Articles on The Matery Of Music

Ten Pathways to True Artistry

The View From the Middle

The Power of Love

Choosing the High Road

From Bravura to Integrity

From Good To Great

The Way of the Will

The Way of the Will

by Barry Green
(written for Instrumentalist Magazine)
 
Famous wind players reveal keys to excellence from

What is the difference between the good, the young talent, the competent, and the truly great? Does Franklin Cohen, Principal Clarinet with the Cleveland Orchestra practice differently than a conservatory student at Curtis or a public high school student at the Cincinnati School for the Creative and Performing Arts?  Does the world famous jazz and classical clarinet virtuoso Eddie Daniels really believe that the key to playing fast is learning to play slow? Paul McCandles, the celebrated reed player from the popular ensemble Oregon, prepares for his marathon concerts by practicing just two notes. “I practice to get rid of the garbage between two notes that I’m connecting.” Some famous musicians don’t even believe in practicing at all because they have a unique way of learning music that eliminates the need for excessive drill. Believe it or not, you can learn to play a short piece of music by memory in a matter of hours rather than practicing it for months.

I personally believe we waste a lot of time practicing mistakes, learning to play badly when we can use this time to learn music in a much more conscious way. Over the past four years I have interviewed over 120 great classical and popular artists on ten topics of the human spirit that account for the difference between good and great music making. These include courage, confidence, creativity, passion, tolerance, communication, joy, ego and humility, concentration and discipline. I noticed that the same personal skills that you express in your relationships, your hobbies, or our jobs are also expressed in your music performances. Have you ever noticed that when you are hired, honored, remembered or even loved by others, it is not for WHAT you do (playing the flute) but for the personal qualities you bring to your music like communication skills, your ability to work with others (tolerance) courage, creativity, even your sense of humor?

When I admire wind players for their awesome technique, I also found they were very well organized in their life, extremely relaxed (rather than stressed or intense), and played with a sense of ease and comfort. They seemed to really ‘have it together’.  And they also seemed to embody the Zen-like principles: ‘Less is More’, ‘The harder you try the worse you get’. We can learn from the highly disciplined pathways that so many great artists have taken and we can develop our musicianship in ways that I had not previously thought possible.
This exploration of ‘The Way of the Will’ is devoted exclusively to just one of these ten ‘pathways’ explored in my new book The Mastery of Music—DISCIPLINE. This ‘way’ is about what makes you WANT to practice. Once you get to the practice room, it’s about how to make this a meaningful experience. It’s about what the pros do that is truly different then those who follow different less effectivepathways.  Can we really embrace some of these principles described by flute soloist Paula Robison, and Detroit Symphony piccolo player Jeff Zook, Cleveland Orchestra principal clarinetist Franklin Cohen, jazz clarinet wiz Eddie Daniels, double reed masters Paul McCandless, Allan Vogel, UK’s Celia Nicklin, and Cincinnati Symphony’s Principal Bassoonist William Winstead.

DISCIPLINE MEANS FOCUSING
         Discipline grows from the wish to do something.   When you very much want to accomplish something, your ambition will call forth the strength and commitment you need to do whatever is necessary to realize your goal. Discipline flows from and follows your ambition and your passion. 

         My mentor Timothy Gallwey who I worked with to write THE INNER GAME OF MUSIC book described the skill of discipline in his most recent book, The Inner Game of Work, as "focusing."  He writes:

         If there is one thing that excellence in sports and excellence in work/life have in common, it can be summed up in a single phrase: focus of attention. Focus is the quintessential component of superior performance in every activity, no matter what the level of skill or age of the performer.
         Having clear focus and discipline is essential. When we lose our focus, we lose our intention and our will. We no longer practice and prepare, and ultimately stop being productive.  But first, let’s examine where we can find discipline.

