Tag Archives: practice

The dictaphone never lies: part 2

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Back in the dim and distant past, I carried out the first half of an experiment that I’ve thus far failed to complete. Depressed about my apparent lack of progress, I recorded myself playing a piece and promised to record the same piece a month later, compare the two, and report back. For six months I failed to do this because:
(a) I was afraid I wouldn’t have improved
(b) Listening to a recording of yourself playing an instrument is almost as bad as listening to a recording of yourself speaking, and
(c)  I’m not very good at following things up

Then moment of truth finally came last night when I did the second recording, then listened to both in quick succession.

The original November recording was absurdly bad, like the audio from some awful St Trinian’s music lesson sketch: terrible tuning, erratic timing, no redeeming features whatsoever. Tonight’s attempt was only slightly less bad, I did notice a significant difference in tone and vibrato but the tuning with still really off in places. So, there has been improvement but rather less than I’d hoped for. Thank goodness I dithered for six months, the results after one month would have been crushing.

Moral of the story: listening to a recording of yourself, however painful, is a useful exercise, – it’s been a timely reminder that my tuning needs some work, and that if I want to make a better sound any time soon I’ll need to practice a bit more regularly and a bit more efficiently (more on that soon).

What it’s like to get it wrong again, and again, and again

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I recently read that Toni Morrison didn’t started writing novels until she was in her late 30s, a single mother with two boys. She got up at 4am every morning to write before work. I find stories like that very inspiring for about 30 seconds or as long as it takes me to remember that I can’t even sacrifice an episode of Homeland to do something life-transforming, let alone two or three hours sleep. Take the past week, I have plenty to do but none of it has imminent deadlines attached, with the result that I spend any available time writing detailed to-do lists and researching things I will never ever need to know about (tips on running a marathon in the rain anyone?), obsessing about how to decorate the spare room in a house in a small rural town that I will never move to, and reading about the life of Joe Strummer (born in Ankara, bet you didn’t know that).

The Easter break was a good opportunity to do some of that practice that I’m always complaining I don’t have time to do. But I had important imaginary house buying to do. Consequently, when I had my first lesson in a number of weeks it was a bit painful. We were looking at Sibelius Symphony Number 1, which I’ll be playing with the orchestra this term. It’s not, on the whole, technically difficult but there were four slightly tricky runs in the section we worked on:

I fluffed them, the teacher and I laughed, we played them very slowly together, I wrote in a couple of fingerings and then I tried to play them back, and that’s when my fingers stopped doing what they were told. I must have tried more than 20 times. At home, alone, I’d probably have sworn a bit, had some leftover Easter egg and come back to it later. Not an option here and by my 10th failed attempt my teacher had run out of encouraging things to say. I don’t know to describe how excruciating it is getting the same thing wrong 20 times in a row while someone is watching you. But imagine someone is standing two metres away and throwing a beach ball at you and you just keep on dropping it – funny the first couple of times.  Still, I wonder if the memory will be enough to motivate me to practice it properly before next time but I guess it depends on how much good TV is coming up over the next couple of weeks.

Fun music practice: a contradiction in terms?

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There’s been a post-concert (I’ll come back to that later) lull in my viola playing, hence no blogging. In the meantime, I’ve been grappling with getting my oldest child to do her music practice. In the early weeks, she was delighted by the newness of it all and practice was still a novelty. Now, inevitably, I’m trying to strike the illusive balance between pushing her enough that she improves (and, in turn, gets more pleasure from playing) and not pushing her so hard that she gets bored and decide it’s all a bit too much like hard work and that she’d actually rather watch Pingu with her little sister.

Her teacher gave me a tip along the lines of: ‘as far as possible, make her feel practice is her choice  – give her ownership of it, offer her options etc…’. He told me how one set of parents had crafted a mini chest of drawers made from matchboxes, filled it with little notes detailing musical activities and left the kids to choose a draw. Worked a treat apparently. So over the holidays I channelled my inner Blue Peter presenter, and my daughter and I created this little beauty:

Enchanting I’m sure you’ll agree, but not complete without these:

Three Blind Mice, the Grand Old Duke of York, Pop Goes the Weasel, One of the Twinkle variations – I’ll leave you to work it out. We keep it really short, 5-10 mins, which is about as much as her concentration span and my patience can take. Seems to be working for now, watch this space.

Vibrato: desirable but difficult

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“A regular, pulsating change of pitch used to add expression to vocal and instrumental music”

“A slight rapid fluctuation in pitch of a note”

Using vibrato on a stringed instrument is a way to mimic the human voice – it adds character and depth. There are evidently all sorts of politics surrounding it: the extent to which it should be used, how long it has been widely practised etc. I don’t have the time, space or knowledge to go into it but there’s a bit more detail on the debate here.

As for the practicalities, I’ve found it to be a lot harder to do than it sounds. And, if the countless YouTube vibrato tutorials are anything to go by, I’m not alone.

