I have recently been enjoying Michael Lewis’s podcast, called “Against the Rules.” Season Two is all about the rise of various types of coaching (athletic, financial, life, etc.). Two episodes in particular captured my interest because of their connection to music and mindfulness.
In Episode Three, “The Coach in Your Head,” Lewis talks with Timothy Gallwey, the author of The Inner Game of Tennis. This is one of the most popular books recommended to musicians, and with good reason. In it, Gallwey deals with the mental challenges that arise in performance (in his case, tennis performance), and his insights are applicable far beyond the world of tennis.
Although I had read the book many years ago, I was interested to hear from Gallwey himself in his interview with Lewis. As Gallwey describes it, he was working as a tennis pro at a country club. One day, out of sheer boredom, he decided to try a new tactic with his student. He wanted to see what would happen if he gave the most minimal instruction possible. So instead of giving specific comments on technique, he simply demonstrated the proper form. His instructions, given sparingly, were mainly on where the student should direct their focus.
Gallwey found this type of instruction to be very effective, which was what eventually led him to write The Inner Game. He found that discussing each minute physical action in a player’s tennis swing would often cause the player to overthink their swing. This overthinking would then cause unnecessary tension in a motion that should be smooth and natural. Gallwey’s innovation was in directing his students’ attention away from the many individual components of their tennis swing and allowing them to simply focus on copying what they saw. This helped the students to detach from their conscious thought and rely on everything they were able to pick up and implement unconsciously.
Episode Five of Lewis’s podcast, “The Data Coach,” deals with a new trend toward data in baseball coaching. One of the examples of this trend is Kyle Boddy, who founded Driveline Baseball. Boddy uses data from cameras and sensors to coach baseball pitchers toward a more efficient pitching motion. Although he has access to an incredible amount of information about each pitcher’s physical process, some of the exercises in Driveline’s training program are very simple. For example, pitchers will often throw weighted baseballs. According to Boddy, the added difficulty of throwing a heavier baseball will cause players to adjust elements of their pitching motion, correcting small inefficiencies in their form. Interestingly, Driveline has had great success with taking pitchers’s conscious thought out of the process and letting them rely on the unconscious connection between the brain and the body.
In the Practice Room
The interviews with both Gallwey and Boddy both deal with a common thread among those of us who perform regularly in any way: Our conscious mind has a way of making things that should be simple very complicated. The Inner Game of Tennis refers to the conscious mind as Self 1, and the unconscious mind as Self 2. Much of the book deals with how to let go of judgements and practice focusing Self 1, therefore letting Self 2 do what it already knows how to do.
These ideas, of course, bear a close resemblance to those often associated with the practice of mindfulness. Judgement and negative conscious thought can often take us out of the present moment. Luckily, our unconscious mind has an amazingly efficient way of being able to carry out the very actions that our conscious mind wants to complicate. Our job, as always, is to do our best to get out of the way and allow that to happen.
For brass musicians, the closest thing we have to throwing a weighted baseball is buzzing on our mouthpieces. My students know that I do this every day, both as a way of warming up and as a way of learning music. Anyone who has tried mouthpiece buzzing knows that it is physically much more taxing than playing. For this reason, it can sometimes seem like a party trick: I buzz a passage that I’m having trouble playing, and it instantly improves. But isn’t it mainly because I just did something that was more difficult than playing, and now playing seems easy?
But buzzing does more than just require us to complete a difficult physical action. It takes the instrument out of the equation, meaning that it illustrates the direct connection between our brain and our lips (or lack thereof). As Arnold Jacobs liked to say, a musical message begins in our brain and travels down the seventh cranial nerve to our lips. So mouthpiece buzzing helps us to connect our ear to our lips, which determine what we put into the instrument. More than that, the added exertion that buzzing requires will cause our lips to do what a baseball player’s arm will do when throwing a weighted ball: naturally eliminate the tiny technical inefficiencies that sometimes add up to larger problems. Our lips, with the help of our unconscious mind, will find their way to the most efficient buzz possible.
Buzzing does not equal playing, nor does it always follow that “if you can buzz it, you can play it.” Plugging the mouthpiece into the instrument completely changes the physics of the situation, so practice on the instrument is necessary. I prefer the slightly less catchy “If you can buzz it–or even halfway buzz it*–you will automatically be CLOSER to playing it.” Not only will you be closer in pitch, but your technical mechanism for playing will be much more efficient from the outset. Such are the benefits of hearing the music in your head and letting the unconscious mind take over.
* This refers to playing the instrument with a paper clip or toothpick inserted between the mouthpiece and lead pipe. This creates a situation in which the player is buzzing, but also getting some help from the instrument. It’s about halfway between buzzing and playing.