Positive practice is your path to success

This is taken from a talk I gave at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama

When are lectures and ‘talks’ useful? 

• When students recognise something useful in them that they can learn.
• When they make students determine to learn
• When the students continue to use the strategies to develop and continue to learn

I have one simple premise; that each one of us – regardless of

• Age
• Experience (in life, or in music)
• Technical knowledge
• Present standard  

– can, with help from books, our teacher, our friends, our hunger to improve, and our recognition of the future promise of huge enjoyment, learn to express ourselves through the horn.  We can do this at any time we choose; in other words we can choose to start this minute. We need to do so, because the horn is the most difficult instrument to play well.

Twelve Benefits of Playing a Musical Instrument 

I’ve got a couple of things to say before I give you this list. Cast your mind back to when you were young and doing new things because you knew you could, regardless of the consequences.  It was a great voyage of discovery. You cannot remember taking your first steps, but took them fearlessly. Perhaps you can remember excitingly eating your first delicious macaroni cheese, or discovering the magic of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony for the first time. These don’t need much effort to get fun out of, but producing your first perfectly produced, soft-tongued high g’’ perfectly pianissimo takes infinite, enjoyable practice. Two things are now happening:

1. The first is that we’ve reached the stage of discovering the relationship between results achieved and the need to use an amount of time and involve our brain in order achieve them.
   
2. And secondly, that some things are not automatically improving now, like using a knife and fork, or kicking a football, and at school finding yourself drifting into the next Associated Board exam, and although not doing very well on the sight-reading and the scales, getting merit or distinction – just. 

it’s now not like that sudden discovery of a new emotion, or Brahms, because it’s a bigger world for us now, and full of things that used to be taken care of by our parents and school. 

And so improving further is starting to take more time than it did. This is partly because more is being demanded of you and new things are happening to you. I don’t want to sound patronising – its only too easy. But I must say – there is an answer to all this, and a way to discover how to get better pretty quickly, and get ahead of the game and stay ahead. This will be exactly like when you started trying to walk and kept falling over and banging your head, and immediately got up again until you could do it. You will be able to access this all over again. You’ll hear others playing really well, and you’ll simply say to yourself  ‘If they can do it so can I. I’m going to practise and work out how to do it’. Let’s call it stickability or determination. Your brain will stop telling you ways of simply getting round the problem – like tonguing a note when you should have slurred it beautifully cleanly – but couldn’t. 

When you rediscover this determination to succeed there will start to be many, new, huge and rewarding moments in your life. And the results of all your work in this and everything else will be so long lasting. You don’t need mac cheese for a long fulfilling playing life.  But you do need pianissimo high g’’s. Because they’re there, there must be a way of playing them, and by experimentation we have to learn what it is.

Playing the horn to your highest possible standard is being in what I’ve started to call the best-ten-per-cent club. It will increase your powers in many directions, many not obviously connected to high g’’, as you gradually discover them for yourself. The magic answer that I seem to be about to offer lies in fact only in regular, thoughtful technical work. And in organising lots of it.  And – crucially – loving doing it. Ask Serena Williams or Beckham. They’ll say their secret was absolutely loving practising. The matches were just showing the results of all the enjoyable hours of practice. 

In experiments with children the spatial awareness of good musicians was found to be 37% better than that of the non-musicians. By spatial awareness I mean the improvement was shown by 

• learning to see things better on the page,  
• fitting notes into the bar and sorting out rhythms. 
• learning how close you should be sitting to the next player.  
• And, most importantly, hearing and adjusting to everything that’s going on around you.

Here are the twelve things that should interest you. Playing the horn and studying it in depth will have the following benefits for you.

1. You are all a bit different and have your own strengths and needs, I know. But because everyone is different therefore, in a way, everyone is the same. The harder you practise specific musical skills, the better they become. The non-musical things that improve as a result of this musical practice include, believe it or not:

• Using your hands more efficiently
• Running
• Swimming
• Your hearing
• Storing information
• Your memory

2. I read that our IQ can eventually improve by 7 points over a relatively short time. 

3. Musicians soon learn that the quality of the time they spend practising is more important than the quantity. And you will learn to apply this rule to your general life. 

15 minutes concentrated embouchure practice is 100 times more useful in the long run than 15 minutes casually blasting through the last movement of Strauss 1 a couple of times. Doing this in the wrong context is a waste of time. Mind you, playing and improving the first 16 bars of the rondo over and over again in order to refine it in the most thoughtful way will be a great thing to do in the short and the long term. Then play through something else – for fun.