I still feel quite dependent on my left hand to hold the instrument at the neck (rather than having it safely gripped between my chin and shoulder) so I have trouble relaxing my left hand enough to roll my finger back and forth as required. Inevitably, the only way to get any better is to do regular vibrato exercises. They sound revolting but, by all accounts, work.

For me, there’s also a psychological aspect to it. As I said before there’s something a bit ‘unEnglish’ about vibrato, like pronouncing correctly a foreign word that’s now widely used in English: a proper French ‘r’ for your Tesco croissants, the gutteral ‘j’ for your extra jalapeno from Dominos. Vibrato a feels a bit show-offy, “look-at-me, look at me I’m not just playing the notes, I’m doing a bit of vibraaaato”. It’s all very well for real musicians but for the rest of us is it not just a little bit pretentious? (The answer is of course no.) And then there’s the fear that you could have a go, not quite manage it and then feel silly for trying. But that’s true of more or less everything.

Why I need a Tiger Mum

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I am determined that, for the first time in my life, next week, I will go to an orchestra rehearsal having prepared properly. But, when I say ‘determined’, while the spirit is willing, the flesh is pretty unreliable.

I’ve touched on this a lot but I can’t seem to learn the lesson myself so I’m going to risk monotony and repeat: you get out what you put in. Not rocket science I grant you, but the mind has ways of playing tricks…

To pluck an example out of thin air: you sit perched on the threshold of a brand new year, the festivities have more or less destroyed any semblance of a routine that you had put in place, you are struggling to get back on top of work, your children’s school routine, housework, thank you letters, family/friend commitments etc but, nonetheless, in the spirit of New Year Resolutions you commit to practising each evening. The first evening goes well, better than expected even, you find yourself clocking up two hours of practice. But, come the second night, you start up again and realise that there doesn’t seem to have been much of an improvement despite “all that effort” that you put in the night before. You tell yourself, “well, perhaps I’m just not cut out for this, if I had any real talent I’d sound a lot better than this by now, and also there’s something on the telly that I’d really like to watch and I could murder a nice glass of wine or several”. And thus, another hobby slowly bites the dust.

I’m sure I’m not the only person to have been a little in awe of the mums on Meet Britain’s Chinese Tiger Mums, which aired tonight on BBC2. Quite mad in parts, yes, and I’m not about to sign my almost 2-year-old up to Kumon maths classes but I did agree wholeheartedly with the message that sustained effort reaps rewards. In fact, I found myself wondering if one of those Tiger Mums would take me in hand and ensure that I spent all my leisure time practising scales and partaking in other improving activities. I just don’t have the self-discipline to do it myself. But, the truth is there is no short cut, if you want to get better at something, you have to put the time in. As my husband helpfully said to me the other day: “if it was easy, I’d be doing it”.

Back to square two or three

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The point of this blog was partly to keep me playing the viola. “If I don’t practise I’ve got nothing to write about…” I said, possibly a little complacently. So that explains my recent cyber silence: a combination of work, travel, Christmas and the preparations for it, has meant very little practice over the past couple of weeks. I picked my viola up again the other day and really felt the difference (not in a good way). Tricky bars that I’d practiced for ages, and more or less mastered, felt completely foreign to my fingers again.

Before the relapse I felt I’d turned a corner, my bowing had improved, I’d attached a new chinrest and felt the benefit, and everything has started to sound a bit better. So I feel as if I’ve taken several steps backwards. It hasn’t taken  me right back to where I started in September though, which is relief – I covered a lot of ground in an hour of practice. But keeping it up feels impossible at this time of year with lots of family visits, no childcare and no routine. Happily, the season of new starts is almost upon us. In what’s left of 2011 I’ll be trying to come up with a practice (and blog) schedule for next year that I have some hope of sticking to. Bring on 2012.

 

Playing along to a CD (not as easy as it sounds)

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Practising can be quite a lonely and, dare I say it, tedious business at times. Particularly if you’re doing it right i.e. not just playing the bits you like and can play, but repeating the devilishly difficult bars ad nauseum until they start to sound better. To shake things up a bit I tried playing along to one of those accompaniment CDs (I bought a book that came with one a few weeks ago but have only just had a chance to test drive it).

Practically speaking, it’s quite a tricky: there’s very little pause before or after each track so after you’ve selected the backing track you want and pressed play there’s a mad dash to put down the remote control, pick up the viola and bow and then catch up the two or three bars that you’ve already missed. I tried a number of different approaches e.g. having my viola in place, remote control in same hand as bow, pressing play and flinging the remote across the room as I started to play. Not ideal though.

In the end I gave up trying to have any say in what piece I played, started the CD at the beginning and treated it as a series of diverse sight-reading exercises, with accompaniment. I hurtled through a hornpipe and a couple of reels, a poignant Bosnian ‘Hero’s Farewell’, a few bluegrass tunes, then some Hungarian numbers, and finished off with some Christmas carols and a traditional Jewish dance – quite a revelation.

