make us more ourselves. Which is good because that work continues … forever!
* Powell, Richard R. (2004). Wabi Sabi Simple. Adams Media.
Roots of Mindlessness: Premature Cognitive Commitments
January 14, 2021
One main cause of mindlessness in our lives is our tendency to hold on to previously-formed mindsets. Consider the word mindset for a moment: it very clearly indicates that our mind is, well, set. Whether our mindset is positive or negative, it is inflexible. Ellen Langer states that we become mindless by “forming a mindset when we first encounter something and then clinging to it when we reencounter that same thing (Mindfulness 22).”
Because this type of mindset is formed without much critical thought, Langer calls it a premature cognitive commitment. Sometimes we accept our first impression of something because it seems unnecessary to reflect any further upon it. That impression simply settles in our mind, and without making a conscious decision (mindlessly), we are committed to that view. When the subject comes up again, our perception of it is already colored by our previous experience, rendering us unable to see it differently.
Langer and her colleagues conducted a study in which two groups of participants were told they would be tested for a fictitious disease called chromosynthosis. They were told that the disease was a hearing problem that was similar to colorblindness, in that it was possible to have it and not know it. The two groups were given two different booklets with information about the disease.
One booklet said that 80 percent of the population had chromosynthosis, and asked participants to reflect on what they could do to help themselves if they were determined to have it. The other booklet stated that only 10 percent of the population were affected by the disease, and did not ask participants to reflect on anything. In other words, the first group had much more reason to believe they might have the disease, and were asked to think about it, while the second group went into the test thinking it was unlikely they had the disease, and that the information in their booklet was irrelevant.
The subjects were then asked to listen to two recordings of conversation and mark down the number of “a” sounds they heard on each one. The participants scored their own tests and all of them were revealed to have chromosynthosis. They were then given follow-up tests requiring them to use specific skills that would challenge people who had the disease. The subjects who had previously considered the information in their booklet irrelevant performed worse once they were diagnosed with the disease. The subjects who had considered themselves more at risk of the disease, and therefore considered their booklet more relevant, performed better. Because the disease was not real, presumably both groups of participants should have had an equal chance to do well on a routine hearing test.
The purpose of this study was to see the outcome of a situation in which different groups took in new information in different ways. The group that took in the information in their booklet mindfully, and with reflection, were better able to deal with the challenges of testing. The group that was encouraged not to reflect on the information in their booklet, or to consider it relevant, was much less able to adapt to the follow-up rounds of testing.
One of the scariest examples of this phenomenon is the way in which many people experience social media. Scrolling Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram is something that many of us do mindlessly, while waiting in line at the grocery store or killing time between classes. When we take in information that way, without stopping to think critically about what we we just saw, it can become imprinted in our mind. That article headline or quote from somewhere on the internet can color our future interactions with the subject material. If we’re honest with ourselves, I think most of us can say we have experienced this. Over time, the repetition of this type of experience can lead us down a path toward extreme mental inflexibility, and an inability to critically assess new information as it becomes available to us.
In the realm of music, premature cognitive commitments can be an outgrowth of our insistence on filing music into discreet categories. For example, we label etudes and solos as either “lyrical” or “technical,” as though skill in both areas is not necessary in order to perform any music well. As I found when conducting a survey of college tuba and euphonium teachers during my doctoral degree, there is great disagreement over what constitutes an etude vs. a technical study, or whether there should even be two terms in use at all.
On a more personal level, I know that I have experienced a fixed mindset in my own practice of etudes, solo music, and excerpts. I can attest to the fact that it is very difficult to undo or change the impression I formed of a piece of music upon first hearing or playing it. This is one reason why I do not usually recommend that students begin learning orchestral or band excerpts until they have reached a certain level of proficiency and musical maturity. A tubist will play the Meistersinger excerpt thousands of times over their career, and if their first experience of it is at a young age, then elements of their own underdeveloped technique and musicianship will become encoded into their performance of the excerpt as habit. Those habits will then become much harder to change than if the player approached the excerpt with more experience.
I see now that the exact age of the player is not the determining factor in whether they will be able to update their performance of a piece of music as they develop. It is the mindfulness that the player employs, both in their first experience of the music and in their subsequent experiences, that allows for long-term flexibility. Langer’s advice is simple: question everything, all the time.
Like the mindlessness that comes from repetition of daily routines, predetermined cognitive commitments are an unavoidable side effect of being human. It is incredibly difficult to take in new information mindfully 100 percent of the time. That said, we can certainly remind ourselves to reassess our ideas about the music we play on a regular basis. Regular sight-reading and improvisation, both of which require constant musical decision-making, will also encourage a flexible rather than fixed mindset. In fact, I’m beginning to think that we need an entirely new word to describe our mental approach to music: perhaps the goal should be that our mind should never be “set.”
Roots of Mindlessness: Repetition
January 6, 2021
One of the most prevalent sources of mindlessness in our lives are the constant repetitive actions we carry out every day. Because of the cyclical, repetitive nature of many of our days, we tend to develop routines that require very little thought. We are not called “creatures of habit” for nothing. Our routines tend to be completed mindlessly in part because our minds are often occupied by other thoughts when we are performing them.
Ellen Langer includes a story in her book about a man who comes home after a long day of work and is preparing to go out to a dinner party. He undresses, showers, then puts on his pajamas and goes to bed. The beginning of his party-preparation and nighttime routines were so similar that he accidentally switched between the two mid-stream.
According to Langer, moving through our daily routines mindlessly week after week, year after year, can cause mental stagnation. We become locked into our perceptions of ourselves and the world, unable to assimilate new information. Mindlessness inhibits both our ability to reach our full potential, and our control over our lives.
For musicians, repetition is a necessary part of our practice room experience. The question is: are we repeating mindlessly or mindfully? Each repetition of a passage reinforces our mastery of its technical elements, but also serves to lock in our perception of the passage and our musical interpretation of it. For example, once we have repeated a passage one hundred times it is difficult to change the dynamics or the articulations. Technical advancement sometimes brings mental inflexibility. Mindless repetition past a certain point inhibits growth.
This is one reason why many brass teachers don’t recommend repeating the exact same fundamentals routine each day. Our fundamentals are perhaps the portion of our practice that is most repetitive and mindless, and if we do exactly the same thing each day, as with any other routine, we will be come dependent on doing it. We will be able to execute the technical demands of that particular routine, but will be unable to go beyond or outside of it. More importantly, our mental approach is completely set and closed. In order to enter a performance situation, we need to be open to new information and ready to adapt.
This discussion is not meant to challenge the necessity of routines. Our routines, both in life and in the practice room, provide us with structure and a certain amount of comfort (ask any parent). The aspect in question here is only the repetition of these routines without the active engagement of our mind. It follows that if we play mindlessly in the practice room, we may also do so in performance.
The next time you begin a practice session, take a moment to think about what you’re about to play. What is the purpose of playing this exercise? What should I be listening for in my playing? Do I need to do that again? What would be the best follow-up to this exercise today? When you practice a musical passage, do so mindfully, making small, deliberate changes in each repetition in order to maintain flexibility. Mindfulness is the process of constantly taking in the information that the current situation gives us and letting that information guide us on a path that is unique to today.
January 5, 2021
The discussion around the subject of mindfulness is somewhat complicated by the existence of both eastern and western perspectives. While these two approaches to mindfulness have overlapping ideas and outcomes, they come from two fundamentally different sources.
The eastern understanding of mindfulness revolves around meditation: the calming of the mind by focusing on the present moment (on breath, a mantra, etc.) and the letting go of distracting thoughts. There is a moral aspect to eastern mindfulness as well. It is expected that achieving a state of focus on the present moment will result in the best possible decisions about our own behavior.
The western approach to mindfulness has been shaped in large part by the research and writing of Ellen Langer, Phd, a Harvard professor of psychology. Langer writes that western mindfulness begins as an assessment of the mindlessness that is present in our lives. By examining how a lack of mindfulness is already affecting us, we can begin to challenge our rigid mindsets and single-minded perspectives. Langer describes mindfulness as “The process of actively noticing new things, relinquishing preconceived mindsets, and then acting on new observations.”
Both eastern and western traditions use mindfulness toward the goal of a more fulfilled and productive life, and a freedom from automatic behavior. The central overlapping idea between east and west is that both aim for a greater awareness of both ourselves and the world around us.
The following series of posts will be an approach to mindfulness that begins with an examination of mindlessness. Much of the discussion will be based on Ellen Langer’s book, Mindfulness, which was originally published in 1989. Langer’s explanation of her years of research on mindfulness is aimed at an audience of the general public, and assumes that the reader has no background in psychology or academic research. For this reason, the book is an excellent resource for those who are interested in an accessible introduction to the topic of mindfulness.
June 26, 2020
I have recently been enjoying Michael Lewis’s podcast, called “Against the Rules.” Season Two is all about the rise of various types of coaching (athletic, financial, life, etc.). Two episodes in particular captured my interest because of their connection to music and mindfulness.
In Episode Three, “The Coach in Your Head,” Lewis talks with Timothy Gallwey, the author of The Inner Game of Tennis. This is one of the most popular books recommended to musicians, and with good reason. In it, Gallwey deals with the mental challenges that arise in performance (in his case, tennis performance), and his insights are applicable far beyond the world of tennis.
Although I had read the book many years ago, I was interested to hear from Gallwey himself in his interview with Lewis. As Gallwey describes it, he was working as a tennis pro at a country club. One day, out of sheer boredom, he decided to try a new tactic with his student. He wanted to see what would happen if he gave the most minimal instruction possible. So instead of giving specific comments on technique, he simply demonstrated the proper form. His instructions, given sparingly, were mainly on where the student should direct their focus.
Gallwey found this type of instruction to be very effective, which was what eventually led him to write The Inner Game. He found that discussing each minute physical action in a player’s tennis swing would often cause the player to overthink their swing. This overthinking would then cause unnecessary tension in a motion that should be smooth and natural. Gallwey’s innovation was in directing his students’ attention away from the many individual components of their tennis swing and allowing them to simply focus on copying what they saw. This helped the students to detach from their conscious thought and rely on everything they were able to pick up and implement unconsciously.
Episode Five of Lewis’s podcast, “The Data Coach,” deals with a new trend toward data in baseball coaching. One of the examples of this trend is Kyle Boddy, who founded Driveline Baseball. Boddy uses data from cameras and sensors to coach baseball pitchers toward a more efficient pitching motion. Although he has access to an incredible amount of information about each pitcher’s physical process, some of the exercises in Driveline’s training program are very simple. For example, pitchers will often throw weighted baseballs. According to Boddy, the added difficulty of throwing a heavier baseball will cause players to adjust elements of their pitching motion, correcting small inefficiencies in their form. Interestingly, Driveline has had great success with taking pitchers’s conscious thought out of the process and letting them rely on the unconscious connection between the brain and the body.
In the Practice Room
The interviews with both Gallwey and Boddy both deal with a common thread among those of us who perform regularly in any way: Our conscious mind has a way of making things that should be simple very complicated. The Inner Game of Tennis refers to the conscious mind as Self 1, and the unconscious mind as Self 2. Much of the book deals with how to let go of judgements and practice focusing Self 1, therefore letting Self 2 do what it already knows how to do.
These ideas, of course, bear a close resemblance to those often associated with the practice of mindfulness. Judgement and negative conscious thought can often take us out of the present moment. Luckily, our unconscious mind has an amazingly efficient way of being able to carry out the very actions that our conscious mind wants to complicate. Our job, as always, is to do our best to get out of the way and allow that to happen.
For brass musicians, the closest thing we have to throwing a weighted baseball is buzzing on our mouthpieces. My students know that I do this every day, both as a way of warming up and as a way of learning music. Anyone who has tried mouthpiece buzzing knows that it is physically much more taxing than playing. For this reason, it can sometimes seem like a party trick: I buzz a passage that I’m having trouble playing, and it instantly improves. But isn’t it mainly because I just did something that was more difficult than playing, and now playing seems easy?
But buzzing does more than just require us to complete a difficult physical action. It takes the instrument out of the equation, meaning that it illustrates the direct connection between our brain and our lips (or lack thereof). As Arnold Jacobs liked to say, a musical message begins in our brain and travels down the seventh cranial nerve to our lips. So mouthpiece buzzing helps us to connect our ear to our lips, which determine what we put into the instrument. More than that, the added exertion that buzzing requires will cause our lips to do what a baseball player’s arm will do when throwing a weighted ball: naturally eliminate the tiny technical inefficiencies that sometimes add up to larger problems. Our lips, with the help of our unconscious mind, will find their way to the most efficient buzz possible.
Buzzing does not equal playing, nor does it always follow that “if you can buzz it, you can play it.” Plugging the mouthpiece into the instrument completely changes the physics of the situation, so practice on the instrument is necessary. I prefer the slightly less catchy “If you can buzz it–or even halfway buzz it*–you will automatically be CLOSER to playing it.” Not only will you be closer in pitch, but your technical mechanism for playing will be much more efficient from the outset. Such are the benefits of hearing the music in your head and letting the unconscious mind take over.
