"My practice"

This morning's dark roast coffee accompanied by a crack-my-life-open essay by David Whyte on Ambition vs. Vocation. "True vocation calls us out beyond ourselves; breaks our heart in the process and then humbles, simplifies and enlightens us about the hidden, core nature of the work that enticed us in the first place."

I have yet to find a better description of a lifetime of practicing a musical instrument.

In the past few months, it has been difficult for me to find the motivation for practicing. I have been gifted new experiences, people, journeys in my life that I have been prioritizing. If you don't prioritize gifts, after all, they just seem like things you earned. So my time has been shared, cleaved, wrapped in paper and handed over; I am glad for this. I don't regret it.
But as a result, the thought that resides in my stomach lining after I don't sleep enough is I MUST PRACTICE MORE. All of the things I "want" to do in this world necessitate my feeling confident about my horn playing, my being skillful in my craft. I use my iPhone timer, I set my music in order on my music stand, I oil my valves before I begin so I can stay in the room, stay with it, for 60 minutes or 45 minutes or 38 minutes. And it's not working. I don't feel alive to the "hidden, core nature of the work" anymore than if I had left my horn in the case, taken a nap, and traipsed off to my next gig.

The blister that friendly poet Whyte casually ripped open this morning is that I have been "ambition"-ing my practice. I have been calcifying my hours by outlining the beginning and the end of each one. Ambition is the pistol at the start of the race, or perhaps the circular track itself. And where we arrive is back again, looped on ourselves. Vocation is the whitewater churning of the lactic acid in the legs, lungs desperate but trained to keep it to themselves, limbs tied on with fishing line, the primitive stem of the brain announcing "now" and then "now" and then "now." 
If practice could assume the qualities of vocation rather than ambition, life would be steeped in a teeming curiosity. My hours with my horn would not be a metaphor for a life well-lived; they would be a microcosm, a fractal that contains the entirety and yet is contained. And fractals juxtaposed with fractals, hours touching other hours, tesselate until all we perceive is this warm net of "vocational practice" that simplifies everything else we do.

Or so I think. When I was in school, the ideal of "practicing" was an athletic montage- now vs. then, how good I'm going to be in 3 months, how much ass I'm going to kick at this audition because of this time I'm depositing into my musical savings account. Now, the ideal is of "my practice" in the eye-rolling New Age-y Birkenstocks sense. How can I discover an hour in my life of relative quiet where my brain is alert, my inbox is triaged, and my lips sensate with the familiar mouthpiece not yet placed there?

"A calling is a conversation between our physical bodies, our work, our intellects and imaginations, and a new world that is itself the territory we seek."

Are track stars called to serve? Yes. They are called to run around a circle. They are called to glue all these different sensations together, not too much or it'll wrinkle, making that almost-embarrassing collage of empathy. And horn players? We are called to buzz. Called to buzz, to fill every nanosecond with "now" and "sing": sing now, now sing, now sing sing sing sing now. Called to urge the metronome digits higher, called to tame the shoulders/throat/hip flexors/ankles in the quest for a neutral inhale, as still as the crepuscular pond. Called to make music, fashion it with our mouths of all things. And who am I to judge that calling? Who am I to proclaim its worth? I just picked up the phone.

Marriage counseling

Day 25

So really, this is more Day 26 because I did not practice yesterday whilst traveling to distant lands. And in fact, that seems to be an emerging lesson of this Focused February project that has come to its whimpering end: I don't practice nearly as much as I think I do. Nor as much as I used to.
Many days (dare I surmise half?) I didn't have any time alone with my horn. That's really my definition of practice these days- am I playing my horn with no one else in the room?
This month may not have been the best choice for a practice renaissance now that I'm looking back at my schedule, but will I ever have an ideal practice schedule? I'm betting not. I'm still a young freelancer with no kids and minimal responsibilities: it's only gonna get worse from here.

I'd rather not harp on all the things this month was not cuz what's the point of that? I'm a good person, I work hard and care about a lot of things, no sense beating myself up over something that really only matters because I declare it matters. And I have declared that practice truly does matter since about the age of 12 when I would eschew TV watching in favor of scales. Ok, ok, sometimes the two would go hand in hand. As they occasionally still do... :)
 Still, I have spent a huge portion of my life dedicating myself to my relationship with the horn. It's really a marriage, seen from that light.

This month has shown me that maybe my marriage isn't as simple as it once was. Maybe I have the musical equivalent of a mortgage, kids, a job offer out of state... And maybe that's okay. Normal even? But just like a marriage, you can't give up on the romance, the special intimacy that's established after so much time together. This month has helped re-kindle some of that romance and shown serious areas for improvement. And for that, I call it a success.

But I might hold off on Motivated March for a little while.

Whining with Intention

Day 24

Today as I was warming up with a descending C Major scale as per usual, I thought to myself in a distinctly whiny tone, "I just can never play that C smoothly from the low D!"
And then I thought, yes I can. I know exactly how to do that. I've been told by some of the best teachers in the world precisely how to do that. And so I did it, played a smooth rich low C slurred from a D. Whoa. That was too easy.
So the rest of my practice today, I didn't just hear the things I didn't do perfectly, I whined about them, verbally and irritatingly. "I can't blow through that high B and make it to the next note on time." Yes, I can. I just did. "I can't valve trill that softly for three beats." boom. Yes I can. 
This feels like a discovery, though I'm sure I've discovered it before. Truly there is nothing I straight up cannot do on the horn. I have been taught to do everything, and do it well. But somehow that whining statement that gets my optimistic-voice going (of course I can, I can do anything!) is exactly what I needed to actually practice at my potential, for a couple hours at least.