4. Your hand/eye coordination and your breathing will both improve. Deep breathing is physically very good for you.

5. Playing the horn will improve your maths and your ability to calculate things generally. 

6. This all helps you to read, and understand what you are reading, better.

7. By making yourself turn up on time and look after your instrument you develop a sense of responsibility.

8. It gives you a sense of history, if you think about the period in which the music was written and what was going on then. Learn the Natural and Baroque horns.

9. It helps your concentration.

10. It allows you to develop your powers of self-expression, and thus relieve stress by showing instinctive emotions. This is noticeably beneficial to those with Autism and anyone with depression. Singing does the same thing. You should all get a choir going. You’d absolutely love it. It doesn’t matter in the slightest whether you think you can sing or not. If you all do this, I’ll organise a concert – half singing and half horn ensemble. I promise.

11. It helps you make friends, become more confident and it promotes happiness.

12. It gives purpose to your life

The better you work, the quicker these results will appear. There is no point in my simply saying this. You must start believing these benefits to be attainable, and start to improve your skills with the promise of these twelve things to encourage you. It is all about the autonomous ‘You’. Do not sit back with your ‘natural gifts’ comfortably under your seat. 

If this is to be a new start for you, in the initial stage of learning you must first acknowledge your technical and musical faults. Once you have done this, your acknowledgement of your lack of competence should be the best and most exiting thing you’ve ever done. It is the only way to get to the second stage of learning and improve further.  And when you see it start to work in your general life you’ll want to practise even better. Have the goals and prizes and ambition at the forefront of your mind.

Stages of Learning

There are four stages of learning. The first stage was when you just picked up the horn with no clue as to what to do. You were unconsciously incompetent. You weren’t thinking and you couldn’t do it. Then you started to have lessons and found out more what you couldn’t do than what you could do. You became consciously incompetent.

Because it’s not easy to admit these things, we tend to sweep our mistakes and weaknesses under the carpet and concentrate on the fun things. And this is OK to do and necessary – in its place. But we are still conscious deep down that we are incompetent. Are you with me? Now, we know we can’t do it. This is good.

The very best thing you can do is to make a list of all the things you can’t do and then to set about putting things in motion.  You make the list and then say out loud after reading each one “I admit I can’t do this”.

That’s why Alcoholics Anonymous is so successful. Standing up in front of twenty others and saying, “My name is Fred Bloggs and I am an alcoholic”. “My name is Julian Baker and I could never play lip trills well enough.” A bit late now, for me. But you cannot make progress until you admit there’s a problem.

You now have the opportunity to get on with some serious general improvement. Between 15 and 60 minutes of your practice on one specific thing will work wonders and you’ll slowly begin to tick things off your list.

When finally you know what to do, and are able to stand up and put on a pretty good performance, you will be in stage 3. Consciously Competent. This is the longest-lasting stage. Some of you are there already, too. You know that if you do certain things certain results will occur. If it goes wrong you will know immediately what you didn’t do, or did wrong. This is when that decision to practice to get better will begin to be noticed in your general life, not just horn playing and importantly show in exam and performance results too.

Great chefs, after buying their produce, prepare and then cook it in the most imaginative way. Then they display it to the customer equally for their own and the diner’s maximum enjoyment and satisfaction. And they, having two Michelin stars, are able to reproduce these results automatically, every day. The chef has become Unconsciously Competent. As far as your playing is concerned, it is when the audience, listening to you playing a beautiful melody, and an exciting fortissimo high c’’’ is able to sit back in or on the edge of its seat and imagine itself strolling through meadows of wild flowers or climbing the highest mountain. You, however, will simply be getting on with the job. And looking forward to your pint. In other words, you’ve arrived.

So, to get there each and every one of you have got to up the ante. As I think I said, I’m not being personal – you’re all different and work differently, but I think you’ll all find something that refers to you individually in what I say.

It is your job to study incredibly hard to allow yourself to be able to play more confidently. You’ve all made a great start, just by getting here. I’ll be hearing you play in a minute, and you’ll all have really good things in your playing. If it takes ten years practice to reach your peak, and assuming the sort of work you’ve already done in last 5 or more years amounts to about two of these new types of practice, you have another 8 years, starting now, to achieve this, and so you’ll be continuing after you’ve left college and into the time when you’re playing professionally.  You will learn to start playing in the top ten per cent of those players that are as ‘good’ as you. Being in the top ten per cent in an audition or an exam will automatically get you noticed in the first two minutes. If you’re not in the top ten per cent they’ll be saying ‘er –I don’t think so’ in the first two minutes. The strategies for achieving this are not as difficult as you might think.

As one of the ten per cent club of players who have reach each new stage in your development you will find yourself in a state of cornucopial bliss. You won’t be complacent though. Not you. You’ll be very humble while being very ambitious.