Start with a Goal
         Setting goals is the first step toward developing discipline and choosing ‘the way of your will’. What do you really want?
         Goals come in different sizes: long term, medium, and short term – and they need to fit together inside one another, the short term goals within the medium range goals within the long term ones, like those Russian dolls that fit within themselves.  Long term goals include career goals that might happen over five to ten years: to make a living playing music, to be able to play jazz or chamber music with great colleagues or to be a technical and musical master of your instrument or voice.

         Your medium range goals, the things you aim to accomplish within the year, follow naturally from your long term goals.  These are naturally less dreamlike and more concrete.  They may include such things as completing a degree, learning specific pieces, playing a concerto, or reaching a particular level of proficiency on your instrument/voice.

         And short term goals are your specific goals for this week, or today, or this practice session. They track your medium term goals and turn them into practicable, doable details.  Your short term goals may include finding technical solutions to one movement of a classical sonata, or learning how to phrase or interpret another piece.

         As piccolo professor at the University of Michigan, Jeff Zook, would say,
It's your dreams we're talking about. Sometimes the dream may not be big enough. If you just want to play a good audition, that’s not really going to cut it. On the other hand if you say, "I’m doing this because I want to play this concerto from memory next year in front of a live audience," your dream has greater immediate and future consequences.

I suggest that you write down all three kinds of goals in a handbook or journal, which will soon become a powerful and constant reminder of your progress. After you see your goals in writing, you can more easily focus on achieving them.

FOUR MOTIVATING FACTORS
         It is difficult to make yourself or your students want to practice when the motivation doesn’t come from within. Motivation or the will to practice should not be something you have to fight for when playing great music. The music should be the inspiration. But often this isn’t enough. External motivators are often used by teachers, parents and ourselves. If you practice, you get a gold star, money, rewards, a vacation, an instrument or a special meal. But this becomes a problem when the prizes or bribes are no longer offered.  These external motivators have little to do with making, learning or performing music.
         As we explore different types of motivation that can improve your will and discipline, your task is to identify the motives that suit you, and go with them.

1) Competition
         Celia Nicklin, who is head of the oboe department at London's Royal College of Music and a distinguished English oboist with the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields under Maestro Neville Mariner, explained to me that the Academy doesn't offer its players contracts for an entire season: every engagement is only for that one specific date.  She also told me that this lack of job security in the orchestra keeps everyone one alert: Neville Mariner's attitude is to keep the musicians on their toes by making them feel there is always someone else around the corner, she told me.  Yet despite this formidable policy, Celia has been there for every recording session the orchestra has played in thirty years.

         Personally, I’m no great fan of the concept of competition for motivation. But sometimes seating challenges or competitions can inspire hard work and great performances. It works best when it serves as an incentive for learning, performance and concentration, rather than as an external reward or goal that produces tension, anxiety or an inflated ego. Our job is to look at competition in this more positive, constructive way, as an inspiration to discipline.

2) Accountability
Celia Nicklin, explained that in the highly structured British school system, there are so many demands, examinations and standards required of students that they don’t have time to think about not practicing. At very early ages, they must play required scales and solo pieces several times a year, and they cannot advance until these examinations are successfully completed. They play in youth orchestras and consequently have to learn orchestral music while competing for their chairs. All these requirements demand so much preparation that practicing just happens -- without anyone noticing that it really was not a choice.

While the academic demands in different countries may vary, there is great value in holding regular class recitals, solo performances, mock auditions, and music festivals, monthly or bi-monthly exams. These deadlines remind performers that a standard has to be met within a specified time, and will call forth the desire and commitment to do what is necessary to play—namely practice!

3) Pride
         William Winstead explained that keeping up with his teaching load at the University and playing Principal Bassoon with the symphony forces him to be well organized – and the motivating factor that keeps him on track is pride.
         The most important thing for me is producing music. The most embarrassing thing would be to go to a rehearsal and find myself not sounding good in front of my colleagues, not knowing what I am doing, or sounding like a klutz. For whatever reason, I must find the time to be prepared. And it’s not just with music. The same goes for teaching -- and it's the same with my cooking.

