Due to my university’s fall schedule, I recently enjoyed the longest Thanksgiving break I’ve had in many years–an entire week! It was glorious, but I traveled to the east coast by plane, so I was without my tuba for the week. I’m currently in the process of learning new music, so my practice for the week consisted mainly of mouthpiece buzzing (to keep my lips in shape) and a combination of mental and partial physical practice. For me this means some singing, buzzing, and blowing the wind patterns for musical phrases while practicing the fingerings. Essentially, I immersed myself in every part of the music except the actual tuba playing.
When I returned from the week away, I approached the instrument with a bit of trepidation. I find comfort in the reinforcement of the physical aspects of playing the tuba. I don’t like to take time off, and I rarely go more than a few days without playing at least a bit. I don’t feel normal when I do. But in this case I found, as I usually do when I’m forced into this position, that my mental practice brought me to a new level of playing when I returned to the instrument. I know this should not be that surprising, but it gets me every time!
When I say a “new level” of playing, I mean that literally. When learning new music, us brass players have a bad habit of diving into a musical work mouthpiece-first and asking questions later. We look at the music, try to play it, and assess what we hear coming out of the instrument (sometimes successfully, sometimes not). I definitely have the skills necessary to learn a piece by singing and working out rhythms beforehand, but I often skip that step in favor of getting “face time” on the instrument. In my case, this is because I’m constantly trying to build muscular endurance, so playing while engaged mentally seems to achieve two goals at once. Regardless of the reason, learning a new piece with a play-first approach means that I’m starting at zero. I am coming into the situation with no real concept of melody, rhythms, articulations, dynamics, or musical gestures.
What this week of mostly mental practice taught me (…again…) was that if I take the time to mentally reinforce the musical pathway I plan to take through a piece, then I’ll be starting at a much higher level of musical understanding when I apply my mental practice to the instrument. Performing a solo piece can be likened to giving a speech. Wouldn’t it be easier to begin practicing a speech if you already had a basic idea of what you’re about to say? Or even better, if you had each word, sentence, and paragraph already planned? Mental practice can help us to jump-start our physical practice. And since our mind is involved in our physical practice as well, it can help to connect our mental image of a piece to the eventual product we create on our instrument.
In the practice room
If I’m completely honest, my lack of mental practice is not entirely due to the need to build physical endurance. In part, it’s just laziness. I find it difficult to sustain my attention and engagement with a piece of music if I’m not actively playing the instrument. It can sometimes feel like a chore. I’ve found that the main necessity for productive mental practice is mindfulness. I know, another shocker.
It seems many of us struggle with attention issues in the practice room these days, either because of the stresses of our nonstop existence, or because of the ready availability of electronics and media. Many of the concepts discussed in this blog, such as one-mindfulness and observation, are meant to be antidotes to this attention problem. Nothing I’ve said so far in this post is earth-shattering. It makes perfect sense that mental practice helps us to better practice and perform our music, but the roadblock standing in our way is usually finding the time and sustained attention to do it.
Here are some tips for getting over the time/attention hurdle into productive mental practice:
Make use of times in which it is inconvenient to actually go to a practice room. Once inside the practice room, many of us find it difficult to not just … practice! But there are plenty of moments throughout the day when we might find a few minutes to think through our music and visualize playing it. This moments often happen in much more comfortable environments than a practice room. It can be refreshing to experience our music outside of the practice room.
Start small. If attention is an issue, set a timer for a manageable amount of time (as short as 5 minutes). Tell yourself that you will fully engage for that small amount of time, and then gradually increase it.
Add physical elements to your mental practice. For many athletes and musicians, mental practice is just that: entirely mental. It is a visualization of an ideal performance. But I find that incorporating some physical movements with my visualizations helps me to integrate the music with the physical act of playing. Sometimes I conduct, and at other times I perform my fingerings. I may even move in my chair in the way I would when practicing and performing. This helps my mental practice to feel more like a true precursor to playing.
It doesn’t have to be silent. Brass players often sing and buzz our music in order to make our playing more accurate and efficient. But singing and hearing our music also allows us to incorporate musical elements with more ease than we sometimes have on the instrument. The end goal is to have that 100% mental visualization (including pitch) to rely upon in performance, but singing helps us build that mental ideal of a piece.
Forgive yourself for drifting. Everyone’s attention wanders. If you find this happening to you, be kind to yourself. Bring yourself back to the present moment and proceed as though there has been no interruption.
If you are interested in reading further about mental practice, I highly recommend Noa Kageyama’s blog on the topic: https://bulletproofmusician.com/does-mental-practice-work/