How To Practise an Instrument - or, How Not to Waste your Time

All musicians will agree that the most important part of learning to play an instrument is the time spent practising. Without practice, there is no improvement. The most effective pedagogical methods and studies have been established for many years. There may be occasional changes in fashion, or the effect of a particularly influential educator, but in general this is a constant. When you learn an instrument, there is a way mapped out for you which will take you seamlessly from beginner to virtuoso.

What has changed dramatically is our understanding of what makes effective, efficient practice. Keeping in mind the single-minded commitment that is required to learning an instrument and the number of hours involved, it would clearly be sensible to make full use of the up-to-date view on this, so that great chunks of valuable time are not simply wasted. The student may know what to practise, but may well have given insufficient thought to how.

The precious resource that we have which wasn't available to us twenty years ago, or even ten, is an understanding of how the brain participates in our practice efforts and it is this that can provide some  stunning insights, which once gleaned will change your attitude to practice in major ways. The second area that we can consider in relation to modern times is the question of motivation.

But first, what is the brain up to when we learn. It's a common understanding that as you learn a new skill the brain is forming new neural pathways, is growing. What we want is to ensure that those pathways are the ones that we want, the right-way-to-do-it pathways, rather than the-wrong-way-to-do-it ones.

If a neural pathway is unused for a period of time then the brain will remove it. If it is in regular use, then it will be reinforced until it becomes what we experience as instinctive. Clearly, we want to create and stregthen the wanted pathways and we want to eliminate the 'wrong' ones.

Two methods of practice that are exceptionally common - and I think you may well recognise them in your own routine - are as follows. In a passage of music, or a study, you make a mistake in a particular bar. It may be intonation, or a position shift, for example. One approach is to make the mistake, then go back to the beginning of the piece and try again. The second approach is to play the mistake, then fix it, then play on.

Both of these approaches are the cause of even more difficulty. When you play the bar in question correctly, the correct pathway is in operation. Great! But when you play it incorrectly, the wrong one is reinforced. If you can play correctly 50 per cent of the time, then the other 50 is maintaining exactly what you don't want. How can you deal with this? Mark the offending place in your music and treat this as a completely separate issue. You can play up to it; you can play after it. That's all. Now, examine the error to determine what is causing it and work out a way to play it correctly, then practise just that. If you practise it ten times, it should be correct every time. If not, go back and start again.

To play the passages that you are good at is productive, even if you have achieved your goal. This is because the 'good' pathway neural cells (synapses) will be consolidated. A layer of fat (myelin) will grow round the connective tissue (the axon) of the synapse. This layer is equivalent to insulation around an electrical wire. What you don't want is any consolidation of those 'bad' pathways.

Another no-no is to make adjustments while you play. The brain will create 'adjusting' neural pathways which if reinforced will be difficult to eliminate. Don't make adjustments as you play, but play an error the first time you notice it. As before, you can go back and work out what was wrong and how it can be fixed. Then fix it with repetitive correct practice. You'll have to judge when you are confident enough that you'll be able to play it correctly every time in the context of your piece and only then should it be reinserted into the whole. If you trust this process and see it through, you will be amazed at the results.

The brain has modes of assimilating what you practise. First, it needs time to assimilate what you are learning and it seems that a practise period of no longer than ten to fifteen minutes is appropriate. Any longer and the ability to learn takes a nosedive. After each short period, take a break for a few minutes. Go check your emails or update your calendar. And when you resume, move on to something different. I like to divide my practise material into warm-ups, scales, studies, pieces and spend ten minutes or so on each of these and not necessarily in the same order. If you focus on one thing for a long period of time, at the end of that period you may well feel that you have accomplished your goal. This feeling has a name - 'The Illusion of Mastery'! The problem is revealed when you come back to do it again tomorrow, when you may well have to start all over again. Short practise bursts with gaps and variety, to the contrary, allow the brain to assimilate properly.

