Excerpt from Passionate Practice

The Premises

“Relax your shoulders.”
“Let go of your tension.”
“Look at the music.”
“Don’t look at the music. Look at the keyboard.”
“Don’t look at the keyboard.”
“Listen to what I’m telling you.
“Listen to the music and you won’t make mistakes.”
“Think about the music and you won’t be nervous.”
“Don’t think about anything. Just play.”

Any of those sound familiar? Is there a music student alive whose teacher hasn’t made those suggestions?  The interesting thing is that most of those statements are true. Relaxing, focusing, looking, feeling, thinking, listening – all make better learning and playing.  But how to relax, focus, listen, look, feel, and how to harness them to work together, automatically and simultaneously for both security and passion in performance – that is the challenge confronted in this book.

This book offers you a method to achieve your musical, your artistic goals based on exactly the premises about learning that underlay your teachers’ suggestions. For beneath those ideas we find two basic premises about learning.
           
Those two basic premises about learning are:

• Learning is maximized when your mind is free to focus and your body   free of unnecessary tension;
• Learning takes place through your senses, or sensory channels. In our work the most important sensory channels are:

Auditory -hearing
Visual - seeing
Kinesthetic – feeling, movement, experience.

From those premises we conclude that you learn more quickly, efficiently and permanently when your mind is free, your body relaxed, your sensory channels open.

Learning means remembering. Most of us usually learn most quickly through personal experience: touching the hot stove, visiting foreign countries rather than reading about them. We experience those events most immediately through our senses: the pained and blistering finger (ouch); the sights, smells, sounds of Paris. But, ahhh, how we feel emotionally as a result of what happens to us is what seals the fate of our remembering:  pain, fear of the stove; exhilaration, passion in Paris.

Another aspect of learning comes from focus and concentration. If you’re engrossed in the last pages of a Stephen King thriller, you may miss the call to dinner. If your boyfriend proposes beneath the Eiffel Tower, you may miss its magnificence. But despite your attention being deflected from the grandeur of the monument at that fateful moment, you may be flooded with the feelings, sights and sounds of that night when you hear the word “Paris” years later.  Intense emotion can embed an entire moment’s gestalt in the recesses of your brain, even when you’re not consciously aware of that taking place.

To sum up then, both focus and intensity of feeling are capable of producing “brain” memory, and it is possible to retain a deep memory of an event if we experienced a strong emotion at the time of its occurrence. Imagine, then, how memory can be enhanced if both focus and emotional intensity are consciously harnessed simultaneously. That is exactly what you will learn to do in these pages.

In practicing then it behooves us to take advantage of what artists
throughout the ages have known, and scientists have proven in their studies of the brain: emotions and memories are bound together in the learning process. Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things, describes a young girl’s exuberance at returning to the movie theatre to see her beloved, Sound of Music: “Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.”

Let’s discuss some implications these premises hold for your practicing.

Picture yourself about to sit down to practice when the phone rings. Your mind starts racing: “It’s okay to get this call, I haven’t started practicing yet. I won’t answer any more calls. But actually I did promise myself I’d use this hour just for practicing. The machine will pick it up and I’ll call back later…but, suppose it’s Marlene? We’ve been playing phone tag for days and…” Well, you get the idea.

We’re all familiar with the process of  focus interruptus. We’ve put our mind on one thing and another immediately beckons. Which is what often happens when we play and get interrupted by a sound in the audience, an internal thought, a missed note.

When intruding thoughts (“I hope I don’t make a mistake”) or external events (a cough, a paper rustling in the audience while you perform) deflect concentration, your mind and body need the means to react immediately and automatically to shift you to neutral, that is, to “calm,” rather than to either of two stress-related modalities: running to your brain and obsessively talking to yourself, or rapidly descending into your body and panicking. These states both take you away from performing with ease. In the following pages you learn simple exercises giving you mastery to avoid the stress-related zones.

The need to know how to shift to neutral, that is to respond automatically with calm, is especially acute during that tiny, anticipatory moment when the following occurs very rapidly:

• You receive sensory input: for example, hear someone coughing, or see someone in the audience yawn.
• You interpret the input: “My playing is boring that person (and probably everyone else).”
• Your body responds: it gets tense, palms may get clammy, your muscles work harder. You begin to make mistakes, which then feeds back into the sensory loop: “Mistakes! Now I’m going to forget what comes next. Where am I?” You’re responding to fear, and the body is getting ready to flee.

It is into that split-second moment between input and interpretation that the intervention of a calming response must be spliced. You are about to learn the steps to become the splicing master.