Music Practice Tips

I performed in a concerto competition at university this week. Performed the first movement of Mozart’s G major violin concerto from memory. Didn’t end up winning (though I didn’t really think that I was going to anyway), but I had a scare in the exposition where I couldn’t remember what to play. I could remember it out in the rehearsal room, but when I got on stage, it left me. After the exposition, I was able to clear my mind and just focus on the playing, and after that, everything went fine.The crazy thing is that I knew exactly what was happening and why my memory slipped, and could almost see it coming.

What happened was that my mind was everywhere but the music. I was worried about what the panel was thinking, I was thinking ahead to what it would be like if I won, I was hoping that I’d do a good performance because my mate was videotaping me and I would’ve liked to have uploaded it to the internet. All these things were distracting my mind from the music. No wonder that my memory of the music left me.

Self 1 and Self 2

The Inner Game of Music by Barry Green with W. Timothy Gallwey describes these chattering comments as “Self 1″ - Barry describes Self 1’s characteristics as follows:

Self 1 gets in our way when it tells us what we should and shouldn’t be doing, and talks to us largely in terms of the past and looming future. It loves to predict failures and successes, and often discusses things that have already happened in terms of the proverbial ‘if only’. Like an after-dinner speaker, it also enjoys having our undivided attention.

Ok, so a lot of my self 1 thoughts were thinking about failures and successes. Definitely self 1, and it detracted from my performance. However, after the exposition, I was able to clear these thoughts, and focus only on the music. My performance was much better, and it allowed me to tune into the Self 2, which was described as such.

The body is the best learning facility of all. It has thousands of feedback circuits. And the feed back is instantaneous. The body contains more information than all the libraries in the world, for it codifies in its structure and its genes, evolutionary experience that goes all the way back to the first living organism. When we vacate our bodies [i.e. pay attention to Self 1 rather than Self 2] … this vast store of information is unavailable to us. When we reinhabit the body and learn to understand its messages, we gain access to a treasure of knowledge and guidance.

The type of information that we want to be receiving comes from Self 2 but, more often than not, if we’re not focusing, we’ll only receive feedback from Self 1. We need to develop ways to get rid of that chattering. The Inner Game of Music has some fantastic techniques in which to deal with it, so I would recommend you buy that book - though there are many more out there.

Meditation

This is something that I have practiced in the past, and found it has helped me a lot. While meditation is often associated with religious issues, it doesn’t have to be if you don’t feel that way. In fact, for this aspect of practice, it’s probably better that it isn’t. Our goal in these situations is to clear the mind of it’s chatter. We’ve got it going on all the time, and through practicing meditation, we can get used to just turning that chatter off. Through regular practice of meditation, you can develop techniques to turn the chatter off at an instance, and then be able to use that in your performances. Now meditation can be quite hard to do at first, but the results are worth it. There are many ways to approach it, but here’s one that I have used.

Find a quiet, comfortable spot to sit. It can be on a chair, a bed, a mat or the floor, so long as you’re comfortable. Sit down and take a big breath in and out. Now for each breath in you’re going to think “Just” and for each breath out “Breathe” - this is going to be your only thoughts. See how long you can keep this going before a different thought comes in. Recognise it, dismiss it, and return to your “Just Breathe”-ing. This “Just Breathe” is what’s called a Mantra that will help you focus your mind. Eventually, you might be able to stop the mantra and just experience a clear mind - if you can get there try and keep it that way for as long as you can.

Other mantras that I’ve heard of are “I am here, now. I am here, now” - which gets your mind focussed on the fact that you can’t change the past, you can’t predict the future, just focus on the present  - and “In Out” which again is focusing on your breathing. You might like to try some different ones, whatever works for you. I’d love to hear it in the comments.

Over the next few months, I’ll be focussing a lot on the mental side of music, so every now and then you can expect to see a post on some aspect of it that interests me. Hope you enjoy it.