Perfect Poise, Perfect Life
Bring your body into balance and revolutionise your life
By Noel Kingsley
Publisher Hodder Mobius
AVAILABLE HERE
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Avoid practicing mistakes
Have you a hobby, sport or something that you're trying to do well at? I'm talking about a passionate ploy such as tennis, golf, singing, piano, dance, learning to touch-type or any other activity that is demanding and requires skill and practice. One of my passions is playing the violin. Well, I mean trying to play the violin.
And do you sometimes feel that you're hitting a brick wall and not making progress, no matter how hard you try? We probably all do, as it's part of the learning progress. But isn't it demoralising sometimes, that despite all the effort we put in along with the 'will' and good intentions and enthusiasm, the sparkling performance or super quality eludes us? But when we get a glimpse of something good, and we think we've got it "Bravo!" it slips away again and we return to a more mediocre performance next time. Where did it go?
Well a performance doesn't last any longer than the moment it happened. But your ability that did the performance hasn't gone anywhere. It's still inside you waiting to come out again. But as part of the learning process, and part of being human (changeable, inconsistent, subject to tiredness, hang-overs, PMT) we bring ourselves to the task in a different condition every time. When we are endeavouring to perform to our best on each occasion, our starting place has moved. We also need to warm up, get the muscles working, the blood flowing.....and get that integration of our whole system so we can bring our best to the task.
I've been battling away on two pieces of music by Handel and Mozart and feeling that I'm not getting anywhere. I have to remind myself frequently that although I don't 'think' I'm getting anywhere, there are changes taking place with every minute I'm playing. Although I sense frustration that 'I can't do this', I know I can, and every attempt to get the fingering right or the tone or rhythm or tempo or pitch, it is going into my subconscious and becoming established in my overall experience. So this is re-assuring in some ways...... but it's also a warning.
Because when we make a mistake, we get this experience, and if we repeat the mistake, we are reinforcing this as a pattern. By repeating mistakes we don't get better except at 'making the mistake'. Indeed we can become very good at them. Muscle memory plays a part here in the same way as any other situation, good or bad. Our muscles pick it up very quickly. The longer we make the mistake the harder it will be to get out of it later.
So this is why we need to make sure that the experience we get is a positive one, as often as possible. But if we're doing something that trips us up, as is my experience with some passages in the Mozart sonata, then we need to go about it in such a way that we don't make the mistake. This requires us to really think about 'how' we are doing it. There are several ways we can ensure we get a positive experience that will ingrain itself to help us move forward.
The key is to perform the activity accurately. But when practicing, we don't need to do it at full-speed. We can slow it right down. We could slow it down to a speed that doesn't make any sense, but does give us the chance of doing the various movements accurately and precisely. When we get the sequence into our head, then we can speed up again. We can break the activity down into small sections and examine how we are doing each minute bit. Once we overcome the hurdle that trips us up, we can join each little bit together and reassemble it into the full movement.
I break down musical passages this way. Sometimes I'll just work on three notes. These notes may be slightly tricky for me to play in a certain sequence on different strings, but by very slowly familiarising myself with the individual finger movement, hand position and creating a smooth transition from one to another, I get a positive experience. When I can play these three notes better, I can speed them up, and incorporate them into the whole passage or phrase of music.
It's really important to keep working at the difficulty and not give up, or skip over it. But it is equally important that we adjust our practice method to ensure that we always get the right experience, even if it's slowed right down or broken up into fragments. Once we can get it into our system, we can speed it up again and we're likely to be able to perform in a way we couldn't do before. We must also be aware of how much effort we are making. It's so easy, when trying hard to do something, that we make more physical effort in the process. More effort does not necessarily bring better results and can often make it worse, as I wrote about in Beginner's Luck. See if you can use less effort.
I've been working along these lines for a while on my violin. And today, I had the real sense that it was all starting to come together really well.
Even when we feel we're not getting anywhere, it's all going into our system and will inform our next endeavours. Just make sure you get the right experience.
:-)
