A quick thought on practicing…
My husband and I were recently chatting about practice habits, and he made a comment to the effect of “I always hear your practice and think ‘how is she going to sound good on the concert’ and then I go to your concerts and am blown away by the accuracy and intonation you play with. I don’t get it”. I responded that I believe the practice room is the place to sound bad, and that if we don’t explore all of our options, how would we ever master our instrument?
Practice doesn’t always have to be perfect. Yes, we need to put reps in on things the correct way or we will never build the neural connections needed, but we also need to spend time exploring the other options as well. We need to spend time experimenting, and that means doing things wrong sometimes. Do you know of a scientist who made a correct hypothesis every single experiment? I don’t think I do.
It’s often thrown around in the education world that “mistakes are how we learn” and that can seem pretty backwards when you realize that you have to repeat things over and over again the correct way to solidify your learning. I often have found myself asking the question, “well then wouldn’t mistakes be derailing the learning process?”. In my experience, if we aren’t taking risks and making mistakes, we’ll never know what we’re capable of. We’ll live forever inside of a box and never know the potential of ourselves and our instrument.
Take for instance dynamic contrast. Every week I talk to my students about this. More often than not, the issue arises from the fact that they’ve never experimented and found what “too much” for them is, so their baseline is skewed. They’ve never played a high A until it sounds gritty and crunchy or squawky. To find those extremes, we’re going to make mistakes and weird sounds, or god forbid, sound bad. And that’s all okay. It’s so easy to get so caught up in the idea making mistakes = bad that we then fail to make mistakes and actually grow as a musician (or reed maker).
Yes, do slow repetitions, but I also think about how to experiment in your practicing. How far can you bend the pitch sharp on a note? How loud is too loud? What does playing a low C super quietly do to your intonation, and what are some ways you can change that? How many different tone colors can you get out of one note? These are just a few examples of questions I strive to ask every practice session. I challenge you to do the same, and let me know how it goes and your thoughts in the comments!
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