ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING

How does repetition in instrumental practice benefit our playing? Pedro de Alcantara provides tips on how to bring some creativity and intentionality into your practice time

GETTY

Every day we breathe in and out again and again, taking some 22,000 breaths. Every day we say thousands of words, giving a steady workout to jaw, lips, tongue, vocal cords and diaphragm, and also to the creative mind that comes up with the words and organises them in meaningful ways. Every day we walk here and there, and without thinking much about it, we can easily accumulate 10,000 steps or more in an afternoon’s outing. In other words, repetition is essential to life.

And if repetition is essential, so is repetitive practice. We see that in the dog playing fetch, the child digging a hole in a sandbox, the cook peeling potatoes, the weaver making a basket, the runner training for a marathon… and the musician at work in the practice room. Five concepts will help you practise repetitions (whether for ten minutes or for an hour or for three hours) without harming yourself. Intentionality is the main thing.

FIVE CONCEPTS

Choice-making Our daily lives are like an immense garden criss-crossed with forking paths. Every few steps we come to a fork where we must make a choice – between left or right, between getting out of bed or lingering under the duvet, between coffee and tea, between a white shirt or a patterned one… We keep making choice after choice, sometimes not even noticing that we’re making so many choices. It’s a natural and inevitable process.

Repetitive instrumental practice is interesting territory in which to exercise your choice-making intelligence. Are you hurting? You can choose to stop or go on. Are you bored? You can choose to stop or go on. Let’s suppose that after four minutes of repetitive practice you’re beginning to get stiff around the neck and shoulders. You can choose to acknowledge the pain or ignore it; you can choose to stop or go on; you can become an amateur physiotherapist or an amateur psychologist, looking for balms even as you keep playing. Elbows higher, elbows lower; sit still, move about; nod your head with every sforzando, leave your head out of the sforzando business; louder, softer, faster, slower. When you weave your choices constructively, repetitive practice doesn’t have to hurt at all.

Essential for a dog’s well-being, playing fetch is a form of repetitive practice comparable to our practising an instrument

DOG PHOTO GETTY

A decision tree such as this symbolises the intelligent choices we make and the paths we take

Creative control Your body is like a multipart structure strung with a thousand little lights, each hovering above a point of latent resistance and latent mobility – that is, a point that you can either hold or move. Your attentiveness and intentionality keep every little light on, putting the thousand points of resistance and mobility under your creative control. If a thousand points work together, no single point has to work hard at all. Let’s put it this way: ‘I’m here, now. I can play and practise. I can make choices – and what needs to hold will hold, what needs to move will move.’

Attentive gradation In my youth, I heard the Cuban-American pianist Jorge Bolet (1914–90) play a recital of works by Liszt and Beethoven. At some point he played a passage with a gradual crescendo that, in my memory, lasted two minutes. I’ll never forget it. More recently, I heard another pianist, highly trained and professionally successful, play a recital in which she seemed to employ two dynamics: a fluffy piano-pianissimo and a harsh fortefortissimo. There was nothing in between the extremes. She wasn’t attentive to gradations, and I wasn’t sure if this was a conscious choice of hers or the result of a handicapping inability.

Repetitive practice is the perfect context in which to explore gradations. Choose a passage that isn’t difficult to play, freeing you from technical worries. Concentrate on making small changes in dynamics, bow grips, points of contact, height of elbows and wrists, tempo, articulation and so on. Start combining these changes and you’ll quickly see that you have infinite combinations at your disposal. In repetitive practice, you can play the same phrase a hundred times and never play it in exactly the same way twice.

Actor – receptor – witness Three characters or forces live inside you, as dimensions of your personality: the actor, the receptor and the witness. The actor makes decisions and carries them out. In other words, the actor is a doer. The receptor has sensations and emotions, both of which can be called feelings. Sounds, textures, tastes, warmth and cold, movement and stillness, contraction and release: it’s the receptor in you who gathers these sensations and enjoys or doesn’t enjoy them. The witness observes, analyses, describes and synthetises information without entering into moral judgements. Imagine that you are rushed to accident and emergency with a bleeding gash on your thigh and the doctor there takes one look at it and says, ‘Ugh, how grotesque! I could puke!’ This is the receptor reacting and speaking. ‘The wound is about half a centimetre deep. It doesn’t seem to be infected. It needs stitching.’ This is the witness reacting and speaking.

