The Sound of Seven

A car dealership is not the type of place one would expect to find musical inspiration.  A few years ago I was sitting on a cold pleather sofa trying to pass the time while my car was in the shop.  It was early in the morning and the lobby was painfully quiet.  My phone battery was low, and there seemed to be no other form of distraction nearby. 

In a rare moment of clarity, I decided to try a listening exercise I had read about in a book a few days earlier:  spending ten minutes writing down every sound I could hear.  At first I thought I would run out of sounds in the first thirty seconds.  I noted the intermittent hum of the beverage machine, the squeak of an office chair in another room, and the vacuous sound of my own boredom.  Another minute passed and my ears sharpened.  I heard the playful chatter of some sparrows in the shrub outside the window, the dress-shoe-clad footsteps of a man walking down a back hallway, and the hurried traffic in the distance.  Soon I couldn’t keep up with all of the sounds around me, so I began to focus on the details of each sound.  I noticed subtle pitch changes as the vending machine cooler woke up or went back to rest.  There was even a noticeable difference between the way the chair squeaked when the desk clerk moved to the left and the way it squeaked when he moved to the right. 

Around this time, I heard a man come in from the shop and pick up the phone to call a customer.  His tone was rhythmic and pointed, conveying his confidence in his findings.  Then his voice changed ever so slightly.  There was a small hitch in the regularity of his rhythm along with a softening of his tone and a rise in pitch.  He was telling the customer how much the repairs were going to cost.  I wondered if the person on the other end of the phone realized how much the repair man disliked this part of his job.

A few days later I was listening back to a practice session I had recorded on my phone.  As my ears focused in, I realized that I could hear exactly how I was feeling about each passage.  (This was to my own horror: My audience should hear the excitement and joy of the music, not my concern with clean articulation!)  I wondered what else had been audible over the years.  With narcissistic curiosity, I listened back to several of my old recordings.  Sure enough, I could hear a range of experiences in my playing from how I felt about a collaborator to how insecure I was about a given technique.  It wasn’t all negative though.  In that experience I heard something I had never really heard before: I heard myself.

I began to wonder, at what point does one’s personality become audible?  Is it at a certain age? Does it happen at a certain level of proficiency? Or is it always there?  At the time, my youngest flute student was a seven year-old boy who had been playing for about six months. (He was very bright and also studied piano.  According to him, piano was much easier.  He was playing a con-cert-o)  He was playing his way through one of his melodies and I was listening to make sure he had the right rhythm and tongued at the right time.  He was trying not to breathe after every note.  I began to listen differently just for a few moments.  What did HE sound like?  Then I heard it: he sounded utterly unselfconscious, joyous, and innocent.  He sounded seven!

Musicians and critics will never agree on how much of a performer’s personality “should” come through, especially within classical music circles.  However, I believe now that the essence of a performer is always there, whether they intend it or not.  The best performers are those who learn to be present in the moment so that their intention and the musical intention are one; their feelings and life experiences fuse with those of the composer to create something unique in that moment.  As performers and as teachers of performers, we work to overcome our difficulties and insecurities so that they do not compete with the music.  How can we hope to address these things in ourselves or our students unless we are willing to listen deeply?  It isn’t easy.  Much of what we project in our playing isn’t musically appropriate, and the sound of a student struggling through a passage isn’t pleasant!  Yet when I think about the way my student sounded that day, I can’t tell you if the sound of seven was appropriate, but I can tell you that it was beautiful. 

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2015 edition of the Texas Flute Society Newsletter.

The Seinfeld Approach to Practice

Shortly after finishing graduate school, I found myself struggling with a case of “gig face.” This is that condition that arises when you are playing all the time, so you aren’t out of shape, but you aren’t practicing enough to maintain the upper levels of your skill set. The question became, how do I motivate myself to get better when the work I am doing only requires a fraction of my current ability?

Around that time I read an article on lifehacker.com about comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s secret to productivity.  His advice was simple: to become a better writer, you have to write every day. You can find similar advice from various creative disciplines. Of course, not every day that you write, or practice, or paint is going to be productive, but if you commit to it every day you will increase the odds of having those inspired moments.  Many of us know this, but the difficulty is in finding the motivation to practice EVERY SINGLE DAY.  Seinfeld’s solution was to get a calendar and put a big X over each day that he wrote.  After a few days, you have a chain and your entire focus becomes “don’t break the chain.”  The benefit of this is that the larger the chain grows, the more you are motivated to continue. 

The first time I embarked on this type of challenge, I laid out some simple rules. I had to practice for at least five minutes a day and rehearsals and performances didn’t count.  I made a pact with myself that if after five minutes, I still didn’t want to practice, I could stop. The goal of these rules was to make the challenge seem so easy that I wouldn’t procrastinate. After all, anyone can manage five minutes of something!  Pretty soon I had built up a 30-day practice streak. The motivation became easier because I knew it would take 30 days to get the same streak back. I also noticed that my musician friends became inspired to join me. By the time I chose to end my chain, I had practiced more than 150 days in a row. 

This summer, some of my friends and I decided to challenge ourselves and publicly tweet our daily practice. As our summer practice challenge draws to a close, I found myself reflecting on some of the lessons I have learned:

Getting started is the hardest part. 

With few exceptions, I did not want to stop practicing after five minutes. I genuinely love playing my flute, and once I got started, I did not want to stop. The caveat that I could stop after five minutes if I wanted to was mostly psychological. If you have a busy day it is easy to think “I am too tired to practice for two hours, so I guess I will just skip it,” but five minutes is manageable. Of course on the days I was sick or only had five minutes available, I did stop, and I did not feel guilty about it.

Excuses Evaporated.

Once I was truly motivated to practice every day, the majority of my excuses vanished. Earlier in the summer, I attended the wedding of two close friends. The day of the wedding, I had planned to practice beforehand so I wouldn’t have to worry about it after the celebration. As weddings often go, my friends ran into some last minute emergencies and I stepped in to help. Somewhere into the cake and coffee, I realized that I was in danger of losing the challenge and publicly admitting I missed a day. When we returned to the hotel, I asked the front desk clerk if I could practice in their conference room since it was so late.  She told me that musicians did that all the time and to go ahead. My friends thought I was crazy, but I did not lose my practice streak that night. If I am being honest with myself, almost every excuse I ever made not to practice was just that: an excuse. 

Efficiency.

One of the comments I have received from my friends in the practice challenge is that they are surprised at how much of a difference five or ten minutes makes. When I was younger, I focused on the number of hours I practiced, even though much of that time was not productive. On days where I only have a limited amount of practice time, I have to be careful how I use that time. Next time you are working on something, ask yourself how you might practice if you only had five minutes. What if you only had one minute?  The answers can be telling.

Rest Matters. 

Just a few days ago, I was in rehearsal with a friend of mine who has been taking the practice challenge with me. He sounded great, as though he had been practicing all summer. I, on the other hand, sounded worse. I mentioned my frustration with myself, and he said, “Of course, you have been working yourself to the bone lately.” It is true. In addition to practicing, I have been engaged in a lot of physical activity outside of the practice room. My body was tired and it was audible. With the challenge drawing to a close in a few days, I don’t think I will take a day off until then. However, if I do another challenge in the future, I will add planned days off.  The things is, when you practice every day, the days you really should take a break become distinguishable from the days you just don’t feel like practicing.  

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2015 Edition of the Texas Flute Society Newsletter.