The second mode of assimilation happens over a longer period of time and you'll know about this via the phenomenon whereby you come back to some music after a couple of weeks break and find you can play it well if not better than before.

Thirdly, another bang up-to-date research revelation has shown that micro breaks during practice enhance results. The study, which quantified this, demonstrates that during a micro break (about ten seconds or so - stop and stare into space!), the brain continues to reiterate the practice but at a much quicker rate.

Now we come to consider learning rhythm and timing. Your friend here is the metronome but probably not in the way that you are expecting. There is a part of the brain that fires off and learns rhythmic and timing skills called the 'Sensory Motor Loop' (SML). If you put a metronome on and play along with it, the SML is inactive, its not needed and does not develop. The question is, how to activate it and encourage it to learn?

First, you will need to develop the skill of playing along accurately with a metronome, no mean skill in itself. This ability is a requirement before you can develop a true sense of timing. The SML development can then be achieved with the following method: 1. Use the metronome as an off-beat.  2. Now use it to click every other beat.  3. Now set it to click on the downbeats only (first beat of each bar). 4. Then set it to click on the 2nd downbeat only... then the 3rd... then the 4th. You get the idea.

When the metronome is not clicking, your SML fires up and helps you along. Bingo! There is an app specially designed to set this up for you called TimeGuru.

Finally (for now!) we come to what is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of contemporary brain research and its relationship with learning. When you are practising, the active part of the brain grows by accommodating the new neural networks that are being formed and consolidated. Mental practice, that is, imagining all the details of a practice experience, has the same effect. Yes, your brain can grow by conducting a practice session as a mental process. The ramifications of this are enormous.

If physical practice is not possible - because you are injured, or because you are away from your practise room, for example - then you can sit very still and quiet, close your eyes and imagine your practice. This needs to be done in detail. Imagine the feel of the instrument the movement of your fingers, or the bow, the intervals spacing between you fingers, the movement in shifting position, the creation of dynamics and expression. Whatever you would do in a physical session can be worked through internally as mental practice. The result will be the same.

I come back now to the second consideration that I mentioned at the outset, that of motivation. I have known, and know, many musicians who have not realised their potential through lack of that valuable commodity. This consideration is relevant in the context of learning music in contemporary times, just as brain research is a modern phenomenon. Motivation, however, has to be considered as a lifestyle concern, rather than one of scientific research.

Hopefully, what I have covered in this short essay is itself food for motivation but much more is needed. I have no clear answers but will offer a couple of prospective suggestions. If you don't enjoy practice for its own sake then the only other real solution has to be by setting goals. Playing a musical instrument to a high standard is an aim where dreams will definitely come true if you decide that the hard work and graft involved will be worth it.

A busy lifestyle is an adversary that is not going away, but can be put in its place, or at least taken into account. For myself, listening to music, reading about music and stepping into genres off the beaten track all feed into my own motivation. Music is an infinite world, socially and culturally and has so much to offer that comes on the back of musicianship.

I've cited a bunch of the relevant sources below so that you know that I'm not just pulling this stuff out of thin air, and I am particularly indebted for these to the Canadian violist and educator, Molly Gabrien, whose series of Youtube videos, 'What Musicians Can Learn about Practicing from Modern Brain Research', distils her research and amplifies further what I have encapsulated here. Her videos, 'Mental Practice', are a revelation.

Abushanab, B. and Bishara, A.J. “Memory and Metacognition for Piano Melodies: Illusory Advantage of Fixed- over Random-Order Practice,” Memory and Cognition 41, no. 6 (2013): 928-937

Buch, E. R., Claudino, L., Quentin, R., Bönstrup, M., & Cohen, L. G. (2021). Consolidation of human skill linked to waking hippocampo-neocortical replay. Cell reports, 35(10), 109193

Lin, C-H.J., et al., “Brain-Behavior Correlates of Optimizing Learning Through Interleaved Practice,” NeuroImage 56 (2011): 1758-1772

