Photo – pavlen|istockphoto.com
I had a strange, roller coaster like experience with my performances at the Aronoff Institute last week. The Brahms clarinet trio that came on opening night was one of those performances where everything worked: the difficult sections felt easy, the ensemble clicked, it all fell together just so. But on Monday night, the Paganini La Campanella was an entirely different story. I picked a tempo that was actually too slow. I was tight and couldn’t loosen up. Everything felt difficult, and the difficult bits felt we nigh impossible. Then on Wednesday, the Penderecki Cadenza worked out basically fine, even with one less day to get the final preparations finished due to program reshuffling. Why did this happen? Because in performance, mental preparation is easily over half of the game.
In the case of the Paganini, I was working over the piece on the morning the day before I was to perform, and there was a point at which I knew that I had just blown the performance simply from the mental aspect alone. I was working on the scale in parallel thirds, and it wasn’t going too well. My mind started to wander. I began thinking of a performance by a violist who is the principal of a major orchestra, and I thought that there was no way that I could play up to that standard, I had no business ever aspiring to a position in a more major orchestra – what was I doing playing this piece that I clearly was not up to? Whether or not any of those thoughts were even remotely true had no bearing on their effect upon me. I had lost the mental battle over 8 hours before the performance was to take place.
I think that I have a unique way of preparing pieces, compared to others whom I’ve talked with. I do a lot of basic ground work months ahead of time, and then I just put the piece away, and then pick it up again several weeks before the performance time arrives. Not only that, but it’s the last few days before the performance in which I start to settle on some of the major interpretive decisions – I don’t like to settle too early, as I find it stultifying and boring to repeat the same set of decisions each time I practice. So, to have this sort of mental struggle right in the final hours is a particular blow to my plans, as it’s a crucial time for the formation of my interpretation. Needless to say, the performance wasn’t at all what I’d wanted for myself. Listening to the recording of the performance, I realize that I was initially way too hard on myself, that I’d done my best to dig myself out of the hole that I’d dug that morning.
The business of mental preparation in music is, surprisingly, still a nascent one. The established star of the field is Barry Green, a string bassist who took the precepts of Timothy Gallwey’s Inner Game of Tennis and co-wrote The Inner Game of Music
The Inner Game of music is that which takes place in the mind, played against such elusive opponents as nervousness, self doubt, and fear of failure. Using the same principles of “natural learning” Timothy Gallwey developed so successfully for tennis, golf and skiing and applying them to his own field, noted musician Barry Green shows how to acknowledge and overcome these internal obstacles in order to bring a new quality to the experience and learning of music. And for those who don’t play an instrument but who feel their appreciation of music will be enhanced if they understand more about the process of playing, this book is Ideal.
Clearly, self-doubt is what crippled my performance of the Paganini, but I was able to come back and contribute a more effective performance the next night.
This is part of why I think that most non-musicians don’t really appreciate the fact that even though we might have a morning rehearsal and and evening concert, the intervening time span is not really “free time”. We’re thinking about the performance to come, whether consciously or not. If it’s a particularly demanding piece or program, we’ll be worked up about it all day, even days beforehand. Every moment that we’re not occupied with something immediate, our thoughts will return to what is to come that night. I’m often reluctant to leave home too much the day of a performance, out of fear that I’ll tire myself out, or that there will be some other intervening factor that might affect the evening’s performance.
For me, some of the most important time I spend in preparation is done off the instrument. I might be driving along and a phrase will come into my head, and I’ll think of different ways it could go, prioritizing the new ones that hadn’t occurred to me before, and they go into the memory bank for the next practice session. Sometimes not thinking at all about the piece for a period of time is very productive, much like the process of studying before bedtime and then sleeping on the results, letting the brain process the new data during the night’s sleep cycles.
So, the process of making music is an incredibly complex and difficult one, made worthwhile by the love and devotion that the performer has to both the composer and audience, and made possible by years of intensive study and hard work. Remember that the next time you consider whether to help out a local arts organization or attend a self-produced recital or chamber concert.