In 2009, Ellen Langer and two colleagues conducted a “mindfulness intervention” with professional orchestral musicians which focused on the creation of novelty in musical performances. Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard, has studied and written on mindfulness since the 1980s. According to Langer, mindfulness is:
“The process of drawing novel distinctions. It does not matter whether what is noticed is important or trivial, as long as it is new to the viewer. Actively drawing these distinctions keeps us situated in the present. It also makes us more aware of the context and perspective of our actions than if we rely upon distinctions and categories drawn in the past (Langer & Moldoveanu 1-2).”
Langer believes that mindlessness (automatic, routine-based behavior) can lead to a life that seems predetermined instead of unique. She writes that mindfulness, in contrast to mindlessness, can help us break free of learned patterns that inhibit our intellect or creativity.
Langer and her colleagues brought the idea of focusing on novelty to their study of performance in the orchestra. The musicians (sixty highly-skilled orchestral players) were given Brahms’ Symphony no. I, a piece they had all performed hundreds of times. During the first performance, the orchestra was instructed to play “in the finest manner you can, offering subtle new nuances to your performance (Langer, Russell, and Eisenkraft 127).” The key to this study was that the musicians were not asked to notice specific novelties, but instead to create them. The idea of novel distinctions was translated directly into the creation of music.
As an alternate to this version of the performance, players were then asked to “think about the finest performance of this piece that you can remember, and try to play it (127).” This is an idea that is often used with great success in sports psychology. The expectation would be that musicians, like athletes, would perform better during the version in which they were trying to imitate the best performance in their memory.
What the study showed, however, was that both the orchestra and the 126-person audience preferred the first version of the performance. Langer and her colleagues found that in this case, a focus on subtle nuances and novelty led to increased enjoyment for all involved. This experiment would not have been possible without the hundreds of thousands of hours that each musician spent in the practice room building up the skill necessary to achieve nuances in performance. But it poses a question to those of us who practice: How does our practice prepare us for novelty in performance?
In the Practice Room
Perhaps one of the reasons that mindfulness can be difficult to employ in performance is because it is almost impossible to maintain in the practice room. I’ll be honest, my last practice session involved a fair amount of mindless, routine playing, because for brass players the most simple (and sometimes monotonous) exercises–like long tones and slow playing–are often the most effective at building consistent technique and endurance. I am often focused on building a piece from the ground up, which usually involves plenty of slow, careful repetition.
But Langer’s study is not really about eliminating routine completely. It is about intentionally choosing a point of focus. If I focus only on what I have thoroughly learned in the practice room, then I am only focusing on the elements of my performance that will be mostly static. Langer’s idea of mindfulness is to shift awareness in performance away from sameness and toward novelty or nuance. Specifically, the orchestral experiment suggests that if we focus our awareness on our own creation of nuance, we (and our audience) may get more out of our performance.
At first glance, this seems like a no-brainer. Of course we should be focusing on our unique musical expression during a performance. But sometimes it feels safer to focus within our comfort zone, which is established in the practice room. Sometimes the “novelty” that happens onstage isn’t necessarily welcome or intended! A solution to getting stuck in a practice-room mentality onstage, of course, is to regularly practice in “performance mode,” focusing on creating musical nuance. This is undoubtedly a healthy alternative to only hammering away at repetitive, technical practice.
I also submit that, looking back to Langer’s original definition of mindfulness above, a focus on noticing novelty (not just creating it) can benefit us in the practice room. As I repeat a specific passage over and over, I can focus on what is the same from one run-through to the next, and this will give me a good idea of how much consistency I’ve built. But if I instead focus on what is different from one repetition to the next, I may get more useful information. The novelties that emerge between performances might simply be errors that I wish to correct. But they could also be musical nuances that I may want to incorporate into my performance. Either way, an awareness of novelty, along with a commitment to creating nuance, will certainly tether me to the present while I play.
**Langer, E.J., and Moldoveanu, M.C. “The construct of mindfulness. Journal of Social Issues, 56(I) (2000), 1-9.
**Langer, E.J., Russell, T., and Esenkraft, N. “Orchestral performance and the footprint of mindfulness.” Psychology of Music, 37(2) (2009), 125-136.