4) Fear
         While we all love music, it is not always easy to maintain one's "personal best" level of play all through the year. At the recent dedication of the new concert hall Eddie Daniels had to perform for only 12 minutes after a long vacation from touring.  Fearful that he wouldn't know how to get back into his ‘touring groove’, Eddie embraced his anxiety as though it was an old friend.

         Anxiety motivates me to get my act together. My guru has a saying:  “Trust in God -- but first tie your camel.”  God will take care of you if you make reasonable preparation.  So I take care of my reeds and do my preparation – and I still don’t know what’s going to happen, but I know I've done my part…

         Whether we are motivated by competition, accountability, pride or fear, the presence of motivation helps inspire your will to do your best. You have to want to do well. With this desire, you can embrace these motivators as keys to improving your will. The will gets you into the practice room. Once you get there we need to get to work.

The Practice Session-the warm-up
         How will you organize your practice session? Most teachers and professionals engage in some kind of warm up exercise before practice, for a variety of reasons.  Some instruments need to be played for a certain time before they actually function properly: keys, resin, valves, and the lubrication in all the joints can be sluggish when any instrument is played right out of the box.  What's more, the muscles we use in playing or breathing likely need to go through a period of movement before they respond fluently and quickly to signals from the brain. 
         Paula Robison, internationally celebrated flute soloist, asks her students to pay attention to the ways marathon runners, ballet dancers and figure skaters take care of their bodies: they all take great care to warm up very carefully. Paula used to study ballet, and learned the value of this kind of discipline with the ballet warm up known as the barre. 

         It was the dancers' discipline, which really brought this home to me.  You'd never see a dancer run out onto the center of the floor and make a tour jete without running through a full barre first.  That would be complete insanity, because the muscles wouldn't be ready for that amount of movement.  You can hurt yourself pretty badly if your aren’t properly warmed up.  But the warm-up is also a kind of blessing, a spiritual thing, and if you go through the same routine every day, you are prepping yourself internally as well.  To me, playing scales and arpeggios should be done with the greatest of reverence and gratitude: it is the process by which we prepare for something sacred.

         Paula explained that for playing the flute, the muscles need to be warmed up slowly and gently at first, with slow long tones. Then the fingers need to be warmed up -- and through this process, the mind sharpens and becomes ready for concentration.

The Way of Practicing: Mastering the Good Stuff
         The next component of the practice session -- learning or mastering some of the music – is the beating heart of the whole process.  And here again we have the opportunity to make our practice efficient, enjoyable and productive.

         What I'd like to do is to explain the way I used to practice, and then introduce you to a profound and simple new approach to the learning of music.

         The old-style Barry Green liked to work hard.  At times he even liked to sweat, suffer, and get frustrated -- because when he finally reached his goal, he felt as though he had accomplished something. I’ve recently learned that this kind of hard work practicing doesn’t make sense. When we slave away at practicing, usually it involves trying to fix something that doesn’t sound very good. The task is to get it perfect or…PRACTICE UNTIL IT IS RIGHT! However-- when we finally get it right, what do we do? Often we QUIT! We stop practicing and think we are done.
Well I want to ask you an important question. What did we practice? We never practiced what we learned! We spent all our time practicing what we DON’T what to play. We practiced the mistakes! Well if we spent all this time practicing the mistakes, what do you think we are going to play when we perform?  You guessed it. We will perform the mistakes! No wonder many people don’t like to practice. Why can’t we make a shift towards practicing what we really want to perform? Why can’t we practice the music, as it should be?   

         Is it possible to practice without practicing mistakes? That certainly sounds as though it might help things go a whole lot better under the stress of performance. Here is a simple rule to follow.

LEARN WHAT YOU PRACTICE, PRACTICE WHAT YOU LEARN.

