The practice problem
Practising can be as frustrating for the pros as it is for the rest of us
Music practice, suggests Tom Service, has got a bad rap. Rather than expect our hours of toil to produce unattainable perfection, we should simply enjoy them
Practice. It’s the musical bare necessity without which there could be no musical culture: right now, billions of notes are being played in practice rooms by professional musicians working up new repertoire, and by schoolchildren and amateurs from Barnsley to Boston to Beijing brushing up on their scales and arpeggios – otherwise there’ll be no Netflix before bedtime.
So given that practising makes up so much of our lives, why is it o en such a chore? And what’s the secret of making the most of your practice time?
One theory used to be that it was all a question of how much time you spent at the keyboard with those mind-numbing technical exercises by Hanon and Czerny. The writer Malcolm Gladwell espoused this so-called 10,000 hour rule, because that’s how much practice you needed to attain mastery, whether you’re a musician, athlete or chessplayer. It’s a seductive idea on the surface, because it seems to say that you too can become the next Lang Lang or Nicola Benedetti, and it’s all just a question of time rather than talent.
Alas: the latest research from Princeton University debunks the theory, since it turns out there is such a thing as a natural gi or propensity for musical virtuosity, and what you need is combination of the right kind of practice with the right kind of talent. Damn. Even with thousands of hours toiling away at it, I’ll never make it to the Albert Hall with my ham-fisted performance of Mozart’s 27th Piano Concerto.
For professional musicians, there’s an essential di erence between ‘practising’ and ‘playing’. As pianist James Rhodes told us on The Listening Service, the former is a kind of forensic hygiene of technical focus and concentration, in which a particularly knotty passage in Chopin’s Fourth Ballade is slowed down, turned inside out and imprinted into muscle memory by rote, repetition and more rote. It’s hard work, and it can be as frustrating for the pros as it is for the rest of us.
But for we amateur players, shouldn’t we turn practice into musical fun rather than a laboursome musical duty? Given that most of us are never going to attain perfection, we first need to ditch the whole ‘practice-makes-perfect’ mantra. Rhodes is convinced we should enjoy our practice, which is why he encourages anyone who’s never touched a keyboard to learn the First Prelude of Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier in just six weeks. Instead of threats of not getting your pudding if you don’t do your musical homework, it’s about practising as pleasure, to deepen your physical relationship with the music you love. That’s what practice should always be about. And think of it this way: practice isn’t preparation for something else, it’s part of life. As the cliché rightly says, life ain’t a rehearsal – so next time you’re working through Hanon’s exercises or Bartok’s Mikrokosmos, enjoy it!