Big Ears

When listening to music as a kid, I’d hum a different part of the song each time it was replayed. For instance, if the soundtrack from Rocky 4 came on, I’d hum the violin part on one play through, and then the electric guitar on the next. Without realizing it, I was practicing aural skills by listening for and identifying different instruments. It even got to the point where I even began humming echos or sound delays from vocals that I could hear. Purposefully training your ear to hear multiple instruments at once, or listening deeply to identify one instrument in a sea of sound, is extremely useful and necessary when performing with a group.

As a percussionist, I constantly find myself in a major role in regards to tempo: maintaining it, establishing it, guiding it to be slower or quicker. In one piece last season, my part was 90% repeated quarter notes while the orchestra had several type of offbeats. I had one job: MAINTAIN THE TEMPO. Pretty simple right? Well, yes but I couldn’t just play every note exactly the same. As a new section enters, I need to pay attention to how they are reacting to my downbeat. Are they directly with me, are they slightly behind, are they slightly ahead? Based on that, I have a decision to make: adjust to compensate, or stay where I am. If I have to adjust then I have to decide, by how much or how aggressively? I can’t just go on autopilot or take the tempo or groove for granted.

It’s definitely a skill that can be developed, and I feel that listening to different examples of this type of flexibility is essential to learning and becoming familiar with it. I often would try to sing along or even clap the tempo of the pieces I was listening, and really paid attention to whether or not the time was shifting. I’d listen over and over to a section that did shift in one way or another, and really tried to pinpoint by how much it changed and WHY it changed. Now, when a similar situation comes up when I play in any group, I know how to approach it. Even if that exact situation is something I’ve never been exposed to, knowing the variables as to who I need to listen to or support tells me enough to make a decision.

We as time keepers have an important job, that often is unnoticed, and for the most part, it should be. I’ve pumped the brakes on an orchestra so the strings could play a hard lick, and then brought the tempo back up, but I did it so nuanced, no one probably noticed…well except for the other drummer. It’s something we have to get comfortable and confident doing, because when the situation comes up, we sometimes are the only ones who can be helpful in a meaningful or audible way. It makes the entire group sound better and really strengthens your overall musicianship and sensitivity to the ensemble and musical moments in general.

New Eyes

"Your eyes deceive you, don't use them"-Star Wars

Something I remember as a child was my attempts to try things I saw on television, all good things thankfully. Like when I first got into wrestling and still thought it was real, I started working out profusely and got really big and muscular in a fairly short amount of time. It was really awesome knowing that I could actually have certain things I saw help me in real life, not just physically but mentally. A show like "Avatar the Last Airbender" has so many adult themes/coming of age themes, and I found it helpful for me to see kids go through what I was going through at that age, even though they were fictional. Long story short, any medium can be inspiring in the real world and I keep my eyes open for anything that helps. 

Star Wars has always been one of those series where people could quote scenes or even the entire movie verbatim. My dad loved the series and we would watch it often enough that I became obsessed myself, and every time I'd watch it, I would find something that I didn't notice before. The above quote is one of those things. As a percussionist, hand eye coordination is a big part of what we do, especially on keyboard instruments (pianists are in the same boat as well). Because of this, our reliance on our eyes for where things are in relation to where we are is something we develop very early on in our development. However, once we generally know where things are, do we really need to look anymore? The energy we spend on looking at the A natural, and then aiming for it, takes away from the reaction time. If we know where the A is, why look? Honestly, it's a comfort thing I think. 

Take snare drum for instance. It's only in one spot. Why look at it? Your sticks aren't gonna go over the edge. If anything, looking at the drum made me more nervous because I was trying to make sure things were exactly in one place and that I hit the drum correctly, instead of just dropping the sticks and using my sense of touch. They say, when one sense is gone, all the others are heightened, so I thought to myself, can I use that to my advantage? If Beethoven can make more beautiful music after he's lost his hearing, what can I do if I stop looking at what I'm playing? The obvious progression therefore was to practice in total darkness. At DePaul, there were a couple rooms where if you turned the lights out, it was pitch black. So I turned the lights out, and a couple things happened. 