* This refers to playing the instrument with a paper clip or toothpick inserted between the mouthpiece and lead pipe. This creates a situation in which the player is buzzing, but also getting some help from the instrument. It’s about halfway between buzzing and playing.
Practicing for a Performance Mentality
May 28, 2020
One of the silver linings of living in these strange times has been how many new resources are appearing online for musicians. Some of the world’s most prolific artists and teachers are creating content in their homes, and much of it is available for free. Added to that, many of us have had more time on our hands with which to consume that content. I tend to view these online resources from the angle of mindfulness, and I recently saw one video that seemed especially relevant to this subject.
Rex Richardson (world-class trumpeter and VCU Professor of trumpet) began his “100 days of practice” challenge sometime toward the beginning/middle (what is time anymore?) of the COVID-19 lockdown. Instead of simply sharing video of himself practicing, he usually includes sheet music for the exercise he is highlighting, along with some commentary. Day 35 was a clinic on various strategies for overcoming stage fright or performance anxiety.
In this video, one of Rex’s recommendations is to focus on the task at hand, not the consequences of how we perform that task. He makes the point that it is almost impossible to tell ourselves NOT to think about a certain thing (distractions, anxiety-producing factors). Instead, he recommends that we actively direct our attention toward the music itself. This occupies our conscious mind with ideas that are productive rather than destructive.
Rex notes that while most musicians know this already, putting ourselves in a healthy frame of mind during a high-pressure performance is easier said than done. The performance mentality has to become part of our practice routine in order for it to be accessible to us in performance. We can view this as just another part of our training: the mental along with the physical.
In the Practice Room
My method for practice, which comes from my teachers (and their teachers), is to simplify each task as much as possible in order to master it. As Toby Hanks explained it, the goal is often to break an excerpt down into its component layers (notes, rhythm, articulation, etc.), practice each layer separately, and then reconstruct the excerpt. Sometimes we even simplify to the point of practicing only one single note or interval. This idea is not new at all, but I have come to realize it is perfectly in keeping with the practice of mindfulness: focus on only one thing at a time.
Inspired by Rex’s thoughts on performance anxiety, I have recently been working to find a way to focus specifically on the mental side of performance during my practice sessions. The first task in constructing a positive performance mentality was to identify what my specific focus would be: where should I actively direct my attention? Many musicians believe that peak performance comes from focusing on the music, but what exactly does that mean? Here are some possible points of focus that could work:
-Focus on hearing an ideal musical performance and play along with that
-Focus on hearing your own voice singing and play along with that
-Focus on connecting each note to the next, forming larger phrases out of micro-phrases
-Focus on your breath and how it becomes music (for wind players)
-Focus on the combined physical and auditory sensation of creating each note and phrase
There are plenty of other ways to think about this, and each performer will have a highly individualized mental concept of the music they perform. I have found it to be worthwhile to try out different points of focus in order to observe the effect they have on my performance.
Of course, performance in the practice room is not the same as actual performance. The closest approximation is making an audio or video recording, since many of us experience similar nerves in both recording and performance situations. Recently I have been applying the “one thing at a time” idea to practicing my mentality while recording myself. I decide on a point of mental focus (an ideal tuba performance, my breath, etc.) and record myself while trying to maintain that focus.
I say “trying” to maintain that focus because I am never able to stay completely focused on whatever I choose. My mind will stray here and there to react to what I hear coming out of my instrument. Luckily, as I have often written on this blog, the practice of mindfulness is not the act of maintaining a focus or an empty mind indefinitely. It is simply the act of returning our focus to where it belongs when we waver. Perhaps the most important part of training for our performance mentality is our perspective on the process. Losing focus is not a failure. It is a human reaction. Instead, the act of returning to our point of focus is a victory. Each time we have one of those little victories, our performance improves because of it. We cannot ask more of ourselves than that.
May 14, 2020
As all musicians know, the emergence of COVID-19 and the necessity for social distancing and quarantine brought many aspects of the music world to a complete halt. Orchestras, bands, Broadway musicals, and other performing arts groups around the world suddenly ended their concert seasons. In the midst of this new landscape, music schools continued to offer instruction to their students, which required a complete reconfiguration of the applied lesson (among many other things).
As my reality shifted along with everyone else’s, my new mode of communication with my students became the online lesson. I still had my students submit videos because the sound quality was vastly superior to what we experienced during online low brass lessons, so the lesson itself mainly became a way to check in and offer feedback. Since my semester ended I’ve had time to reflect on the successes and failures we experienced using this system. One of the main challenges in this instructional setting is maintaining our attention.
When students are in a face-to-face music lesson, attention is generally not an issue (I’m speaking mainly about college students). With a class size of one, students have no choice but to pay attention and be engaged. Both student and teacher are responsible for creating the content of the lesson, and we interact constantly. It is certainly possible for attention to wander, but the usual distractions (phone, computer, other people) are not present.
When applied lessons moved online, they brought one of our primary distractions (a screen) front and center. The novelty of teaching and experiencing lessons in our own homes, maybe even in our pajamas, wore off fairly quickly. We were left trying to maintain our productivity in a setting that removes us from the most important, engaging aspect of a music lesson: the completely analog experience of music itself. Additionally, we were now staring into the very screen that constantly wants to send us notifications to let us know what we’re missing while we’re in the lesson. It is important to note that this can create attention issues for both the student and the teacher. So how do we maintain our mental focus while experiencing a lesser version of music through a screen?
I had an interesting lesson recently with a middle school euphonium student. I had sent him some music to work on, but he had to use his tablet to view the music. This meant that he could keep the Zoom meeting going, but we lost video. I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of teaching a student I couldn’t see, but in the moment there wasn’t another way around it. We proceeded with the lesson, and I found that an interesting change occurred in my attention. With no student on the screen, I was forced to really focus in on what I heard. I found myself closing my eyes and listening with more intensity because I didn’t have any visual stimulus. My student also had to do the same when I was speaking or playing for him. I was unable to comment on anything I might have seen in his playing, like posture, breathing habits, or facial setup. But I was able to be more specific about everything I could hear (even with how bad low brass sounds on Zoom) because my ears were so plugged in.
Many of us are finding that platforms like Zoom give us a way to connect with students, colleagues, friends, and family right now while we can’t see people in person. But many of us have also had frustrating experiences with online communication, especially in situations with more than a few people in the same meeting. I recently spoke to my mother on the phone and she reminded me that even though we had visually seen each other in our weekly family Zoom hangouts, we hadn’t really had the chance to speak and catch up in more detail. A regular old phone call gave us so much more of a connection than a Zoom call during which we could see each other.
We already know a few things about attention. We know that when we eliminate stimuli around us, we are better able to focus on our current task. Eliminating the sense of sight so that the sense of hearing becomes more attuned is an extreme example of this. Simply removing screens from the room while working used to be a way to accomplish this, before our entire lives revolved around screens! But we also know that attention is a skill that doesn’t necessarily come to us easily. It needs to be developed with practice. And during a time when the way we go about our daily lives and interact with others has completely changed, that practice may need to be adjusted.
Many of us have made adjustments instinctively. I’ve heard from colleagues who have begun taking notes and keeping records on paper (imagine that!) so that they can get their eyes off of a screen for any amount of time. This also probably helps them maintain their attention as well. Consciously adopting practices that develop our focus can help us to achieve the mental clarity and fight the “brain fog” that many of us have struggled with in this new environment.
My experience teaching a purely audio lesson made me realize that one of the issues with experiencing music (and life) online is that audio and visual stimuli together can be overwhelming. Recently I have begun to seek out audio and visual experiences separately as way to better focus on each type of experience. In general, the practice of mindfulness asks us to focus on one thing at a time. How many times are we listening to music while doing absolutely nothing else? How many visual experiences do we have without audio?
I have found that I can gain and maintain focus by creating either pure audio or pure visual experiences. For me this means either listening to music while doing absolutely nothing else (preferably with my eyes closed) or drawing/coloring in a quiet room while doing absolutely nothing else. I have found that pure audio experiences are more calming and centering for me than pure visual experiences (maybe this is why I’m a musician). But in both cases I gain focus and mental clarity, often times in 10 minutes or less.
December 5, 2019
Due to my university’s fall schedule, I recently enjoyed the longest Thanksgiving break I’ve had in many years–an entire week! It was glorious, but I traveled to the east coast by plane, so I was without my tuba for the week. I’m currently in the process of learning new music, so my practice for the week consisted mainly of mouthpiece buzzing (to keep my lips in shape) and a combination of mental and partial physical practice. For me this means some singing, buzzing, and blowing the wind patterns for musical phrases while practicing the fingerings. Essentially, I immersed myself in every part of the music except the actual tuba playing.
When I returned from the week away, I approached the instrument with a bit of trepidation. I find comfort in the reinforcement of the physical aspects of playing the tuba. I don’t like to take time off, and I rarely go more than a few days without playing at least a bit. I don’t feel normal when I do. But in this case I found, as I usually do when I’m forced into this position, that my mental practice brought me to a new level of playing when I returned to the instrument. I know this should not be that surprising, but it gets me every time!
When I say a “new level” of playing, I mean that literally. When learning new music, us brass players have a bad habit of diving into a musical work mouthpiece-first and asking questions later. We look at the music, try to play it, and assess what we hear coming out of the instrument (sometimes successfully, sometimes not). I definitely have the skills necessary to learn a piece by singing and working out rhythms beforehand, but I often skip that step in favor of getting “face time” on the instrument. In my case, this is because I’m constantly trying to build muscular endurance, so playing while engaged mentally seems to achieve two goals at once. Regardless of the reason, learning a new piece with a play-first approach means that I’m starting at zero. I am coming into the situation with no real concept of melody, rhythms, articulations, dynamics, or musical gestures.
What this week of mostly mental practice taught me (…again…) was that if I take the time to mentally reinforce the musical pathway I plan to take through a piece, then I’ll be starting at a much higher level of musical understanding when I apply my mental practice to the instrument. Performing a solo piece can be likened to giving a speech. Wouldn’t it be easier to begin practicing a speech if you already had a basic idea of what you’re about to say? Or even better, if you had each word, sentence, and paragraph already planned? Mental practice can help us to jump-start our physical practice. And since our mind is involved in our physical practice as well, it can help to connect our mental image of a piece to the eventual product we create on our instrument.
In the practice room
If I’m completely honest, my lack of mental practice is not entirely due to the need to build physical endurance. In part, it’s just laziness. I find it difficult to sustain my attention and engagement with a piece of music if I’m not actively playing the instrument. It can sometimes feel like a chore. I’ve found that the main necessity for productive mental practice is mindfulness. I know, another shocker.
It seems many of us struggle with attention issues in the practice room these days, either because of the stresses of our nonstop existence, or because of the ready availability of electronics and media. Many of the concepts discussed in this blog, such as one-mindfulness and observation, are meant to be antidotes to this attention problem. Nothing I’ve said so far in this post is earth-shattering. It makes perfect sense that mental practice helps us to better practice and perform our music, but the roadblock standing in our way is usually finding the time and sustained attention to do it.
Here are some tips for getting over the time/attention hurdle into productive mental practice:
Make use of times in which it is inconvenient to actually go to a practice room. Once inside the practice room, many of us find it difficult to not just … practice! But there are plenty of moments throughout the day when we might find a few minutes to think through our music and visualize playing it. This moments often happen in much more comfortable environments than a practice room. It can be refreshing to experience our music outside of the practice room.
Start small. If attention is an issue, set a timer for a manageable amount of time (as short as 5 minutes). Tell yourself that you will fully engage for that small amount of time, and then gradually increase it.
Add physical elements to your mental practice. For many athletes and musicians, mental practice is just that: entirely mental. It is a visualization of an ideal performance. But I find that incorporating some physical movements with my visualizations helps me to integrate the music with the physical act of playing. Sometimes I conduct, and at other times I perform my fingerings. I may even move in my chair in the way I would when practicing and performing. This helps my mental practice to feel more like a true precursor to playing.
It doesn’t have to be silent. Brass players often sing and buzz our music in order to make our playing more accurate and efficient. But singing and hearing our music also allows us to incorporate musical elements with more ease than we sometimes have on the instrument. The end goal is to have that 100% mental visualization (including pitch) to rely upon in performance, but singing helps us build that mental ideal of a piece.
Forgive yourself for drifting. Everyone’s attention wanders. If you find this happening to you, be kind to yourself. Bring yourself back to the present moment and proceed as though there has been no interruption.
If you are interested in reading further about mental practice, I highly recommend Noa Kageyama’s blog on the topic: https://bulletproofmusician.com/does-mental-practice-work/
November 1, 2019
Last week the UNI Tuba and Euphonium studio had the pleasure of hosting Øystein Baadsvik for a guest masterclass and recital. Baadsvik is a world-renowned tuba virtuoso, and perhaps the only person to make an entire career of touring as a tuba soloist. We are still processing the experience, but as I speak to my students about it individually, certain ideas that Baadsvik mentioned in his masterclass keep surfacing consistently in our conversations.
