“I learn every time I play” is something I have heard so many times during my career. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that it is impossible to learn when you play, and I certainly don’t disagree with the sentiment of this statement. Imagine how great it would be to make progress every time you picked up the instrument. Unfortunately, for me, this simply isn’t so.
Several years ago I was fortunate enough to perform in a six week theatre show. We rehearsed for a week, doing band rehearsals, cast rehearsals and technical rehearsals; then we went straight into five weeks of shows which finished at 8pm everyday. This early finish was great because I could either go to bed early (a rare occasion for a working musician) or I could go on to do another gig. The theatre show was a run of fifty five shows, but I also did another six shows after in the evenings, two days of teaching which I did on off days from the show and two recording sessions. So sixty five engagements in six weeks. This is a lot, even for someone who does this for a living. The first day back home after this finished I felt like my playing was in good shape. I had been playing several hours a day for six weeks and I wanted to take advantage of this and keep the momentum going. I sat down at home to start practicing and began by doing a short warm up. Usually I play through some simple songs that I know just to get the blood in my hands moving. I had been going for ten minutes before my flat mate knocked and the door and asked if I wanted to go to the cinema. I hadn’t had a day off for six weeks so of course I said yes. I didn’t worry about not practicing and I certainly needed to do something other than music for a day or two.
But was it right for me to walk away from that ten minutes on the instrument saying that I had taken in some new information, that I had learnt something new? In my opinion the answer is a clear and resounding no. What could I have possibly learnt in that time? I played through a bunch of songs I had played many many times before; I wasn’t really paying attention whilst doing so and I wasn’t approaching this situation with any intention of learning. I have spoken to several of my peers about how they warm up and this routine is something we all do in a similar way. We find warm up exercises too boring so we find small, simple pieces of music to use that accomplish the same goal. A successful warm up. In my case there was nothing new to me about these songs in any sense. So why would I be compelled to say that I learnt something from them? Or by extension, that I learn every time I play. There’s something that doesn’t quite add up.
First of all I feel it is important to outline and define what constitutes learning. When I think back to past experiences when I have learnt new things, not just in music but any area of life, the learning process has always involved me engaging with something new. Something that I didn’t completely understand or even something that I didn’t understand at all. Now, it is important to say at this point that it is perfectly possible to learn something new from a piece of music or a situation that you are already familiar with. But, even so, the above idea of finding an aspect you are unfamiliar with still applies.
For example, I have a big problem practicing technique. I hate doing exercises because I find them boring. I also think that they often lack genuine musical context. But it is vitally important for musicians to have efficient and effective technique. Several months ago I found a weak spot in my playing. Leading with the index finger on my right (plucking) hand. Before I had always used my middle finger first and I wanted to work on this problem. Rather than doing exercises I decided that I would start learning Bach pieces. They have all the ingredients of technique exercises. They have scale runs, arpeggios, tricky fingerings for both hands, they help to develop relaxation, stamina and much more. They also present a huge musical challenge. It is very difficult to get pieces like this to sound like music and not a constant stream of 16th notes. I began practicing the piece (the gigue from the D Minor Partita) in the same way that I start anything that I find technically challenging: without a metronome. I feel that good technique brings together co-ordination and time. My fingers have to know where they are going and how to get there but also at what time they should execute these actions. Co-ordination has to come first. If my fingers don’t know where they are going speed is an irrelevance. So I didn’t practice this piece in time. I only worked on fingerings for both hands and once I was comfortable I began to practice in time but still I wasn’t using a metronome. I have been listening to Bach for years now, and so many of the recordings I hear have sections of rubato timing (where the tempo isn’t constant), which helps add more emotion and feel to the music. I listened to several recordings and tried to copy bits of phrasing that I felt added something to the piece. However, there was a problem. My version of the music never sounded as good. Even after practicing this piece for a further three months I still couldn’t get the version out of myself that I wanted. Why not? I knew the piece; I knew the form; I didn’t need notation; and I knew where I wanted to add these artistic interpretations; yet it didn’t sound good. After a break of a few weeks I came back to this Bach piece and made a discovery.
