Maestro of the Day (#2) (and now for something completely different)

H. W. Henze – Drei Tentos played by Marlou Peruzzolo Vieira, Guitar

I just always liked these pieces, bristling with disinterested beauty. A really nice performance.

Maestro of the Day

A natural performer. Looks like he has a good teacher as well. He’s got great rhythm and is having fun. Notice that he’s simply playing repeated notes on his bass-E string, which makes it easy enough that he doesn’t have to worry about fancy chords or fingerings, and can just sing and play. I think this is an awesome way to teach children music. He’ll have plenty of time to learn all the fancy stuff, but for now, he’s already discovered joy in performing, which is something many quite serious musicians never learn at all.

Hat tip tip of the day

The Art of Repetition: An incredible insight into the art of practicing from my friend Kevin Gallagher

In life, we cannot relive the same day repeatedly – but as musicians, we enter into the same musical situations repeatedly through the the art of repetition. Taking a phrase, a passage, or a full piece and playing it over and over again is absolutely necessary for memory, technique, understanding, endurance, listening, etc. However, the one aspect of repetition which is most often overlooked is how we feel when we repeat. By being conscious about how we want to feel during each repetition, we can progress much faster.

For example, a few days ago I taught someone who was having difficulty with a fast passage and was explaining to me how he had been “drilling and drilling this bit, but it doesn’t seem to get any better”. We checked fingering, preparation, etc. Everything seemed to be fine. I then asked him to play the passage for me a few times. Sure enough, each time he played it, I could tell that he was feeling like he couldn’t do it. He kept repeating the situation with the same mindset – and therefore getting similar results.

I then asked him to take a little time, breathe, relax, sit up straight, and think about how it would feel to be fully confident when playing the passage. Feel confident and stay focused on that feeling while playing. Now we began to repeat again. The first few repeats were no different than before, but this time instead of reacting to the mistakes, I asked him to keep refocusing on the feeling of confidence before and during the passage. Sometimes I would just tell him to say “this is easy” and imagine what it would feel like to be a player who had that kind of belief. Each time he would make a mistake, we would reset the feeling of confidence and repeat again.

Now this might seem like fantasy, but after about 6 or 7 repeats, he began to play the passage more accurately and fluidly. His body started to relax, his concentration increased, and although we were focusing on simply getting the passage accurate, even his tone and rhythm improved. At times, he would slip back to the old way (mental habits are hard to break) but the feeling of confidence or ease has to be practiced like anything else for it to take root. Awareness is key here, because it’s so easy to do and not feel. Feeling is often totally overlooked, but I’m finding that it has to be practiced hand in hand with doing. One of the best questions you can ask when you are practicing is “how am I feeling?” and then “how do I want to feel?”. Observe this as often as you can when you are working and keep refocusing on the feelings you want – practice having them now.

For the full post, go here

The Learning Zone

Here’s a little piece for anyone who practices but doesn’t seem to improve much.

I suggest you take a look at a book called “Talent is Overrated,” by Geoff Colvin. The book is not written primarily to musicians but to a general audience of business, organizational and sports readers. Its subtitle is “What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everyone Else.”

I highly recommend this book. It systematically and scientifically pulls apart the longstanding myth of innate talent. And by examining great achievers, it demystifies their process, breaking it down and making it much more concretely available to anyone who is willing to do the work.

According to Geoff Colvin’s research, the element that can be shown to separate the W.A. Mozarts or Tiger Woods of the world from everyone else is something he calls “deliberate practice.”

Here are the elements of deliberate practice:

1. It’s designed specifically to improve performance—designed very specifically, for exactly what needs improvement at the specific stage of development. It’s hard to get this efficiently accomplished without a coach or a teacher but not impossible.

2. it can be repeated a lot-–if you’re afraid of annoying your roommates or get bored too easily or worst of all, don’t understand what exactly it is that you are shooting for, you probably won’t be motivated to repeat your scale  or your exercise enough that it has a truly beneficial effect and really sinks in.

3.feedback on results is continually available—you need to be constantly listening, judging, adjusting, experimenting—if you know what you are trying to achieve in the exercise. And if you don’t quite know, you need to have a teacher or coach or someone who is able to give you good, accurate feedback.

4. It is highly demanding mentally—-deliberate practice is all about focus and concentration. It’s not mindless play, it’s not just having fun. “Continually seeking exactly those elements of performance that are unsatisfactory and then trying one’s hardest to make them better places enormous strains on one’s mental abilities” (p.71)  This places a limit on how much time can be spent practicing in this manner. Three to five hours a day at the most, with breaks for rest.

I like this quote, from the violinist Leopold Auer: “Practice with your fingers and you will need all day. Practice with your mind, and you will do as much in one and a half hours.”