One of the reasons that Øystein Baadsvik has had such success as a musician is that his manner of playing is utterly natural. His tuba seems to be an extension of himself, and he is able to truly sing through it, making each note and gesture musical. As he worked with several of our students in his masterclass, a major focus was on the general theme of relaxation. There were several variations of this, from adjusting a student’s posture to make breathing easier to describing how to approach playing high-range notes with focused air instead of forced air. But the overall message was that most things become easier on low brass instruments when we relax … in other words, “take it easy.”
Relaxation is one of the hardest things for us musicians (and particularly brass musicians) to enact in our daily playing. This is in part because of the process that most of us go through in order to learn and master our instrument. When we begin playing our instrument, sound production takes a huge effort. Sometimes even holding the instrument correctly is a challenge for young students. As we become more practiced on our instruments, the act of playing becomes easier, but there are always notes or passages that are difficult. In order to achieve what seems just outside of our grasp, we push. And it is that habit of pushing that stays with us into our musical adulthood. In my experience, the study of music at the college level often amounts to a gradual undoing of the various unhealthy habits that have built up until that point. For better or for worse, we build and reinforce those habits in the practice room.
As Øystein Baadsvik noted, simply relaxing is not enough to play the tuba well. Ironically, thousands of hours of training are necessary to get us to the point where we are capable of making our music sound effortless. Because of the tension that can build up in during practice, we constantly need to be reminded to get out of our own way. I personally strive toward a sense of equilibrium; balance between the athletic work that goes into playing my instrument and a sense of relaxed stillness as I focus on the music I intend to make.
In the Practice Room
The act of pushing, or tightening up as we play our instrument is a habit. Like most other habits, simply saying to ourselves “don’t do that” does not particularly help us to stop doing it. Instead, we can counteract the habit by focusing on an approach meant to replace it. Below are some strategies that can help to build relaxation in the practice room.
1. Set a timer to go off at certain intervals (5, 10, or 15 minutes). These are check-in points. When the timer goes off, take a moment to observe your own body. Do you feel tension in your shoulders, neck, jaw, or anywhere else? Take a moment to hit the “reset button” by taking a deep, cleansing breath. Focus on your breath (in and out) until you feel the physical tension dissipate. When you begin playing again, note any change that may occur in your sound or style.
2. Use a written symbol to note places in your music where you can take a moment to release tension. Write a word or invent a symbol if necessary. In my music, I include a symbol that specifically reminds me to relax and reset. I write the symbol between phrases or at the end of larger sections of music. This helps to counteract the progressive buildup of tension that can sometimes occur in solo pieces. If it will help even the tiniest bit, why not include it in the score?
3. If and when you feel relaxed and tension-free in the practice room, record yourself. It can be illuminating to hear the results of a sound that is not overly controlled. Sometimes a recording can dispel the notion that a tightly controlled sound is better than a free one.
4. Develop a simple, relaxed, habitual way of beginning things (phrases, passages, or entire pieces). Over many years of study, we can develop all kinds of strange habits around musical beginnings. Because the way we begin a piece influences our playing during the rest of the piece, it is worth examining our beginnings for anything extra and unnecessary. Simpler is often better.
5. If you employ all of these strategies, but still find yourself overly tense and struggling to relax, it may be time for a break. I know, I know, we should all be practicing all the time no matter what until the end of time. But–and I’m speaking mainly to brass players here–if you are physically fatigued, and the only way you can play is by pushing the notes out with force, then your practice has become unproductive. Instead of progressing, you are reinforcing a tense approach in your muscle memory. Consider shifting your practice to one of the myriad techniques that does not involve the instrument. Listen to recordings, sing or blow through your music with fingerings or slide positions, or plan your phrases and breaths. Or go get a cup of coffee! If at any time you are unable to release the tension from your playing, take it as a sign to stop playing.
October 17, 2019
This week I had the pleasure of visiting (virtually) with an elementary school music class. The teacher, a friend of mine, was taking her students through a unit on the symphony. The kids are working on creating a program of classical music, so I mostly talked to them about the part of my job that involves planning, programming, and rehearsing music for an ensemble concert. But of course, I also introduced myself as a tuba and euphonium teacher, which led me to show them a tuba, which led to a performance (it inevitably does). It was an illuminating experience that took me out of my well-established performance comfort zone.
I played an unaccompanied solo that I’ve played several times before. In fact, I plan to play this solo again in a few days in recital at the University of Iowa. Needless to say, performing for a group of antsy elementary school students is an entirely different animal than performing for a quiet, well-behaved audience of musicians. Since I was able to see the students on my computer screen, I found myself reacting to them while I was performing. I made musical decisions designed to exaggerate and amplify the dramatic gestures in the piece. I shortened the pauses built into the music to make it clear that the piece was continuing through the silences. While the notes and rhythms were the same as ever, I performed an entirely new and unique interpretation of the written music simply as a reaction to my audience.
This performance experience sent me down a path of contemplating the contradictions that exist in my own practice of music. The goal of this blog, and one of my primary goals as a musician, is to increase and enhance mindfulness in myself and others. A performance like the one I gave to the elementary class is only possible when I am able to bind myself to the present moment and ride along with it. I am happy to say that I was able to do that in this case, but the experience was also a bit disconcerting. Like most musicians, I practiced that solo for many, many, many hours before ever performing it. Each time I program it, I add more hours of practice in order to re-familiarize myself with it. This type of repetitive practice relies heavily on certain routine elements. The repetition itself is routine. I work hard to incorporate my musical interpretation of the piece into that practice. But how many times in all of my practice of this piece did I play it exactly as I did during this one performance? Zero.
In the writings of Ellen Langer (one of the first scholars to write on mindfulness) and others, routine is often presented as the antithesis of mindfulness. This is because many types of routines are comprised of the mindless repetition of actions. The lack of thought or attention around those repetitive actions can lead to behavior that is automatic. How many times have you heard a waiter say “Enjoy your meal,” and accidentally responded with “You, too”? We often have built-in, automatic responses when our brains are not engaged in the moment. When we engage with our behavior mindfully we often find that the automatic action or response is not the best one for the present moment.
I bring this up because routine is unavoidable in the practice of music, and especially in brass playing. I have a routine of fundamentals that I try to play every single day–I don’t do exactly the same thing every day, but I do play similar types of exercises each day that target the main technical areas of tuba performance. This fundamentals routine is responsible for my ability to play most music that I find on the stand in front of me at any given time. I do not need the routine in order to be able to play, but I do need it in order to be a well-rounded brass player in the long term.
I think many musicians would agree with me that it is incredibly difficult to be entirely present and mindfully engaged in every minute of our daily fundamentals practice. Regardless of how often the exercises may change, it is still the most tedious thing we do in the practice room. It often feels mindless.
It is far easier to be mentally engaged with our etudes and solo music than with our technical studies. Nevertheless, we are creatures of habit. The patterns of routine repetition that anchor our technical practice also find their way into our more “musical” practice. This is very much on purpose: when I’m having trouble with a certain interval in my solo, what do I do? I isolate it and repeat it until it becomes more comfortable. Even though solos involve much more musical interpretation than fundamentals, I still follow a routine in practicing my solos. It is what grounds me and gives me the confidence to perform the music. I don’t just play through my solo pieces; I build them from the ground up through practice.
My elementary music class performance made me rethink the idea of routine in my solo practice. Although slow, methodical, routine-based practice does help to build the skills necessary to perform our music, it also tends to reinforce only one musical interpretation of a piece. As I incorporate my musical ideas into my practice I am generally aiming toward one version of the piece that I hear as perfect. But I now realize that musical practice should prepare us for more than one eventuality. Instead, it should prepare us for as many outcomes as possible. Different audiences, performance spaces, and occasions call for different interpretations of our music. Our practice should reinforce engaged, mindful performance instead of mindless repetition.
Ultimately, I believe that I was able to provide a mindful, appropriate performance for the students that heard me this week. That was made possible in part by my routine, repetitive, methodical practice of both fundamentals and of my solo music. But I will continue to explore what mindfulness and mindlessness mean in my practice. When I find myself using repetition and routine in my solo practice, I will also take time to turn on my “performance mode” switch and create a unique interpretation of the music that only exists in that moment.
The Three Parts of the Practice Day
October 4, 2019
I recently learned about a TED Talk given a few years ago by a monk. In order to create a schedule that would be maximally beneficial, he advocated for breaking each day into time spent on three distinct categories: 1) Creativity, 2) Productivity/Management, and 3) Education/Entertainment. Part of the speaker’s point was that productivity and management tasks are necessary and often prioritized first. But those tasks often benefit from fueling the parts of the brain that are activated during creativity/learning/entertainment time.
This got me thinking about how I spend my own days. Granted, I have a very different schedule from a monk. But many of my waking hours are taken up by tasks related to productivity and management. At best, I experience entertainment in the form of having the TV on in the background as I continue to wade through my near-constant stream of emails each evening.
My most disturbing realization, though, was that I haven’t dedicated much time toward being creative in the past several weeks. I have been working toward a recital, which means a lot of slow, careful repetition and endurance building. I certainly exercise creativity in my musical decisions while playing my solo music, but I am often focused on shoring up technical aspects of the music. Because I’m focused on a specific set of pieces, I am not often putting myself in the position to create a new interpretation from scratch. Instead, I’m constantly tweaking music with which I have a high level of familiarity.
I believe that the idea of breaking the day into different types of tasks or actions can be transferred onto the practice session. I have often viewed the practice session (and the lesson, for that matter) as a pie chart with different categories, including warm ups/fundamentals, études, solos, etc. But what if we changed the categories? What if instead of moving from task to task we moved between types of tasks, making sure to exercise different parts of our brains?
In the Practice Room
Like the aforementioned monk, I have chosen to break the practice session into three types of tasks. But I have made some slight changes to the categories in order to optimize them for music. Entertainment and creativity are closely linked in the practice room, so I have combined those categories. Productivity and management tasks, however, are not exactly the same thing in music, and are therefore separated.
The Practice Session:
Maintenance/management: This part of the practice session includes warm-ups and fundamental exercises. These tasks are incredibly important because they give us the technical ability to play any music that we might find on our stand on any given day. This segment of our practice is often the most tedious, but the most necessary.
Productivity: This part of the practice session is devoted to learning and improving upon our current musical works-in-progress. It includes slow, methodical practice, repetition of phrases and sections of music, and drilling the parts of our music that give us the most difficulty in performance.
Creativity/Entertainment: This part of the practice session feeds the soul. It is the time when we set aside our self-assessment and join ourselves to the present moment. It may be a run-through of a work-in-progress during which we simply focus on creating a unique musical interpretation in the moment. It may be reading new music, or returning to an old favorite. Whatever the musical material, the point of this part of the practice session is to exercise our musical mindfulness; To purposely set aside the elements that we focus on for the bulk of our practice session (namely our mistakes) by focusing solely on the music. Ignoring errors is harder than it sounds, but it can provide a great sense of freedom of expression.
It is this final part of the practice session that I have noticed myself to be lacking. This week I’ve been experimenting with incorporating at least ten minutes of pure creativity and/or entertainment into my practice sessions. It may sound obvious, but this type of activity can easily move to the bottom of my priority list when a stack of music for an upcoming performance is demanding my attention. The results so far have been positive both mentally and physically. Practicing for the purpose of exercising my creativity contributes to my physical endurance while it nourishes the part of my brain that I rely on to make music in the moment during a performance.
**I am still trying to track down the link to the original TED Talk. Apologies for not having the source available here!
Musical Meditation: Spiegel im Spiegel
September 27, 2019
The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt spent the early part of his career composing in neoclassical forms and experimenting with twelve-tone music and serialism. After some of his early compositions were censored by the Soviet government, Pärt entered a period of compositional silence. Instead of creating new works he turned to the past, studying plainsong, Gregorian chant, and the polyphonic vocal works of the Renaissance. He emerged from this period an entirely different composer.
Pärt called the compositional style that he developed during this period tintinnabuli. If you know anything about Pärt, you probably know that word because you were made to memorize it for a music history class. Inspired by the clarity and simplicity of early vocal music, tintinnabuli (meaning “like the ringing of bells”) featured the building blocks of Western music: simple triads and unembellished notes. Spiegel im Spiegel, written in 1978, is an excellent example of his meditative, minimalist style, and is perhaps Pärt’s most beloved piece.
The title of Spiegel im Spiegel translates roughly to “mirror in the mirror,” or possibly “mirrors in the mirror.” Triads revolving around the tonic in the key of F major are repeated on piano in a seemingly endless pattern with slight variations. A violin melody composed entirely of long tones within the F major scale contrasts the bell-like nature of the accompaniment. The piece progresses slowly but undeniably as the two lines interact, building and relaxing to form peaks and valleys. The music reflects upon itself like a mirror, giving the impression that the piece is part of an unending pattern, of which its performance can only convey one tiny part. Spiegel im Spiegel, like many of Pärt’s later compositions, creates a truly meditative experience for both the performers and the listeners.