Porter, J.M. and Saemi, E. “Moderately Skilled Learners Benefit by Practicing with Systematic Increases in Contextual Interference,” International Journal of Coaching Science 4, no. 2 (2010): 61-71

Rao, S.M., et al., (1997). “Distributed neural systems underlying the timing of movements.” The Journal of Neuroscience 17(14): 5528-5535

 Shea, J.B. and Morgan, R.L. “Contextual Interference Effects on the Acquisition, Retention, and Transfer of a Motor Skill,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory 5, no. 2 (1979): 179-187

Sonderstrom, N.C. and Bjork, R.A. “Learning Versus Performance: An Integrative Review,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 10 no. 2 (2015): 176-199

Walker, M.P., et al. "Practice with sleep makes perfect: sleep-dependent motor skill learning." Neuron 35 (2002): 205-211

Painting With Music

As a composer, I've developed some (to me!) interesting abilities, ideas and techniques. I'm beginning to know what I'm comfortable with and what is out of my comfort zone. Sweeping musical statements I can do but they don't come naturally. Harmonic progression I can do, but takes work. And the need to 'change key' to maintain interest is an unwanted compositional distraction. I have absorbed a whole variety of compositional facets: counterpoint, fugue, serialism, minimalism, form, phrasing, harmony, discord, sequence, repetition...  In addition, in working with groups of musicians, chamber strings, woodwind, brass, full orchestra, I've absorbed some ability to orchestrate, to choose an effective combinations of instruments for a given circumstance.

 The result that emerged is a liking for 'painting with music', by which I mean making brush strokes of short musical statements and joining them up within a context that frames them to make a whole. A brush stroke can be anything from a single note or chord to a run of semitones, from a random sequence of notes to a carefully constructed phrase, a piece of counterpoint, a scale.

 The first project using this newly-found musical canvas is a series of four meditations on haikus by Japanese masters and I chose one for each season. Here is Winter: https://youtu.be/GadT1gS5b2g
 

 The process is, first, to choose a subject and then to use that subject to suggest the atmosphere, the instrumentation and also to make some imaginative connections, for example, dividing the composition into three parts, one for each line of the music, or choosing an instrument for specific facets, like the flute for frost. These imaginative connections are somewhat arbitrary but make the music express its subject matter. Thereafter, it's a case of making those brush strokes and seeing - or rather listening to - what happens.

I apply as much theory about what could work as I can, particularly where harmony is concerned, also rhythmic phrasing, but then come endless repetitions of listening hard and making vital adjustmens to what sounds right. Somehow, the brain, which after all is the music-maker, recognises the right note and the wrong one as much for the composer as for the listener. Listen to Snow's Falling! and judge for yourself.

At its extreme, this painting-with-music can become a Jackson Pollock-esque creation of happenstance musical patterns ('stochastic' is the term used for random events, loved by experimental composers of the 1960s and 70s, John Cage springing to mind). But my method uses chance and design on the palette, alongside all the other musical colours.

Falling into this use of visual language to describe music is fascinating for a multitude of reasons.

It is difficult for a listener to cotton on to a new piece of music at the first listening, especially if it contains any challenges, but by suggesting or accompanying it with an image or images is a sure way of leading the listener in. Again, Snow's Falling! is an example, the simple image holds attention while the music plays on, weaving its detail into a coherent whole. We are used to background sound tracks creating atmosphere. Here, the opposite occurs, an image re-enforces the music's atmosphere.

 Even without the video, the haiku is enough, conjuring a strong image. These haikus are ideal subject matter as their essence is to take a particular subject, one we can all recognise from personal experience, and incorporate into it an awareness of the universal. It is a small hook and bait to catch a much greater truth.

The history of the visual arts has an equivalent in music and there are some clear equivalences that can be made in describing the development of either genre, Impressionism (Renoir, Monet/Debussy, Ravel), for example, or, in the case of my four seasons meditations, abstract expressionism, although, of course, all music is abstract.

