Zen and the Art of Analytic Practice
As musicians we spend a lot of time in the practice room. We work scales and exercises, etudes and excerpts, pieces of all different sorts. We spend countless hours in those small rooms to prepare for our performances. Hopefully over time we amass a bunch of tools and techniques that make us more efficient in our efforts to perfect the music we work on. All of that time is useless though if we are not able to effectively perform the pieces. In order to be the most effective musicians we have to have two modes of practice; the Analytic and the Zen.
The Analytic is what we are perhaps more familiar with; stop when we make a mistake and drill until we get it right. The methodologies and philosophies on how to do so are as varied as the pieces we play. Many musicians have the unfortunate habit of simply repeating the passage over and over. While this can get the job done, it is rarely the best way to do so. I am a big proponent of breaking things down into small simple steps to build them back up, with a variety of different techniques I talk about with my students (look around the blog for specifics on that score). My general rule is that if I make a mistake more than once, I circle it. If I make it again, I stop and figure out a way to fix it. This usually involves one of the many techniques I use in my teaching, or coming up with something new on the spot, but I always start at the problem and slowly work my way out. Maybe that means working the whole measure or simply a single beat. It depends on the situation. The point is to fix it. If I make the mistake again I do a further marking of some sort and figure out a different way to iron out that particular wrinkle. The Analytic mode is all about getting the piece to have as few mistakes as possible. It is where we aim for the perfection we know we’ll never actually reach. That fact of perfection being a myth is where Zen mode comes in.
Zen mode is the way we have to practice for performances. If the Analytic mode is about noticing every mistake and stopping to fix it, the Zen mode is the exact opposite. When we make a mistake in a performance it is easy to fixate on it. When we fixate on it our chances of making another mistake go up drastically. This can snowball on us until we have a bad performance, when it is highly likely that no one in the audience even noticed the initial mistake that started the spiral. To be able to handle these situations we have to practice going all the way through our pieces without stopping, no matter how badly we mess up. Being able to figure out a way to keep going is as much of a skill as playing exactly what is written.
I knew a guy in college who completely forgot the Bach sonata he was playing in the middle of a recital. Because he had spent time practicing how to keep going he was able to figure out a way to jump to a spot near the end that made sense. The only people in the audience who knew something had gone wrong were those who knew the piece. He was able to do this because he practiced performing.
I call it the Zen mode because it is very similar to meditation. The goal of meditation is not to try to stop the thoughts or focus on them, it’s mainly to let them go by. This is what we have to do with mistakes in a performance. Worrying about them won’t fix them, so we shouldn’t focus on them at that point. It is a skill that comes easier to some than others.
Like Analytic Mode, Zen mode can be done in different ways. It isn’t effective to just run the piece from beginning to end every time. It can be done in sections, broken up by switches back to Analytic mode. For me every practice session starts and ends with Zen mode. I choose the passage I’m working on and go through it to see what state it’s in. I will be as Zen mode as I can be at this time. This includes the first time I read a passage. The difference there is that I will often stop to mark places that were not immediately sightreadable, and then continue playing the section in Zen mode. When not sightreading the initial Zen pass is to see how effective the previous day’s Analytic mode work stuck.
The key is knowing how to balance these two modes of practice. In the early stages it should be mostly Analytic to get as many mistakes out as possible. If we go too much Zen too early we can ingrain mistakes that would have been an easy fix. Every musician learns the hard way that unlearning something we’ve done wrong is so much harder than learning something right the first time. The initial stages of Zen mode are most effective when they are used to judge the wholeness of a passage. A quick Zen pass can tell us how effective our latest Analytic mode work was, and point out potential new areas that need to be worked. Perhaps we nailed the tricky rhythm we needed to fix, but now have to work the transition out of it for example.
No matter what our instrument is we have to balance out these two modes of practice if we are going to be good performers and well balanced musicians.