Although Spiegel im Spiegel was written for violin and piano, it has been performed and recorded with cello as well. But the simplicity of the piece’s construction allows it to work in a wide variety of instrumental combinations. It is helpful, though not completely necessary, for the instrument playing the triadic line to be a string or percussion instrument. The gentle bell tones can be performed with the most ease on an instrument that creates its own sound decay. I had the opportunity to play this piece on my own instrument (tuba) with harp playing the accompanying part. I have returned to it many times since then because its mystical, calm character is so unique in classical music (or any other kind of music).
Although Spiegel im Spiegel is simple in its construction, it should not be mistaken as an easy piece to perform. Wind players, in particular, will find that a piece composed entirely of long tones presents its own unique physical and mental challenges. Its transparency demands that the musicians stay in the moment, experiencing the music beat by beat along with the listener. I highly recommend that all musicians experience it at least once. I have even been known to play along with a recording when I don’t have a collaborator close at hand!
Please enjoy the video performance above, along with this delightful interview of Arvo Pärt by the Icelandic musician Björk:
September 12, 2019
This week at UNI we are looking forward to a visit from Dr. Noa Kageyama, who is probably best known among musicians for his blog, The Bulletproof Musician. Dr. Kageyama is an expert in performance psychology, and currently serves on the faculty of the Juilliard School and the New World Symphony, working too help orchestral musicians prepare for auditions. He regularly presents masterclasses and seminars on performance enhancement and overcoming performance anxiety around the country.
Amid the lead-up to Dr. Kageyama’s visit I have been checking in with members of my studio about how performance anxiety affects them. Some version of “nerves” is present among almost all of us musicians in performance, and it is worth noting that they aren’t always a bad thing. Sometimes the energy and adrenaline that course through us on stage are exactly what make performances unique and memorable. But when that nervous energy snowballs into a reaction that causes us not to perform at our potential, it is generally characterized as performance anxiety.
I am looking forward to hearing more on Dr. Kageyama’s research and conclusions in the arena of performance anxiety (more on that later). But the conversation brought me back to something that I originally heard from a mental health professional in the context of generalized anxiety. What she said has stuck with me since that moment: “Anxiety is not an emotion.”
We often connect anxiety with our emotions because our emotions are most definitely wrapped up in the experience. And anxiety is certainly something that we feel. But anxiety is actually not the emotion itself. Anxiety is a uniquely human reaction to emotions that are verging on unbearable. The example given to me was this:
When a gazelle is grazing in the Serengeti and is interrupted by lion, the gazelle fears the lion and runs for its life. Its instinct for flight in the face of fear saves its life. But later, the gazelle doesn’t scold itself, saying “I was so STUPID to graze over there by that lion.” And it doesn’t worry about the future, asking “What if there’s a lion at the place I choose to graze tomorrow?”
For us humans, anxiety is everything surrounding a particularly negative emotion like fear, sadness, or anger. But for performers, it is most often fear. We badly want our listeners to enjoy our performance, or we want to make a good impression on them. We want to get the job. We want to convey the meaning we have found in the music we play, and we fear that we will not. That fear is often simply not there in the practice room, when we are playing for ourself alone. Anxiety comprises the mental and physical reactions to that fear.
In the Practice Room
Understanding the emotions from which our various forms of anxiety originate is a crucial step in successfully dealing with that anxiety. This process is simply a skill that can be developed over time with practice. Luckily for us musicians, we’re very familiar with practice.
As a musician trained in the conservatory model, I have consumed plenty of content on defeating performance anxiety, particularly in the arena of auditions. Much of what is recommended deals with simulating performance conditions in one way or another so that the performer can examine their mentality, practice regularly in “performance mode,” and over time become desensitized to the worst symptoms of performance anxiety. I do recommend exploring all of the options available for this type of practice, as detailed by Dr. Kageyama and others.
However, I also recommend taking some time, either in the practice room or not, to examine the underlying emotions that can cause performance anxiety. Emotions are not our enemies. They are helpful and necessary to us, and they make us human. They are our friends. They don’t need to be scary, but instead simply need to be unpacked and examined in the light. I don’t remember having a fear associated with performance when I was banging away on my Mickey Mouse drum set as a child (as evidenced on many home videos). But as I advanced, and as the stakes got higher, that fear, along with the accompanying anxiety, did appear. A major turning point in dealing with it was the realization that there was simply an underlying fear of what people would think if and when I make a mistake. A close examination of that fear went a long way toward taking away its power over me.
September 6, 2019
In 2009, Ellen Langer and two colleagues conducted a “mindfulness intervention” with professional orchestral musicians which focused on the creation of novelty in musical performances. Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard, has studied and written on mindfulness since the 1980s. According to Langer, mindfulness is:
“The process of drawing novel distinctions. It does not matter whether what is noticed is important or trivial, as long as it is new to the viewer. Actively drawing these distinctions keeps us situated in the present. It also makes us more aware of the context and perspective of our actions than if we rely upon distinctions and categories drawn in the past (Langer & Moldoveanu 1-2).”
Langer believes that mindlessness (automatic, routine-based behavior) can lead to a life that seems predetermined instead of unique. She writes that mindfulness, in contrast to mindlessness, can help us break free of learned patterns that inhibit our intellect or creativity.
Langer and her colleagues brought the idea of focusing on novelty to their study of performance in the orchestra. The musicians (sixty highly-skilled orchestral players) were given Brahms’ Symphony no. I, a piece they had all performed hundreds of times. During the first performance, the orchestra was instructed to play “in the finest manner you can, offering subtle new nuances to your performance (Langer, Russell, and Eisenkraft 127).” The key to this study was that the musicians were not asked to notice specific novelties, but instead to create them. The idea of novel distinctions was translated directly into the creation of music.
As an alternate to this version of the performance, players were then asked to “think about the finest performance of this piece that you can remember, and try to play it (127).” This is an idea that is often used with great success in sports psychology. The expectation would be that musicians, like athletes, would perform better during the version in which they were trying to imitate the best performance in their memory.
What the study showed, however, was that both the orchestra and the 126-person audience preferred the first version of the performance. Langer and her colleagues found that in this case, a focus on subtle nuances and novelty led to increased enjoyment for all involved. This experiment would not have been possible without the hundreds of thousands of hours that each musician spent in the practice room building up the skill necessary to achieve nuances in performance. But it poses a question to those of us who practice: How does our practice prepare us for novelty in performance?
In the Practice Room
Perhaps one of the reasons that mindfulness can be difficult to employ in performance is because it is almost impossible to maintain in the practice room. I’ll be honest, my last practice session involved a fair amount of mindless, routine playing, because for brass players the most simple (and sometimes monotonous) exercises–like long tones and slow playing–are often the most effective at building consistent technique and endurance. I am often focused on building a piece from the ground up, which usually involves plenty of slow, careful repetition.
But Langer’s study is not really about eliminating routine completely. It is about intentionally choosing a point of focus. If I focus only on what I have thoroughly learned in the practice room, then I am only focusing on the elements of my performance that will be mostly static. Langer’s idea of mindfulness is to shift awareness in performance away from sameness and toward novelty or nuance. Specifically, the orchestral experiment suggests that if we focus our awareness on our own creation of nuance, we (and our audience) may get more out of our performance.
At first glance, this seems like a no-brainer. Of course we should be focusing on our unique musical expression during a performance. But sometimes it feels safer to focus within our comfort zone, which is established in the practice room. Sometimes the “novelty” that happens onstage isn’t necessarily welcome or intended! A solution to getting stuck in a practice-room mentality onstage, of course, is to regularly practice in “performance mode,” focusing on creating musical nuance. This is undoubtedly a healthy alternative to only hammering away at repetitive, technical practice.
I also submit that, looking back to Langer’s original definition of mindfulness above, a focus on noticing novelty (not just creating it) can benefit us in the practice room. As I repeat a specific passage over and over, I can focus on what is the same from one run-through to the next, and this will give me a good idea of how much consistency I’ve built. But if I instead focus on what is different from one repetition to the next, I may get more useful information. The novelties that emerge between performances might simply be errors that I wish to correct. But they could also be musical nuances that I may want to incorporate into my performance. Either way, an awareness of novelty, along with a commitment to creating nuance, will certainly tether me to the present while I play.
**Langer, E.J., and Moldoveanu, M.C. “The construct of mindfulness. Journal of Social Issues, 56(I) (2000), 1-9.
**Langer, E.J., Russell, T., and Esenkraft, N. “Orchestral performance and the footprint of mindfulness.” Psychology of Music, 37(2) (2009), 125-136.
Musical Meditation: The Spit Valve Drill
August 30, 2019
Several years ago I came across a post about something called the “spit valve drill” on TubeNet (this is our tuba message board, and yes, it is as nerdy as it sounds). The post was made by Roger Lewis, a former student of M. Dee Stewart at Indiana. Lewis wrote about this exercise, which originated with Arnold Jacobs, and was passed to him by Mr. Stewart. It only recently occurred to me that this drill, which I have used on and off over the years, is the musical equivalent of a meditation. It asks the player to focus only on breath while eliminating tension from the embouchure.
(Apologies to my non-brass playing friends. This post focuses on the basic processes of brass playing. I am sure, though, that the concept could be adapted for almost any instrument or voice–perhaps this has already been done).
Years of brass playing can result in a buildup of unnecessary tension in the embouchure (the facial muscles around and in the mouthpiece). This tension can begin to affect tone quality and resonance if it is left unchecked, and especially as we use less and less air over years of playing. Roger Lewis writes that he has been using the spit valve drill to keep himself from getting lazy with his airflow. It serves as a daily reminder that although the embouchure is a necessary component of playing, the air that supports a brass sound is still more important.
The spit valve drill is done as follows:
First, place yourself in front of a mirror. If one is not available, use the camera on your phone. I know you have it with you right there on the stand! The tension in your embouchure will appear as pronounced lines that run from the side of your nose to the corners of your mouth. The goal is to eliminate those lines as much as possible by supporting the embouchure with air.
Bring the instrument to your face, open the main spit valve, and blow as though you are trying to clear water out from deep inside the instrument. Do not use any attack–simply 'ha.’ As Lewis says, “Just let it all hang out.” Your cheeks will puff, and the facial lines beside your nose will disappear. Use a large quantity of air and move it fast, as though you are playing at a fortissimo level.
(Roger adds a note, and I agree wholeheartedly, that puffing the cheeks is not detrimental to playing the tuba. While you need to maintain control of the corners of your embouchure, a larger oral cavity will actually help notes to resonate).
After blowing air through the spit valve several times, the next step is to engage your lips. Begin by letting them vibrate at whatever frequency comes naturally. Still use no articulation (breath attack). Lewis writes to “let your lips flap in the breeze.” Breathe deeply, blow in a relaxed manner, and buzz your lips. Repeat this several times, still allowing your cheeks to puff.
Finally, during one of these long buzzes, let go of the spit valve. You will still be moving a large amount of relaxed air through the instrument, and your cheeks will still be puffed out, resulting in what should be a huge sound. According to Lewis, “At this point I usually ask people if they have ever made this much noise with so little effort and I usually am told ‘never.’”
After achieving this sound, play again, still with a breath attack, and slowly bring the air level back down to roughly a mezzo piano level. Try to maintain the relaxed flow that you established with the spit valve open. As you move into playing the instrument, use short, simple exercises (long tones, scalar warmups, etc.) to adjust your embouchure with only as much tension as is minimally necessary for the notes you are playing.
As you continue practicing, you will undoubtedly experience muscular tension as you play throughout your range and move into whatever music you are practicing. I have found that the spit valve drill is helpful not only at the beginning of a session, but as a break throughout, providing a “reset button” for the air and embouchure. Like other types of meditation, it provides a point of focus separate from all the other thoughts and concerns crowding our mind during a practice session. The fact that the focus is a relaxed air flow, free from any expectation of a good sound, makes it especially healthy for brass players, who can always benefit from a reminder of how it feels to play while truly relaxed.
I know that many brass pedagogues have already developed their own version of an exercise like this. Toby Hanks described to me Chester Schmitz’s practice of taking a full, “cleansing breath” before an entrance while performing with the Boston Symphony (or anywhere else). The reality, though, is that while we might all teach it to our students, we don’t all remember to do it throughout our practice sessions. This week I’m going to remind myself with a post-it on my music stand. Just like any traditional type of meditation, a small time commitment can have a big payoff.
**Roger Lewis’s full writeup of this drill can be found here: http://forums.chisham.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16642&hilit=Spit+valve+drill
August 22, 2019
It’s time for me to finally admit something that I’ve known for a few years, but never had the confidence to say out loud: I’m into birds. That’s right, I enjoy birdwatching, or as the real birdwatchers call it, “birding.” I may never be comfortable actually uttering the word “birding” without either real or air quotes, but I am into birds.
