Thomas J. West Music

If you started learning how to play a band or orchestra instrument in an American elementary school, you probably had the experience of having to fill out a practice chart. You know the one - you have a grid with 7 blocks for each day of the week and a spot for your parents to sign. You are supposed to write down how many minutes you practiced each day (30, right?) and then have your parents sign it for submission to your music teacher each lesson.

What did this activity teach me as a fourth grader? Traditional charts accomplish little except teaching students how to fudge numbers and forge their parents' signature. Even honest little kids like me were forced to fake the signature when my parents lapsed and forgot to sign the chart. Practicing at home is essential, especially in the early stages of skill development on an instrumnet. Most American public school elementary music programs have little room in the schedule for instructional time, so home practice is essential.

Practice is Essential, But Not Common

After that formative stage of skill building in elementary school, the average instrumental student resorts to as little, if any, home practicing. Depending on the demands of the school's music program and the community that supports it, students home practice can range from doing none to having private teachers and practicing several hours a week. Unless your child is part of a program like Carmel Indiana, where the top orchestra (out of five!) is by audition and every single student studies privately, the majority of school programs in the country are in the former category. Even in the one high-achieving band program I've worked for, students as a general rule did very little practicing at home.

How is it that it is common practice to not practice? Quite simply, because most music programs are thought of as "the extra stuff" or "the fun stuff" rather than as an important part of a child's education. For students with high aptitude, they don't need to practice to play the level of literature their program is working on. For students with average musical aptitude, the amount of rehearsal during the school day is sufficient to get them to become proficient by concert time. And for those with low musical aptitude, they often just hang out in the bottom of their section, play the "easy parts", and lay out of the more difficult technical passages. In most programs, students are graded on participation, which is simply being present for all classes, out of school rehearsals, and performances. There are additional portions of their grade for playing tests or seating challenges, but most teachers design their grades so that a person can just show up, be a good participant, and they'll get a C or better.

So, how does a music teacher motivate their students to practice? How do we push the envelope of what the band or orchestra is capable of? Let me share the evolution I have been experimenting with so far.

Step One: The Practice Journal

I teach at a rather unique School for the Performing and Fine Arts. At the school, we have the challenges and benefits of small class sizes. I average about six students per class, and I combine classes to form a 20-30 person chamber orchestra for concerts. The expectation is that they every student is going to maximize their aptitude and become proficient on their chosen instrument. By proficient, I mean capable of playing major and minor scales and arpeggios, play the full range of their instrument, play expressively with proper tone, and be able to sight read and improvise. Depending upon their aptitude, lower achieving students may not be capable of all of these things, but they are capable of some of them. For the average student, all of these are possible with proper practicing and study.

I select repetoire that pushes the envelope in one way or another for every concert they are working towards.Even the advanced players have work to do, because if the ensemble literature doesn't challenge them, they have solo and duet literature assigned to them that will. Because of this, every student is expected to play their instrument five times a week (twice at school, three times at home) and are required to fill out and submit a practice journal entry once a week. During the 2008-09 school year, the practice journal was designed to teach the students how to create an effective practice session.

There were three main sections they had to fill out - one for warm-up and scales, one for repertoire, and one for what I called "fun time", which could consist of sight reading, improvising, or playing a tune out of their method book they already mastered and enjoyed playing.

Initially, as with any change, they were slow to respond. I had to chase them down often. After a while, they got used to just jotting down some specifics like approximate time spent on each phase and the specifics of what they worked on. There was also a section of the page to write comments on each thing. The form enabled me to see what they were actually working on, how long they spent on it, and even give them feedback on the comments they made about their practicing.

Step Two: From Journal to Self-Analysis Rubric

At the end of the first year, it became apparent that I was not going to need to continue to reinforce the concepts the students learned about how to practice effectively. I needed to give them a way to evaluate their own performance as part of the journal. Stealing a page from my work as a marching band adjudicator, I created the following:

The newly designed practice journal page did not have a slot for estimated time. The focus was on student self-analysis, so the amount of time it took to get the results they wanted varied. The new journal page had a section for scales and arpeggios, a section for method or etude book assignments, and a section for repertoire. Each section had a blank for the student to score themselves using the rubric (a final total for the week on that item), how many octaves (for scales and arpeggios), and a "problem spots" blank for them to identify problematic techniques or measure numbers.