Waste it, it's free

Day 23
Today while doing a little yoga, I was trying to "send" air to different parts of my body, as per my Youtube instructor's urgings.  Send air to your lower back, to your upper rib cage, down your right side, out your fingertips, etc.  And today in my classes, I led my students in a bunch of warm ups where they "launched" imaginary arrows, darts, paper airplanes, and various other projectiles using their air.  And yet, my air often feels like it gets stuck.  Like I have to picture it in some other metaphorical way to get it to where I want it to be.
Same thing in my practice tonight.  Send the air out my bell and around my head back to my left ear, as my teacher used to say.  It helps, as do all of these biofeedback techniques.  But why?  Where does the air "go" when we send it?  And why doesn't it go there to begin with?
Just some Thursday night musings as I oxygenate my blood...

Bankruptcy

Day 22
It is early in the morning, I have only begun to sip my coffee, and so remembering yesterday's practice is rather difficult at the moment.  I know I did practice.  My horn was still on my bed when I got home late last night, in optimistic hopes that I'd be back earlier to get some more playing done.  And I saw what music was on my stand, saw my mute on the ground, and vaguely recalled that it was probably a new music-oriented practice session, which can be tough after a day of teaching, which yesterday was.

I haven't figured out why exactly, but my lips are always exhausted after teaching, even when I don't bring my horn into school.  I just sound super fuzzy and unclear, like I'd had a heavy 6+ hour the day before.  Is it that I'm dehydrated?  That I talk too much and dry out my lips?  That my brain cannot fathom the idea of accomplishing things in two separate arenas on the same afternoon?  Or is it perhaps all in my head?  I try not to get too down on myself about it, because I love to teach and would never stop doing it simply because I can't practice excerpts that day.  But it does make me hope/wonder/optimistically dream about a future time when teaching doesn't entirely bankrupt me and make me pass out on my bed next to my horn, dreaming of our next productive practice adventure...

Strum, strummy strum

Day 21

I taught a lesson this afternoon to a smart, talented student who can't seem to practice particularly well. She has good musical instincts, but week to week, things just aren't sticking. So I've started talking very deliberately about different ways to structure practice- using a timer, making a list, writing journal entries, recording things on her phone. But today I went back to basics: a good old step-by-step list. And here's what we came up with:

Step 1: Learn rhythms

Step 2: Learn fingerings

Step 3: Learn pitches

Step 4*: Trial and error

Step 5: Play through sections

Step 6: Play through piece

Obviously this list is intended for a beginner, but it's interesting how much it applies to me too. (Minus step 2. I feel pretty good about my fingerings these days.) The step that I put a star next to in my student's workbook, Step 4, is the one she really struggles with. And don't we all? That's the step where you have to actually hypothesize something, anything, that might help you play just a tiny bit better. And then try it out. “Does thinking about the shape of my tongue help me to play that measure softer?” Yes? No? Kinda? Argh.

When I discussed this step with her, she actually groaned out loud. “I never had to do that with piano,” she said. And she's right. You don't have to do that with piano, at least not at the beginner level. For an instrument like piano, you put your fingers on the right buttons, get the coordination down, and voila, a song appears! But horn is just harder. It's a difficult instrument and you can really only think about one thing at a time while your brain is trying to process how to accurately engage tiny random muscles around your mouth. And you have to think about something; you have to make a psychological choice to trick your brain into learning an unintuitive skill.

Problem solving is a fundamental part of any practice, but horn takes a kind of emotional self-awareness that isn't required in certain other instruments (again, at the beginner level). I feel for this poor 8^th grader, although it also made me feel for myself too. Why oh why didn't I/we just pick ukulele?

Alternate universe me

Once more, with feeling

Day 20
I started learning a difficult new piece today that I have to perform in about a month.  As I sat down to sightread through it for the first time, I was super annoyed by the looks of it.  It didn't look idiomatic or fun to play, and it seemed mostly unnecessarily tiring.  I got through it painfully, missing just about every note and every other rhythm, yelling a couple choice obscenities along the way.  Then I grumbled into the kitchen, made myself a cup of tea, and realized that one 15-minute sightreading session does not a blog entry make.  So back I went to the music stand, this time starting from the end of the piece.
Given that I've been a musician for about 93% of the time that I've been alive on this earth, it should no longer surprise me that practice actually works.  But guys, it really does.  I spent a little over an hour working on the last page of the piece, taking it apart and getting it in my ear and my fingers, repeating each lick 10+ times until I knew what atonal note would come next.  And hell, I actually learned a quarter of the piece.  Within 60 minutes I went from dreadful, abject imaginings of how the performance would go to, "oh, this'll be fun to put together!"
I laughed out loud at the end of all this because I'm writing a goddamn practice blog, you would think I'd have some faith in the art of practicing.  But I'm still surprised how dramatically one can improve merely by repeating something.
||: Merely by repeating something :||