It started out as a simple curiosity. Because I have a dog, I spend a lot of time walking outside, and my dog loves walking on trails. Prior to having the dog I hadn’t hiked much since my family’s yearly vacations to the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia during my childhood. But as an adult I began to notice my surroundings more, especially during those moments that I stopped walking and stood still (this happens often for various dog-business-related reasons). During those moments of stillness, my eyes were constantly drawn to the parts of the scene around me that were moving.
Later, after embarking on some training in mindfulness practices, it struck me that birdwatching is, at least in my opinion, one of the ultimate mindfulness activities. First, it places you in nature, which is already a calming setting, away from the usual distractions. Next, in order to track a bird with your eyes and ears, you must be still. Only when you are still are you able to lock in on the movement of birds in the trees around you. And finally, birds are a captivating focal point. Their movements are unpredictable–a bird that you can see clearly one moment could be gone the next. Tracking a bird engages both your eyes and your ears, and requires your full attention, which means that you are fully in the present moment.
Although I am very much invested in the ideas and practices of mindfulness, I have never connected to the traditional idea of meditation. I have tried the version of meditation that involves sitting alone in a room and focusing on my breath, and have certainly found some value in it. But walking outside, and birdwatching specifically, are my ideal forms of meditation. I find birds fascinating to watch, and I experience a great deal of peace and mental clarity when I take time to study my surroundings and follow the birds I see and hear.
What I have learned is that watching birds does not have to be a formal activity, requiring lots of specialized gear and a book to log sightings of different bird species. I mean, I do have an app … but that’s as far as I’m willing to go right now. Birdwatching can also be taking a moment to look out the window, or to look up from your phone while walking outside, and observe what what you see and hear moving around and above you. Those moments–when you are locking your attention onto one thing and staying in the moment with it–are moments of mindfulness. You’re not thinking about my next task, or your last practice session, or your upcoming recital, or whatever stresses are pushing on you at the moment. You’re just watching a bird move from tree to tree and branch to branch.
In the Practice Room
Birdwatching is almost impossible in a practice room. First of all, if there is a bird in your practice room, there is probably some issue that needs to be brought to the attention of the facilities manager. But often, birdwatching is not even possible from a practice room. The ones that tuba players usually use are windowless basement cubicles as far away as possible from other music classes and lessons.
If you are lucky enough to have a window in the place where you practice, though, take a few moments to look out of it every once in a while (it sounds obvious, but it isn’t always!). I bought a bird feeder to put on my balcony at home, and it provides a great visual and mental break when I’m practicing there. If you do not have a window in the place where you practice, then please be aware that not having access to natural light and fresh air could very well be contributing to your stress as much as your missed notes! In the same way that a smoker would go outside for a smoke break every few hours, we could all benefit from a “scenery break” here and there during a practice session. Taking five minutes to use trees, birds, or whatever else you see outside as a focal point instead of your music can contribute to a healthy perspective both inside and outside the practice room.
If it’s not birdwatching for you, it will be something else. But I encourage you to find that form of meditation that allows you to focus on only one thing and remain in the moment with it. It will give you a mental break from the thousand things that simultaneously demand your focus all day long. But it will also help you to hone your ability to maintain attention and awareness–skills which, incidentally, are also very useful in the performance of music.
6 Reasons You Should be Slow-Practicing
August 1, 2019
I am not nearly the first, nor will I be the last, to extol the virtues of slow practice. The technique has been much-discussed, especially in recent years, as a way to learn and internalize music at a deeper level than a regular run-through at performance tempo allows.* More than simply a method to gain facility in specific faster or technical passages, slow practice has been revealed as an effective tool for building a musical interpretation of a piece. I will add my own two cents to the chorus of performers and educators praising slow practice in the form of the internet’s favorite way to consume information: a list!
It does work on faster, technical passages
As my teacher Toby Hanks put it, practicing is about identifying and isolating specifically what is difficult about a piece, then eliminating that difficulty in order to learn the music before reincorporating it. If a piece is difficult because of its fast tempo (as so many are), then the first order of business is to play it slowly. This is a time-honored practice tool for a reason: it works.
Most of us learn our music slowly, but many of us do it in an inconsistent way, fluctuating in tempo (consciously or not) and slowing down only when the speed of the notes requires it. This type of “slow-ish” practice is not the subject of this post. In order for slow practice to be effective, it MUST be done with a metronome. This allows us not only to learn music in a manageable way, but to understand the proportional relationships between tricky, faster passages and the musical material surrounding them.
It also works as a way to build musical phrasing
In order to have complete command over your musical interpretation of a musical work, you need to develop a fluency in the language of both the composer and the piece. Until the necessary level of fluency is reached, musical elements will fall through the cracks when you play through the piece. Articulations, dynamics, and phrasing ideas that you meant to incorporate will not happen, or will not line up with your intentions. Certain parts of the music or its interpretation will get away from you as you concentrate on the more immediate challenge of playing notes and rhythms.
Practicing a piece slowly will allow you to focus on each individual aspect of the music in a more manageable time frame. How slow? Ridiculously slow. Half tempo. Maybe even slower than half tempo. Slow practice should occur at a tempo at which the performer can reasonably expect to incorporate musical elements like dynamics, articulations, phrasing, and note groupings with ease. Whatever tempo is required for your brain to process and participate in each level of the music in the piece at hand will be your slow practice tempo. It may be extremely slow, or even tedious, but nothing will get away from you.
The good news is that the human brain is an amazing machine. It learns through repetition, and when that repetition is careful and consistent it forms an imprint that sticks.** Contained in that imprint is not only the surface level of the music (notes and rhythms), but whatever musical inflections you had time to add during your slow practice. I have personally seen incredible results from simply alternating between slow practice and up-to-tempo practice of a passage or an entire movement or work. The beauty of this method is that your brain will do all the work for you. You don’t have to question, analyze, or even think as you transition between tempos. Simply observe that what you imprint on your brain during slow practice tends to show up in the up-to-tempo version. For this reason, most of your thinking should be centered around imprinting exactly what you intend to imprint at the slow tempo.
It helps in recital prep
We have all been there: that point in recital preparation where the repetition of the music you’ve chosen to perform starts to really wear on you in the practice room. How many times can you repeat a piece in the same way without it becoming routine? How can you possibly maintain an attention to the musical details contained in the piece over several months of preparation? How can you continue to notice new musical nuances after your thousandth run-through?
Enter your good friend, slow practice. Playing through a piece slowly will force you to perceive it differently than the up-tempo version. The details that are easier to gloss over at a faster tempo are difficult to miss when performed slowly. You have no choice but to focus on the musical ideas you intend to incorporate, since they should be magnified in the slow tempo. Slow practice of recital repertoire is a way to check and reaffirm the imprint of a piece on your brain.
It doesn’t lie
Speaking of months-long, methodical recital preparation, slow practice is a way to answer the question, “Am I doing what I think I’m doing?” Too often we can be lulled into complacency by the type of repetition that is necessary to learn a piece of music. Are you really performing that crescendo? That accent? Are you really allowing the final note of that phrase to resonate? Is that interval in tune? Have you really nailed down the awkward fingering pattern in that passage? These are questions we often don’t even think to ask ourselves when running through a piece, especially once we’ve become familiar with it.
This brings us back to one of my early points about slow practice: It MUST be done with a metronome. A click is necessary for an honest, effective imprint to be formed. It ensures that the rhythmic building blocks of a piece (individual subdivisions of beats) are firmly in place. A metronome also just makes good sense: if your brain has to compute tempo along with everything else, how effective can it be at slow practice? Playing a passage at a slow tempo, with metronome, will illuminate exactly what is happening too fast to process in the up-tempo version of the passage.
It helps build endurance
For some of us, and for brass musicians in particular, it can be a struggle to build up the muscle endurance necessary to play a recital’s worth of music. In addition to all of its other benefits, slow practice assists in this area as well. Although a slow run-through of a piece may diminish a player’s endurance on that particular day, it will help to build it in the longer term. It can have a similar effect to that of swinging a weighted baseball bat before swinging a regular one. When switching from slow tempo to performance tempo, a piece will often suddenly feel lighter, easier, and more free-flowing. It’s a mind game, but we’ll take what we can get.
It is kind to your brain
Think about what your approach would be in a music lesson with a child who exhibits frustration with their music? Let’s say the child is struggling with the notes and fingerings in a certain tune, to the point that they can’t play it at tempo. The first thing I’d do is look for a way to alleviate the student’s frustration by changing the goal. Instead of asking them to play the tune at tempo, I ask them to play it at a tempo at which they will be able to manage the notes and fingerings. Teachers do this not only because it helps to learn the music, but because identifying a manageable goal allows the student to experience the accomplishment of achieving that goal.
While we would do this for any young student without even thinking about it, we don’t always give ourselves the same consideration in the practice room (where we are both the student and the teacher). Because we know our long-term goals for a certain piece, we don’t always identify our short-term goals in the practice room. If the goal is only to play the piece at a professional level at performance tempo, then we will fail many, many times before we succeed. But if the goal is to be able to play a specific passage musically and at a manageable tempo? Then we give ourselves a chance to succeed. So to return to the question of “How slow to slow-practice?”: slow enough that you can succeed at the immediate goal you have set for yourself. By moving the goalposts from hour to hour, or from day to day, we can build our musical interpretation of a work from the ground up through small but significant successes.
Slow practice does not ask more of your brain than it can reasonably handle. Instead, it allows you to trust that your brain will do what it is meant to do with the information that you carefully encode into it. Slow practice is a process that respects the complexities and intricacies contained in each piece of music. It will honestly tell you exactly where you stand in your preparation of a piece. And it will give you the opportunity for small, daily victories, allowing you frame your practice room experience around the positive progress you make.
*https://bulletproofmusician.com/is-slow-practice-really-necessary/
https://www.musiciansway.com/blog/2011/02/a-different-kind-of-slow-practice/
https://www.thestrad.com/10-views-on-the-benefits-of-slow-practice/18.article
https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/what-is-slow-practice/
https://www.frankhuangpiano.com/single-post/2018/06/23/3-Benefits-to-Slow-Practice
https://www.carolinaphil.org/zen-and-the-art-of-piano/slow-practice-fast-practice
The list goes on …
July 26, 2019
“The ideal combination would be to play with thinking and intelligent feeling .” –Marcel Tabuteau
This summer I have been revisiting the book Sound in Motion by David McGill. McGill, who served as principal bassoonist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for seventeen years, wrote the book using the ideas of Marcel Tabuteau as a starting point. Tabuteau (1887-1966) was principal oboist of the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1915 to 1954, and taught at the Curtis Institute of Music for thirty years. His playing was foundational in the development of a distinctly American oboe sound, and his teaching influenced multiple generations of Curtis students (and their students). Part of Tabuteau’s legacy is his approach to teaching and implementing ideas related to musical phrasing.
McGill writes that “The roots of a rationalized system of musical phrasing” can be traced back to Tabuteau (7). The word “rationalized” is key in this explanation–Tabuteau’s methodology was based on a logical system of phrasing rooted in musical analysis. His teaching explored the function and purpose of each individual note toward the goal of achieving forward motion in music. His implementation of this system of phrasing yielded performances that brought the music to life. According to McGill, “…he defined the natural in music. His phrasing existed in harmony with the music’s structure and his teaching explained how to achieve this result (7).”
In an early chapter in the book, McGill discusses the misunderstandings surrounding the idea of feeling in relation to making music. Emotions have, of course, long been associated with music both from the perspective of the audience and that of the performer. In some cases, the audience perceives a connection with the performer, and may even feel that the performer has transmitted the emotions of a musical work to them. Almost all great performances are discussed in terms of their emotional effect on the listener.
But McGill makes the point that emotions are not always helpful to the performer. If you rely on feeling to make music, then what happens on a day when you aren’t feeling well for some reason? Moreover, many professional musicians are regularly contracted to perform music not of their own choosing–music with which they may have no emotional connection (polka, anyone?). How can you give a great performance if you don’t love the music? What if you don’t feel anything in particular about the music?
McGill’s (and Tabuteau’s) answer is that the musician must seek a measure of separation from a subjective state of mind. “Professional musicians are not paid to simply feel the music in public act of exhibitionism and then, by virtue of this, to mesmerize the audience into feeling exactly the same way (17).” While emotion may be present both in the performer and in the audience, it is not the feeling but the thought behind a performance that makes it great. Tabuteau was in favor of this approach, saying that his goal was “to play as I think.” He further remarked that “the ideal combination would be to play with thinking and intelligent feeling (17).” In short, a performer’s feelings should be tempered by their intellect. Tabuteau’s system of musical phrasing was built around thoughtful analysis of the music itself rather than an emotional response to it.
