I spent this past week coaching twenty-one of the United States’ most accomplished teen-aged classical musicians.
I could see the effects of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice—the impacts of highly specific activities, designed by expert teachers, to improve specific aspects of performance. According to psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, it’s these intense, sustained campaigns of deliberate practice (begun in childhood, and extended for 10 to 20 years) that account for much of what is typically thought of as innate “talent” (Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer, 1993).
All week, I was immersed in the effects of practice. I heard musicians struggle to make phrases longer; to hold riskier silences; to hold tension to better control its release. Watching musicians work to inhabit more personal statements, I felt re-connected to the best of what practice can bring about.
So why is it that I still have such a fraught relationship to practice?
For much of my life, practice was attached to achievement. (It was, literally, how I got to Carnegie Hall: an impressive feat for a girl of my time, place, and social class.) But when practice is attached to achievement alone, it risks becoming a form of tyranny: an imperative that demands compliance. This kind of practice can evince extraordinary gains, but without a moral mooring it becomes a kind of renegade technology.
Lately, I’ve been coming to understand the features of practice norms as reflective of white cultural supremacy—the idea that white people and their ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions are superior to People of Color and their ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions.
The website maintained by Dismantling Racism Works (dRworks) reflects the work of hundreds of activists, leaders, and community members. Among the many resources on the website is this taxonomy of the characteristics of white supremacy culture, and their antidotes (Okun, n.d.).
Among these, many ring true in my musical experience:
The standards and norms of classical music are universal: it is the “best” and “highest” form of music to which we can aspire. It follows that there are “better” and “best” ways to play my instrument, and I must aspire to master them.
Musicians personally earn their achievements though merit, talent and discipline alone. It follows that when I have failed to achieve something, I am personally to blame.
I have choices, and so does everyone else. If I practice it’s because I made the choice to practice. If I don’t practice, it’s because I’ve made that choice, too (and not because I was prevented from practice by grief, illness, or trauma; lack of time or space; lack of access to expert instruction; lack of role models; and so on).
More practice is better: practicing for six hours a day is better than four or two. More is better: more practice, more recordings, more gigs, more money, more likes, more audience members.
A player can be “better than” or “worse than” another, and to be “better than” others is to be more deserving of success.
There are other reasons why we might practice: for enjoyment, for connection and self-expression, for self-discovery, to have a fighting shot at saying what we mean, and what needs to be said. But none of that was expressed to me in my musical training. Instead, my teacher wrote a comment on my senior year jury like it was an epitaph:
She could have been a world-class musician, but lacked the necessary discipline.
Bulletproof Musicians
In the musical cultures to which I belong, practice is a virtue: an automatic good, a sign of good character, and the answer to nearly every question.
In the schools where I work, practice is a form of capital. It carries the promise of success in the form of audition and competition wins, and the promise of more perfect performances. And while “talent” is mysterious, and unevenly conferred, the general thinking is that practice is a matter of good character—in the form of willpower, focus, and discipline.
Growing up, I was enculturated into classical music’s set of norms about practice. We practice against weakness and vulnerability. We practice like we’re anxiously collecting skills. We won’t rest until we can tick off the patterns we can play in all twelve keys, the most complicated harmonic substitutions, the “bucket list” repertoire we’ve mastered. We practice like we’re Olympic athletes; as if there were an absolute metric of musical value like the fastest time or the farthest throw. We practice as the goal is to make our bodies dissolve and resolve on a new plane. We practice against mortality; obsolescence; insignificance.
We can read these norms in the various blogs, training programs, and coaching services that cater to musicians’ desires toward peak performance.
In his popular blog, The Bulletproof Musician, violinist-turned-psychologist Noa Kageyama parses evidence from positive psychology and sports psychology to help artists devise strategies to perform better, more consistently, under pressure. It’s a generous, evidence-based resource, to which I often refer to my students, even as I feel uneasy about the message implied by its title. (A good musician is impermeable, invulnerable to attack—a bulletproof musician. There’s a market in defensive armor for musicians: Kageyama’s Juilliard bio says his blog has more than 100,000 monthly readers.)
