More Communal Singing Please

Karen Loew, writing in the Atlantic, laments the lack of communal singing from our culture: How Communal Singing Disappeared From American Life. I heartily agree. Loew suggests, "in these divided times as much as ever, we need to do some singing and feeling together, united as both citizens and amateurs."


As I read, I was reminded of Steven Mithen's book, The Singing Neanderthals. Mithen explores the origins of music and language, arguing that a holistic musical protolanguage actually preceded language as we now have it.

dancing or clawing?

I heard a little interview the other day with Steve Young, the Hall of Fame NFL quarterback. He was being asked about the potential problems on a team (the Jets) with two quarterbacks that fans may want to see play. Young is particularly able to speak to this since he began his career backing-up Joe Montana. In talking about his experience, he said something that of course for me connected with cello practice.


He said, "every great player...claws their way to it. nobody dances their way to it. It is a clawing against all odds, everybody is out to get you [mindset]." He also said that those players "fight for those reps. Nothing is given--everyday is a competition." He said that he was completely annoying in his back-up role, always asking the coach for more repetitions in practice, and pushing to get on the field.


Really effective practicers will identify with this. I think of really effective practice as practice that accomplishes a lot. Practice should be judged by how much better you get, nothing else. This kind of practice will be full of struggle and frustration. I don't mean that it is overwhelmingly difficult, and without any success, but that it is staying difficult enough that we are at the edge of our ability. There must be a strong motivation in order for us to put ourselves into this kind of place over and over. The great athletes like Young love to compete and that motivates the attitude toward practice he described. When a person really loves music, they have strong ideas about how it should sound. It is very bothersome when it doesn't sound that way, and they are frustrated by it. Then the clawing comes naturally, and the progress comes fast.

Stop Practice

I use and teach a practice strategy that I call "stop practice" that is terrifically effective for certain types of problems. This post will be my attempt to lay out the basic strategy as I use it, and I expect to write future posts elaborating on various more narrowly focused aspects of the strategy. Perhaps the most common example of a problem well-suited to Stop Practice would be executing a particular shift correctly, consistently, and with ease. Stop Practice can be applied, however, to any kind of problem where a specific transition can be identified as needing work.

I call this strategy "Stop Practice" because it involves playing up to the transition, stopping in order to think, then going on.

Arts Education=Civil Right?

This brief article (reprinted at the blog link below) by Anthony Brandt is fascinating. Brandt draws on one of my areas of high interest, brain science, to make a case for another interest of mine, arts education, as a civil rights issue. He makes a compelling argument. I have long felt that the developmental benefits of early arts education are so powerful as to make it in society's interest to invest in it for the public good. Taking it another step, to the level of a right is at least an idea worthy of provoking discussion.


See what you think:


It’s About Freedom of Thought: Why Arts Education is a Civil Rights Issue

Changing a Habit?

I've been working with an idea for my students for when they are trying to change a habit, such as a different bow hold (the example I'll be using). The problem with a habit is that once whatever you are playing is sufficiently hard, not only are you back to playing with the old habit, you aren't even able to notice it, and you can't correct anything you aren't aware of. In order to make the new habit, you need to correct the old one many, many times. So, as I've come to put it, in order to change a habit, your goal is to be able to 'notice while hard.'

How do we work on this?

Whole Body Awareness

Teaching groups this past weekend, I tried a riff on some ideas from Carey Beth Hockett. She's one of my favorites. She's big on using movement to discover freedom in body use. I chose five large muscle group movements to do while playing French Folk Song (one-at-a-time).


They were:


Body Bowing. This is essentially twisting the shoulders to move the bow while keeping the arm in one shape. It helps connect with back muscles, and has numerous implications.


Sinking and Floating. Collapsing the stomach and lower back, then 'floating' back to a tall posture. I love Carey Beth's terms here. I ask the students to keep the instrument in contact with the chest in the same place throughout. This means letting the knees be off the sides.


Rocking on the Sitz Bones. I also like "one buttock playing." This one is pretty self-explanatory. We rocked by the measure. Helps connect with the feet and feel the different coordinations of the lateral movements in the whole body with those of bowing. It is good to explore rocking in the same direction as the bow, in the opposite direction, and at a pace that requires variation.


Head Down, Head Up. Keeping the frame tall, drop the head forward from the base of the neck. Then let it fall back, looking straight up at the ceiling. Again, change each measure.


Feet Out, Feet Back. Reach feet out as far as possible, heels on the floor. Reach them as far back as possible behind the legs of the chair, toes on the floor.


So we played French Folk Song once doing each of these things. Then we played it switching with each phrase. I did it with three different groups. With the younger groups I didn't do much explaining, letting them just do it and feel some of the implications. With the older ones I suggested a bit more to ask them to be aware of. As I do these myself, I feel better playing and am more aware of my body as I continue playing.

Coaching

Recommending this excellent article, Personal Best by surgeon Atul Gawande (also included below).


Gawande writes about his experience with asking for coaching from another esteemed surgeon in order to try to improve his skills. My own experience in a teacher training program at the School for Strings was that the practicum was most valuable. It does indeed require humility to actively seek criticism, especially once one is accustomed to being the authority. On the other hand, if Tiger Woods continues to have a swing coach, and Renée Fleming a voice coach, shouldn't anyone who wants to keep improving?


I think this is the point. If we want to get better, not just be good, then we have to be willing to work on our weaknesses, and at a certain point we will not be able to see those areas or know what to do in order to keep improving without outside perspective. Uncomfortable? Yes, perhaps. Worth it? If the coach is good, definitely.

PERSONAL BEST

Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?

by Atul GawandeOCTOBER 3, 2011

No matter how well trained people are, few can sustain their best performance on their own. That’s where coaching comes in.

I’ve been a surgeon for eight years. For the past couple of them, my performance in the operating room has reached a plateau. I’d like to think it’s a good thing—I’ve arrived at my professional peak. But mainly it seems as if I’ve just stopped getting better.

During the first two or three years in practice, your skills seem to improve almost daily. It’s not about hand-eye coördination—you have that down halfway through your residency. As one of my professors once explained, doing surgery is no more physically difficult than writing in cursive. Surgical mastery is about familiarity and judgment. You learn the problems that can occur during a particular procedure or with a particular condition, and you learn how to either prevent or respond to those problems.

Tonalizations

I am fascinated by the Suzuki concept of the tonalization. It is for the string player what a vocalization is to a singer. So, one thing I expect to write about regularly is tone and tonalizations. Sometimes I use a tonalization to focus on a physical habit that leads to easier playing and better tone production. I heard a new one yesterday that I like, and figured I'd start with it. It comes from one of the most exciting cellists out there right now, Jean-Guihen Queyras. At a master class at the very exciting new Piatigorsky International Cello Festival he gave a warm-up that he called the "morning sofa exercise" which consists of dropping the bow onto the string at the frog with an enormous release like falling into a sofa at the end of a long day. Queyras recommends doing it 40 times. The number is especially curious to me, and I look forward to seeing if there is any new realization after that many as opposed to 25 or 12 or whatever.

a blog?

Why this blog?
I do like to write, and think it is an important part of getting better, but like everyone these days, it can be hard to make the time. If a few people read something I write and find it helpful for their teaching or playing, that would be great, but mostly I'm doing this because I think it will make me a better teacher. So since I think doing some writing is good, I thought I would put it out there in order to spur myself to do even more of it. We'll see where it goes!