Author: brycon
Date: 2021-11-12 21:03
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I'm thinking about slow, "perfect" practice this morning as I go through my daily work. I am an impatient adult learner, and would much rather "get to the good stuff" than, as basketball coach Red Auerbach famously said, "learn the fundamentals."
Perhaps the impatience you experience is a result of your practice not providing enough mental stimulation. The sort of slow, monotonous, repetitive, stick-with-it style of practicing I see often advocated for here would bore any sentient being. Jumping among tasks, what sports psychologists call "random practicing," can help with focus. Also, thinking less about technical perfection and more about musical expression can help.
We can think about a phrase or gesture, the shape, color, intensity, expression, etc. we want to achieve; try going for it without giving a damn about perfection; and see where the "mistakes" occur. The method of preemptively avoiding any mishap, by contrast, often leads to lifeless playing. Moreover, it doesn't allow you to fix your issues because you simply avoid making them: always playing softly, for example, so that your intonation doesn't go flat or always articulating legato so that voicing issues aren't so noticeable.
Quote:
As soon as a mistake occurs we should slow things down to a speed at which we can play that section accurately. If we don't, all we "human creatures of habit" will be doing is reinforcing playing it wrong: something that the more we do, the harder it will be to break.
I disagree. As soon as a mistake occurs, you need to determine for yourself what the cause of the mistake was. Maybe I was zoning out, thinking about when I'm going to start making dinner, and I flubbed something that I play correctly all the time, in which case there probably isn't any need to slow things down. Or perhaps it's some sort of issue with my playing, in which case perhaps I would try and replicate the mistake several times over so that I can figure out exactly what's happening. What's more, maybe the issue is with a single note connection, those pesky Ds to F#s in the D dominant arpeggios in the Mozart concerto, and it would be a far better use of my limited time to design some sort of exercise to address this specific problem rather than to practice an entire section of music at a slow speed.
Again, for me, this pedantic, one-size-fits-all, slow-everything-down-and-play-perfectly method is simply a terrible way of practicing the clarinet. But your mileage may vary.
Post Edited (2021-11-13 05:49)
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The Clarinet BBoard
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