Rhythm Practice
I’m facing an afternoon of rhythms. I have three hours of practicing to squeeze into the next two hours before my first student arrives, which basically means that after I finish my own rhythm work, I will hold the space for five hours of students and their rhythms. Strangely enough, rhythm practice often doesn’t mirror the actual rhythms on the page at all. Rather, we intentionally distort the written rhythms by inserting patterns of very long and very short notes into gnarly technical passages, thereby ironing out the bumps.
Or at least that’s the idea.
“Your long notes need to be longer.” I already know I will say this to students, over and over again. This could be my mantra, written on my tombstone. Their ‘longs’ always need to be longer. My ‘longs’ always need to be longer. We are, all of us—teacher and students—impatient.
This afternoon feels, not so much like a practice session, as a battle with my impatience for I am trying—unsuccessfully—to mindfully practice a difficult and technical set of three pieces by Clara Schumann for violin and piano. I have played this set at least five times in different recitals over the last few years, which means that I'm hardly reading it anymore, but I still need the physical practice of reminding my fingers how to negotiate these notes. The act of tracing the shapes of patterns as they circle up and down the keyboard reinforces both the neurological and muscular grooves, not to mention the musical ones. “You can only deepen a practice when you think you don’t need it,” a yoga teacher once told me. Or, as Ms. Allen, my former college teacher, would say, “The ‘longs’ must be very long, and the ‘shorts’ must be very short.” I wonder if this might not be the very same thing.
For, despite my good intentions, I am only half-heartedly here. After all, I basically know this piece; what I’m doing today represents practice on another level entirely. I am, in a very literal sense, using the practice of rhythms, the deliberate insertion of both held notes and held space into the running passages, to deepen the practice. While I must review this music so I am ready for a rehearsal with the violinist next week, this work is more about using this particular piece of music as a tool to practice my skills as a musician. Can I find a better, more graceful way to flip the thumb under in the arpeggio passages? Am I listening closely enough to hear how some notes are a bit fuzzier on the edges than others, as though I am not quite finding the core of the sound? Do I notice how some sets of long and short notes cause me to tighten my jaw and curl my toes as if my jaw and toes were trying to help my fingers do their job? Almost weekly, I remind my students that only after learning the notes and fingering of their major and minor scales does the real work begin. The real work, I tell them, is how to use scale practice to better our technical, musical and listening skills. I believe this, just as I believe my practice on Schumann’s piece this afternoon could do the same thing, but I’m bored, my mind wanders. My longs are not long. My shorts are not short. I have the attention span of a fruit fly. I stay with this for about three minutes before giving up and turning to something—anything—more interesting.
Breaks are a good thing, or so I tell myself, as I get up and put a load of laundry in the washing machine downstairs. After an extra intense teaching schedule this summer during June and July, I had two weeks off before beginning my fall semester last week. I created for myself a sort of at-home retreat/holiday: time with friends, extra yoga classes, hours of solitude. I ran errands that had been piling up. I took naps. I deep cleaned the house. I talked on the phone with friends and family members. I watered the garden and practiced.
Just before I went on summer break, I found myself trying to advise a parent in my studio who was complaining about her son. “Dylan will not stay seated on the piano bench. Every five minutes he gets up and wanders through the house. Practicing takes hours.” I nodded sympathetically, all the while thinking, “You should see me practice.”
There are cognitive benefits to wandering. Every time one walks away from a demanding task, the brain files, even temporarily, the information into storage. Coming back to the work then forces the brain to pull this information out of its long-term memory bank, which strengthens neurological pathways. Particularly when memorizing something—a poem, a piece of music, the keys and opus numbers of all Beethoven’s works—multiple retrievals act like low-stakes tests, and research has shown that these kinds of frequent pop quizzes lead to faster learning and a more secure grasp of the material over the long run. More is, in fact, more.
Sleep has the same effect, providing another sort of mental “wandering,” which helps to cement the work we have done. Repetitions that are spaced by breaks, a good night’s sleep, meandering aimlessly through the house, are more likely to get imprinted, not in the more fleeting short-term memory, but in the more permanent long-term memory. This is all a way of saying that there is a reason we practice every day, and not just in a single big chunk once a week, just as teachers have always told students not to cram for an exam the night before but to spread out the studying over several days. Cognitively, it simply works better.
But honestly, in the case of my afternoon of rhythms, I am not being intentional about my cognitive functioning. I am just avoiding the work at hand. Carrying the load of dirty clothes through the basement, I almost stumble over a pile of books I had set aside to sort and give to the library. Suddenly, this seems the most urgent thing I could attend to. I must clear out all my bookshelves. Right. Now.