5. It isn’t much fun—-unless you enjoy deliberately seeking out what you suck at  so you can do it over and over until you’re ready to move on to the next level of suckitude.

One more illustration, from the book, that I’ve found very helpful for my students. It’s fun to “practice” things that you are already good at, that you feel comfortable with already, that you have some level of mastery over.. In a way, this is one of the great rewards of learning to play. But you’ll never get very far if you don’t challenge yourself, constantly, to push just a bit past what you feel comfortable doing.

Draw three concentric circles. Label the inner circle Comfort. Label the outer one Panic. The one in the middle is where your deliberate practice will take place, it’s the Learning Zone.

If you stay where you are comfortable, you’ll never improve very fast.  But if you push too hard, always trying to do things that are too far out of your reach, you’ll run yourself ragged and tense, develop bad habits and you will not improve much either. Either that, or you will skip important steps or stages in your fluent development of skills.

The trick is to be constantly searching for and finding the Learning Zone where the challenge is just right.

Thanksgiving music for guitar

I’ll bet you didn’t even know there was such a thing as thanksgiving music. Neither did I and I’m still not sure there is. But this being a uniquely American holiday, I did do a search for Turkey in the Straw.

First off, some great bluegrass playing. These guys sure are celebrating that old turkey. Looks like fun,

And here’s Franco Morone, an Italian guitarist, playing it with a certain Italian flair….I’m not sure he’s quite aware of the humorous intention in the song’s lyrics, but he does make it lyrical….

No-one seems to know the lyrics to Turkey in the Straw anymore—it’s so  catchy it doesn’t need words. But you can get some idea from a version close to the original, that I dug up on this website: (Try not to imagine these words while listening to Franco M play it….)

Went out to milk, and I didn’t know how,
I milked the goat instead of the cow.
A monkey sittin’ on a pile of straw,
A-winkin’ at his mother-in-law.
Turkey in the straw, turkey in the hay,
Roll ‘em up and twist ‘em up a high tuckahaw
And twist ‘em up a tune called Turkey in the Straw.

Met Mr. Catfish comin’ down stream.
Says Mr. Catfish, “What does you mean?”
Caught Mr. Catfish by the snout,
And turned Mr. Catfish wrong side out.
Turkey in the straw, turkey in the hay,
Roll ‘em up and twist ‘em up a high tuckahaw
And twist ‘em up a tune called Turkey in the Straw.

Best for last, here’s another version of the lyrics. Enjoy, and happy thanksgiving, even if you are vegetarian!

 

P.S., someone please tell me what a “high tuckahaw” is.

Guitarcentric manifesto

Guitarists, musicians, students, teachers, and all the musically curious of the world, welcome to Art of Guitar!

As a guitarist, I’m “classically” trained. You could even call me a classical guitarist,  and you wouldn’t be wrong, even if that’s not exactly how I think of myself. More on this later, but basically being classically trained means that I’ve spent a lot of my life fiddling with my fingernails,  listening to people like Andres Segovia, Julian Bream, John Williams , practicing J.S. Bach and Fernando Sor and Federico Moreno Torroba in stuffy green-carpeted conservatory practice rooms at places like Juilliard, and reading, (writing) and memorizing scores that bristle with dense notation. And calling my concerts “recitals.”

But for me,  simply playing the guitar has always come before playing “classical” guitar. And playing music has always come before playing guitar.

Still, the instrument through which the music is filtered is important; as much as I try to transcend the guitar (a common theme among classical guitarists, but more on that later as well), its strengths and limitations define and color whatever music it allows to spring forth.

Look at the top of the page. On the left of my blog header, you’ll notice a picture of a hand holding a guitar-shaped key-chain. As a guitar player of more than 30 years, and as a professional guitar teacher with students of all ages and levels learning many different styles of music from me, I plan to provide the reader with as many keys as possible, with all kinds of insight into the hows, why’s, and possibilities of guitar playing. There will be information, links, reviews and suggestions, both the practical and the esoteric, but always with a singular goal in mind: sharing my thoughts on how to become a better guitarist and a better musician.

On the right side of my header, you’ll notice a picture of a man hanging out some notes, chords, scales and other musical figurations to dry on a clothesline. As a composer and as someone who listens to more kinds of music than most “normal” people can probably stand to even think about …and as someone who spends far too much time just thinking (and reading) about music and its place in society and in the universe, I will hang some of my thoughts and musings out to dry on this blog. Along with links, pictures, videos, anything of interest that I feel will stoke your interest, excite your musical imagination, or give you a moment of musical zen.

I’ll try to get this musical laundry as clean as possible before hanging it out for the world to see, but I can’t make any promises….

And in the center, you’ll notice…me,  promising to make this the best guitar blog in the world.