“Is This YOU!?”
I grew up with those infomercials where someone would really be struggling.
While unintentionally whimsical—wouldn’t it be awesome to be an actor in one?—These commercials are not so realistic for musicians. We tend not to have narrators telling us exactly what the issue is (outside of lessons), but even when we do know what turpitude our playing has brought upon us, salvation does not come from a simple solution like buying a chamois cloth or a Tupperware lid holder.
Musical problems tend to be more insidious and unknown, as David Epstein calls them in Range, “wicked” learning environments.
I’ve felt, and seen my students feel, these pains. Maybe you have too?
You seem to revert to devolve every new day of practice, despite frequent effort
You try detailed practice plans, but they don’t work.
You invest in science-backed practice methods, but you don’t learn notes quickly enough
You try to be creative in the practice room and improvise with material, but you don’t learn enough music in time.
You try to build accuracy and precision, but you get super nervous on stage
It feels BAD to think you’re trying too hard and nothing is working! Maybe even worse than those Infomercial situations.
Unknown Unknowns
Recently, while working with musicians at Unsnared Studio, a little summer session organized around my book Unsnared Drum Lab, we focused on precisely these “unknown unknowns of our musical development. Not ‘why do I suck?,’ but ‘what is getting in the way?” Here’s what we discovered.
When we hit a plateau, our first instinct is usually to work harder, for longer. But on what? This mindset is reinforced by many music teachers (myself included). “Music learning takes a long time to incubate” is a doxology in classical music pedagogy. That’s true!
But, incubation only works if you know you’re sitting on a chicken egg, and not a Cadbury egg. Sometimes, the problem is that we’re not diagnosing the right issue: the cure is not linked to the right disease.
Perhaps the plateau is not the problem. The plateau suggests you may be solving the wrong problem.
So, deciding what to work on in the practice room is as important as how to work on it.
The Thing Behind the Thing
Unsnared Drum Lab is all about inventing dynamic exercises to help you overcome your musical hurdles. But, how can you invent a solution if you don’t know the problem?
I was very fortunate to interact with brilliant musical entrepreneur and coach Jennifer Rosenfeld a few years ago. In one of her sessions, she described “The Thing Behind the Thing” as a way of articulating emotional blockages in our creative work. Often, these blockages seemed to have little to do with the stated problem. Often, a Thing Behind the Thing was an assumption, and challenging these assumptions might unleash a torrent of professional and creative activity.
Jennifer’s Thing Behind the Thing exercise tended to focus on larger challenges of professional identity or a creative path. But, for performing musicians, there is a particular kind of professional dehabilitation that comes from stagnation in the practice room.
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Taxonomy of Plateaus
One reason experienced teachers can diagnose problems quickly is that they’ve seen many versions of the same problem before. Over time, you build a mental catalog of recurring obstacles. If you don’t know what is going wrong, here are some ideas, organized by the following topos: technique, learning music, remembering music, playing on stage, and time management. Maybe some of them resonate.
Eating too big a sandwich.
Practice intake is too big for our recall
Too many desirable difficulties and too much contextual interference in the practice room
Not Practicing for the Stage
Don’t have a clear mental image of the performance situation
Don’t know what you sound like on stage, while nervous
Practice may not be sufficiently improvisational (in the moment) OR planned (over time)
One limits the durability of learning, the other limits the amount of learning.
You don’t know how long things will take to complete
Technique Mismatch: Your technique doesn’t match your needs
Your technique doesn’t let you communicate what you want to under pressure.
How Do We Find The Thing Behind The Thing?
How do you find these things behind things, especially when you don’t know what the blockage point is?
Learning Communities
Where our heads are matters as much as what’s in them. Communities of shared practice offer terrific opportunities to compare notes, diagnose issues, and reflect. It’s why I wanted to host a live program around Unsnared Drum Lab: dynamic conversations with peers often lead to individual epiphanies. Other musicians often see the problem we are too close to notice.
Experiment on Yourself with Design Thinking
Another way to uncover hidden problems is to treat practice like a series of experiments. I wrote here about using recordings in the practice room to make hypotheses about potential issues and take quick action to determine whether you’re right (and fix the problem).
In Unsnared Drum Lab, I discuss how improvisation can help assess a musical problem and determine whether a devised solution might be working. I shared one such session in a previous post here.
You might use your performances as data, comparing concert recordings to your own memory of the performance to calibrate what isn't working according to plan and help assess what you might focus on in your next practice sessions. Here are some ideas.
Try it:
In our session, we broke out to chat about our own experiences with these seemingly unknowable barriers. Here are some of the metacognitive queries we coagulated around.
What are the plateaus you are facing? How long have they been there?
What kind of feedback would help you tell if what you’re doing is working?
What kind of musician am I trying to become? What technique would that musician need?
Reflection
In our next Unsnared Studio session, we’ll dig into improvising, composing, and designing techniques through targeted musical invention. But to do so without knowing the true goal of one’s playing—what kind of musician am I trying to become and what technique supports that goal—would be malpractice.