In the Practice Room
It struck me while reading this that McGill and Tabuteau were both voicing an idea central to the practice of mindfulness. We are always searching for wise mind: the balance between the emotional mind and the rational mind. We need access to our emotions, but it is not helpful for us to be overwhelmed by them. We also need rational thought to guide us, but only combination with our unique emotional responses. I began to reflect on how these two sides of my mind are engaged not only by the act of performing, but also by the act of practicing. The emotions that I experience while performing can be markedly different from the emotions (or lack thereof) that I experience during the hundreds of hours I spend methodically preparing for performance in the practice room.
The question posed above (what happens to a feeling-based performance if you’re not feeling well?) applies doubly to time in the practice room. If we rely on feeling to perform, then shouldn’t that same feeling be present in the practice room? Any musician knows that this is a laughable proposition. Feelings change from day to day, hour to hour, and minute to minute. Even what we feel about a certain musical work will change and progress as we learn and internalize it. This is why Tabuteau’s concept of musical phrasing based on rational analysis makes so much sense to me. It is a way to establish a truly consistent approach to shaping the music we perform.
Mindfulness does not teach us to ignore, push away, or deny our feelings. Instead, it teaches us to acknowledge what or how we feel in any given moment, and then to move on. This is a necessary skill in the practice room. Because we are engaged in the high-risk endeavor of learning and performing music at the professional level, we may feel any number of emotions around a piece of music on any particular day: elation, frustration, fear, and contentment are all typical in the practice room. Mindfulness instructs us to accept our emotions and make music anyway. A McGill/Tabuteau-inspired approach to building a piece of music, phrase by phrase based on its unique structure, can be a helpful tool in achieving the balance of a wise mind in the practice room.
**McGill, David. Sound in Motion: A Performer’s Guide to Greater Musical Expression. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007.
July 18, 2019
As I near the close of my first session as a faculty member at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, I am taking some time to reflect on the unique experiences I’ve had with the students here. Last week’s blog was about the negativity that many students voiced leading up the their initial auditions on the first day of camp. But over the course of the ten-day session, my day-to-day interactions with the campers have been overwhelmingly positive and rewarding. They are smart, conscientious, respectful, and open to trying everything I throw at them (which has been almost my entire bag of pedagogical tricks). More than that, they are curious about their instruments and about music. I’ve found myself in conversations about very specific tuba-related topics that I am quite sure I wasn’t thinking about when I was the age of these students.
Still, they are high school students, and some are as young as thirteen. They have now been living, eating, and rehearsing in close quarters for over a week. Every minute of their day is scheduled and supervised, including the fun. So when they arrive at my sectional rehearsals in the midst of a hectic day, it can sometimes be a struggle to bring 10-20 high school low brass players onto the same mental page in order to have a productive rehearsal.
One of the luxuries of summer camp (as opposed to band in the school year) is that if the students are overstimulated, frazzled, or need to let out some energy, I can allow that to happen. Part of my job as faculty is to create a positive environment for the campers, and camaraderie is a huge part of the large ensemble experience. But the other part of my job is to achieve specific musical goals with the students, and in order to do that the students need to focus. Honestly, I relate to these students more than I thought I would.
Over the course of the week, I began to realize the parallels between my high school low brass students and my own practice-room brain. Like my students, my brain is sometimes scattered in several directions and needs to be purposefully pointed in the right direction (sometimes repeatedly). Like my students, my brain doesn’t usually respond well to being coerced into focusing. But like my students, my brain does respond to learned verbal and physical cues that become a kind of “reset button” in moments when I need to bring my focus back to the present moment.
The verbal and physical cues that I use with my students are similar to those that many teachers employ. I hold up my mouthpiece at the beginning of each class to signal that our mouthpiece warmup is about to begin. Like a conductor, I use my hands to show students when to quiet down and get ready to play. When the class gets rowdy, instead of attempting to force the students to refocus by raising my voice, I use physical cues and repeated verbal phrases, spoken at a normal to low volume, to bring the group back to order. I’ve found that quiet repetition is a much better tool in the classroom than aggressive yelling.
It now strikes me that these same tools are available to me as an individual, and are recommended by the practice of mindfulness. Many people use a mantra of some kind to ground themselves in the present. I have yet to come up with a really cool, zen-sounding mantra, but what I often repeat to myself when I’m distracted in the practice room is “Aaaaaaaand back to the present.” In many cases, that’s enough. In other situations, a deep cleansing breath while closing my eyes helps me to refocus. I recently came across a qi-gong movement that has become my go-to method for establishing mental focus in the practice room (and other situations). Check it out at the following link: https://youtu.be/Ac08kMK-dyI?t=549
What I am realizing this week is that while I’d love to believe that I’m immune to distraction as a mature, evolved adult, my brain can be just as scattered and out-of-control as a class of high school summer band campers. But luckily, my experience with the campers this year has helped me to see that I, like my conductor colleagues, possess the verbal and physical tools to bring myself back to the present moment, no matter how many times my mind wanders. If I can do it for them, I can do it for myself.
**I wrote this blog while sitting outside at Blue Lake’s Kresge Lodge, which is our only source of wifi at camp. While I was writing, an impromptu baby shower was taking place about twenty feet away, seriously testing my mental focus. I’m happy to say that after losing focus several times, I took a deep breath and relocated to a spot where I couldn’t hear or see the party. Sometimes a change of venue is its own reset button.
The Audition Negativity Echo Chamber
July 11, 2019
This week I find myself in beautiful Western Michigan, working as a faculty member at Blue Lake Fine Arts camp. Today was the day that the students arrived, so after a day of faculty orientation, the camp was suddenly overrun with hundreds of high school art, music, and theater students. The first order of business for most of the music students was to audition for placement in the various ensembles where they will play for the next ten days.
As I met the students one by one, we introduced ourselves and I learned where each camper was from, what grade they were in, and whether they were new to the camp. I also checked in with them about whether they felt prepared for the upcoming audition. Some students were well acquainted with the process, and felt prepared, or at the very least ready to perform and be done with it. But I’d say the majority of students voiced some kind of negativity about the audition to me. Comments ranged from “I haven’t practiced and I’m going to sound bad!” to “I am definitely going to fail!” Overall, the students seemed to be wound up about the audition, and the stress about it was bouncing around among them.
There are plenty of reasons why students voice negative feelings before an audition. First and foremost, auditions are stressful, especially when added into a day that already consists of moving into a camp and meeting tons of new people. Almost none of us are completely comfortable when auditioning (Let’s face it, auditions are designed to create this scenario!). But there are other reasons why younger students might be overly negative about auditions. In some cases, students are actively trying to lower expectations of themselves (either their own or that of other students or teachers). This happens in other settings as well, especially in the lesson. Students say, almost reflexively, “This is going to sound terrible,” or “Sorry, I sound bad today.” Sometimes statements like this are accompanied by an excuse, but many times they are just thrown out as an opening statement.
Needless to say (I hope), none of this negativity is helpful in any scenario. There is a difference between voicing your honest feelings (“I am really nervous about this audition”) and voicing a negative reaction to something that hasn’t happened yet. Part of the pessimism that I experienced today is a reflection of the teenage culture in which being good at something is sometimes considered not cool. This is especially unfortunate, because it’s hard to tell which students lack confidence and which ones only want to appear sufficiently bad at their instrument to seem cool. The end result is a kind of negativity echo chamber that seems to benefit no one.
When approaching any audition situation, it is helpful to remember what mindfulness teaches us about the past and the future. Until the audition happens, it is a future event. We cannot actually do the audition until it’s time to do it, at which point the goal would be to stay tethered to the present moment. But before the audition, all we can experience is the preparation for it. That is what occupies our present moment (sometimes many hours of moments over weeks or months). The throwaway negative comment about an audition, or any other performance, is not a comment about the present moment. It is a prediction of a future moment, and one that can sometimes be self-fulfilling. This week, when I hear negative language from my students aimed toward themselves, I’m going to work on helping them to replace that language by simply describing their present state.
July 4, 2019
What mind games do you play while you are practicing?
I was working with a high school tuba student in a lesson recently, and I noticed a pattern in her playing. This particular issue was a longstanding one for her: although she usually took a nice big breath through her mouth before her first note, she often reverted to breathing through her nose as the phrase or section continued. This is a habit we had been attempting to break for some time.
While nose breathing is optimal for humans in our everyday life, we need to take in a larger quantity of air in a small amount of time when playing tuba, and therefore mouth breathing is necessary. My student was accustomed to nose breathing (from, you know, being a human), and so had trouble consistently breathing through her mouth while playing the tuba. The result was that in many cases, her air supply became so depleted that she had trouble finishing phrases. I asked my student questions about her breathing and playing process, trying to pinpoint exactly what was keeping her from being able to use her mouth instead of her nose. She knew that mouth breathing was necessary, and it was her intention to do it.
She eventually told me that she had gotten into the habit of essentially keeping score while she played. When she missed a note or didn’t center a note properly (a common occurrence among young players), she started at zero. Every correct note was part of a streak that she was trying to extend for as long as possible. When she was on such a streak of correct notes, she was unwilling to remove her face from the mouthpiece for fear of ending the streak. Unfortunately, this reluctance to move her mouth left only one way to breathe: through her nose. So instead of extending her streak of correct notes, her playing process usually resulted in a massive air deficit, making any note impossible to play. Even though I repeatedly pointed out the need for larger, more frequent breaths, and even though she repeatedly acknowledged same, she often found herself unable to “break the streak” in the moment.
Something about this student’s story really resonated with me. I can remember having similar mental processes when I was a beginning band euphonium player. In part, it has something to do with playing a non-visual instrument. We can’t see a keyboard or fretboard to visualize the notes, so we come up with mental visuals to assist in our playing. Some people, for example, associate certain notes with specific colors. As a middle school tuba player I developed a mental visual organization system for the notes that was based on how each note physically felt when I played it. I relied on that system to help me navigate from note to note long before I developed the aural skills that would help me place notes later. Like my student, my technique on the tuba was in many ways shaped by the way I conceived of the notes mentally. And also like my student, I had to relearn my technique later because (surprise!) my strange middle school concept of notes on the tuba did not serve me as I advanced in music.
As a college applied instructor, I have found that most of the teaching I do is centered around breaking habits that were formed when the student was much younger, and building new, healthier habits that are more conducive to long-term success. On brass instruments, much of this revolves around the mental processes involved in playing. At some point, we all need to take a long, hard look at what is going through our mind while we play.
In the Practice Room
The next time you’re practicing, choose an étude or a piece that you have played many times, and know well. Use a run-through of that piece as an opportunity to enter observation mode. Do you play any mind games with yourself? Do you visualize or hear the notes before you play them? Do you have a mental visual concept of musical phrases? Do you get competitive with yourself, challenging yourself to extend a streak of correct notes? Do you mentally scold yourself for missed notes or bad technique? Our mental processes while we play are truly unique to us as individuals. You may find some disturbing trends, but you will probably also notice whatever is truly “you” about your playing mentality. That’s something that you want to preserve.
In my experience, even a slight re-tooling of my mental processes can result in major changes in my playing, or at least in the way that I perceive my playing. This can be a helpful exercise when the various technical studies we employ seem to fail us. We’ve all had the experience of practicing a passage in every possible way we know, only to hear the same mistakes or imperfections over and over again. In moments like these, we may not be able to magically upgrade our technique over the span of a few minutes (or even hours). But what we can do is pay special attention to our mental processes, and through that attention strengthen our mental concept of the music we play. A clear musical concept is not a replacement for good technique, but good technique will take us nowhere without a clear musical concept.
Musical Meditation: Long Tones
June 27, 2019
Meditation is perhaps the practice most associated with mindfulness. In my opinion, it’s also one of the aspects of mindfulness that turns the most people off to the practice as a whole. I have certainly found myself among the ranks of those who have trouble meditating, and/or don’t get much out of it. I have since found a use for it (in small doses) as part of my overall mental health routine. But in addition to regular old sitting-still-with-eyes-closed meditation, I have also begun to think of certain musical exercises as a way of meditating in the practice room.
One such exercise/meditation that I do every day is based on long tones. Nearly every brass player has a favorite long tone study, and many of us incorporate them into our daily practice in order to improve our tone consistency and endurance. But because of their relative rhythmic simplicity, most long tone exercises also work well as musical meditations.