The actor, the receptor and the witness are equally important. The difficulty lies in getting them to collaborate in a constructive give-and-take. The actor might get involved in doing, in struggling, in moving: more, more, more, nonstop! The receptor easily overwhelms the actor with too many sensations and emotions. And the witness can prevent the actor and receptor from jumping into the pool, observing it, describing it and listing the possible risks associated with it: ‘The water may be unsanitary. Another swimmer might elbow you in the nose. You may drown. These dangers are small, but they exist.’ And your actor and receptor now refuse to get wet.

Repetitive practice becomes the arena in which the actor, the receptor and the witness engage in a constant dialogue.

The inner actor, receptor and witness are engaged in a constant dialogue

VIOLINIST PHOTO ELMA AQUINO. SIGNPOST IMAGE GETTY

A CLEAR LINGUISTIC IMPULSE DOES SOME OF THE TECHNICAL WORK FOR YOU, ALLOWING YOU TO PLAY SMOOTHLY AND WITH LESS PHYSICAL EFFORT

While you repeat a musical gesture on a loop, the three functions learn to talk to one another, doing their homework as a team. The actor makes a choice and plays the note or the phrase. Feeling and listening, the receptor reacts constantly with pleasure or displeasure. The witness analyses the situation and proposes a dispassionate overview. This goes on more or less at the same time, and more or less continuously.

Let’s suppose you play a note that for some reason you dislike – or, rather, that your receptor dislikes: ‘Horrible scratchy sound. Waste of time. I could puke!’ Then the actor responds to the receptor and tries harder, harder, harder. Now backtrack to that note your receptor disliked so much. Let the witness speak instead: ‘My mind wandered and I rushed the shift.’ And the actor plays again, with renewed attention and care.

A linguistic impulse Playing can come from a series of technical and mechanical decisions: lower your elbow, pull the bow across the string, slow down at the tip. Or it can come from a series of linguistic or conversational decisions: say this, exclaim that, argue, affirm, ask, answer. Ideally, these two dimensions work together. A clear linguistic impulse does some of the technical work for you, allowing you to play smoothly and with less physical effort.

You’ve worked through these five concepts and are now ready for repetitive practice. What to repeat, again and again? Here are some suggestions.

WHAT TO REPEAT

Silent gestures It’s useful to practise silent gestures. Put the violin up in playing position, take it down. Repeat! Hold the bow in your hand, bring it to the string, don’t play, bring the bow down to where it began. Repeat! Tighten the bow hair, loosen it. Repeat! Playful repetition of these preparatory gestures might give you a renewed sense of how you handle your instrument and how you handle yourself at the instrument.

Open strings These are the most wonderful things in the whole world. We might liken the sustained open string to a foghorn in a distant bay or the drone of a tanpura in classical Indian music: a mysterious sound that transports us to remote regions where everything is mysterious and beautiful. The fundamental and its overtones, the feeling of contact with the string, the vibrations propagating from you and through you, the implicit promise of consonance and dissonance, the incredible Tartini tones of two open strings tuned in just intonation and played together: it’s an infinite sonic world with inextinguishable riches. You could just play an open string back and forth, forever and ever. Or you could invent improvisations and compositions involving multiple open strings, singly and together, with a variety of tempos and time signatures. Or you can sustain an open string and use it as a drone, above or below which you sing a melody of your own invention.

WE MIGHT LIKEN THE SUSTAINED OPEN STRING TO A FOGHORN IN A DISTANT BAY OR THE DRONE OF A TANPURA IN INDIAN CLASSICAL MUSIC

Natural harmonics These are the lovely children of open strings. Your task is to play (again and again) the first eight natural harmonics of an open string, choosing nodes that get closer and closer to the bridge as you go up the harmonic series, then going down again (figure 1). Remember that the open string, which in this context we can also call a fundamental, is also the first harmonic of the series.