This reminds me of a short book, Fear of Music, by David Stubbs, subtitled, 'Why people get Rothko but don't get Stockhausen'. Its thesis is that art galleries have no problem attracting audiences for abstract art, while music struggles to find an audience for contemporary music. Using this thread, the book follows the phases of 20th-century art together with those of music happening at the same time. Recommended!

If you would like to hear the other three haiku meditations, go to  www.billanderton.uk/compositions.html.

Message to Myself

The process of composing music, for me, is a game. Given one or two seed ideas, it then becomes a matter of copying and pasting, starting with something quite simple and then using this to build a piece that has enough twists and turns to become musically interesting and satisfying. It's a minimalist approach as the fragments that I copy and paste become repetitive and layered, perhaps distributed among the different instrument parts in overlapping ways. The game is to make it work as a whole. Even the most simple musical fragment can quickly become uncontrollably complex so, I suppose, the craft is in maintaining the simplicity while adding in the interest.

The history of modern art, from impressionism to contemporary abstractions, is particularly useful for inventing associations with musical ideas. The closest I can get to relating my copy-and-paste method with a visual form is that of the cut-out-and-pasted pictures made by Henri Matisse in his later years. His quite crude juxtapositions of colours and shapes, collaged together are often abstract, sometimes more figurative, sometimes somewhere in between.  Whatever, they are all expressions of an inner artistic force or experience.

I like having a title first.  That seed brings forth musical expression; sucks inner experience into the outside world to become the building blocks dropped into my computer software.  I had always thought of this particular composition process as simple and naive in a childish way - a child could have done it.  But I value composing like this as something not to move on from having learned how to do it, but on which to focus more, to value and to hone.  It makes inventing or purloining titles, then composing, a pleasure; not a chore. All I am doing is playing the game.

If you'd like to listen to one or two samples: billanderton.uk/compositions.html

Comedy Cuts

I wasn't back home quite as late as expected from the KOKO and the Bonzo's gig last Friday, but it was still pretty late, especially considering I had to be up for conducting our local orchestra first thing in the morning. The lack of sleep did not, to quote Wooster, make me exactly disgruntled in the morning but I was far from gruntled.  Worth it, though.

I described the venue in my last blog and I can add a little to this now. When you enter through the foyer of the KOKO, you find yourself not in the theatre pit but straight onto the upper balcony, a disorienting experience. In other words the stage is buried well below ground level. It's a proper 'Muppet' theatre with its rows of ornate boxes adorning the walls layered right up into the gods. The Bonzos were accompanied by their own version of Statler and Waldorf. At this gig the odd couple of disagreeable old men were more akin to a tribute act for the surrealist duo Gilbert and George, making their weird artistic comedy contributions throughout the show.

There is a long line of comedy acts leading to the Bonzos beginning in the days of old-time music hall and threading its way through to the Temperance Seven, the New Vaudeville Band and on to the Beatles pastiche band, the Rutles, created by Eric Idle and Neil Innes in the 1970s, who were supporting.

While driving home afterwards and reflecting on the great show I'd witnessed, I was reminded of a couple of acts whose memory is worth resurrecting. The first of these is Spike Jones (1911-1965) whose band of musicians were, like the Bonzos, highly skilled, unruly and rebellious but, perhaps unlike the Bonzos, were rehearsed down to the finest detail of comedy timing, the whole show being well supported by the USA TV networks. Spike's madcap musical comedy is well worth taking on board and you won't have heard Tchaikovsky like this before.

The other comic musician was a household celebrity still remembered by many but who may now not recall the reason for recognising his name. The Danish Victor Borge (1909-2000) achieved widespread fame in the USA and Europe as a classical pianist who single-handed took the pomposity and elitism of classical music and reduced it to tatters. Musical skill and comedy timing are used by Victor Borge as the blade that slashes at the classical bubble and boy does it let rip. He clearly provided inspiration for Morecambe and Wise's musical sketches, including the one with Andre Preview, and made his own notorious appearance on the infamous Muppet Show. But then which celebrity of any note didn't.