         In order to do this, it becomes necessary to learn your music BEFORE you practice it. Learning implies study. In order to practice what you have first learned, you need to get the music in your head before you put it into your body or instrument. There are many ways to HEAR the music before you actually practice it.  You can study a recording, a teacher can play the piece for you, or you can play the piece very slowly yourself with the sole purpose of learning the sound, line, rhythm or harmony – not to master the piece or play it perfectly.  If you are careful to play it this way – being very clear in your own mind that you're not trying to "play" it, just to ‘acquaint’ yourself with it -- you are not practicing the piece; you are just checking it out.

         You should spend a good percentage of your time listening to or studying the music before you ever attempt to play (or practice) the piece.  This involves listening, studying, tapping rhythms, singing melody so that you really KNOW the tune you are playing much like you know the melody of ‘American the Beautiful’. The next aspect of this learning involves adapting this music (rhythm and melody) to your own instrument or voice. This involves working out fingerings, bowings, articulations, breathing, and even phrasings.

When instrumental transcribing is completed (away from your instrument) it is also known to be most effective to practice moving the muscles or ‘miming’ what you have learned. You can play with the instrument in your hands and moving our fingers and body but not making any sound. This silent practicing can liberate you from trying to play perfectly in tune or in with the correct rhythm but still program your muscles. Finally, when you feel you can sing it, hear the music in your head, understanding and rehearse your articulations and bowings, you are ready to ‘check it out’—You are truly ready to:  PRACTICE WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNED.
Don’t Practice Mistakes

         The world famous flutist and teacher Julius Baker is quoted as saying, You’ll never make a mistake if you never make a mistake.  But how can we manage that?

         You will still have to make adjustments in bringing your ‘inner vision’ of the music into reality. It probably won’t be perfect the first time you play but it will be a lot better than practicing the notes you have never learned in the first place. There is a way to further minimize practicing more mistakes. The key is to realize that unconscious mistakes don’t count.
We use this simple fact to change the way we learn our music. We can focus in on one aspect of the music at a time – and practice just that one aspect. If you are learning a melody, it doesn’t matter what tempo you play at while you’re learning it – the melody is what you are focusing on, and you can learn it at any tempo.  Start playing slow enough so that you can get the melodic line right, and you'll be practicing the correct melody – at an altered tempo. What do I mean by ‘unconscious mistakes’? If your mind is consciously focusing on melody, it is not paying attention to your tempo, dynamics, expression or articulations – and any mistakes you make in these areas simply aren’t highlighted.

         If you are practicing for the notes, don’t play so fast that you make mistakes. It’s that simple. So we need to follow a routine that makes sure that each time we play, we choose what we want to focus our attention on, and learn it – and only after we've learned it, move on to rehearsing what we want our minds to remember. It is very important to get into the habit of separating that first stage, in which we are learning, from the second and quite different stage in which we practice what we learned. 

  Practice Slow     
         Paul McCandless said Leon Goosens once told him that it was most important to eliminate the garbage between the notes so there is no noise.  Paul says he uses legato as a doorway to velocity. Think about it.  When you increase your tempo, you may find you're speeding up the notes themselves, but not necessarily the transitions between them – or at least, not to the same extent.  This means that any lack of clarity in your transitions is occupying a greater and greater percentage of the total playing time – and as computer scientists would say, your signal-to-noise ratio is going way down.  
         So the legato is the first step towards mastering a passage. The mastering of slurs comes next, according to Paul:
         Discovering a way to do something really well is a highly creative activity, and if I can get really psyched about one thing, the energy and enthusiasm will echo through my entire practice session -- like getting one slur from a C to a Db.  And the secret is in your quality of attention and movement.

         Eddie Daniels is another believer in practicing slowly -- really slowly.
         I don’t have a system as such, and when I practice I don't just practice slowly. I have a way of going from a note to the flow. When people want to be able to go faster, they often take things just a little bit slower -- but I slow things down so much, it's maybe to the point where I'm playing sixteenth notes as though they were whole notes, and I listen intently to each individual note. 

