Priorities and patience

ByBret Pimentel

Student: I really just want to improve my sound.

Beautiful tone is a nice goal, but it’s subjective, and it’s inextricable from less-sexy pursuits like consistent tone, solid intonation, and reliable response. Let’s expand your focus to your overall tone production and make sure you do lots of listening to the great players. Then you’ll be equipped to play beautiful ideas, not just beautiful notes.

Student: I need to play this faster.

Speed without control is unimpressive. Let’s work on moving your fingers and tongue in an efficient, even, and relaxed way, and take the time to learn the notes slowly and well. The speed will come, and it will turn out to be less important than you think.

Student: The most important thing right now is this audition/competition/recital piece.

Auditions, competitions, and recitals come and go. They are stepping stones to greater opportunities—what will you do if you get there and your only skill is playing this one concerto or étude or excerpt? Treat every lesson, practice session, and performance experience as a chance to become a better musician, not a better trained monkey.

Similar Posts

  • Interpretation at small and large scales

    ByBret Pimentel

    When I ask my students about their interpretation of a piece of music, their answers are often about shaping phrases. The phrases should have some kind of beginning, middle, and end, often expressed in some kind of dynamic shape, like starting softer, growing to a louder peak, then gradually getting softer again.

    That isn’t wrong, but it’s really just interpreting individual phrases. The next step is to give those phrases some relationship to each other. Does the next phrase continue the previous one in some way? Answer it? Contradict it? Make a contrast with it? If your favorite tool for expressing your interpretation is dynamics, then the answers to those questions might determine whether the next phrase, say, picks up at the same dynamic level as the previous, or at a dramatically different one.

    Then the phrases should build a larger structure, such as a theme. The individual phrases that make up the theme should have beginnings, middles, and ends, but they should join together into something bigger that also has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

    The themes might combine to build a movement, and the movements to form a complete work. And multiple works may even construct a complete concert program.

    Small-scale phrase shaping is a good start, but mature interpretation requires thinking on a larger scale.

  • |

    Not good

    ByBret Pimentel

    I like to use a Socratic-ish method in my private lessons, and ask my students questions. It means that I have this conversation several times per day:

    [Student plays.]

    Me: How did that sound to you?

    Student: Not good.

    Me: What didn’t you like about it?

    Student: It didn’t sound good.

    Me: What aspect of it didn’t sound good to you? The tone? the pitch? the phrasing? the articulation?

    Student: Um, I guess the articulation?

    Me: What didn’t you like about the articulation?

    Student: It wasn’t good?

    It’s an ongoing battle to get my students to listen more deeply than that. Was the articulation “not good” because it started with air noise instead of tone? Because it was accompanied by an unwanted percussive sound? Was the articulation technique perfect but you failed to follow the composer’s markings? Or was it something else?

    Photo, David Bailey
    Photo, David Bailey

    Often the “not good” is a combination of factors, but if my students can identify even one of them, then they can immediately start working in a focused way to improve it. If it’s just “not good,” then they tend to just play it again from the beginning without any clear approach to making it sound better, and repeat until frustrated.

    Part of my job is to help them identify and verbalize the desirable and undesirable phenomena in their playing, and to teach them the techniques for manipulating the variables involved (breath support, voicing, embouchure, finger technique, and tongue technique, to name the most obvious ones). But it’s up to them to take that information and run with it. For my students to become independently-functional musicians, they need to learn to listen critically to themselves and troubleshoot.

    For yourself and for your students, don’t be satisfied with bland value judgments (it sounded “good” or “bad”). Be factual and descriptive about what you hear, and tackle problems in a methodical way. Practice smart!

  • Fix fixable problems now

    ByBret Pimentel

    Just about every day I have a student show up for a lesson with an etude or repertoire movement they have been working on for a week or more, and there are little, silly problems that haven’t been fixed:

    • A spot where a fingering choice needs to be made, but hasn’t.
    • A page turn in an awkward spot.
    • An unfamiliar foreign term that hasn’t been looked up.
    • An ambiguous accidental that need to be double-checked against the piano part.

    It’s easy for them (or me) to ignore or procrastinate small but easily-fixable issues while busily drilling technical passages. But I know they—and I—are doing our best work when those details don’t slip through the cracks.

    It’s not worth it to spend a week practicing something in an incorrect or compromised way because you haven’t gotten around to fixing the fixable problems. Would any of these help you solve those issues more promptly?

    • Print an alternate/trill fingering chart and keep it with your practicing stuff, or bookmark an online one on your phone.
    • Put a few dollars on your copier/printer card/app so you can photocopy a page when needed.
    • Keep a good music dictionary in the pocket of your instrument case.
    • Keep your piano score and solo part together so you can always use them in tandem.

    Consider what other easily-fixable problems you haven’t bothered to fix, and ask yourself what you can do to remove friction so they get solved right away next time you practice.

  • Why my college band chair placements ended up not mattering a bit

    ByBret Pimentel

    Over 20 years ago, I was a brand-new music performance major. This is a story about that first year of college that I’ve told many times to my own college students.

    I arrived at college with the confidence granted me by a freshly-minted high school diploma and a track record of first-chair saxophone school band placements. I eagerly auditioned for the university concert bands and jazz bands, and was gutted to find myself placed not only in the lowest groups (the #3 band in both cases), but doubling up parts with other players. Devastatingly, a fellow freshman saxophonist landed spots in both the #1 groups.