My daily long tone study is adapted from two of my former teachers: Mike Roylance and Andrew Hitz. I first play an eight-count hairpin (crescendo followed by decrescendo). Then, after four counts of rest I play an eight-count decrescendo. Both long tones are played with no articulation, or a “breath attack.” This, along with the order and range in which I play the notes, comes from Mike’s routine. I added on eight quarter notes at the end based on an experience in a lesson with Andrew. He noticed an inconsistency in my ability to play detached quarter notes in a steady crescendo pattern. After I tried several times to achieve steady articulations and dynamic growth, Andrew noted that “This exercise will get even harder when you do it in the opposite [decrescendo] pattern.” Challenge accepted. I began to incorporate detached quarter note hairpin figures into my daily long tones routine with the idea that playing consistent dynamic figures first on long tones would make playing the same dynamic figures on quarter notes slightly more natural. I envision the quarter notes simply as smaller parts of the long tones I just played. I still have not mastered the skill, so I continue …
This long tone study can easily become routine and boring to the point that I zone out instead of focusing on achieving the best tone and dynamic range possible. So I have tried to re-conceive of it as a musical meditation: an exercise so simple that I can climb inside it, hang out for a while, and have an up-close look at the most foundational elements of my playing. As I would in meditation, I try to notice as my mind wanders (which is ok), and bring my focus back to the present moment (that is the practice). There is nothing to listen to aside from my articulation, tone color, and volume. The goal of the exercise is only to give myself an accurate snapshot of my playing on any given day–no part of it is meant to be repeated, even if I feel that it needs improvement. I will repeat it tomorrow, and the day after. This aspect of the exercise–observation without qualitative judgement–is the key factor that allows for a present-in-the-moment, meditative state.
Below I have included a version of this study in treble clef that is probably more readable for other wind instruments or voice.
June 20, 2019
About three and a half years ago, I was preparing for my first doctoral degree recital at Shenandoah University. I was still getting used to being back in school after several years as an adjunct instructor and freelancer. During those years, my job was to teach lessons and classes, and to be ready and available as a player for any gig that might come along. I played in brass quintets, large brass ensembles, bands, orchestras, and even an ensemble that included accordion, violin, mandolin, drums, and a vocalist/belly dancer. Solo playing was not a main focus for me, even during the faculty recitals I programmed here and there. I have always preferred collaborating.
So I found myself immersed in the intense preparation necessary for a degree recital that was intended to show my skill as a solo performer. At the same time, I was also adjusting to some physical changes in my playing setup that improved my sound, but decreased my endurance. I was making up for the lack of endurance by planning and overthinking my program to an extraordinary degree. In short, I was a mess.
One week, my teacher, Mike, picked up on this during my lesson. I would play a five-minute excerpt for him, then spend ten minutes describing my practice approach, my frustrations, my mental processes, etc. Mike is calm to the point that one might even use the word ‘zen.’ As a tuba player he’s incredibly natural, relying mainly on his killer ear to create a beautiful, resonant sound. He told me, though, that he had experienced some of the same frustrations in his younger years, saying he had learned that “you need to be able to put your brain in a jar.”
Mike’s view, which I have come to share, is that the brain can be both a blessing and a curse for musicians. In the practice room (and the classroom), our brain is an asset, allowing us to analyze, deconstruct, and reconstruct music. We regularly deploy dozens of tools and methods in order to first understand a piece, then to develop our technical skills to the point that we can make an individual musical statement with it. But throughout this process, and especially on stage, the brain can also work against us. The habit of constant self-evaluation that develops in the practice room can take us out of the moment when we’re performing, hindering our capacity for musical expression.
I began to use the “brain in a jar” idea as a sort of mantra, especially in high-pressure performance situations. My husband made me an illustration (see below), which hangs on the wall in my office, and sometimes accompanies me onstage, sitting on my stand next to my music. It is a reminder that I need the freedom that comes with being only in the present moment (one-mindfulness). Playing music while the brain is on practice-room overdrive is like trying to tell a story with a mouth full of peanut butter. The experience will be better for everyone (musician and audience) if it is unencumbered.
How do I put my brain in a jar? Sometimes successfully, sometimes not. We know that we cannot un-think thoughts, or prevent ourselves from thinking thoughts. What we can control is our attention. My most successful musical performances happen when I am vigilant about maintaining my attention on the musical thought at hand, and on simply playing with the sound I hear in my head. Hours of work and thought in the practice room have crafted that sound, which allows me to unplug from practice mode, put my brain in a jar, and tether myself to it in the moment.
June 14, 2019
Rational Mind, Emotional Mind, and Wise Mind
At any given time, our state of mind exists on a spectrum. At one end of this spectrum is emotional mind: a state in which our emotions dictate our decisions. The emotional mind is more reactive and intuitive than analytical. At the other end of the state-of-mind spectrum is rational mind: a state in which we consider the facts at hand and make decisions logically and intellectually. Our rational mind gives us a clear view of our present circumstances, along with our past experiences.
We’ve all been in situations when our state of mind veers dramatically either toward the emotional mind or the rational mind. When we’re overcome by emotions like fear, sadness, or even joy, our base psychological state takes the driver’s seat. We don’t have access to the rational thought we need to navigate our present situation. But remember: emotions are not inherently bad. They are important signals that are deserving of consideration. When we are stuck in rational mind, we are only operating based on facts and logic. If we don’t have access to our emotions, we can’t fully process the meaning of our actions. Emotions connect us to other people much more than logic.
According to the practice of mindfulness, the ideal state of mind is a balance between emotional mind and rational mind called wise mind. In wise mind, we have access to both our emotions and our intellect – neither dominates the other. This allows us to act effectively, which means that we are mindful of our goals, and we are able to do what is necessary to accomplish them in our present situation (not the one we wish we were in, or the one that would be more fair or comfortable). Effectiveness means that instead of focusing only on what feels right, or on what we think is correct, we focus our actions on what works, based on both our intellectual and emotional intelligence.
In the Practice Room
If music were to be associated with only one side of the state-of-mind spectrum, it would be the emotional mind. Music as an art form has long been prized for its ability to either convey or inspire emotional states. For example, many sixteenth and seventeenth-century writers believed that art, poetry, and music could physically alter the blood and spirits of a person, resulting in a direct physical experience (affect) or a passive mental experience (passion). The arousal of affections and passions became a primary goal of Baroque composers. Later, composers like Beethoven, Wagner, and Mahler were lauded for their music’s ability to portray various emotional aspects of the human condition.
But what role does emotion play in the practice room? Just because I love the way a piece sounds doesn’t mean I can pick it up for the first time and let emotion carry me to a perfect run-through. The irony that musicians encounter every day is that in order for us to eventually produce the type of transcendent performance that conveys and inspires emotion, we must approach our practice methodically, rationally, and logically. However, an over-abundance of methodical logic in the practice room is also capable of crushing one’s emotional connection to a piece. We need the same wise mind balance in the practice room that we do everywhere else.
The tendency to veer into rational mind or wise mind is different from person to person, so it is impossible to propose a formula that will work for everyone. Instead, I recommend feeding each side of the mind in a balanced way, alternating between exercises like the ones listed below.
Exercises to feed the rational mind:
Slow scales, arpeggios, or long tones with a tuner, drone, and/or metronome
Spotlight an excerpt of a piece and alternate between performing it half tempo and performance tempo.
Spotlight an excerpt of a piece and deconstruct it, practicing only one layer of it at a time (rhythm, articulation, pitches, fingerings) with a metronome.
Play through a section of a piece, stopping on random notes to check them with a tuner.
After identifying a difficult spot that needs improvement, devise a technical exercise around the skills required in that section. For example: if you struggle with a certain rhythm, incorporate it into a scale exercise. Then repeat that exercise in all twelve keys every day.
Rational mind exercises focus on logical analysis, which in many cases can be provided for us by the practice tools we use every day. As always, the goal is to avoid any qualitative self-analysis (or at least to notice it when it occurs, then move on).
Exercises to feed the emotional mind:
Play or sing a piece (or etude, or simply a melody) that you love
Listen to a recording, or part of a recording, that you love
Play or sing along with a recording of music you enjoy, improvising an accompanying bass line, counter-melody, harmony, etc.
Choose an etude or piece that you know very well (to the point of memorization). Play through it with a focus only on exaggerated musical expression, rather than on technical perfection.
Choose a single word or phrase that encapsulates the music you are currently practicing, and write it in your music before the first measure. Take a moment to hear that word or phrase in your mind before playing, and try to embody it while you play.
These exercises are designed to encourage the emotional mind to participate in our practice sessions, and to guard against the robotic type of performances that can result from an over-emphasis on technique over music. Although technique must be practiced, we constantly need to remind ourselves that it exists to serve musical expression.
My final recommendation is to keep track of the types of exercises you are incorporating in the practice room. If you find your practice room mind leaning too heavily toward either rational or emotional mind, make an effort to incorporate at least one exercise from the other side of the spectrum. The goal of course, is not only healthy and balanced practice, but a true wise mind in performance.
June 6, 2019
The past and the future don’t exist in the present.
The concept of participation goes hand-in-hand with one-mindfulness. Think about the last time you were performing in an audition. Did you experience any thoughts about the past? Were you distracted by an earlier missed note, or by a memory of a past audition? Did you notice any thoughts about the future? Were you anticipating what the committee might call next, or thinking about the consequences of your playing? It’s safe to say that most of us musicians have had thoughts like these, particularly in stressful situations. It’s not a question whether this will happen to you, but instead a question of what you will do when it happens to you.
The past and the future don’t exist in the present. All that can exist in the present moment are thoughts about the past or the future. If these thoughts do arise, the practice of mindfulness recommends that we acknowledge them, and then let them continue on out of our minds. We do this not by scolding ourselves for our thoughts, but simply by recommitting our conscious thought to the present moment. We attempt to think one-mindfully, and we attempt to fully participate in the present moment.
The act of true participation involves completely throwing ourselves into whatever we are doing in the present moment. This is true whether or not we happen to be enjoying our current activity. In addition to being present in the moment, we can go a step further and attempt to be one with what we are doing, forgetting ourselves in the process. Full and complete participation in the moment is brave; it involves acting intuitively, going with the flow, and trusting ourselves to respond to every situation with spontaneity.
Interestingly, many of the activities recommended to help practice mindful participation involve music (dancing to music, singing along with music, singing in the shower, karaoke). These are things that non-musicians may not find themselves doing regularly. It makes sense, though, doesn’t it? Music is something that demands participation, and that fully engages our senses, intellect, and imagination. But musicians who regularly practice music have reached a level of proficiency at which certain elements of music-making are routine. Without much conscious thought, we can do things that non-musicians couldn’t dream of doing. The irony, of course, is that most of us decided to pursue music precisely because of the sense of joy, wonder, or purpose we got from participating and fully engaging in it.
In the Practice Room
The truth is that not every moment in the practice room is full of joy and wonder. It feels like work, and for many of us, it is work. It is literally what we need to do to get paid. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, but it does sometimes make us susceptible to non-participation in the present moment. It’s difficult to be as fully engaged in a technical exercise when playing it for the one hundredth (or one thousandth) time. Personally, I don’t blame us.
The antidote to non-participation is playing music that requires our full participation. I mentioned sight-reading in the previous post, which I consider to be excellent practice for one-mindfulness. But participation requires us not just to be, but to act, and to act with intuition. In order to practice this, I recommend the one activity that strikes fear into the heart of most classically-trained musicians: improvisation.
Stay with me … I’m not asking you to suddenly become the next Coltrane or Mozart. All improvisation, even at the highest level, exists within parameters. Start by establishing reasonable parameters for yourself. I often recommend that my students pick a ‘scale (or mode) of the day.’ This can be a great starting place for any kind of improvisation. Play the scale, then begin to alter the rhythm, and then the order of the notes. Create patterns, repeat them, and vary them.
Another idea is to play an étude, then improvise an addition to the étude in the same key and style. More experienced improvisers may choose to improvise in the style and key of their current solo piece. These exercises have the added benefit of requiring you to think and become conversant in a specific musical style. Maybe the musical style you know best doesn’t happen to be style of the music you’re practicing — then improvise in the more comfortable style. If nothing else, it will bring a welcome contrast to your practice session. As a tubist, I enjoy listening to music in my headphones (usually not classical music) and improvising my own bass line.
You can improvise for two minutes, ten minutes, or twenty minutes. But the goal is full engagement and participation. If you feel yourself going somewhere else mentally, or lessening your level of participation, then I have good news for you: you are a human! Be patient with yourself. Consciously bring yourself back to the present moment by focusing on your physical and mental participation in it. Remember, that is the practice.
May 30, 2019
The myth of multi-tasking: Learning to stick with the cursor
I’d like to start this post by addressing the myth of multitasking. Let’s say you’re having a phone conversation with a friend while reading emails on your computer at the same time. The myth of multitasking leads us to believe that we can accomplish these two tasks simultaneously, thereby somehow saving time. But the reality is that instead of doing two things at once, you’re really dividing your attention rapidly between both tasks, doing neither of them very well. You won’t remember the emails you read, and your friend on the phone will definitely notice that you’re not totally present. The reality is that we can only do two things completely simultaneously if at least one task is so routine to us that we can complete it without conscious thought (i.e., walking while chewing gum).
The temptation to multi-task is strong for me. In some cases I welcome distractions, like the podcasts I listen to while driving, walking my dog, or doing other mundane tasks. But in other cases, the constant presence of distractions (phone, computer, etc.) diminishes my focus when I really need it.
