I recently learned about a TED Talk given a few years ago by a monk. In order to create a schedule that would be maximally beneficial, he advocated for breaking each day into time spent on three distinct categories: 1) Creativity, 2) Productivity/Management, and 3) Education/Entertainment. Part of the speaker’s point was that productivity and management tasks are necessary and often prioritized first. But those tasks often benefit from fueling the parts of the brain that are activated during creativity/learning/entertainment time.
This got me thinking about how I spend my own days. Granted, I have a very different schedule from a monk. But many of my waking hours are taken up by tasks related to productivity and management. At best, I experience entertainment in the form of having the TV on in the background as I continue to wade through my near-constant stream of emails each evening.
My most disturbing realization, though, was that I haven’t dedicated much time toward being creative in the past several weeks. I have been working toward a recital, which means a lot of slow, careful repetition and endurance building. I certainly exercise creativity in my musical decisions while playing my solo music, but I am often focused on shoring up technical aspects of the music. Because I’m focused on a specific set of pieces, I am not often putting myself in the position to create a new interpretation from scratch. Instead, I’m constantly tweaking music with which I have a high level of familiarity.
I believe that the idea of breaking the day into different types of tasks or actions can be transferred onto the practice session. I have often viewed the practice session (and the lesson, for that matter) as a pie chart with different categories, including warm ups/fundamentals, études, solos, etc. But what if we changed the categories? What if instead of moving from task to task we moved between types of tasks, making sure to exercise different parts of our brains?
In the Practice Room
Like the aforementioned monk, I have chosen to break the practice session into three types of tasks. But I have made some slight changes to the categories in order to optimize them for music. Entertainment and creativity are closely linked in the practice room, so I have combined those categories. Productivity and management tasks, however, are not exactly the same thing in music, and are therefore separated.
The Practice Session:
Maintenance/management: This part of the practice session includes warm-ups and fundamental exercises. These tasks are incredibly important because they give us the technical ability to play any music that we might find on our stand on any given day. This segment of our practice is often the most tedious, but the most necessary.
Productivity: This part of the practice session is devoted to learning and improving upon our current musical works-in-progress. It includes slow, methodical practice, repetition of phrases and sections of music, and drilling the parts of our music that give us the most difficulty in performance.
Creativity/Entertainment: This part of the practice session feeds the soul. It is the time when we set aside our self-assessment and join ourselves to the present moment. It may be a run-through of a work-in-progress during which we simply focus on creating a unique musical interpretation in the moment. It may be reading new music, or returning to an old favorite. Whatever the musical material, the point of this part of the practice session is to exercise our musical mindfulness; To purposely set aside the elements that we focus on for the bulk of our practice session (namely our mistakes) by focusing solely on the music. Ignoring errors is harder than it sounds, but it can provide a great sense of freedom of expression.
It is this final part of the practice session that I have noticed myself to be lacking. This week I’ve been experimenting with incorporating at least ten minutes of pure creativity and/or entertainment into my practice sessions. It may sound obvious, but this type of activity can easily move to the bottom of my priority list when a stack of music for an upcoming performance is demanding my attention. The results so far have been positive both mentally and physically. Practicing for the purpose of exercising my creativity contributes to my physical endurance while it nourishes the part of my brain that I rely on to make music in the moment during a performance.
**I am still trying to track down the link to the original TED Talk. Apologies for not having the source available here!