What really went wrong? Leaning into problem spots

Every week I hear students play badly, then tell me, “but I can do it in the practice room…”

Here are some reasons things might go more poorly in a lesson than in a practice session, and some strategies for dealing with those problems.

• It’s possible that you’re not really playing any differently. Things seem worse because having someone else listen heightens your sense of what you really sound like. Try recording yourself while practicing, then listening back. It can be a painful revelation, but it can bring problems to your attention and improve your ability to really hear yourself as you play.
• It’s possible that your mastery of the music is really only borderline, and the normal stress of having an audience is enough to cause trouble. This is what I call “sight-reading mode.” It’s not that you are necessarily playing the music for the first time, but you are still at the point of having to mentally process each note as it goes by. For more stress-proof performance, put in more slow, accurate repetitions when practicing to build your muscle “memory” and aural memory.
• It’s possible that your mastery of the music is good, but your stress is above normal. In this case the problem isn’t your practicing per se. Improve your ability to play in front of others with techniques for managing performance anxiety. These might include healthy lifestyle habits (sleep, nutrition, and exercise) or mental exercises (like visualization, affirmations, or mindfulness practice).

Don’t make excuses, look for solutions!

David Allen’s well-known book Getting Things Done is always within arm’s reach at my desk. I find its concepts and techniques valuable for managing my time and productivity.

I don’t consciously use a lot of “GTD” ideas in my practicing, since practicing seems to me like a thing that is never “done.” (If any of you are applying GTD concepts to practicing, I’m interested in hearing about it.) But there’s one part of the GTD system that I do think of often when practicing or working with students: the “two-minute” rule.

The idea is this: when organizing your tasks, if something comes up that will take less than two minutes to complete, it’s better to go ahead and do it rather than taking the time to process it into your to-do list and revisit it again later.

I try especially to impress this on students who are stuck in “stage one” practicing, running long passages or entire pieces without stopping to isolate and fix problem spots. If you are practicing, here are some examples of things to spend two minutes or less solving now, rather than adding them to a do-later list:

• Look up an unfamiliar foreign term
• Mark in a missed key-signature note or ensemble cue
• Practice an awkward three- or four-note passage (How many times can you practice it in two minutes? One or two hundred times?)
• Check and adjust the tuning of a problem note
• Revisit a favorite tone exercise to improve the sound of a certain note or passage
• Figure out and mark in a trill fingering
• Make and notate an interpretive decision (You can always change your mind later. For now, pick a plan and try it out rather than leaving it up in the air.)
• Choose and mark a good place to breathe
• Settle a question or conflict by consulting the full score or accompaniment part
• Make a quick recording (your smartphone probably has a voice-recording app) and identify some areas to focus on (and possibly solve in two minutes)

This approach does sometimes mean breaking stride on larger practice-time projects, but in general I find the two-minute fixes to be worthwhile.

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.

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.