It took a while for student to figure out how to use a rubric (many of them just wrote a 1, 2, 3, or 4 for the levels rather than using the 100 point scale), but here at the half-way mark of the 2009-2010 school year, they are becoming quite good at using the rubric to evaluate their progress towards performance readiness.

No System is Perfect

Now I know what you're thinking: "They can still lie to you." Of course, and I have no way of holding them accountable for the accuracy or veracity of the data they submit. However, it is fairly apparent from their in-class performance (which they also receive weekly points for) and the lack of progress over time. In most cases, the students are very astute about their own performance and rate themselves quite accurately (or even too harshly) using the rubric.

The evolution of this concept for next year will include some method for them to track their ratings from week to week and see if they are consistently rating themselves and approving each item they practice.

If any music teachers out there use a practice record system similar to this or any system at all, please post a comment or send me your thoughts.

This article (c) 2009 Thomas J. West. If you wish to reprint this article on another website or offline, please contact the copyright holder before using.

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The modern metronome is an indispensable practice tool for musicians of any level of experience. Digital metronomes are readily available from any music retailer, as an app for your iPhone, or other online metronome websites.

Most student musicians and even some more experienced musicians do not realize how inconsistent humans are in terms of their perception of time. Our perception of time changes from moment to moment based on our emotional state. Music played at louder dynamics tends to rush, softer music tends to drag. Even a difference in age of the performers tends to produce differences in perceptions of "how fast time passes."

Benefits of Playing with a Metronome

Most student musicians have an unpleasant experience when they first have a metronome forced on them by a teacher. Suddenly, music that the student thought they played well becomes clumsy and hesitant. This is because as they practiced before, they fluctuated in tempo based on their ability to correctly perform each passage. Parts that were "easy" to their perception tended to rush, while passages that were "hard" to them tended to drag. By playing with a metronome, the student is forced to perform at a consistent tempo, which will immediately highlight the passages in the music that they can not perform technically.

Students are reluctant to use a metronome because it "is frustrating" or "makes everything harder". This perception is due to the fact that they can "play it better" when they are allowed to make their own fluctuations in tempo than they can when they are required to maintain pulse. Once students work with a metronome for some time, under the guidance of a teacher, they begin to understand how valuable it can be. Here are some tips for incorporating metronome work into the practice of a student who does not use one.

Ten Tips For Incorporating Metronome Work Into A Practice Routine

1. Explain how metronomes measure tempo in "beats per minute." Link those tempo ranges to musical terms they find in their music, such as Adagio and Allegro.
2. Have a student play a line of music they have already mastered along with the metronome set to various tempi. Have them focus their attention on aligning their performance with the metronome's pulse.
3. Teach students how to use a metronome at slower tempi - either subdividing the metronome's pulse mentally, or setting the metronome to the tempo of the subdivision.
4. Teach students how to incorporate the metronome into their practice, which occurs after the initial note learning is accomplished. The metronome becomes useful once they can basically play through a line of fingerings.
5. Teach students how to use the metronome to identify techincal problem spots in the music and isolate them.
6. Give students metronome goals to shoot for - start with a tempo they can achieve comfortably and increase it throughout the period of concert preparation.
7. Use the metronome to test students' ability to internalize pulse. Give them a tempo from the metronome, have them count silently in their mind, turn off the metronome as they continue to count internally, have them show their pulse visually with conducting or verbally with counting. Check their results against the metronome.
8. Have student improvise duple and triple rhythms while a metronome is playing.
9. Teach students how to find 60 and 120 beats per minute without the use of a metronome.
10. Have a "speed contest" between students using a metronome. Award a prize to the student who can play a difficult passage the fastest with the greatest accuracy.

One last thought on metronome use: It is possible to overuse the metronome, especially with ensembles. Performers should use the metronome to help develop their own internal or ensemble sense of pulse. It can just as easily become a crutch as having the music teacher clap and count along.