    It was one of the best things that could have happened to me. I hit the practice rooms hard, gradually worked my way up, and in my senior year finally got spots in both top bands. By that time I had gotten serious about woodwind doubling, and earned a fun and important spot in the top concert band outside the saxophone section. And I got the lead alto chair in the top jazz band (and couldn’t help but enjoy a little that the classmate I had envied so much was sitting second).

    Had I gotten the seats I wanted right away, maybe I would have coasted through college. And it’s possible I never would have developed an interest woodwind doubling, which now is central to the career that I enjoy so much. Looking back now, having those particular chairs in those particular semesters seems very unimportant, but my growth during those years laid the groundwork for two graduate degrees and a life in playing and teaching music.

    Whatever your current stage in your musical development, there are bigger and better things to come. How you measure up to others matters much less than what you’re doing to get to your own next level.

  • “Next” steps in preparing repertoire

    ByBret Pimentel

    I think many aspiring musicians pass through a phase in their development where they have “learned” fingerings, music reading skills, and other fundamentals at a basic degree of mastery, and turn their attention to developing sufficiently fluent technique (mostly finger technique) to tackle the instrument’s standard literature. Once they acquire that fluency and tackle that repertoire, they will begin to deal with the nuances of interpretation.

    Whether this is the best way to do things is a subject for another post (or book), but the reality is that a lot of advancing music students, including many of my university students, are at a point where they are very focused on playing notes in time in tempo, and when they achieve that level with an étude or repertoire piece, sometimes they don’t have a clear idea of what else needs to be done to bring the assignment to a performance level.

    Photo, S. Parker
    Photo, S. Parker

    If you or your students find yourself in that holding pattern, here are just a few ideas of what to “add” to your technical preparation:

    • Are you following all the composer’s marked articulations? dynamics? tempo changes?
    • In the places between the dynamic markings, are you giving the phrases appropriate shaping?
    • Is each note in tune? Does each note have a characteristic, pleasing, and consistent tone? Does each note respond precisely when and how you intend it to?
    • Have you familiarized yourself with all of the composer’s textual indications, and translated them if necessary? Are you making them audible?
    • Are you using vibrato (if applicable) in a purposeful and expressive way?
    • Are you taking a purposeful approach to performance practice? For example, are you using historically-informed approaches to ornamentation, dynamics, tempo, articulation, etc.? Or, alternatively, have you made a conscious and well-informed decision to break from these?
    • Have you studied live performances and recordings of this work by the finest musicians, compared their interpretations, and made careful choices about which ideas to incorporate or adapt into your own performance?
    • Have you thoroughly studied the full score, and do you understand how your part fits into the whole?
    • Do you have opinions about the formal structure, and are you using those to shape your overall interpretation?

    Those are just a few, but probably enough to keep most of us busy for a lifetime of study. Feel free to add some more in the comments.

  • Recital preparation

    ByBret Pimentel

    A few of my students have had recitals or other solo performances recently. Besides musical preparation, this is the advice I give:

    Visualize. If possible, spend time in the performance space before performance day. If not, imagine up a good representation of what the space is likely to look and “feel” like. Mentally walk through the entire performance, from your arrival at the venue to your departure. Include every detail you can, no matter how mundane. In your mind’s eye, see yourself entering the stage, taking a tuning note, making a reed adjustment, waiting for the audience to fall silent. Audiate the whole performance the way you want it to sound. Hear the last note reverberating in the hall, then see yourself taking a bow and leaving the stage.

    I find this valuable because everything feels familiar on the night of the performance. Even if I get some of the details wrong or leave something out, I can deal with those things as minor glitches in an otherwise controlled experience, rather than seeing them as part of a flood of unanticipated events. It also gives me a chance to think through any logistical issues; I take notes and make a to-do list while I do this exercise.

    Warm up intelligently. I like to keep practicing to a minimum on performance day when possible. It’s not likely that I will make significant improvements in my preparation at that point, and I want my mind clear and body rested. If I have an evening recital, I typically do a leisurely warmup in the morning and make semi-final reed decisions. I focus the warmup on tone production and tension-free technique.

    I practice the performance repertoire as little as possible on recital day. If there are difficult technical passages that I am worried about, I make a point of not trying to play them up to tempo, but instead run through them in a very slow and controlled way, focusing on tone and expression. That keeps my final practicing positive and constructive, rather than causing me stress about potential failures.

    Have a good, normal day. I don’t want to depend on recital day rituals or superstitions, but I do want to be in a good mood. I don’t eat a special breakfast, but I eat something that is a favorite among my typical breakfasts. I don’t wear new clothes, but I wear something that I feel good in. I don’t take the day off work, but I do carve out a non-working lunch hour. Small, ordinary pleasures are the order of the day.

    I find that if I make too big a deal of performance day, I overthink and attach unwarranted weight to the event. Keeping things good but normal makes performing less stressful.

    I would be curious to hear your advice for performance preparation (besides the hours of practice). Please share in the comments section if you feel inclined.

One Comment

  1. Such a wonderful, simple and helpful post, Bret! To have clear, measurable goals, prioritized to give us the best chance of success, is not only a productive process, but is also a great way to avoid frustration and confusion. Well done!

    Reply

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