Last week we explored some ways to bring creativity into your practice routine. As a review, my are my Magnificent Seven:

7 Practices for Creative Practicing

1. Take on Big Problems
2. Keep Track of Your Time
3. Turn Your Music into Exercises
4. Turn Your Exercises into Music
5. Practice Multi-Modally
6. Record Yourself for Instant Feedback.
7. Be Curious

Two big ideas this week:

I. Creativity

Practicing “creatively” is not about alleviating boredom in the practice room. It’s about being proactive, inquisitive, investigatory. These habits help you hone your mental representations and make your musical learning more durable and effective. When I say creative, I’m referring to thinking creatively. Articulating issues, brainstorming solutions, and testing those ideas quickly. These are the essential principles of Design Thinking, and they serve us well in the practice room.

II. Learning is Hard

You’ll note I’m not being very specific in terms of my exercises and practice techniques. I will be! But, part of our development of musicians is to learn to diagnose and address our learning issues honestly and accurately. While I love offering tips and tricks, examples and other lists of possibilities, what you really need to learn while studying music is how to learn.

No exercise can help a performer who doesn’t know how to use it. Real learning requires perception, intrinsic motivation, thoughtfulness. You won’t learn those habits through rote memorization or following a flow chart.

This week’s example is a wonderful demonstration of “creativity:”

5. Practice Multi-Modally

By getting to know your repertoire from a different angle, you develop a more nuanced and durable representation, which reduces performance anxiety. There are MANY ways to do this.

A quick idea: think in terms of axes.

Horizontal

If a passage is moving primarily horizontally, practice it vertically. Likewise, if you are addressing musical material consists of vertical sonorities, practice them as horizontal passages to hear the inner voices.

Here’s a passage from “Fleet,” the second movement of Jacob Druckman’s Reflections on the Nature of Water:

The music here seems to undulate and flow horizontally. The said, the primary musical idea is harmonic, not melodic. The graceful voice leading helps the music flow and ebb, setting the stage for the sfz notes to come. Although the primary technical challenge is a 4-3-1-2 permutation, It’s not a great use of one’s time to hover unnecessarily over the evenness of the 32nd notes. In fact, the timing of the smallest notes is a powerful interpretive tool. Here, I recommend practicing each group of 4 32nd notes as a single block chord. This practice allows us to hear Druckman’s voice leading more clearly. It also allows us to hone in on the real difficulty in this passage: moving between positions. All of a sudden, the double lateral strokes are not such a big problem…

Working this way accomplishes three more goals.

1. These practices provide a built-in analysis as you develop your own exercises.
2. You are hearing different elements of he piece as you practice, solidifying your mental representation of how the passage can (and later, should, sound).
3. At the same time, practicing multi-modally develops memory.

Musicians tend to activate three types of memory in performance: visual, aural, and kinetic. Percussionists tend to rely on kinetic memory, leading to some nasty surprises if something sounds or looks different in a performance than a practice session.

If you think you know a piece, try testing your aural memory and singing it or playing it on a different instrument. Or, test your visual memory by ‘looking’ your way through a piece.

Cheat Sheets

Another “mode” to incorporate is the type of memory used in a passage. When we perform, we tend to activate three types of memory:

1. Visual. What does the passage look like?
2. Sonic: What does the passage sound like?
3. Kinetic: What does it feel like to perform this passage?

Together, these three “memories” are a significant part of our mental representations. Over-reliance on one can lead to disaster in performance.

I like to work on blending and testing these three memories by making cheat sheets for repertoire I’m learning.

Here’s a cheat sheet a made for a movement of Robert Honstein’s Down Down Baby, for two performers on a single cello.

And here’s a cheat sheet I made for Han Lash’s Start, for solo snare drum:

• Structure
  • Making the cheat sheet forced me to think about how the music was structured, to look for self-similar sections and think about how they are represented, to conceptualize the music from a different point of view. Isn’t that analysis?
• Kinetic
  • At the same time, writing something down which represents a number of encoded physical actions is a powerful way to cement the kinetic memory needed to perform each of these works.
• Visualization
  • Reviewing the cheat sheets helps me to visualize myself in performance, which can alleviate performance anxiety.
  • Finally, having less to look at simplifies my visual pathway through a piece on stage, enabling me to look and listen more closely to my own sound and motions.

The cheat sheets accomplish precisely what the Druckman exercise did: they allow me to address the problem behind the problem. Yay!

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Next time: How to record yourself for instant feedback:

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