By

Thomas Carson Mark

 Excerpts adapted from

Motion, Emotion, and Love: The Nature of Artistic Performance

To be published in October, 2012, by GIA Publications, Inc.

Copyright 2012 by GIA Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

The way the body map influences movement, the way it arises in the brain, and the way experience alters it, have implications for practicing and rehearsing. To perform is to move, and to practice is to learn and perfect the movements that will constitute the performance. Dancers and actors know this because they communicate by means of movement itself, but many musicians are less keenly aware than are actors and dancers that when they practice, they are training movement. Because a movement approach may seem less familiar to musicians than it does to actors and dancers, I shall discuss practicing mostly from the perspective of musicians.

The French word for “practice” is répéter, “to repeat,” and repetition is what many musicians appear to think practicing consists of, whether or not they know French. They talk of getting the notes “in their fingers,” which they do by repeating them many times, assuming, apparently, that repetition will give security. If a passage is insecure or unreliable they say they need more practice, but they rarely mean that they should do anything different from what they’ve done before. They mean that they need to do whatever they’ve already been doing, but more of it. So they repeat the passage over and over. But all too often they attend to the notes they are playing rather than the movements that produce the notes and the passage remains insecure. They rarely attribute slow or unsatisfactory progress to faulty practice habits, and if they notice that progress is slow are likely to conclude, “I need to practice more,” rather than, “I need to practice differently,” although the second conclusion is often the correct one.

Technical exercises, the cornerstone of some musicians’ technical training, encourage a habit of paying more attention to the notes than to the movements that produce the notes. Many people acknowledge that possibility, but nevertheless persist in hours of technical exercises because they believe – or their teachers believe – that repeating a prescribed series of notes, if only they do it sufficiently many times, will create a skill.

But it is not the notes we play today that enable us to play tomorrow. What enables us to play tomorrow is the dispositional patterns established in our brains by the movements we use to play the notes. To be sure, repeating notes may establish patterns in the brain, but whether those patterns can serve as the foundation of a skill that will meet the demands of the literature without risk of injury will depend on the quality of the movements used to establish the patterns. Repeating notes using inefficient, tense, or awkward movements does not produce a skill, it merely ensures that next time the person plays, the movements will again be inefficient, tense, and awkward. I do not claim that technical exercises cannot be used intelligently, but repeating them mechanically, as students often do to comply with their teachers’ instructions (“Play these exercises for twenty minutes every day without fail! Understand?”) is likely in the long run to do more harm than good.

We need to develop a better understanding of what goes on when we practice intelligently. I believe we can do this by exploring the way voluntary movement is the result of a body map governing that movement.

We need to consider not only the way the brain directs movement, but also the messages that, by moving, we are sending to our brains. When we practice intelligently, the conscious mind examines the demands of the passage or composition and discovers a set of movements by which the body can meet those demands with ease and comfort, without risk of tension or fatigue. Then, with full kinesthetic attention and awareness to verify that those are the movements actually being used, the brain guides the hand and the body, moment to moment, in executing the movements. Attentive repetition of those movements establishes patterns in the brain that can direct future movements. Thus, the brain finds solutions, and at the same time movement trains the brain to guide future movement. Someone who practices intelligently repeats solutions, not just notes, and future playing is grounded in those solutions.

Artistic performance, though it is movement, is not just movement; it includes emotion and communication, which means that it requires a coordination of circuits across different parts of the brain, those that control bodily movement and those dedicated to emotional response and communication. These different parts of the brain are capable of operating independently, to some extent, but the goal of artistic performance is to have them operate together. Therefore, the goal of practicing must be to create dispositional images whose activation will involve not just bodily movement but the emotional and communicative elements of the work as well, and to incorporate those elements into the movements that constitute the performance.

If someone practices without attending to the quality of the sound, the sound is likely to be poor. If someone practices without attending to the emotional content of the music, the playing will be inexpressive. Someone who practices in these ways cannot shift suddenly in performance and insert expression or improved quality of sound. The instrument responds to movement, not to intentions that have not been mapped as movement. If someone has made habits out of movements that produce inexpressive sounds, merely thinking of a different result at the time of performance is unlikely to produce appropriate changes in the movement. Intention cannot bring about action if the appropriate dispositions are not already present.

A musician who tries to “add the expression” after having learned the notes has a difficult assignment. If the playing is inexpressive, she will need different movements to get a different result, but different movements will go counter to the dispositions already established. What usually happens is that she thinks of expressive effects and imagines that they are emerging from the instrument, whereas in fact the playing sounds the same, thanks to the established dispositions.

Mindless, mechanical practicing not only produces mindless, mechanical performance, it also produces insecure and unreliable performance. It is indeed possible, through repeated activity, for the mindless practicer to establish habits—dispositions that deliver the notes—and then, with the notes “in her fingers,” she may imagine that she has done her job of preparation. What has really happened is that her hands and fingers have acquired motor habits that can work more or less automatically provided she doesn’t pay close attention to exactly what she is doing. What she thinks she knows—that is, what her fingers can do automatically at home, where she is under no pressure and nothing is at stake—becomes insecure, unreliable, and foreign-seeming at the lesson or in performance. This is so common that music stores sell novelty buttons: “It was better at home.” But it wasn’t better at home. The student thought it was better because conditions at home didn’t call attention to the insecurity.