Basic tools, habits and skills that must become automatic 

Here are the basic tools and habits and skills you will begin to have automatically at hand.

• Sitting up straight and starting to breathe in just before you lift the horn
• Lifting the horn to your embouchure, not bringing your head down to meet it.
• Having a perfectly formed concept of the music before you play
• Staring at the page and hearing the pitch of the piece and all the intervals in it, in your head while you are playing
• Always keeping the air moving and always playing loud enough.

Practice list

Here is a list of things to practise. Don’t ignore any of them, even or especially the ones you’re good at.

• Develop a perfect production on your lip/the mouthpiece/the horn.
• Find a middle C (our G) on the piano. Sing, buzz, buzz on the mouthpiece, buzz into the horn and play on the horn – a beautiful series of mezzo piano/mezzo forte notes. As many different pitches as possible – all produced in the same way. Practise producing each pitch perfectly in tune.
• Bring your lips in to meet the air that you are releasing – do not force them to vibrate because of the amount of air you are using.
• Practise all types of long notes in every conceivable way, and learn all conceivable scales until fingerings are automatic. (All music is made up of long notes and scales).
• Every note that looks the same as the last one is in fact a new note, requiring the same care and attention as any of the others. A pitch heard or imagined accurately in your head need never be split.
• Practise bending all the harmonics down as far as they will go before they click onto the harmonic below (with only movement within the area covered by the mouthpiece – i.e. invisible in the mirror). Pretend you didn’t know there was a note below until it suddenly ‘happened’. Practise, also, bending – very slightly (they won’t go far) – open notes up, using only the breath to sharpen them until they click up, but with no embouchure/tongue-movement at all. This is difficult to do, but it results in a very strong high register. Take a deep breath before you start. NB If you find this easy, you are doing it wrong. When you can do all this effectively your embouchure will have become much more flexible and efficient.
• Practise all the exercises and scale routines in the two volumes of Thévet Mèthode pour Cor. Play the Kopprasch studies until you know them all, and buy the contemporary studies called Theme and Forty Variations, by William Salaman.
• Learn a) all the Mozart, and the two Strauss concertos by heart as well as all the rest of the obvious solo concert repertoire, and b) learn all the orchestral excerpts in the gold book and in the opera books. Look forward to practising them and everything else until you can’t get any of it wrong.

Two physical factors to take on board

Do breathing exercises every day, as well as for 5 minutes before you perform in public. This calms you and reduces your pulse-rate. Imagine what you’re going to be doing in a minute – like concert audition, exam whatever and then……
……Learn to accept and use the necessary adrenaline to excite rather than cause anxiety. Beta-blockers and alcohol can make for either a dull, or a dodgy performance, and both, while helping a bit in extreme cases, can be addictive. Practice is the perfect short cut to success. Any addiction should be merely the thrill of doing something clean as well as you can.

Make sure you do the following:

• Look for work – any work, paid or not
• Get a hobby, and of course, ‘a life’!
• Enjoy practising, pleasing yourselves and pleasing others

Finally:

• Become street-wise – perhaps the best advice of all

I’m not a particularly wise man, and we all know that you can’t learn wisdom from a wise man anyway – it has to be your own wisdom. But I’ve had a lot of experience teaching, and everything I’ve said is the result of what I’ve seen and heard and reflected on.

So, it’s more than likely that you can benefit from what you’ve heard. I haven’t exaggerated anything. Its just what is the truth – as I see it. All the philosophy and all the technical advice work very well, if you can apply it.  It will be of especial use to you in exams and when doing auditions. You will find yourself playing as well as you can at that particular stage in your playing life,

The thing is – I know that each of you can do it. It makes no difference whether you went to a state school, a private school or a specialist music school. It is not important that your parents are musicians or just musical or not musical. You don’t automatically inherit others’ talent and there is no such thing as musical DNA. There is no such thing as ‘Natural Talent’. All ability is learned. Some learn particularly quickly, that is all. You can be encouraged by your teachers and your parents, and that’s great. But if you develop what is called a Growth Mindset you will get there yourself, regardless. Each of you can choose to do it. Because we all in fact have the clear choice to do anything we want. Its just the question of whether we decide to make the right choices. Yehudi Menuhin said that if a hundred two year olds from any country and every socio-economic background were taught in the same way as he’d been, they’d all have exactly the same chance of being as good as he was.

Throw away all that keeps you the same. Start to learn and to develop a mind-set that makes your playing grow and grow. 

Recommended reading:

• The Inner Game of Tennis – Timothy Gallwey
• Bounce – Matthew Syed
• Mindset – Dr Carol S Dweck