I decided to play this piece through with a metronome. I thought it would be easy. If anything, I was, at first, using a metronome for the sake of doing so. I honestly didn’t think I would learn anything from it. I took another look at the score and saw the piece was in the time signature 12/8. I programmed this time signature into my metronome set the pace as 40bpm and got to work. All most instantly I fell apart. Even though I could hear the time signature and tempo when I was practicing without it, I had made my own interpretation of that time signature. Once a strict tempo (the metronome) was put in place, so many more aspects I hadn’t considered came to the surface. I all of a sudden could see where Bach had written passages that stressed accents against the time signature and where he had written cross rhythms. All in this constant stream of 16th notes. Without doubt I learnt something, but only because I searched through several aspects of the piece to find something I hadn’t considered and wasn’t comfortable or familiar with. This is a clear example of my original point. Whether or not you are searching for this unknown stimulus material within music you already know or music you don’t isn’t the issue. The point is that, in either case, you’re learning because you are actively engaging with something you don’t fully understand.
So let’s take this view point back to my ten minute warm up. Yes, I was already familiar with the songs I was playing, so I could’ve tried to dig deeper into them, but the important thing to understand is that I didn’t. I am the first to admit that, during this particular warm up (as well as many others), I wasn’t really paying attention to the music I was playing. Knowing that, how could I possibly have been engaging with anything new and further to that point, how could I possibly have enabled or facilitated any kind of learning? Clearly, I didn’t. Even though I was playing, I learnt nothing.
So, where am I supposed to go from this realisation? Should I only play when I am in a genuine learning situation? Is time spent playing time wasted unless I learn something new? Absolutely not. The first thing to understand is that not all time spent on the instrument is meant for learning and improvement. A great deal of it is either maintenance or making end’s meet. Now that I can play this Bach piece to a high standard I have found that I have to dedicate some time (between one and two hours a day) to keeping it at the same standard. This isn’t time spent learning. But it’s not time wasted. The purpose of these maintenance sessions is exactly that: maintenance. The goal is to keep this Bach piece at its current level and not drop below and certain standard that I have established, not to learn anything new.
I have come to think that learning is not only something that is rarer than we might think, but also something that is very demanding both physically and, much more often, mentally. Competitive sport demonstrates this well. I am a very keen swimmer. It is a sport I have enjoyed since childhood, and when I can, I enjoy watching races on TV. When I was younger I always found it really strange when a commentator would talk about a certain swimmer and say something like “they’re looking for a good result today but they (the swimmer) said in their press conference that they won’t be going for any records this time”. I always thought this was bizarre. They are competing in a race. Surely it would be logical to always try and beat the current record. If they beat the record then they are swimming faster than anyone has previously done in history, and if they swim faster than anyone else, surely they’ll win the race. The Commentator’s point, of course, was this. It would be reckless for competitive swimmers to push themselves to their limits all the time.
A swimmer at the olympics has several races to get through not just one. If they wear themselves down in race one, they might pick up and injury in race two, or by race five they might be so tired that they don’t qualify for race six. In other words, always operating at their limits will likely have a serious and negative backlash.
Music is the same. Learning is mentally exhausting. If I only ever tried to learn then I would only ever be working on the edge of my comfort zone. This would leave me far too tired to do all the other necessary things, like maintenance, that being a musician requires. The position musicians are in with practice is similar to that of the swimmers. In the same sense that not every race is an attempted world record, not every practice session is there for us to learn from. Some have to be about maintaining the level we are already at. If anything, trying to approach all practice sessions with the objective of learning is counter productive. Let’s say that I have a two week tour playing some technically demanding music. In this case, I would make sure that I divide my practice time into different sections which are designed to achieve different things. Part of it will be to absorb new information and learn new things, but part of it has to be to keep at the level I have achieved. If I spend my maintenance time learning something else new, then the very thing I set out to achieve will slip in standard. Learning is only one part of the process and we have to recognise that. Take a look around Youtube and find interviews with big-name players and you’ll find that so many will say the same thing: that a huge part of their practice routine is just repetition. I for one (given the amount of practice and learning they have done in their lives) feel that it would be a good idea to trust in their experience.
