This week I had the pleasure of visiting (virtually) with an elementary school music class. The teacher, a friend of mine, was taking her students through a unit on the symphony. The kids are working on creating a program of classical music, so I mostly talked to them about the part of my job that involves planning, programming, and rehearsing music for an ensemble concert. But of course, I also introduced myself as a tuba and euphonium teacher, which led me to show them a tuba, which led to a performance (it inevitably does). It was an illuminating experience that took me out of my well-established performance comfort zone.
I played an unaccompanied solo that I’ve played several times before. In fact, I plan to play this solo again in a few days in recital at the University of Iowa. Needless to say, performing for a group of antsy elementary school students is an entirely different animal than performing for a quiet, well-behaved audience of musicians. Since I was able to see the students on my computer screen, I found myself reacting to them while I was performing. I made musical decisions designed to exaggerate and amplify the dramatic gestures in the piece. I shortened the pauses built into the music to make it clear that the piece was continuing through the silences. While the notes and rhythms were the same as ever, I performed an entirely new and unique interpretation of the written music simply as a reaction to my audience.
This performance experience sent me down a path of contemplating the contradictions that exist in my own practice of music. The goal of this blog, and one of my primary goals as a musician, is to increase and enhance mindfulness in myself and others. A performance like the one I gave to the elementary class is only possible when I am able to bind myself to the present moment and ride along with it. I am happy to say that I was able to do that in this case, but the experience was also a bit disconcerting. Like most musicians, I practiced that solo for many, many, many hours before ever performing it. Each time I program it, I add more hours of practice in order to re-familiarize myself with it. This type of repetitive practice relies heavily on certain routine elements. The repetition itself is routine. I work hard to incorporate my musical interpretation of the piece into that practice. But how many times in all of my practice of this piece did I play it exactly as I did during this one performance? Zero.
In the writings of Ellen Langer (one of the first scholars to write on mindfulness) and others, routine is often presented as the antithesis of mindfulness. This is because many types of routines are comprised of the mindless repetition of actions. The lack of thought or attention around those repetitive actions can lead to behavior that is automatic. How many times have you heard a waiter say “Enjoy your meal,” and accidentally responded with “You, too”? We often have built-in, automatic responses when our brains are not engaged in the moment. When we engage with our behavior mindfully we often find that the automatic action or response is not the best one for the present moment.
I bring this up because routine is unavoidable in the practice of music, and especially in brass playing. I have a routine of fundamentals that I try to play every single day–I don’t do exactly the same thing every day, but I do play similar types of exercises each day that target the main technical areas of tuba performance. This fundamentals routine is responsible for my ability to play most music that I find on the stand in front of me at any given time. I do not need the routine in order to be able to play, but I do need it in order to be a well-rounded brass player in the long term.
I think many musicians would agree with me that it is incredibly difficult to be entirely present and mindfully engaged in every minute of our daily fundamentals practice. Regardless of how often the exercises may change, it is still the most tedious thing we do in the practice room. It often feels mindless.
It is far easier to be mentally engaged with our etudes and solo music than with our technical studies. Nevertheless, we are creatures of habit. The patterns of routine repetition that anchor our technical practice also find their way into our more “musical” practice. This is very much on purpose: when I’m having trouble with a certain interval in my solo, what do I do? I isolate it and repeat it until it becomes more comfortable. Even though solos involve much more musical interpretation than fundamentals, I still follow a routine in practicing my solos. It is what grounds me and gives me the confidence to perform the music. I don’t just play through my solo pieces; I build them from the ground up through practice.
My elementary music class performance made me rethink the idea of routine in my solo practice. Although slow, methodical, routine-based practice does help to build the skills necessary to perform our music, it also tends to reinforce only one musical interpretation of a piece. As I incorporate my musical ideas into my practice I am generally aiming toward one version of the piece that I hear as perfect. But I now realize that musical practice should prepare us for more than one eventuality. Instead, it should prepare us for as many outcomes as possible. Different audiences, performance spaces, and occasions call for different interpretations of our music. Our practice should reinforce engaged, mindful performance instead of mindless repetition.
Ultimately, I believe that I was able to provide a mindful, appropriate performance for the students that heard me this week. That was made possible in part by my routine, repetitive, methodical practice of both fundamentals and of my solo music. But I will continue to explore what mindfulness and mindlessness mean in my practice. When I find myself using repetition and routine in my solo practice, I will also take time to turn on my “performance mode” switch and create a unique interpretation of the music that only exists in that moment.