The first thing is the feeling of darkness. Cold and spacious. Everything feels like it's farther than it really is, but also it feels like nothing is around, vacant and just chilly. A scale feels really contained when played like that, the space is magnified extremely (or minimized). The other thing was that I still had my eyes open, so I was looking at darkness. When you have your eyes closed you may still have a sense of light on the outside of the lids, or maybe not, but your not looking at what is dark because it's basically caused by your closed eyes, and you can open them whenever you want. But knowing that you are staring at darkness and can't "open your eyes" is a really weird feeling. A lot of trust has to come into play here. The fact that the floor is there. When you feel a door handle, you question it. Is this the correct door. Sense of direction, which way is which. Everything you know becomes questioned. 

There I stood by the light switch, and I knew that the xylophone was in the opposite direction, about five feet away. Ok, so I make an exact U-Turn, and walk like five steps forward. I tried that, and bumped my calf on a chair, luckily it was the soft part. Then I hit a music stand trying to move the chair. Finally I found the xylophone and realized I didn't know where my stick bag was. More hilarity ensued of course, but I did get to play a scale eventually. And It Sucked. C-major is so hard without a point of reference to look at, but I learned a lot from it. My left hand loves to travel too far in the direction it is going. My right hand tends to ignore where the left is, so if my intention is to play CDE, my left will play C and my right will play C, because it doesn't know what my left is doing,  or where to go in relation to it. Sooo many doubled notes. After about 10 minutes, I could play a C-major scale going up well and kind of going down. When I turned the lights back on, I could play both ways without a second thought.

My whole philosophy about technique is to be able to do something harder than the thing you have to do. So, if I can play an excerpt blindfolded, it'll be way easier when I can actually see. I don't play blindfolded as often now, but man, when I did, my playing really improved, and my sense of where things were on instruments was enhanced as well. I say give it a try. Even if you don't actually look at your instrument, see how you feel when playing in total darkness. All you have is your sense of touch and hearing, and really those are the senses that we really need to focus on as musicians. Our eyes may tell us where things are generally, but really our sense of touch tells us exactly where things are, and our hearing if it's right. I'm sure intonation would be pretty poor if we just used our eyes to locate a note. Even if we know exactly where a note is one day, things change all the time and we have to react quickly, not look for the next exact position with our eyes. In any case, this quote gave me another practice tool that really helped me, and if nothing else, gave me something to challenge myself with for a very long time. 

Finding Freedom/Letting Go

One of the things we should and do strive for is flexibility and versatility within our instrument and musicality, and while hours and hours of practice get us to a certain level of ability, the "last phase" is a lot less concrete than we'd like it to be. I'd get really frustrated with myself in college, and even now sometimes, because of my inability to make something sound "like my instructor's sound or interpretation." I'd get even more frustrated going into an audition, playing what I thought was a great round, technically sound, and wouldn't get passed the first round or wouldn't win in the final round. I thought that practicing my technique and the pieces at all the tempos and dynamics was enough for my lessons and the audition, but there was always something missing. 2+2 just was not equaling 4 and I did not know why, and it was making me crazy.

Instructors can't directly teach what the "missing ingredient" is, but they can direct you towards what it is for you. You've probably heard these phrases before: "Sing more" "Play it like a vocalist" "It should flow more" "Play it like a dance" "It should sound scarier" "More elegant", etc. The adjectives could go on, but none of them give us a specific answer, at least one that we can process into a technical exercise in the moment. These are all feelings or subjective ideas, but they all produce an emotional response, both in the musician and in the listener. It's basically going for an effect rather than trying to play the page, by playing the page as an effect (that's the way I think of it now). Yes, we have to play the page, but if that's all we're doing, there's no point and it ends up sounding boring. Usually we take this problem and try to solve it by phrasing more and/or having more dynamic contrast. This does help a lot and usually will work, especially in excerpts, but when a solo piece comes up, specifically Bach, there's a certain way of playing his music, traditionally and otherwise, that makes it sound great and not just good. You can't spell out what it is, because it's so subjective and almost indescribable.

If I had to give this a specific description to what it is, as far as what it is to me and what my instructors and colleagues have told me, it's this: technical ability to accomplish (as close to) anything that is thrown your way, letting your technique become like conversational speech (making that technique second nature so you don't have to think about it and just play), playing the effects on the page (if there's a waltz pattern, there's a certain way a waltz feels, same with a march or otherwise), going for your personal musical choices and instincts (not just playing a rehearsed way of playing but always looking for another way, within the structure of that piece). Finding freedom within your technique, within the pieces you play, and within your musicality and instincts of expression (some people say playing classical music like it's jazz, basically like you are making it up, or making it sound natural and "unrehearsed"). 