         You may think, "Well, gee, I should be playing fast" -- but your finger is now holding down that note. A lot of times when people play fast, they think it is the movement between notes that really makes the difference, but it's not, it's arriving and being at the right place that really creates accuracy in playing a fast passage.  When you are sitting on a note, you are getting to know what it feels like to play that exact note; you are familiarizing yourself with its position. Let yourself experience what it needs to know, by playing very, very slow.

Oboist Allan Vogel tells me he doesn’t practice anything faster than it should be played, and he feels he can only improve a piece by slowing it down:
         I don’t work up from my metronome markings, I work down from them.  When I slow my playing down, I can be more musical, I can be more aware of my posture, breathing, and tone quality, or vary my rhythms.  I believe practice should be on the slow side in general. It is rare for me to practice at performance tempi. At a slower tempo, you can interpret the markings better and play with more energy.

         Confidence comes from not making mistakes, and avoiding mistakes is a matter of picking the right speed.
         What an amazing concept!  I used to think being prepared meant I should be able to play the music much faster, and that's how I practiced.  Now I have come to recognize that if I play faster, I cannot clean up my problems -- and will only have more of Goosens' “garbage” between the notes.  Now I understand why I hear those oboe players playing all those long tones! 

The Beautiful Voice Inside
         The first human instrument is the voice.  When we hear great violinists, flutists or even pianists, we often say they are "singing through their instruments."  Just as Jazz can’t swing without the beat, music cannot communicate unless it sings.

         Celia Nicklin tells her students (and reminds herself) that all the music she makes must sound vocal.  She goes to great lengths to get her pupils and herself to work with their voices.
         We do a lot of singing. In the beginning, the kids hate doing it, and can find it quite embarrassing, but eventually they get used to it. I ask my students to listen to birds.  Birds always sing in a clear, deep voice that can carry for great distances, it's not croaky, it doesn't rattle, and it is the most sensationally wonderful sound.  I tell them that this is the clarity of sound we have to create.

Franklin Cohen feels he is singing with his inner voice when he plays his clarinet.   He told me a wonderful story about Maestro Pablo Casals.  Apparently the maestro once gave a master class in which he was singing really terribly to his students, while telling them how beautiful it was to hear the singing voice -- and then he smiled and pointed to his head, and said, I'm not talking about what I just sang for you, I'm talking about the beautiful voice inside.
         The mastery of music and the voice are closely interwoven, perhaps even inseparable, and that's why these different kinds of voice work are so profound and important to achieving artistry of the voice or of any instrument.

THE WAY OF THE WILL
         Eddie Daniels could not easily tell me the source of his motivation or will. He doesn’t believe it is self-manufactured, it just happens to be there.
         I used to say at clinics that anybody can be a good as me -- all they have to do is practice. And yet I don't think it's really as simple as that. It's not easy to get someone to practice the way I practice; it's not easy to get someone as excited about a piece as I am.  That inner motivation I have is hard for others to manufacture. 

         In my view, it all comes back to the idea that playing music on the stage is a very spiritual thing; it comes from God, it is the most communicative, non-verbal, direct line to the heart.  So you can deal with learning all the notes and technique, but if you haven’t learned the direct line to your heart yet, most probably you won’t manage to do it tomorrow on stage.  My idea of the true artist is someone who has all the technique at his disposal, but who also has a depth of being that comes through when he plays.

         Along somewhat similar lines, Paula told me,
         We live in a generous, freedom-loving country, and we have the opportunity to develop a personal gift, the love of music, and we should be thankful.  But there's a responsibility that comes with it, the responsibility to develop and share it.  It is our gift – let's make it our gift to others.

         These qualities of discipline, will, organization and efficiency make a difference in why these artists are exceptional in what they do. It not only manifests in their music but in the soul of the musicians that contribute to true their artistry. We can study several of these characteristics of musical mastery (like discipline), that are found in abundance in the soul of the very greatest musicians, we can learn from those who have them, we can build these characteristics into our own musicianship----and as we become rich in these skills, we’ll be making a difference not just in our own music but in our lives.