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Practicing is training; practicing is meditation and therapy. But before any of these, practicing is a story you tell yourself, a bildungsroman, a tale of education and self-realization. For the fingers as for the mind, practicing is an imaginative, imaginary arc, a journey, a voyage. You must feel you are moving forward. But it is the story that leads you on.
Practicing is training; practicing is meditation and therapy. But before any of these, practicing is a story you tell yourself, a bildungsroman, a tale of education and self-realization. For the fingers as for the mind, practicing is an imaginative, imaginary arc, a journey, a voyage. You must feel you are moving forward. But it is the story that leads you on.
I listen to the first two measures of the fugue in my head. Then I close my eyes and listen more carefully. I watch my fingers in my mind as they make the sounds I want to hear. Without allowing the vision to dissipate, I play the first two measures for real.
Franz Schubert composed most of his songs on the guitar and only later transcribed them for piano accompaniment. Many of Schubert's songs were originally published with a guitar part, including “Ungeduld,” “Das Wandern,” “Heidenröslein,” and “Lied der Mignon.”
Martin Luther played the guitar, as did Benjamin Franklin and Richard Wagner. Giuseppe Verdi was a promoter of the instrument. Gustav Mahler composed for it, as did Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky.
Technique is at the crux of being a musician—of being a person, really—the place where what you imagine meets the reality of who you are, where your ideals meet your habits. Whether you're working to change, or working not to, you always return to technique.
Musical harmony is just the audible form of the greater harmony of all creation. “The movements of the heavens are nothing except a certain everlasting polyphony, perceived by the intellect, not by the ear,” wrote Johannes Kepler in The Harmony of the Universe.
German poet Heinrich Heine, who declared, “Nothing is more futile than theorizing about music.”
The lute became the philosopher's instrument, the symbol of neoclassical humanism, of learning and courtly love, while the guitar—though more closely related to the kithara—inherited the aristocracy's disdain for peasants and the Christian philosophers’ mistrust of the body, women, and pleasure. It could have become so many things. But in the end it became this.
“The guitar is greater than you are,” he says to his friend. “Every instrument is. Give yourself to this greatness, let it open your heart and expand your imagination. But don't confine its spirit with your words. Make the music you can,” he sighs, settling back in his chair, “and let the guitar be the guitar.”
We were interpreters of a tradition, and so we vied with one another over obvious things, technique and tone,
who decides what is musical? The composer when he conceives the notes as an abstract form? The musician when he realizes them on an instrument in performance? The audience when they sit silently listening?
music is about vibration, about allowing myself to be moved.
Most of the time we experience fear at the prospect of performing, as if we weren't performing all the time, as if most moments in our lives didn't count. Faced with a sudden sense of significance, then, we panic. Being seen seems dangerous, and we hide ourselves; we protect what is most valuable and offer up only what we aren't afraid to lose.
Practice lets us grow in our own time, protected from the demands, the vitality and mortality, of each moment. Within the practice-room walls it often seems as if time really does stand still, as if we could always remain protected, practicing and improving forever. This illusion holds transformative power—but also a dangerous seduction. Practice, by itself, is a dream of perfection. Only performing can turn practice into shared life, where our own time may join with others’, becoming musical.
Limitation is the condition of our lives. What matters—what allows us to reach beyond ourselves, as we are, and push at the boundaries of our ability—is that we continue. But then everything depends on how we practice, what we practice.
