Tips for musicians
I’m going to depart from my usual fare of talking about engineering for a bit, and talk about music.
For the past several months, I’ve been taking some time off to re-center myself, and as part of that, I’ve been preparing to perform a piano recital. I have about an hour’s worth of music, some Ravel, some Beethoven, and some Chopin, and through this practice I’ve come across some things to keep in mind that have helped me immensely.
Now, if you’re a conservatory musician, all of this will be absolutely absurdly elementary. But for someone like me, who played throughout grade school but took a very long hiatus (like 12 years), it’s been really illuminating to look back at practice with adult eyes.
Every note different.
Every note. If you’re playing an instrument where you can play multiple notes simultaneously (read: piano), that applies to every single note in the chord as well. If you make a concerted effort to make every single note sing in a slightly different way, you make it more interesting. This applies to phrases as well; so even if the phrase is written to be repetitive, find a way to make it different. If it’s a Baroque or Classical composer, volume is often a good differentiator: first time loud, second time sort. When it’s a Romantic piece, especially Chopin, rubato or speed changes can be liberally applied. For more modern music, use your best judgement; but whatever you do, make each note different.
Practice until all of the musicality is gone.
This is a little counter-intuitive. “But I’m playing music!” you might exclaim. True, but once you have a complete mastery of the music that you can play it completely flat, you can then re-introduce musicality with intent. It’s no longer an accidental crescendo, but something you’ve decided would work better. And then you can try other dynamics and other phrasing to see if it sounds better or it suits your style.
My inspiration for this?
Slow practice + sleep = performance-ready.
And not slow practice through the entirety of a piece. But rather, practice only the few problematic measures slowly. Even four or five times will do. But doing so, and then sleeping on it, will let it sink in. When I was younger, I would play everything from beginning to end, and ended up wasting a lot of practice time.
Conclusion.
Armed with these few insights, it actually doesn’t take a whole lot more to become a great musician, once you’ve logged the sheer number of hours for the mechanics to be set in place.