On a webpage for his coaching service, auditionhacker, Metropolitan Opera percussionist Rob Knopper summarizes what’s at stake:
A five minute audition could be worth five million dollars. Winning an orchestra job means a life in music. It means a salary and a career of musical fulfillment.
Knopper insists that “with the right work ethic and preparation methods” (and a one-time payment of $497 for his self-paced training program) “I truly think anyone can win an orchestra job like mine.”
Let’s disregard his unredeemable promise. And the dismal job satisfaction statistics for orchestral musicians. And the fact that a career as a symphony orchestra musician is, temporarily, off the table. A conception of practice that links better performance with professional success and personal fulfilment—livelihood, recognition, exceptionalism? Well, that’s a lot of baggage to put on practice.
Practice Tips for the Pandemic
It is an axiom that practice makes perfect, and perfect is good.
In a panel discussion at YoungArts this week, the younger musicians asked us, the instructors, about how we were managing productive practice during the pandemic. They wanted reassurance on the basic terms of the agreement. How best should I practice? How much should I practice? Am I doing enough? Am I doing alright? Is it okay to practice with everything else that’s going on?
One of my colleagues reminded us that we perform better when we chunk our learning in twenty minute sessions. Another said we function better when we have a break—he takes a full 24-hour break once a week. Another talked about active listening as a form of practice. Another talked about setting reasonable, achievable goals for your daily practice: not so high that you can’t reach it, but high enough that you feel a sense of accomplishment.
My answer was more complicated. I said, we practice in different ways, at different times, for different reasons. Sometimes we practice to get somewhere: all through high school I practiced to get out of Alberta. Sometimes we practice for a specific event. Sometimes we practice to meet a personal challenge. There are seasons to practice. There have been times in my life, like now, when I don’t practice at all.
Practice problems are thinking problems
I wanted to practice these past few months, but I haven’t. There have been a few days at time where I’ve maintained a little routine (the 24-beat bows that beloved Joey Corpus taught me in the few lessons I was fortunate enough to have with him; a left hand drill adapted from Dounis; a little Bach played slow, clean and true) but mainly I’ve faltered on the same old attraction-aversion faultline that’s marked the character of my practice for thirty years.
I’ve had few obvious barriers to practice these past ten months. My instrument was in the next room. I live alone; I work from home. I was overworked and pulled in too many directions, but I know well how to make meaningful progress in ten minutes a day. I know that practice can be like meditation: energizing and grounding. I know how it activates the wires to connect my intellect, emotions and muscles; how it ties my past back to my present and roots me solidly in my own story.
Many musical problems are really thinking problems. In order to fix my problems with practicing, I have to fix the way I think about practice.
In part, my reluctance comes from the pain of getting started after a long break. Summoning the will to begin again has not gotten easier as I get older. I’m more aware of the many ways in which I can fail. I’m less inclined to believe in a New Year’s resolution. I always doubt I’ll be able to regain what I left behind, and the longer I live, the greater the loss accrued; the more bitter-sad-sweet the knowledge that it was never a matter of my being good enough. That I was always good enough, just as I was.
Some of it is longing for the right relationship with the right teacher. Some of it is being ashamed to ask my colleagues in elite conservatories for a referral, for fear of revealing how far from the fold I’ve strayed.
There are triggers. I can’t believe I’m this old, starting at the same copies of Schradieck and Ševčík, with my name in my thirteen-year-old handwriting on the upper right hand corner, still battling the same battles.
It’s likely that my attraction-aversion to practice is symptomatic of unresolved trauma. When I made my biggest strides with practice—from ages fourteen to twenty-one—I signed a Faustian bargain. Practice powered a remarkable series of moves across unfathomable gaps in geography, culture, and social class. In exchange for access to the renegade technology and its supercharged spoils, I silently agreed that I was nothing, and were it not for practice, would return to worse than nothing.
