Practicing for artistic success: empowering the student with self-management skills in the practice room

Music is an intuitive art. Practicing is a conscious managerial skill. To practice effectively, you must be in touch with your intuitive artistic impulses and, at the same time, stand outside the proces as a coach, making a series of conscious managerial decisions. greatest in quantity musicians cannot coach their practice because they have at no time learned to micromanage it.

I think of the mind, which is central to management dominion government as a third hand. This conception is useful because the musing process must be timed as precisely as the left and right hands to create music using an instrument. The capacities of the mind--observing, evaluating, guessing, hypothesizing, planning, directing and feeling--are like the fingers of a third hand.

For an instrumentalist, single of the most important fingers of the third hand is imaging. Imaging involves visualizing routines in the "mind's eye" before performing them. Effective imaging causes improvement in the proces being imaged without a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of physical practice.

For a musician, imaging includes more than visualizing. Besides visualizing the notes and the material part playing the notes, you must have feeling the body moving and touching the instrument (kinesthetic imaging). You also must hear the whole (auditory imaging) and experience the musical expression (emotional imaging).

The imaging finger of the third hand commands instrumental performance. While your third hand is coordinating your playing, it also is managing your practice to acquire instrumental musical skill. The tool of imaging is an integral part of what I give in charge to as the Basic Work Proces which has four steps

pace 1. The Technique of Observation: Identifying and Prioritizing Problems

To unfold a problem, you must first notice it exists. To increase your sway of a skill, you first must mark what is out of superintendence to gather objective information about it.

Using the Pie Strategy (see below), you determine which of the four slices of the pie--tone, intonation, harmonious flow or expression--needs the most work. Armed with this knowledge, you proce to pace 2.

Step 2 The Technique of Succes at Any Cost: Setting an Achievable Goal and Finding a Strategy to Reach It

An achievable goal is not too hard (frustrating) and not too easy (boring), and it can be attained without physical strain within a short time.

select a strategy that enables you to make an improvement in a chosen "slice of the pie" quickly and without physical strain. As part of your effort to establish an achievable goal without strain, simplify the enigma When you achieve an improvement, say on the outside loud, "Good job, --!" Then move to Step 3.

pace 3. The Technique of Intimacy: Stabilizing the novel Success

At the first jiffy of success, your short-term memory is greatest in quantity in your control. It is at this flash before your memory of the succes fades, that you have a chance to increase the proportion of successe to failures. If you can change your percentage of succes from 10 percent to 50 percent or better now, your last memories forehead today will favor your succes tomorrow. This is more efficient than trying to achieve three four or five successe in a file today.

Using the Technique of Intimacy requires you to detain track of the number of successe you achieve in ten tries each day. You will find that by means of day four you will achieve five for five or five for six. That is when you will have reflexive rule If you don't achieve five successe within ten tries upon day one, you set a novel more achievable goal and begin the proces again.

To come by ready for a performance, make trial of Step 4.

pace 4. The Technique of the First Try: Testing Performance Control

individual major difficulty with performing is you perform at a prearranged time whether or not you perceive like it. Another is you secure only one try: you start one time you continue "come hell or high water," and it's over

With the Technique of the First examine you formalize your practice space to throw back these two performance realities. Play from one side a piece once each day at a time specified the day before. one time you start, do not stop playing no matter what the quality. Based upon your observations of the play-through, decide what extremitys the most work. When you are assuming of your performance four days in a line you are ready to perform.

The techniques of the Basic Work Proces form a powerful cornerstone to support technical and musical ascendency in performance. Here, I have sole been able to hint at the operations involved. To find out more read nay work Practicing for Artistic Success: The Musician's Guide to Self-Empowerment in the Practice play and on Stage.

Burton Kaplan is professor of violin and viola at the Manhattan place of education Of Music and New York University. He also is director of Performance Power, an organization dedicated to teaching a combination of parts to form a whole for harnessing and integrating the powers of mind, material substance and spirit in the practice compass and on stage.

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