The hard truth of rhythm practice is that if I do it right, it forces me to pay attention, and when I pay attention I am faced with too much I don’t like. I don’t like that holding a fermata for longer than about two seconds makes me want to crawl out of my skin. I don’t like how uneven my triplets sound, particularly in measure 18. I don’t like how awkward the transition between measures 35 and 36 feels. I don’t like that no matter how much I practice I can’t make my hand big enough to negotiate easily the large stretches in the left-hand arpeggios. I will always be limited by my small hands. Paying attention reminds me of this.
The hard truth of my life is that I am restless, at odds not only with my practicing today, but lately with my world at large. For weeks I have been cranky, quick to find fault with everything. I have a laundry list of complaints, significant and petty both. The heat. The dishes sitting in the sink. The pile of compost in the driveway. The dirty bathroom. The five long hours of lessons ahead of me today, hours that include Thomas, who is six and will not stay seated on the piano bench for more than 17 seconds. There’s the difficult parent in my studio I would like to fire, if firing a parent was an option. The colleague whom I can’t seem to win over. It is easier not to pay attention, to ignore all of this, squirming away from the discomfort.
Given this list, it might seem that the specifics are the problem. Ironically, however, my dark moods have always been exacerbated by seeing too much of life in gross, vague generalities: the sheer number of students I have to face every afternoons; the thousands of notes I still have to learn for that recital next month; the stack of papers and bills I need to sort and file. Instead, I need to sharpen the focus on the specifics, however painful or insignificant those might seem to be. I need to remember that this afternoon includes not only Thomas but also Kara, who, when I ask her to play scales, will inevitably turn to me and squeal, "Amy! I love scales!" I need to notice that one place in the Schumann that makes my heart lift inside my chest. I need to note, not the general dullness of my murky outlook, but even the smallest details of my world: the cheerful pink geraniums in my window basking in the sun; the gorgeous lacy ironwork in the gate down the street; the bright ristra of red chile peppers hanging on my neighbor’s front door; the sharp corner of the adobe roof cutting out a chunk of deep blue sky; the seven yellow leaves in the tree across the street, reminding me that autumn is near and this long hot summer will finally come to an end.
Maybe it’s all in the details. Or in my case the little notes. “Make sure you give enough room for all the small notes in every beat,” a teacher once told me. This is good advice, and something I think about when I hear my students smearing the short notes together in a wash of sound, forgetting that they each have their own clarity and function. Sometimes, of course, a swirl of sound is exactly what is desired. Many of the effects that Impressionist composers like Debussy and Ravel were trying to achieve come from such a blur. But often, we are simply ignoring little notes for the bigger beats, details lost to the larger sweep of line and phrase and more is sacrificed, I think, than just precision. Listening generally, rather than specifically, leads to vague and unfocused playing. Holding space for each and every short note makes fast music seem less harried, just as attending to one’s breath for 20 minutes has a way of infusing the rest of the day with a sense of expanded time.
As my avoidance of the Schumann has demonstrated this afternoon, such attentive listening and observing is not natural for me. I have to pull myself into the immediate a million times a day. I am driven to distraction by the future: that difficult phone call with the demanding parent, the dread of next weekend when I have multiple work-related obligations and no time to myself, the pedagogical articles I intend to write but haven’t begun. I wander: my work is not linear or focused, half-finished projects litter both my house and my mental space cluttering my thoughts and my desk. I stop listening to the music: be it my students’ playing, my own practicing, or the sounds of the mourning doves cooing outside my bathroom window. I begin speaking in a rush, my words tumbling over one another, my directions darting ineffectively from point to point. I don't notice the person in front of me—whether it be Matt or a student or a colleague—who needs not my distracted half-focus, but my entire being: listening, attentive, engaged.
Mustering all the discipline I can dig up, I force myself to return to the Schumann and abandon both the laundry and my pile of books for now. They aren’t going anywhere. Back at the piano, I watch my breath, my clumsy left hand tripping over an awkward arpeggio, the way a small wave of discomfort rises within me as I wait out another long note. Owning the specifics of one’s existence, whatever they may be, is how an honest practice deepens organically, gracefully bending to accommodate the gritty circumstances of life, rather than rigidly refusing to adapt in the face of change. That the discipline of staying with a practice rather than running away is the very antidote to the agitation and restlessness that practicing often uncovers is, of course, the answer to the riddle. The question lost in translation.