It was good fun, which is the main thing, and playing in a variety of styles feels like a healthy thing to do, musically speaking. Also, playing along with a CD makes it painfully obvious if you’re either out of tune or not keeping time, and, it’s occasionally quite nice not just to hear the sound of your own playing echoing round the room.

It’s been pointed out to me that you can achieve the same effect by playing along to YouTube – particularly useful if you’re learning an orchestral part.

How and why to join an orchestra

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Playing for and with other people is ultimately what learning an instrument is all about. What’s the point of spending hours practising a piece if you are the only person to hear it? And you really don’t have to have been learning for very long before it’s possible to play in a group.

There are masses of good reasons to join an orchestra or ensemble, but here are the ones that stand out for me:
- It exposes you to music that you might not otherwise play (or listen to).
- You get to know that music inside out – to this day, my favourite pieces of music tend to be ones that I learnt as a teenager for orchestra concerts (or sang as part of a choir) and that now feel like old friends
- It forces you to practise regularly: you’ll want to be able to play your part competently, particularly when the conductor says “there’s something not quite right in the viola section, please could you play that section on your own”. If, as in my orchestra, there are only three of you, there’s really nowhere to hide.
- You’ll meet new people: all orchestras involve a degree of socialising whether it’s over tea and cake during the break or at the pub after rehearsals.
- Then there’s the thrill of performing at the end of it all. I haven’t done that for well over a decade but I’m pretty sure that when the time comes I’ll enjoy it again.
- You can walk around town with your instrument and pretend to be a real musician.

Once you’ve made up your mind, UK Amateur Orchestras is a great place to start (provided you’re in the UK obviously), it lists all manner of non-professional orchestras, bands etc, catering for everyone from beginners to semi-professionals. There are dozens in London alone and, to my great relief, plenty of them don’t audition, you’re just invited to attend a rehearsal and see how you get on. And that is what I did last week, albeit with some trepidation because it’s been a long time, and I wasn’t sure my sight-reading was up to the job. I needn’t have worried, I was not alone in struggling with some of the music… and it was fun and challenging, and everyone was very friendly. So that’s it, there’s a small sub to pay and then I shall officially be a member of an orchestra.

 

How much should you practise?

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If you really want to improve, that is. I put this question to my viola teacher whose response was “whatever you can manage” and then, when pressed, “ideally, an hour a day”. A bit daunted, I sought solace on one of my favourite sites, Pay the Piper, but it told me more or less the same thing: 15 minutes ‘well-organised’ practice per day for every two grades of progress (so 15 minutes for grades 1-2, 30 minutes for grades 3-4 etc). I wouldn’t know what grade I’m at now, but based on the fact that the last music exam I took was grade 7, I ought to be doing about an hour a day at least 6 days a week.

At the risk of sounding a bit whiny (and obvious), it is incredibly hard to find an hour a day to practise once you’ve factored in small children, work, washing, cooking, the occasional bit of socialising, not to mention the mundane business of eating and sleeping. (There is also the small matter of blogging to fit into the equation, which explains why I’ve been a bit quiet these past few days).

I haven’t been keeping track of my practice time so far but will tot up the minutes/hours this week – and it’ll be interesting to see how far I fall short. In the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions for how I might squeeze an extra hour or three out of each week I’d be most grateful.

It may be dispiriting but it’s good for your brain

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At the time, I thought I was fairly realistic about what it would be like to start playing the viola again. But, looking back, I was mostly skipping mentally to the part when I could play fluently and melodically. I imagined myself welcomed into the bosom of a friendly, enthusiastic string quartet. What I didn’t think about was how long I would spend being quite bad at something; lonely hours of practise making the same mistakes 20 times in a row before finally getting it right.

It’s the same with most things you take up as an adult. There’s often a gaping chasm between the aspiration and the reality. You take up running and dream of cutting lithely through the air, people cheering you in a race; you anticipate your newly toned physique and increased energy levels. You don’t think about the days when you will drag your carcass around a field for 20 minutes with a stitch, and feel utterly shattered afterwards.

Apparently this is as it should be, the official term is ‘creative visualisation’ and it’s what motivates us to succeed. But, it does mean that when the dreary reality of 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration hits home, you have to be very dedicated to stick with it. And it’s all rather humbling: as a child you’re used to getting it wrong a lot, it’s accepted that you haven’t yet learnt how to do most things properly; but once you reach adulthood, you tend to stick to activities that you know you can do competently.

Daunting as it feels to step outside the comfort zone, it’s reassuring to know that it is actually good for our brains (and probably our souls too, but that’s another post). The view used to be that our cognitive powers peaked in our mid-twenties but then we learnt of neuroplasticity – the ability of the adult brain to rewire itself, changing its physical structure and function through experience, thought and behaviour. So, we have the power to change our own brains by learning a new skill – something to bear in mind when you’re starting to feel you’ve had enough of your own faltering playing.