This article (c) 2009 Thomas J. West. If you wish to reprint this article on another website or offline, please contact the copyright holder before using.

 
If you find this website helpful, please leave a donation for Tom so you can enjoy the spirit of giving as well.

Human perception is a fascinating thing. We do not sense what is actually "out there", we sense what we think is there based on our previous knowledge and beliefs. Two observers can see the same object and get two completely different experiences from that observation. For example, if I look at a famous painting, such as a Monet, I can admire it for its interesting use of color, blending, and proportion. I could then go and study the life of Monet, find out when he painted the work I had viewed, find out what his inpiration was for it, how the events in his life at the time shaped his vision, and how potential patrons may have influenced the painting. I could then return and view the painting again, but the experience would be quite different because of my increased knowledge of the work.

Music is in the Ear of the Beholder

There is perhaps no greater place where this difference of perception is so easily demonstrated than in people's individual tastes in music. The more knowledgeable an individual is about music, the more likely they are to enjoy wider varieties of music and be able to understand more subtle layers of its construction. My wife and I have had several debates on the value of a piece of music. I often find pieces to be technically flawless and subtely expressive in its phrasing, and her reaction is that the same piece is fall-off-your-chair boring.

When it comes to music performance, whether as a soloist or as part of an ensemble, what you perceive is only a small part of what is actually going on. At any given moment during a rehearsal or performance, assuming you are focused on the performance and not allowing the mind to wander, your conscious focus is only on one single aspect of the music at a time. In one instance, you are concerned with your individual pitch matching the others. In the next moment, you are listening for vertical alignment in timing. In any given moment, there are scores of variables to assess and adjust.

What happens is, while you are focused on the multiple aspects of the performance, your conscious awareness is not noticing the ones you take your focus away from, along with many other stimuli that may be bombarding you at the moment. Add the ominous internal voice of  "performance anxiety" to the mix, and the result is simply that there's too much for you to consciously perceive all at the same time.

Most musical ensembles that operate at a high level of excellence receive coaching of some kind from at least one pair of eyes and ears outside of the ensemble. In the case of many school bands and orchestras, this consists of the director running out into the middle of the house during the dress rehearsal in order to assess group balance. In the world of marching band and drum corps, there are instructors and judges both on the field and in the press box to work on all aspects of a group's performance. In the world of competitive barbershop quartet singing, top competitive quartets spend hours with coaches in order to achieve a 100% blended sound.

How Recording Your Performance Can Be Enlightening and Discouraging

Most of us have probably had the experience of hearing our own voice on a recording (is that really what I sound like?) or seen ourselves on a video (my mirror image doesn't look quite like that guy). Recordings capture things exactly as they are - without the filter of our own personality, judgments, and perceptual limitations. The recorder captures what is actually there - nothing is covered over. This can be very enlightening, because you will hear things on the recording that you will never hear live. Recording can also be very frustrating, because it picks up every tiny flaw indiscriminently. I always tell my students and fellow performers that "the recording is unforgiving" because we as performers can't possibly hear and perceive everything that is happening. But, the good news is that the audience can't perceive it all either.

Ever have a great live performance and then go back and watch it on video? It can be a big letdown. Your memory of how it went live doesn't stack up to what the cameras recorded. This is the reason why hearing an unedited live recording of a phenominal musician or ensemble that is still a study in musical mastery is even more impressive. For the rest of us that do not have the time, resources, and ability to perform live at that level, making a recording has to be done with the right attitude. Recording your performance should be about detecting flaws and not about boosting or deflating your sense-of-self.

Some Tips For Recording Your Practice Sessions

If you're not tech savvy, the good old hand-held tape recorder works just fine for detecting flaws. If you want to have a clean digital recording without spending an armload of cash, I recommend a simple digital voice recorder like this one. The microphone is uni-directional, which means you'll have to point your instrument at it or hold it in front of your mouth when singing in order to get a good recording, but if all you're looking for is feedback to work with, it does the job.

If you have a Mac or an iPhone, you can easily record and playback your sounds using the built-in equipment and software that comes with your computer.

