Doug Lemov's field notes

Got a note from my friend Victor McSurely in response to my recent post about practice and professional musicians.  Victor’s both a professional musician and a teacher, so not surprisingly he had some really useful insights to share.

First he reflected on the importance of passion–he called it “wish”–which i interpreted as the burning desire to play, and his reflection was is part about how to sustain the passion to express oneself–“wish”–while also sustaining enough to-the-point practice to ensure mastery sufficient for professionalism.  

He quoted Rilke from Letters To A Young Poet to offer description of the passion one must feel to become a musician, or artist of any stripe really.

“This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity…”

In reflecting further on the challenges of getting enough practice to sustain technical mastery without losing the base passion, he notes that some musicians have “found themselves in professional situations where … over attention to the mechanical work of musicianship that professional performing requires… carries the unintended result of losing the muse.” 

Wondering if other folks who practice daily feel that tension and how they reconcile it.

 

On another note, Victor also offered this vignette:

 

“A young student once asked Ustad Parvez Khan at a school performance, “How much do you have to practice (to master sitar), how many hours a day?

His answer, “It is not a matter of hours, you have to live in music continuously.”

I thought this was especially powerful.  There’s explicit pratice but there’s also implicit practice–the heightened level of attention to and analysis of elements of the thing you intend to practice as they occur in the natural world.   A musician hears music differently; a writer constantly assesses word and syntax choices around him and–if he’s the writer of this blog–re-writes certain sentences in the books and articles he comes across for clearer explication of the idea… or at least the idea in his head as a reader… even though they will never see the light of day.  It is easier to do it than to NOT do it some times.

Anyway, you can read more of Victor’s response here:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/victor-mcsurely/on-practicing-victor-mcsurely-2013/587878161275285

 

Practice; Musicians