A more useful concept of practicing emerges when we return to the basic insight that performing is voluntary movement, and voluntary movement is what happens when an intention occurs in the context of dispositions that enable and direct a physical movement that realizes the intention. Voluntary movement thus has two components, intentions and dispositions, and to train voluntary movement a person must consciously train both components, not just one. Moreover, the two must be practiced together. When learning a passage or a composition a person must consciously direct movements that play the notes and meet the expressive elements of the music. The expressive elements must be worked out in detail; it is not enough just to think of the general features of the work, not enough just to say to oneself “this is a sad piece” and expect the result to improve. One must examine the particular character of each moment and every note: what quality of sound to produce in the first chords and the bodily movement that produces that quality, what quality of sound is needed in the second measure and the movement needed to get it, and so on to the end. A musician must not just intend the notes but also a tempo and a dynamic and a type of sound, and must intend these things physically, feeling them in the body so that intention takes the form not of a mere wish but is a conscious directing of bodily movement.

When the proper dispositions have been established, they can serve as the foundation for other dispositions and they can operate without conscious direction. At that point, but not before, the performer is free to intend the music. He is able to listen for the results he wants and rely on dispositions to supply the movement. At the same time, he is able at any moment to turn his attention to the movement if that seems necessary or desirable. He knows how to direct the particular movements needed throughout the piece, and if he misses a note or a chord he can quickly recover. Notice that awareness of movement is not the only element involved; harmonic, structural, and rhythmic awareness are also important. But awareness of physical movement is essential to avoid stumbling in the first place and also to enable recovery; no amount of harmonic awareness will prevent stumbling if the movement is wrong.

Failure to practice the skills needed in performance creates a gap between practicing and performing: the two become different activities. That, in fact, is how many performers think of them. They consider performance to be essentially different from practicing or rehearsing, an alien activity for which no amount of preparation ever seems to be sufficient. That attitude turns performing into an impossible assignment and makes a mystery of the fact that there are people who learn to do it. It may be tempting simply to acknowledge the mystery and say, “Well, some people are just born performers and that’s all that can be said.” Many people seem content to leave it at that, but in fact it is a cop-out. The kind of preparation I am advocating bridges the gap between practicing and performance. Narrowing the gap and, ideally, eliminating it, is essential for successful performance. Recognizing this, some teachers try strategies like urging their students that the only difference between practicing and performing is that in performance one plays the composition through without stopping, and wears nicer clothes. But that is helpful only if the focused intention required in performance is also part of the preparation.

When practicing does include the intention required in performance, the difference between performing and practicing becomes largely a difference in description. If I am playing Chopin, I could describe my activity as “playing the Fourth Ballade” or as “moving my arms to play a certain series of keys with a certain quality of sound.” When I think of myself as “playing the Fourth Ballade,” I am in performance mode; when I think of myself as “moving my arms to play a certain series of keys with a certain quality of sound,” I am in practice mode. Thinking of the activity under that description may lead me to recognize things I previously hadn’t noticed that affect the quality of my playing. I can then make appropriate changes and cultivate the intention that will deliver the result I want and carry me through in performance. When I switch to performance mode, I intend the music. But the intention to play the music now occurs in the context of dispositions that not only play the notes but also control the expressive result. I can play securely and am free to focus on the musical result, even to make musical choices while performing, because my practicing included everything required.

Here’s a link to the article: The Antidote to an Overly Teched Brain

Enjoy!

I thoroughly enjoyed the Dohnanyi. I hadn’t thought about the piece for a long time, but of course once the music started every bar seemed familiar. I was reminded how hard some of the piano part is (Dohnanyi himself was a great pianist; I, unfortunately, am not!), and I marveled to think that at one time I actually got through it creditably.

Nevertheless, the Schubert was the high point of the evening for me, but not because the music that emerged was the best imaginable instance of the piece. It was very good, but not wonderful; there were times when the balance wasn’t quite right, and there were moments of shaky intonation. I’ve heard more “perfect” versions from recordings. But one doesn’t know, of course, how much the recording was doctored, how many parts were re-recorded or edited; the recording may give a perfect version, but it doesn’t give a performance.

What was special about last night was the fact of its being a performance. I talk in my book about the relationship of performers with each other, and I claim that their interaction has many of the earmarks of a loving relationship which lasts during the performance, whatever their relationship with each other may be in daily life. That is what was thrilling last night, seeing the communication between the players, how they adapted and adjusted to one another. One of the cellists, in particular, was a joy to watch from that point of view.

So last night brought out for me what is special about performance, and what it is that performance offers that is unavailable any other way. Performers interact in a sort of loving relation, which can itself also be seen as a kind of artwork, but an artwork whose point is the creation of another artwork at the same time, namely the Schubert Quintet. We hear a masterpiece of music emerge from a human interaction taking place moment to moment before us, which cannot be captured on a recording, however perfect the sounds may be. Performance occurs in real time, like life, and like life it’s gone when it’s over. That is the predicament of performers as artists: they create artworks that endure only during the time of their being created.

But would I be right to say that to her? Some people may feel that provided she doesn’t make noise and audibly interfere with the music, then it doesn’t matter whether she reads her program or not; if she doesn’t choose to listen to the music, that is her loss. Other people may insist that they can listen to music even while reading, so how do I know she wasn’t listening? On that point I feel little doubt: she can’t have been actually listening and reading at the same time (many people, I think, overestimate their ability to “multi-task”). That holds especially for the C-Sharp minor quartet, which is a long, complex, and subtle work. No one could truly follow it without giving it full attention. One can, of course, treat it as “background music,” as you can any music at all, but merely having music in the background while you focus on something else is not the same as listening.

There is a further point: I think that one of the things that makes performance special is that it is shared. As an audience member, the experience is enhanced by the awareness that I am not alone; I and everyone else in the audience share the experience. The sense of it’s being a communal occasion makes it very different from merely listening at home to a recording. I think everyone knows what a difference it can make to be part of an attentive, receptive audience (and performers respond to that also, of course). If that is true, I think it confers a responsibility on members of the audience to contribute their part to the shared experience. So the lady reading her program was shirking her responsibility as an audience member. She ought to have stayed in the lobby with her program.