Practice… makes what?

It may have been the first week of the last term for 2009, but it was no surprise to find that the majority of students I teach hardly completed any practice during the two week break.

I’m sure a lot of other instrumental teachers would be echoing the same sentiments too. After all, students are getting at least 30 hours back per week when education takes a rest. Another way to think of it is you are getting 1800 minutes back, especially when you have a lot of younger students that would not be prepared to work, or focus, in hourly blocks of practice. This current break, students have received about 60 hours, or 3600 minutes, back and have used it for what? Of course when you travel away it can make things a little difficult, but what about those that have stayed at home?

Even when you explain to students that there are 10080 minutes in a week (and if they say they need to spend some of it sleeping, which is roughly a third of the week, they are quickly informed they have 6720 minutes remaining) and all they need to do is spend 15 minutes a day practising (giving a grand total of 105 minutes out of the week) the message still seems to fall on deaf ears.

For a lot of students this week, about half of their lessons were spent discussing practice. I believe this is something other instrumental teachers should consider doing with students that are not getting the message. The discussion was broken up into two sections; “What is the purpose of practice?”, and “Scenarios of practice.”

What is the purpose of practice?

This is a question I don’t think is ever asked enough by instrumental teachers. In fact, if I asked some teachers for an answer to this question I would be very interested to find out their response. When I was younger, none of my teachers asked me this question or even went into explaining the purpose of practice. And to be honest, I could be lazy at times when I was younger when it came to practice.

The most common answers I received to this question were…

- a shrug of the shoulders
- to get better at playing the instrument
- to be able to practice longer (i.e. build stamina)

Instead of giving the answer, I went straight to the “Scenarios of practice”.

Scenarios of practice.

My students would now be placed in my shoes. Suddenly they have all become clarinet/saxophone teachers. Everyone has two students each.

Student one is dedicated to practising for 30 minute blocks, a decent amount of time. This student only practices for 2 days a week.

Student two is dedicated to practising every day of the week, but they only practice 5 minutes a day.

Which student would most likely be doing better, and why? The most popular response was that the first student would be doing better because they are completing 60 minutes of practice per week, compared to the second student completing 35 minutes of practice.

The amount of students that went with the second student could be counted on one hand. To give you an idea of how many students I currently teach, it would be close to fifty students. Those that gave the correct response as to why the second student would most likely be doing better were even less.

What is the purpose of practice? Could it be that practice helps us remember what we have learnt from our lessons and rehearsals? The concept of PRACTICE = REMEMBERING is something I don’t think is drilled enough into students. There is still a belief today that you have to practice in set blocks of time, from the beginner through to the emerging experienced student. Even telling students to practice one day on and one day off is not proving beneficial, and I will be the first to admit I tried to use this as a teaching strategy.

The belief is that “quantity” determines the skill and ability of a musician. My response to this is that it is not of “quantity” or “quality”, but of “consistency”. I have had students of beginner to intermediate standard, regardless if they were mine or someone else’s, come up and say they practiced for anywhere from one hour to four hours a day. Then when they go to play they forget basic things in their music or do not understand the technique they are to use whether it is in the air, the embouchure, or the fingers. Either they are seriously burning themselves out physically and/or mentally with their practice, or they are lying. Simple as that.

If a student is consistent in their practice, the quality of their practice and playing will emerge. Why is this? Because they are remembering what they have learnt! As soon as a student decides to take a day off after a good solid practice session the previous day, the information they were remembering from their last session will start to leave their brain. Take two days off, and the information is essentially gone. Three days, it’s been flushed away. We want information that has been given to us not to float around in our head, but to be engraved in our memory. This includes technique and performance practice of pieces (despite whether we perform from memory or not). We want the information to transform from floating around to becoming more solid and remaining firm in our memory. Once the information is engraved, we have succeeded in practice.

If I was to ever refer to “quantity” in practice it would not be in minutes and/or hours, but frequency in days. The consistency of even just a little bit of playing squeezed in on the “off day” will help a lot more than not doing anything at all. We do not need to burn ourselves out physically or mentally with constant set blocks of practice. Some people are capable and have the stamina to be able to do this, but not everyone will be able to do it. You push yourself to your own boundaries, and not to someone else’s who may be well behind or beyond yours.

I’m going to close with a quote from a translation of The Art of War by Sun-Tzu. An excerpt of this quote was brought to my attention earlier this year, but when it was brought into context with the rest of the quote it became so much clearer. If there ever was a personal battle with instrumental practice and its results, this phrase from the chapter Making Plans would sum it up nicely.

“Victory belongs to the side that scores most in the temple calculations before battle. Defeat belongs to the side that scores least in the temple calculations before battle. Most spells victory; least spells defeat; none, surer defeat. I see it in this way, and the outcome is apparent.”