Music Practice Tips

I’ve just recently been re-reading The Inner Game of Music by Barry Green. It’s a great read, and I recommend it for anyone with an interest in music, either Performing or Teaching. He opens with a chapter called “The Mozart in us” and suggests that we have lost the ability to play. We call what we do “Playing music” but more often than not, we “Work Music” - we have lost the ability to play that we had when we were young.

When I was young, and first starting off on the violin, my parents got a CD by the Soweto String Quartet, their first album Zebra Crossing. My parents tell a story of me going into my room, putting the CD on and playing along with the music. I didn’t care if I wasn’t exactly in tune, or in rhythm, it was fun, and it was what I wanted to do. More recently, I have played with Jazz and Irish music, improvising around tunes, and having fun. It’s the aspect of play that keeps me interested in music.

Quite often, we’ll forget that we’re supposed to play music. We get bogged down in technical work and etudes or studies, learning pieces and what not, and we forget to have fun. We need to relearn how to have fun, and how to incorporate it into our practice.

Someone once compared fine musicians to elite athletes, in regards to their body. When someone is at the highest level in the musical world, they have an acute knowledge of their body. They know if something doesn’t quite feel right, they know the angles that they need to be at. They also know the importance of warming up. Warming up our body each day, and stretching, is a very important part of being able to play for longer periods of time, and also preventing injury. This is one of the most obvious ways we can incorporate play into our practice - the warm up session.

For me, I usually play Irish music in my warm up session. It’s fun music that I can play around with, and it often warms up a good part of the body. I’ll start with a medium-slow piece, such as an Air or slow march, and then move onto some faster jigs and reels. I’ll generally finish up with my “show piece” - a piece that I pull out whenever someone asks me play something on the violin. I actually have three. I start with The Minstrel Boy, and then transition from that into Toss the Feathers (as done on The Corrs CD Forgiven Not Forgotten), I’ll then play The Devil’s Dream, which is a rocking tune that I build up from slow and end up going quite quick. Lots of fun, and a great warm up.

Another way to incorporate play into your practice is to make up games to play. You might have a small pattern that requires a certain fingering. On a string instrument, you might like to play around with it, and either play with different fingerings, or play it in different positions and different strings with the same fingering but different notes. Or you might like to play a game and see how many times you can play a tricky passage correctly before making a mistake, and then once you’ve made a mistake, try and beat it again.

I’m sure you can think of many other ways that you can play in your practice. I’d love to hear any ideas you have. What do you play with? Do you have a CD that you play along with, like I played along with the SSQ?