The practice of mindfulness asks us to be completely present in the moment — to rivet ourselves to the now. The goal is to do one thing at a time: When you are walking, walk. When you are eating, eat (or even: when you are worrying, worry). Mindfulness resources often recommend practicing this skill by focusing on awareness while performing simple tasks like making coffee or tea. Complete each step of the task with conscious thought toward it (take out the bag of coffee, take out a mug, scoop the coffee into the coffee maker, etc.). When the desire to do something else, to go somewhere else mentally, or to multitask arises, notice it and bring yourself back to the present activity. Distractions can be acknowledged, but then must be let go.
We have never had as many potential distractions as we do today. And the act of ignoring them in order to do one thing at a time is actually counter-cultural. Our society gives us the opportunity (encourages us, really) to surround ourselves with every possible kind of media around the clock, every day. It’s really no wonder that so may of us are tired, stressed, and stretched in several directions. The concept of one-mindfulness, when practiced, can provide a break from this daily hamster wheel.
In the Practice Room
The discussion of one-mindfulness brings us to what I believe is the ultimate mindfulness exercise for the musician: that’s right, our old friend, sight-reading. The beauty of sight-reading is that it demands all of our attention be directed toward the music itself. That first reading of a new étude or piece is always an opportunity to practice one-mindfulness. Rather than viewing it as a dreaded task to be endured, we can use it as an excuse to set aside all of the other thoughts and emotions that regularly bounce around in our minds when we play.
There was once a time when students could reliably get away with the “I can’t afford to buy new music for sight-reading” excuse. But that time is long gone. We all have our laptops, tablets, or phones in our practice rooms with us, and we all have pretty reliable access to the internet. The advent of IMSLP and other music pdf websites gives us access to an enormous amount of music, which can be delivered to our screen in a maximum of fifteen seconds. Even if we’re not actively using it as a mindfulness practice, most of us are aware that we should be sight-reading every day.
I once gave a sight-reading example to a student in a lesson, and when he finished playing, I asked him what was going through his mind as he played. His answer was that he visualized a cursor moving across each measure as he played it, similar to the one that moves across the screen in music notation softwares as an example is playing. I found this to be an excellent visualization for sight-reading, and I have shamelessly used it ever since. In sight-reading we can’t afford to take time to consider a missed note in the past, or a potential missed note in the future. There is barely even time for observation. We have to stay with that cursor, which represents the present moment. There is only one rule in sight-reading: Don’t stop playing.
As soon as we’ve played a piece once, we are no longer in sight-reading mode. Our training kicks in, and we begin to observe, evaluate (maybe judge), and seek ways to improve. We start to take each section apart, piece by piece, and slowly put it back together. This is what I’d call practice mode, and it can certainly be done with one-mindfulness. But when we go out onstage to perform, we can’t still be in practice mode. In performance we need to activate that cursor and direct every ounce of focus to the present moment. Sight-reading as an exercise in one-mindfulness can help us prepare for the shift from practice to performance.
**For new sight-reading material at reasonable prices, I recommend the Clarinet Institute (https://www.clarinetinstitute.com). They have archives for each instrument, each containing hundreds of public domain musical examples. I purchased the trumpet, trombone, and tuba archives years ago, and I still haven’t run out of music!
May 23, 2019
A thought is just a thought, and a feeling is just a feeling.
Join me in a one-minute meditation. Sit or stand comfortably, breathing in and out regularly. Practice the skill of observation on yourself: focus on the sensation of breathing. What other physical sensations do you feel? What emotions are present within you? Engage all of your senses: do you smell, taste, or hear anything? After practicing the skill of observation in this way, the next natural step is to describe what you observed.
Like observation, description is a skill. It requires us to put our experiences into words, which means that we need a degree of separation from those experiences. We do this by sticking to the facts: who, what, when, and where (“I can feel my feet on the floor and my leg touching the chair”). Labeling a thought as just a thought (“My upcoming lesson just crossed my mind”) and a feeling as just a feeling (“I feel overwhelmed”) allows us to acknowledge our experiences without letting them overtake us. It also allows us to honestly observe our inner and outer state without any fear, guilt, or other negative emotional responses.
The aim of the practice of mindfulness is to observe and describe an experience without qualitative judgement (labeling it ‘good’ or ‘bad’). This applies both to ourselves and to others. Think about a masterclass situation, in which a student is playing for a teacher as others watch. The most effective masterclasses I’ve seen involve a teacher honestly observing and objectively describing what they hear and see, rather than making a value judgement on the performance or the player. “I had difficulty hearing your articulations” is vastly different than “your articulations were messy.” We all know that the latter scenario happens. But a precise, honest description often opens the door for interaction and constructive criticism. As musicians, we hone our senses (hearing in particular) to such a high degree that we should strive to be able to describe what we perceive without using judgmental language.
In the Practice Room
Take five minutes out of your practice session to observe and describe yourself without judgement.
Sit or stand comfortably, grounding yourself through your feet and legs, breathing steadily.
Start by observing and describing your breath, reciting mentally “inhale … exhale … etc.”
Prepare to play an easy scale, continuing your mental description: “I’m raising my violin … now I’m raising my bow …”
As you play, keep describing the process mentally: “I’m playing a C … I’m playing a D.” Try to remain completely engaged in the acts of observing and describing, and when your attention wavers, calmly bring it back.
When you are finished playing, start by saying to yourself “I noticed …” What did you notice in your playing? If it helps, write down what you observed in the most objective way possible. For example, “I played an E-flat instead of an E-natural,” or “I felt the muscles in my left shoulder become more tense.” If you noticed any thoughts or feelings, write those as well. The object of the exercise is not to change any of these observations, but simply to make them, separate from any judgement. Take the phrase “I noticed …” from this exercise into the rest of your practice session.
The practice of mindfulness is rooted in an awareness of and engagement with the present moment. Exercises like the practice meditation above can provide us with a helpful “reset button” in the practice room. It may be impossible to continue with such a detailed level of observation and description as you move beyond scales into études or solo repertoire. That is completely natural. The act of noticing your attention wandering, or of noticing judgmental language in your self-descriptions, is part of the practice. The fact that you noticed it at all is enough for today.
May 16, 2019
We cannot un-think judgmental thoughts, but we do not have to fuel them.
Take a few moments to call to mind your last practice session. Did you run through a daily routine? What music did you practice? Was it a typical session, or was there something out of the ordinary about it? As you look back, keep track of the thoughts about your practice that pass through your mind. You may find that while some of your thoughts are objective, others may be rooted in value judgement. Did the words “good,” or “bad” cross your mind?
Judgement is a uniquely human reaction. While we cannot avoid it, we can raise our awareness of it. As musicians, we need to be able to evaluate our playing in order to improve. But many of our self-evaluative thoughts mix with judgement. This is particularly difficult to avoid in artistic or musical situations, because we experience art and music subjectively. Musicians often feel the need to use subjective words to describe musical sounds. In the context of music and mindfulness, judgment occurs when subjectivity veers off into qualitative evaluation (good and bad).
Consider this example: You’re having a conversation with someone, and you notice that while you are speaking, the person’s brow furrows, and the corners of their mouth turn down. You think to yourself “What’s wrong? Was it something I said?” After observing the person’s body language, your thoughts assigned a judgement to the situation. The reality is that the person’s expression could have changed for a variety of reasons, only a few of which have anything to do with you. If you let your own behavior be colored by your judgement of the person’s facial expression, what good does that do? This is an example of the tiny judgements that color our perceptions every day.
The practice of mindfulness asks us to observe at a very detailed level, but to do so without judgement. The goal is to accept each moment without evaluating it as good or bad. Acknowledge what you observe as helpful or as harmful, but do not judge it. Acknowledge your own emotional reactions (emotions are not judgements), but do not judge them. And finally—the trickiest task of all—when you catch yourself being judgmental, don’t judge yourself for judging.
In the Practice Room
Eliminating judgement from the practice room is a tall order, so I would suggest starting with a simple exercise that helps to track the mental language you are using in the practice room.
Choose an etude or section of a piece and record yourself playing it. Think of this as a snapshot of where you stand on that music in that moment.
As you hear yourself play, and then as you listen to the recording, keep a running list of the words or phrases that float through your mind in response to what you hear.
Write those words and phrases in your practice journal, computer, phone, etc. Make this list as complete as you possibly can.
Note which words or phrases are objective, and which are subjective. Try to identify terminology that makes a value judgment on your playing. The word “warm” can be a helpful descriptive term in music, but the word “ugly” is a value judgement.
Acknowledge your own emotional response to the listening, and to this exercise.
Make an effort not to judge your playing, your terminology, or your emotional response. Then give yourself a break for being judgmental!
As you sort through your own mental terminology, try to imagine using that language with a student during a lesson. You may find that you are much more harsh and judgmental toward yourself than you would ever be toward a student. Why wouldn’t you use judgmental language in a lesson? Because it would not be productive. The same, of course, could be said about judgment in the practice room. Even positive value judgments don’t particularly aid improvement, though they may bring an accompanying positive emotional response.
The task in the exercise above is to recognize and acknowledge judgmental thoughts and language. But what do we do with judgment when we find it? Even as our awareness grows, judgment will never completely leave us. We cannot un-think judgmental thoughts. But we do not have to fuel them by dwelling upon them, or by following them down a rabbit hole of subjective thought. We can simply let them drift past our mental field of vision like clouds. We can make an effort to balance the judgment by incorporating observation-based language into our mental and verbal vocabularies.
May 2, 2019
While we cannot control what we see or hear, we can control our attention.
What exactly is happening around you at this very moment? Take a moment to survey your surroundings. Take note of the specific objects you see in your field of vision. What do you hear? If the room is quiet, do you hear the hum of an air conditioning or heating system? Are there any smells? What textures do you feel beneath your fingertips? Now take a moment to check your inner environment. What physical sensations do you feel? What thoughts or emotions are present?
The skill of observation is central to the practice of mindfulness. How often do we move through a space without really noticing the environment around us? It’s incredibly easy to lose track of our surroundings in the midst of a busy day, with plenty of distractions that demand our attention. Our habit of running from task to task, barely coming up for air, often contributes to the stress in our lives rather than helping to dispel it through our accomplishments. There will forever be another task, but there will never be another moment exactly like this one.
I describe observation as a skill because it is just that. We are not born with most skills, but they can be developed through practice (sound familiar?). In the practice of mindfulness, the skill of observation is more than just a glance around the room. It requires us to purposefully direct our attention to the present moment. While we cannot control what we see or hear, we can control our attention.
In the Practice Room
How often do you observe yourself in the practice room without simultaneously analyzing and/or evaluating yourself? It’s a tall order for most musicians. While we are usually (mostly) paying attention during practice sessions, there is often an extra layer of self-analysis and qualitative judgement. Add in a few more layers of self-doubt, self-criticism, and fear of rejection, and we have a volatile cocktail that can really hinder our progress.
Analysis and evaluation, of course, are necessary. But take five minutes in the practice room to try this:
Simply sit or stand comfortably and take stock of your surroundings: sights, sounds, smells, touch, etc.
Next, take stock of your inner state, both physical and mental. Are you feeling confident? Nervous? Distracted? Stressed? So be it.
Take three or more deep breaths in and out, paying close attention to the feeling and grounding yourself in your attention to your breath.
Play or sing a simple exercise — one that doesn’t require too much of you technically. It could be a warmup exercise, an etude, or part of a piece of music. While playing, direct all of your attention to observing both the physical sensations you are experiencing and the sound you are hearing.
Whatever you notice in your playing while closely observing it, so be it. If something about your playing pleased you, excellent—but don’t cling to it. If something went wrong in some way, don’t push it away. Just allow yourself to only observe for a few moments. When I do this, I find that words will float through my mind, like “dark,” “sharp,” or sometimes, if I’m really distracted, “lunch!” So be it. The goal is to let those words and thoughts keep on floating past your mental field of vision. Cling to nothing, and push nothing away.
The practice of mindfulness is … well, a practice. It is not a serene, zen-like state of being where your mind is magically free of negative thoughts. When you are in the practice room, intent on observing, but your attention wanders, you notice it, and you bring yourself back to observing—that is the practice. And it does take practice.
**The information here is adapted from DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition, by Marsha M. Linehan
**For a non-musical practice in observation download and try the “10-Minute Walking Meditation” episode of The Mindful Podcast.
May 2, 2019
This blog is a documentation of my continued study and practice of mindfulness. Specifically, it deals with how mindfulness can apply to musicians in the practice room. A disclaimer: I don’t know everything about mindfulness. The information for the following series of blogs comes from a six-week seminar on the topic, and from my own experiences. I write because it helps to ground me and hold me accountable in my own practice of mindfulness. The most important fact that I have learned about mindfulness is this: it is a practice. It is not a state of being, but rather it is something you try to do (successfully or not) every day. Luckily for us musicians, we are accustomed to the idea of practice. That moment when we step back and simply notice that our focus has shifted from the present moment to regrets about the past, fears about the future, or any other emotional rabbit hole — that is the practice.
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