As soon as I let go of worrying about playing everything exactly as I rehearsed, or playing perfectly, I started feeling freer in my performances and it allowed me to focus on and make more phrases, even better than I had rehearsed. The same goes for my technique. When I knew I was at a point where I didn't have to work to make anything happen, I accepted that, "It doesn't have to be a battle every time" or "I don't have to do anything to make this work." That's when my technique really started feeling more natural and second nature, and again I could focus on the music more, rather than worrying about what sounds come out. Your body and brain are extremely intelligent and really good at playing off of your instincts, so if you have worked out the technical parts of the piece, just let go, go for the musical idea and your body will make it happen.

It's scary though because we want to make sure things happen in our performance. That's what we practiced all those hours for right? We probably broke everything down, played things through slowly, tuned every single note, listened to a million recordings, but if we don't let go, it will sound like we are trying, or working hard, basically, it won't sound natural. We have to get to a point where we don't have to worry about our technique. If we can produce the music on the page and the phrases we want, then our technique is fine, and we have to be ok with that. Our technique is fine. Now we simply need to let go, let our bodies do what we know they can do, and just go for the music and the effects it asks for. If we've done the specific work on the piece, we don't have to do that specific work in the performance. Just let it go, be free and play. 

Never Prepare... Respond

Something that I became obsessed with in college was instinct and reflexes within playing. While we work to develop our technique, become more "in control" of our bodies to produce sounds and music, we must also work to develop our instinctual technique. When you hear a sudden drop in sound, what is the instinct? Similar questions can be "answered," or discovered through constantly experimenting, and listening to different versions of pieces, or just any type of music in general. Of course, you have to prepare your music, you have to know the notes, the tempo changes, etc., but the mistake comes in when you are with the group or on the stage and you go on autopilot. Maybe the conductor decides to completely ignore the ritardando, and you are the only one doing it. Maybe you play a solo in an audition at a certain tempo but the hall is too wet, so the tempo you chose makes it sound muddy. If you aren't reacting, through your preparation, then things are more likely to go wrong.

It's probably the scariest, most difficult thing to accept about our development, but it is, in my opinion, one of the most important things about performing that we can grasp. It does leave us vulnerable. It is almost counter intuitive to, basically, be willing to ignore your prepared style and method and simply react to what you hear. Maybe your plan works, maybe it doesn't, but you won't know if your closed off from the moment. Be willing to change, or else it might not sound appropriate or clear, etc. Again, prepare as much as you can. You should have control over everything that you can control, but there are always variables that will come up in the moment. The more comfortable you are with reacting within, or without, your prepared method, the better you will feel when change does come. Don't prepare to play, playing should be a reaction, a combination of your prior knowledge, your preparation and the information available to you at that moment. Don't just go on auto pilot, react and respond; that will make the magic happen.

A Snail's Pace

One of the themes in my overall development has been slow practice. It wasn't until my sophomore year in college that I really understood what it actually meant. I had begun to not only practice notes and rhythms at slow tempos, but I also started slowing the motions themselves down. This could be compared to Tai Chi as far as the idea of slow movements giving you a chance to pin point and fix any unnecessary tension or hesitation. I literally think about every aspect of my strokes and movements towards and away from notes or positions that my body finds itself in. As I speed things along, I try to maintain, as closely as possible, the feeling of ease and care that each stroke had when it was slow. This has done wonders for my overall playing and my awareness during performance.

My best friend, Sara Neilson, is a bassist and she once decided that she would try to play her long tone exercises as slow as 30bpms. Of course this is difficult because there has to be a certain amount of impulse to get the note going, and there has to be a certain amount of pressure and speed to the stroke to sustain it. I think she eventually was able to play a 56 second long tone....WIth 1 down bow! She of course saw great improvement in her playing overall. This attention to her basic stroke helped her fix more things in less time and that's exactly why I continue to do the same. We now play long tones together whenever we are in the same city. My favorite dance duo, Les Twins, also practice slowly and even perform in slow motion at times (which literally looks unreal). It's amazing to see their bodies, not emulating the perception of slow motion, but actually doing the movements slow! It was incredible.

So please, don't count out the importance of practicing slow. It gives you a chance to locate any mistakes you are prone to making, or even notice bad tendencies and habits during your performance. Take the time now so you don't have to relearn or unlearn anything. Literally, slow and steady will get you to where you want to go.