Recently at a meeting an administrator posited the hope that perhaps someday soon a neurologist would study people’s brains while they were practicing, and be able to come up with enhanced technique for using one’s practice time more efficiently. It sounded like a good idea on the surface.
After all, wasted practice energy is the bane of young musicians everywhere. We hear them charging away in their practice rooms, playing themselves concert after concert, entertaining themselves and no doubt hearing in their mind’s ear the polished, fully-finished performance that is sadly far from the actual sounds emerging from their instrument. Professionals who have learned to make the most out of their practice time hear such private grandstanding and wince. How many times have I wanted to poke my head into a room and tell them ix-nay with the ousy-lay actice-pray!
But as I let the administrator’s statement bob around in my mental duck pond, I became convinced that the neurological-training route was almost certainly doomed to disaster. We have plenty of overgrown hothouse flowers in the musical world already. What we need are more steady, mature musicians.
It occurs to me that the long haul towards using one’s time efficiently is locked up in the slow, long development of artistic maturity. For one thing, you can’t use practice economically if you don’t know what it is you’re trying to achieve. And that ability to conceptualize a performance in the mind comes with age, experience, experimentation, performance, study, and just plain old living in music.
Nor is there one kind of practice. Efficiency is a meaningless term where hardcore technical development is concerned. Building a reliable physical mechanism is more or less the same process as acquiring six-pack abs. Yes, there might be a few tips and hints that can grease the process along a bit more smoothly. But when all is said and done, you have to do the exercise, however long it takes. Whether you are focused on the process or drifting off into another plane of mental existence doesn’t really matter.
But most people need a lot less of that than they think, even in today’s overheated profession of Popeye-armed pianists who rattle off passagework like so many machine gunners or violinists who play Paganini caprices with the inhuman speed and reliable perfection of a MIDI sequencer. A significant percentage of that ability is inborn, the result of innate hand-eye coordination, bone structure, and musculature. The rest can be developed with steady physical cultivation. But just as no amount of gym time will make everybody look like GQ models, so no amount of physical drill will turn an unsuited musculature into Lang Lang.
Efficiency is the concern of learning the music itself—the process of turning notes into mental concepts in the mind and physical responses in the body. Just getting the notes into the head isn’t all that difficult—and it’s just the first step to creating a real performance—but it’s the one area where students seem to flail about the most. Most of them are still punch-drunk on playing itself and the music itself is new to them. Maybe that Beethoven violin sonata is their first significant exposure to Beethoven. So of course as soon as they can play a passage they get all obsessive about it, and the practice-room concert hall is born. Having absorbed some of their sense of the piece from recordings rather than relying on their own resources adds more fuel to the fire.
But should it be any different? After all, the chief glory of being a young person is being young. And being young means to be foolish about some things. It means to acquire white-hot obsessions that fade as suddenly as they arise. It means to have lousy taste. It means to experiment with bizarre clothing or hair styles. It means to rebel against the comfy doctrines of your upbringing. It means to have the rug repeatedly kicked out from underneath you, to be humiliated, to be plagued with insecurity. It also means to fall in love gorgeously and wholeheartedly, to have a fresh mind for which everything is new and amazing, to enjoy resilient health and beauty, to have everything before you.
Slowly and imperceptibly all those wonderful attributes of youth—even the obnoxious ones—morph into new attributes, different advantages and disadvantages. There’s no rushing that process, though, no quick fix that will turn a child into an adult. We all mature at different rates and in different ways, and the process ends only at death.
We get better at a lot of things as we get older. Seasoning and experience teach us how to deal with any number of issues that might have left us punching panic buttons left and right when we were younger. There’s no short-circuiting that, either.
No. Advise students about practicing, try to help as you can—just as you might advise a young people to get more sleep, stop partying so much, reminding them that they don’t have to see absolutely everything. But it’s the time in life for sleep deprivation and partying and seeing everything. So our advice mostly falls on deaf ears, as it should.
They’ll learn and grow in their own sweet time. Our job as teachers is to nurture and guide that growth, not bypass it.