If you're a PC person, or even if you want a better quality recording on a Mac, I suggest getting a simple stereo lapel mic like this one. The advantage of this is that you can clip the mic to your shirt collar, on the end of a brass bell, behind the bridge of a violin, etc. in order to get a full sound when making a recording. For recording solo practice work, the up-close mic work really enables you to hear well but also gives you a bit of sound from the room as well.

For recording sound on a PC, I highly recommend Audacity. The freeware version of Audacity gives you many of the features and abilities of professional level programs such as Cakewalk SONAR without having to spend a dime! I actually use a digital CD recorder, two omni-directional mics, and Audacity to make recordings of my student ensembles and concerts. There's a bit of a learning curve, especially if you've never used recording software before, but it doesn't take very long to learn how to make good quality recordings using this application.

Lastly, if you want to not only record your music, but have your computer give you feedback on your performance, provide accompaniment for you that follows your expressive phrasing, and have access to a huge library of music online, you have to check out Smart Music. I used Smart Music extensively with my students this past year and had some great experiences with it. In addition to all of the features mentioned above, Smart Music can record your performance as an mp3 file, so you or your students can email the recording or put it on their mp3 player. I will be writing a more in-depth article on Smart Music in the near future.

Make Recording Part of Your Concert Preparations

I recently sang in an a cappella concert with Project Philly. The concert was recorded and also had a live webcast. A few days after the concert, I went back and watched the recording from the live webcast, and was reminded again why I needed to write this article. The performances that evening were definitely of a high quality. However, one of the aspects of performing that was lacking across the board was ensemble balance. Balance was addressed at times throughout the concert preparation period, but as the directors of a cappella groups are nearly always performers as well, there was no time except at dress rehearsal when the directors stepped out and listened from afar.

Recording a performing ensemble should be a part of any concert preparation period during the final phase of macro-rehearsal. After all the nitty-gritty rehearsing has happened and performers are "putting it all together" and doing runs of entire tunes, recording the ensemble can be very illuminating in terms of balance, blend, pitch, and rhythmic flaws. I highly recommend to everyone (myself included) that either recording or having a trusted colleague listen to the ensemble or soloist from a distance be a part of every concert preparation about 3/4 of the way to concert time.

How many times in your life have you heard someone say, "I can't do it. This is too hard!"? It is practically the battle cry of any struggling student in any subject area. It is the mantra of those who were raised in a culture where success and failure continue to be taken personally. When I inevitably have a student tell me that a song they are striving to play on their musical instrument is too hard, I always give them the perspective that "hard" and "easy" are completely subjective terms relative to one's level of experience with any given task.

One Man's Difficult Is Another Man's Simple

Each of us has a completely unique perspective on the world around us, and our perception of that world has a fundamental part in creating the world we experience.Our attitude determines our perception, our approach, and our willingness to take risks. This applies to every decision we make in life, and my students learn to apply these concepts to areas outside of music. However, we begin by putting it in the context of learning a piece of music on their instrument.

When a student looks at a piece of music for the first time, they immediately will compare it to their previous experience and make a prediction on how "hard" the music will be to learn. Typically after a first attempt, they will either have those predictions confirmed or denied to a variable degree. If the music turns out to be much harder than they anticipated, some students will immediately label the piece "too hard," which is a story they tell themselves to rescind all responsibility for doing the work necessary to learn the music. Ultimately, everything in our lives is our responsibility, even if we give away our ability to act.

What I try to help students realize is that "hard" and "easy" are totally relative terms. I often will tell them, "To you, playing 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' or 'Ode to Joy' is easy. To a beginning student in fourth grade, it's hard." Once upon a time, 'Ode to Joy' was "hard" for them too. How did they change that song from being hard to being easy. The answer is simple - by repeating the song multiple times until the neural connections necessary to execute the fine motor skills were mapped and in place. In effect, "hard" BECOMES "easy" when the musician BECOMES the person who can perform it effortlessly.

