Practicing for artistic success: empowering the student with self-management skills in the practice room

American Music Teacher, Oct-Nov, 2004 by Burton Kaplan

Music is an intuitive art. Practicing is a conscious managerial skill. To practice effectively, you must be in touch with your intuitive artistic impulses and, at the same time, stand outside the process as a coach, making a series of conscious managerial decisions. Most musicians cannot coach their practice because they have never learned to micromanage it.

I think of the mind, which is central to management control, as a third hand. This conception is useful because the thought process must be timed as precisely as the left and right hands to create music using an instrument. The capacities of the mind--observing, evaluating, guessing, hypothesizing, planning, directing and feeling--are like the fingers of a third hand.

For an instrumentalist, one of the most important fingers of the third hand is imaging. Imaging involves visualizing routines in the "mind's eye" before performing them. Effective imaging causes improvement in the process being imaged without much physical practice.

For a musician, imaging includes more than visualizing. Besides visualizing the notes and the body playing the notes, you must feel the body moving and touching the instrument (kinesthetic imaging). You also must hear the sound (auditory imaging) and experience the musical expression (emotional imaging).

The imaging finger of the third hand controls instrumental performance. While your third hand is coordinating your playing, it also is managing your practice to acquire instrumental musical skill. The tool of imaging is an integral part of what I refer to as the Basic Work Process, which has four steps.

Step 1. The Technique of Observation: Identifying and Prioritizing Problems

To solve a problem, you must first notice it exists. To increase your control of a skill, you first must observe what is out of control to gather objective information about it.

Using the Pie Strategy (see below), you determine which of the four slices of the pie--tone, intonation, rhythm or expression--needs the most work. Armed with this knowledge, you proceed to Step 2.

Step 2. The Technique of Success at Any Cost: Setting an Achievable Goal and Finding a Strategy to Reach It

An achievable goal is not too hard (frustrating) and not too easy (boring), and it can be attained without physical strain within a short time.

Choose a strategy that enables you to make an improvement in a chosen "slice of the pie" quickly and without physical strain. As part of your effort to establish an achievable goal without strain, simplify the problem. When you achieve an improvement, say out loud, "Good job, --!" Then go to Step 3.

Step 3. The Technique of Intimacy: Stabilizing the New Success

At the first moment of success, your short-term memory is most in your control. It is at this moment, before your memory of the success fades, that you have a chance to increase the proportion of successes to failures. If you can change your percentage of success from 10 percent to 50 percent or better now, your last memories front today will favor your success tomorrow. This is more efficient than trying to achieve three, four or five successes in a row today.

Using the Technique of Intimacy requires you to keep track of the number of successes you achieve in ten tries each day. You will find that by day four you will achieve five for five or five for six. That is when you will have reflexive control. If you don't achieve five successes within ten tries on day one, you set a new, more achievable goal and begin the process again.

To get ready for a performance, try Step 4.

Step 4. The Technique of the First Try: Testing Performance Control

One major difficulty with performing is you perform at a prearranged time whether or not you feel like it. Another is you get only one try: you start once, you continue "come hell or high water," and it's over.

With the Technique of the First Try, you formalize your practice space to reflect these two performance realities. Play through a piece once each day at a time specified the day before. Once you start, do not stop playing no matter what the quality. Based on your observations of the play-through, decide what needs the most work. When you are proud of your performance four days in a row, you are ready to perform.

The techniques of the Basic Work Process form a powerful cornerstone to support technical and musical control in performance. Here, I have only been able to hint at the procedures involved. To find out more read nay book, Practicing for Artistic Success: The Musician's Guide to Self-Empowerment in the Practice Room and on Stage.

Burton Kaplan is professor of violin and viola at the Manhattan School Of Music and New York University. He also is director of Performance Power, an organization dedicated to teaching a system for harnessing and integrating the powers of mind, body and spirit in the practice room and on stage.