Practicing Quotes

“Music lives only in performance; only then does what we hear become real. Performing reveals everything we are able to show, and yet for this reason, the first time through, we often perform badly. And we yearn so deeply to go back again and correct our mistakes. Few yearnings are as profound in us, because the truth is, we cannot go back. Yet the fiction of practicing makes it seem as if we can, and this is enough to change our lives. 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. Yet practicing is the necessary lie that lets us pause to collect ourselves. It is the inner life of performance, the inward turn that allows us to develop, to grow, to move forward having learned.”
― Glenn Kurtz, Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music

“Similar to the Rodrigo in form, “La Catedral” has a slow, atmospheric introduction, followed by an episodic, rhythmic dance. It is constructed around a simple figure, an arpeggio that Barrios pushes through a series of chord changes: a small gesture, undistinguished in itself, yet full of musical possibilities. I set the music stand aside and play it from memory. The first finger of my left hand holds a bass note while above the theme sways with a tentative rise and fall. My left hand feels secure and steady, the ground on which the music builds. My fingers make swift, pulsing motions that gain weight and mass when the sound is larger, louder. The arpeggio grows increasingly insistent and agitated. I feel every note, not just in my fingers but along my arms to the elbows, where the fingers’ motions begin, and into my shoulders, neck, chest, and back. Everything is connected. My ear, my muscles, my flesh, these notes, and this wood and string—all are parts of a single vibrating structure, communicating their movement to each other. Playing feels different now. For the first time this cathedral is really dancing. It's built on a questioning anxiety. But the structure develops a kind of reassurance, like pleading that becomes a prayer. This feeling is not notated on the page. It is something that takes place within the notes, or between them, and within my body, within the guitar's body. I first played this piece in my third year at the Conservatory, just about the time I bought my church door guitar. With so fine an instrument in my hands, I suddenly heard an unexplored dimension latent in everything I played, as if the guitar knew things I had never dreamed of. It was a moment of great promise for me. The guitar offered a quality of vibration beyond anything I had imagined before, bringing greater forces into motion than just the strings. But in those days I couldn't play it. I was braced too tightly. Playing now feels somehow simpler. I'm not practicing a fantasy of the guitar or of myself, but this instrument, this wood, these strings; I'm playing this music, letting these notes dance. It's easy to forget how simple music is. I'm like a soundboard, whose job is to communicate excitement, to balance tension. Building the instrument and learning to play it involve complicated physics. But music is about vibration, about allowing myself to be moved.”
― Glenn Kurtz, Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music

“gradually understood that I wasn't practicing to play the guitar, but playing the guitar to learn about practicing.”
― Glenn Kurtz, Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music

“Interpreting literature was like performing a piece of music. It was a matter of lines and phrases, of hearing the resonance and learning where the stress falls. The note A has little significance by itself, just like the words love and yes. Yet placed just right, surrounded by other notes, other words, even a single tone can absorb all the forcefulness of our need, returning it to us as meaning.”
― Glenn Kurtz, Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music