Another interesting point that “I learn every time I play” calls into question is the nature of progress itself. I have been told so many times by teachers and mentors that “progress comes in leaps and bounds”. In other words, this means that we don’t progress at a steady rate. Writing this now I can think of many times over the course of my career when I have had an experience or teacher that has accelerated my learning across a period of time. I’m sure that other people have had the same thing. And again, I have asked a lot of my peers about this and they all say that it has been inconsistent for them. Yet, surely, if we truly did learn every time we play why aren’t we making constant progress. Many of my private and Skype students contact me saying things like “I’ve been stuck in a rut for a few years now. I play a lot but I don’t feel I’m getting anywhere”. Does this sound familiar to you? It does for me as well. I have been in this position before, but the point I want to stress is that, if you are, have been or will be in this position at any point in time, telling yourself that you learn every time you play is not just false; the mentality of this statement may also be the very thing that is stopping you from progressing at all.
I mentioned in my previous post about the way that I had avoided doing hard work in the past by making excuses for myself not to practice. Something very similar is at play here. Let’s go back to my example of my first day off after the theatre show. During that ten minute warm up, if I told (and believed) myself when I said “I learn every time I play” I would actually have been setting a very low standard for myself. If I learn every time that I play then how much focus, effort and dedication I put into my practice becomes totally irrelevant because improving is, according to that statement, something that happens by default. In short, it becomes another excuse I can use to stop me from doing any genuine work: I don’t need to put in the hard work; I learn every time I play. Clearly, this doesn’t add up.
I want to point out that I’m not saying you shouldn’t play and practice on a regular basis. Nor am I saying that there aren’t benefits to reap from regular practice because there are. It’s a great way to keep your muscles in shape and your musical instincts sharp, but, much like the swimmer, a huge amount of this work is about just keeping in shape. I remember seeing an interview with olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps who said “some days I really don’t want to be in the pool but I have to know that if I’m going to break records I have to be consistent”. The point Phelps is making here is that progress isn’t arbitrary and so many times progress is dependent on the progress that has come before it. The previous progress helps to set standards which, when they are maintained, help provide a platform to the next learning experience. This interview with Chris Thile also supports the point of view that maintenance practice is vital. “I feel like if I’m not playing for two hours a day, I actually start to go backwards”. Granted: we all have good and bad days. But if we want to progress in any discipline, it’s not a matter of getting lucky. Victor Wooten has worded this brilliantly.
In his book “The Music Lesson” his teacher, a character named Michael, says that he can’t teach Victor anything. He can only show him things. Why? Because “the knowledge is already out there. You just have to tune into it”. I feel that this sums up my views on this topic very well. If you want to progress and learn something new you have to engage with something new. You have to actively seek out a genuine challenge, work hard at it but crucially be honest with yourself about whether or not you find it challenging. Many times in the past I have been guilty of doing something that doesn’t challenge me just to eat down hours on the clock. Of course I get to come out of it and say to people “I practiced for six hours yesterday” but that doesn’t mean I made six hours of progress. But, saying that, maybe my intention during that period wasn’t to progress at all. If it was not to improve but only to maintain there is nothing wrong with that, but I can’t use one as an excuse not to do the other.
Lastly, the biggest issue I have with “I learn every time I play” is also the one I am by far the most passionate about. This is an issue that has only come to light for me in the last four years. Only since I began teaching and following the progress of my own students did I realise just how reckless it is to tell someone you learn every time you play. As a teenager I spent a lot of time talking to other musicians, reading interviews, going to clinics and masterclasses. Sometimes I found it inspiring, but if I’m honest, a lot of other times I found it was a huge knock to my confidence. I would see players who were years in front of me make this dubious claim. I’d go home, practice, often get nowhere and then say to myself “I’ve practiced and learnt nothing. There must be something wrong with me”. This was never the case but I lost a lot of time believing that the work I put in was of no consequence or that there was something I didn’t get and was never going to get because I wasn’t constantly improving.
It can be soul destroying to put in some hard work and not get any reward from it, but what can be worse is the feeling that how hard you work is irrelevant because you’re not “gifted” or “talented” enough to learn every time you play. This is something I have never said to any student and I seriously doubt I ever will. If you’re reading this and you identify with this situation or being stuck in a rut then please know that the best thing you can do is be honest with yourself about what is and isn’t challenging for you. This can be daunting and unsettling but ultimately this is what progress and learning is all about. Uncharted territory. However, I have to say, whenever I get into these positions that expose some sort of problem in my playing, I take great comfort in knowing that it’s just a matter of work just like it is for everyone else. How many gold medals did Michael Phelps win during his career in the end?
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