The Myth of Difficulty, Success, and Failure

There is no question that a sequential building of skills is necessary to complete more complex tasks. Just as a beginning gymnast will not attempt to do a level 10 difficulty high bar routine, a beginner instrumentalist will not attempt something like the Haydn trumpet concerto. The ability to play complex music is built in many small acquisitions of necessary skills much in the same manner that a person must learn basic computational mathematics before they can understand the concepts needed for trigonometry and calculus. Calculus, when compared to whole number arithmatic, can correctly be labeled "difficult." Similarly, concert band repertoire is grade on a six-point grading scale with a one being an elementary band piece and a six being a complex piece reserved for advanced performers playing at a professional level.

Within that spectrum of difficulty, the musician finds themself working on music that is appropriate to their skill set. If a musician or music teacher knows the performer's abilities well, they should be able to select repertoire that provides a challenge to the performer without being an insurmountable task. The difficulty selected is appropriate given the amount of preparation time that is available. It is also true that less experienced musicians can master complex music by providing them a longer period of time to work on the skills necessary.

Unfortunately, our culture has made it common practice to attach your sense of self worth to your ability to succeed or fail. My students, despite my encouragement, constantly compare themselves to one another and tell themselves a story about how wonderful or miserable a musician they are. For the student who compares and finds themself coming up short, they create the perfect excuse to limit themselves and give up. The latest hip version of this attitude can be found on the popular fail blog website, where users submit photos and videos showing people or signs that are making an obvious error usually due to lack of attention and stamping it with the word FAIL. While I must admit that some of those pics are pretty funny, deeming something an "epic fail" has worked its way into my students vocabulary. Comments like "I fail at life" are very common.

The Natural Evolutionary Learning Process

In order to grow and become something grander and more expanded than we are now, all people follow the same evolutionary process of learning, stated here in abbreviated form [1]:

1. Knowledge: We learn theories and philosophies about how something works in reality.
2. Experience: We apply that knowledge to actual performance and experience either success or failure. If we fail, we revisit our knowledge base and attempt the skill again after making modifications.
3. Wisdom: Through the experience of success and failure, we develop an understanding of what we did to produce the results we received, which in turn allows us to select behaviors that create our desired outcome.

There is no learning without failure - we're supposed to fail. It is in comparing our failures to other people's successes that we develop a sense of inferiority or victimization. We literally separate ourselves from others in a way that inhibits our growth.It is the slow, methodical repetition of skills over a period of time that gives us the eventual mastery of the skills we desire to know. By taking the time to let our brains coordinate activities with our muscles and build the neural networks needed to perform the skill, we are literally becoming the person with the ability to perform that skill.As I often tell my students, 90% accurate is insufficient. Every skill required by the music we study must be repeated to a point of mastery, until we literally own that skill and can perform it accurately 9.5 times out of 10 attempts."Hard" becomes "easy" after the process of learning is complete. When one takes the time to learn the philosophy and theory behind a desired skill and then applies that theory to actual practice in repetition, one develops mastery of that skill. Once that skill is mastered, it creates a new launch pad to develop more complex skills.

Detatchment and Patience

There are two other virtues that are necessary in the process of learning a skill. One must detatch themselves from the emotions associated with success and failure. Of course, emotions will come with both events, but when one identifies with them and makes it a part of their sense of self, the story in their mind about who they are, they take power away from their ability to make progress. As celebrity trainer Tony Horton is fond of saying, "Do your best and forget the rest."

The other virtue that almost goes without saying is the virtue of patience. Even in my own practice, I still have to remind myself occasionally to not get frustrated with my own body. Each of us has a different level of aptitude when it comes to musical intelligence, kinesthetic motor skills, and so on. Mastering a skill may take longer to accomplish than we predict or desire. The steady repetition of skills over days, weeks, and months is necessary for the brain to create the neural networks capable of performing the skill. As the Dali Lama stated, "Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it."

References

Evolve Your Brain, The Science of Changing Your Mind. Dispenza, Joe. Health Communications, Inc. pp. 206-208.

This article (c) 2008 Thomas J. West. If you wish to reprint this article on another website or offline, please contact the copyright holder before using.

  

If you find this website helpful, please leave a donation for Tom so you can enjoy the spirit of giving as well.