(The supercharged spoils: they’re no joke. In one memorable stretch from December-February, age seventeen, I remember performing in Carnegie Hall on Christmas Eve, Pinchas Zukerman literally holding open the door to the hall for me with his coat slung over his shoulders like a cape; eating a sloppy hamburgers and ice cream sundaes on Columbus Avenue with Issac Stern’s son; crashing at Nigel Kennedy’s apartment during my Juilliard audition; toasting my success with champagne supplied by Nigel and the son of an English Prime Minister, and illegally entering the club Limelight—all of which made no sense whatsoever to anyone back home in Alberta of the 1980s, where my teacher had told my parents that I lacked the necessary talent to succeed. I practiced, and I thumbed my nose at him. Can you blame me?)
Practice, under such terms, is a powerful force. We often speak of the benefits that practice confers, but rarely acknowledge its harms. How it asks us to purge our bodies of vulnerability and unreliability; to admit our weakness and corruption; how it makes us vulnerable to the harmful actions of unscrupulous others. I certainly hope this is not the case for other musicians, but I know this to have been the case for me. I believed I was nothing without practice, but it was okay, because practice was in my hands. I had come so far, already.
The myth of personal responsibility
I’m not against practice. Technical mastery gives us a fighting chance at expressing our truth. The problems come when we confuse the pursuit of excellence with the promise of a narrow kind of success.
The problem with norms about musical practice is that they create the illusion that one’s worth as a musician—one’s successes or failures—is entirely up to the individual and their discipline. In reality, there are vast, invisible systems that determine one’s professional success or failure. We pretend that practice and merit can render irrelevant the host of factors, visible and invisible: those factors that grant you access, that dispose you favorably to opportunities, that reward your sense of ambition, that cushion your falls, that guide you into professional networks, that teach you how to “play the game,” that make you aware that there is such a thing as a “game” in the first place.
To suggest that a young musician can’t succeed because one lacks “talent” or “discipline” is akin to blaming the victim. It’s like when oil companies ask, “What are you willing to change to help reduce emissions?”
Putting success onto the aspiring musician takes responsibility off the machine and puts it on the shoulders of a child. If I’m honest, that’s where I feel myself to be when I struggle with practice.
The technology of practice—precision, control—can be used for better ends, but until now, I have not allowed myself to ask what those ends might be. Instead I’ve been locked in a continual cycle of discipline and punishment. It’s no surprise that, barring a few “comeback” campaigns where I practiced hard to meet an artistic or career challenge, I’ve never been able to sustain it. Now that I think about it, it’s unsurprising. Who would wish to stay in a place like that for very long?
Toward an Ethical Practice
I want to build a new relationship to my instrument. I want it to be a friendly, loving, curious relationship.
My viola holds a few grudges, but he’s open to it. He's family. (It’s the same instrument I bought when I was fourteen, with a $4000 Canada Savings Bond that my Grannie left to me when she died. I know the man who made my instrument: Joseph Curtin. He was a young man when he made this viola, and I feel like I hold something of his life in my hand when I hold the instrument.)
One of my main goals in starting this newsletter is to create a space where I can renegotiate my relationship to music. This coming week, I’m going to launch a new feature: a practice journal, where I will document my process in creating an ethical, harm-reduction approach to musical practice.
I write this with some trepidation, but I know it to be as important for me as it is for any of my students and friends to whom I repeat these words:
I know I need to make that sound. I need you to make your sound, too.
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Thank you, Tanya, for the clear language and shared reflection in this essay. I am so excited to have connected with your writing/thought here, and I look forward to the learning. I have particular resonance with your description of why we practice, and the deep-rooted hierarchies bound up in this seemingly basic (simple, fundamental) activity that we learn - I know I did - as a child (read - open, unfiltered) and carry into our adult lives and practice, often (as with many habits) unexamined. Reading you has quickly (re) connected me with my childhood and growing up as a musician. The timing could not be better, as this time period has unexpectedly afforded so much more time for reflection. And, perhaps, a reset on several levels.