Variation and Mastery

As musicians, we spend a lot of time repeating musical passages over and over, trying to get them right. Also in composition or improvisation we can get stuck looking for the right combination of rhythm and sound. Often we stick then to what we already know, things within our experience. However, music is amazingly varied, and it would do us good to treat it a bit more like something outside of ourselves, which we can get to know in a complex and intimate way, opening up new possibilities that we cannot at first sight discern.

Repetition is used a lot in the practice rooms. You can hear it as you walk down the corridor of the conservatory coming from every room. However, it is not always repetition of quality that you hear. Sometimes the player seems to get worse, rather than better, and then gives up a certain passage out of boredom and picks another.

Newer information from the motor-neurologist tells us that our brains prefer variation to repetition when it comes to learning. This makes sense, as brute repetition dulls the senses and makes us bored, which leads to mind wandering. Repetition makes our brains bored and our bodies tired. Our brain stops listening to the sound, our body, the instrument, etc. As our brain dulls, it ceases to carry out the superlative coordination necessary to imagine and filter musical ideas and create the exact physical actions we need to play or sing well.

By varying our approach to practice, we can keep ourselves fresh and alert, and expand our mastery of music making to include new discoveries every day.
Here are some of the ways that you can vary your practice to get the most out of it. It may seem that you are diverging from your goal at first, but you may find that you progress in time at an alarming rate if you embrace the process of practice (instead of sticking to your first goal) and create a wider menu of choices for yourself.

Types of Variation:

How You Play or Sing It
We always try to do it the “right” way without experimenting. Try learning a passage by altering it from what you think the “correct” way is. This will not only inform your final interpretive choice, but will train your coordination as well. In addition, your brain will have had a chance to look at the passage from many angles, aiding your memory, and making mistakes much less likely. Change the rhythm, dynamics, expression, even the emotion in the phrase. Play it faster, slower; play sections in different octaves, keys, etc.
See a more complete explanation in the Flashcard section under:
Variation makes perfect

Where you focus your attention:
Without changing what you are playing, you can direct your attention to different aspects each time you play it. You can focus on musical aspects, aspects of sensation or proprioception, or aspects of the craft of playing and singing, to name a few.

Musical aspects:
Inform your repetition: decide to listen differently to the passage you are practicing. Think of listening to different aspects such as:
-harmony
-melody
-dissonance and consonance
-articulation
-text or interpretation

After doing this in detail it is a good idea to take a break or wait until another day before “running it.” This lets your brain process what you have heard and felt.

Sensation or Proprioception Tour:
There are two aspects your can focus on when taking this tour: body awareness and the craft of making music.

Body awareness:
You can focus on your body awareness while practicing, letting your mind monitor different aspects of your use of yourself when playing or singing. Such as:
-Where you are sitting, where your feet are (pressure sensors.)
-Where your head is, your back, legs and arms, how it to sit or stand, how it feels to move (kinesthetic sense, stretch sensors.)
-The amount of effort or ease you are using to do something (muscle tone, muscle tension.) The amount of tension you use to play a fast or loud passage, the way you make yourself smaller or stiffer to play softly. Try varying it: can you make less effort, less contraction?
-The musical effect of a certain type of movement: make the link between what you feel and what you hear. Try different approaches.

On stage we like to focus on the music itself, and not get stuck only on the sensations, as this slows us down. However, your experiences monitoring these aspects in the practice room will help you to steer more lightly and efficiently on stage should you need to re-direct. Your awareness in the practice room will build a healthy, flexible playing or singing technique.

Craft of making music:
You can also focus on the actual craft of playing or singing. This means first letting go of what we think “we need to do” for good technique for a minute, to stop sending instructions to our bodies, in order to receive the sensations and information that comes form the act of playing or singing. It requires us to stop and think what our contact points are with the instrument (or lips and tongue). What do the keys feel like under the fingertips, the string or bow, the contact of tongue with lips, or reed? Also to consider what the role of the instrument is in magnifying sound, and how the room enhances the sound.
The three aspects mentioned above have been given names:

Frames of Attention:
Microcontact
Whole Instrument
Whole room

You can focus your attention on each aspect, until they become a whole picture. Students are often surprised at the quick results they get from this approach, so it’s worth trying.

See the Flashcard section under Frames of Attention.

Mastery

Master musicians allow their minds to range around all the aspects mentioned above, as they have learned to view their craft from many angles, creating a coordinated whole in their practice. Mastery involves being able to stop and focus your attention on the different aspects of your craft. Yet we tend to just go on and on, and forget to stop and think, to re-orient and fine-tune our thoughts and actions. For mastery, we need to do what is necessary, without unnecessary tension or confusion. Mastery is a constant journey of discovery.

But each time you want to try something new, you first need to stop.

Art of stopping:
Stopping is built in to music itself. Between pieces, before we begin, in between movements or sections in the piece, just before mood changes, like before we begin an exciting section, there is a potent silence. Great performers keep us spellbound with their sound, but also with their powerful silences. Just for this reason it is worthwhile practicing stopping.

As mentioned in other lessons, stopping also refreshes the body and mind and gives time for your system to learn and process. We called these stops “breaks” or “warm-ups.” Another kind of stopping during practice can escalate your learning process in a short amount of time. Limiting how long you give yourself to practice a short passage makes you concentrate more, not less. It is a good idea to set a limit of 20 minutes or so to work on a hard passage, then to put it away for later, or the next day. After 20 minutes your attention starts to drop, and your coordination with it, so take a break or change the activity.

You can also practice stopping at a micro-level: at 15 second intervals! You play a passage of about 15 seconds, and alternate it with imagining it, or stopping altogether for the same amount of time. We call this STOP-GO-IMAGINE. By repeating this process 3 times at random, using shuffled cards with the words STOP, GO, and IMAGINE on them, you can “crack” a tough passage in 2 minutes and 15 seconds! Then stop, and put it away! Can’t repeat that enough, I am sorry!

If we don’t stop before we try a new approach, then our usual habits will take over, limiting our development. Practicing the art of stopping and re-directing your practice will help you to develop your own mastery.

Conclusion

Varying what you do is exercising your creative choice. Choice is healthy, keeps us alert and prevents injury. By utilising the power of choice, you develop yourself as an artist. Stopping and choosing becomes a seamless way of working, challenging and developing your talent daily.

See what Stravinsky said about this:

“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self.
And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.”

Long ago, I learned from a friend of Stravinsky’s what he meant by this. She heard him speak at Harvard where he said that, when he was young, he liked to use the maximum number of instruments and performers, like in his “Rite of Spring.” Later, to stimulate his creativity and technique, he progressively limited the number of instruments, and chose unusual combinations. Through this decreased pallet of color, he felt that his creativity and technique was challenged. He had to do more with less! Notice that he says that the choice, the limitations that you set, can be random (he says “arbitrary”). You do not need to worry that you are making the wrong choices when you choose to vary your practice or direct your attention to only a few aspects. He says, “…this serves only to obtain precision of execution.” In other words, it improves your technique, no matter which variation you choose.

So, the strange thing is that variation is not less disciplined than trying to do “the right way” over and over: it requires more discipline, more art. Variation requires temporarily limiting yourself by making a choice and carrying it out, improving your perception, technical options and range of expression.

But first you need to stop!