While playing these harmonics, you’ll need to keep track of pitches, numbers, intervals in a sequence, the geography of the fingerboard, bow placement, hand positions and much else besides. When everything coalesces into an integrated whole, the repeated practice of the harmonic series elevates your playing to a new level of sensitivity and intelligence (figure 2, page 42).

FIGURE 1 These are the first eight natural harmonics on the cello C string, the corresponding figures below showing which part of the string you’re playing on (halfway point; two-thirds of the way up; three-quarters of the way up and so on) to achieve each one

FIGURE 2 This is a suggested exercise for repetitive practice of harmonics on the lowest string of the violin, the viola, the cello and the double bass

FIGURE 3 Bach Sonata in G minor for solo violin BWV1001: the opening passage from the first movement, preceded by the bass-line or germinating seed on which it is built

A musical unit Pick a small, self-contained musical unit: two arpeggiated chords, for instance, such as tonic and dominant; or four notes of a bass-line: G–A–D–G. Put the metronome on, and repeat your chosen gesture with the feeling that you’re spinning an ostinato – which is a basic germinating seed for compositions across multiple types of music.

Let’s suppose that you’re a violinist practising the bass-line G–A–D–G many times in a row. Once the bass-line has imprinted itself reliably in your innermost self, play the beginning of the first movement of Bach’s Sonata in G minor BWV1001 (figure 3), which is a marvellous elaboration of this particular bass-line. The repetitive practice of its germinating seed will have given you the feeling that you’re the improviser and composer of Bach’s music.

Four-bar phrases The four-bar phrase is an archetype in music, a timeless pattern that manifests itself in thousands of works. Its rhythmic organisation invites dance and movement. In construction and length, a four-bar phrase simulates many types of spoken sentences. Its meaning can be selfcontained and easy to understand, digest and memorise.

Your normal repertoire has a tremendous number of four-bar phrases that would be interesting to play repeatedly. As an illustration, let’s look at the Gigue from Bach’s Cello Suite in D minor BWV1008 (figure 4). Its opening 16 bars are easily broken up into four units of four bars. Begin by noting their layout in the ordinary manner, after which they can be viewed in a sort of linguistic layout that shows each set of four bars as a self-contained unit, similar to verses in a poem’s stanza. Finally, isolate the first of these verses and put it on a loop, exploring gradations of dynamics, articulation and inflection. The same can be done with each verse in turn. This is similar to learning a poem by heart, knowing it so well and speaking it with such depth and clarity that you feel that you wrote the poem yourself. The poem, and in this case the composition, becomes truly embodied.

Boredom, frustration, anger, judgement, punishment; or curiosity, discovery, joy, gratitude, wonderment. We know that two musicians, two music students or two children engaging in exactly the same procedure might react very differently to it. It’s tempting to assign the emotion to the procedure itself, rather than to your response: ‘Repetitive practice is wonderful!’ or, ‘Repetitive practice is horrible!’ And yet, the wonderfulness and the horribleness really live inside you, not in the procedure. It’s an amazing thing to sense that your emotions and thoughts are the godparents, as it were, of the procedure. And it’s even more amazing to make the shift one day from horrible to wonderful, thanks to a change inside yourself. I’m not saying it’s easy to initiate or accomplish such a change, only that it’s possible.

FIGURE 4 Bach Cello Suite no.2 in D minor, Gigue, bars 1–16: a) as in the score, b) in a format akin to a poem and c) the first ‘verse’ of an exercise for repetitive practice

From head to toe, a thousand points of resistance and mobility are at your disposal. You make choice after choice, navigating the entire range of gradations. Actor, receptor and witness are friendly to one another, working together under your relaxed supervision. Every note you play is animated by a linguistic or conversational impulse. Body, mind, instrument and music are synced. Thanks to the integrative properties of repetitive practice, you’re alive and well. You’re the dog playing fetch, the child digging a hole, the weaver making a basket, Claude Monet dabbing at a canvas for hours on end. You’re the glorious open string, singing its harmonics morning, noon and night. There is no greater pleasure!