"What Should I Practice?" and The Musical Life

Kia ora koutou katoa, I hope you're all doing well physically, socially and emotionally. I know this period of online learning is going on for longer than some of us had expected, but I'm still impressed at how well everyone is learning, exploring, listening, improvising, arranging, thinking about, and obviously, playing, music. I've been asked several times recently "how long should I practice for?" or "how long should I spend at the piano each day/week?", and I'd like to give some thoughts and advice on practicing music more generally, regardless of the repertoire or techniques everybody is individually working on right now. Sorry this has turned into rather a long email, but I think there are some important points in here for students and parents or supporters alike. Although the "10,000 hours" number is thrown around quite a bit when talking about "mastering" or at least acquiring a good level of proficiency in a skill, it is really hard to quantify a number of hours of practice into a particular level of musical achievement. According to the research that Edwin Gordon did into the psychology of music learning, everybody is born with some level of musical aptitude, and our earliest musical experiences generally help it stabilise somewhere around the age of 9. Those who have been acculturated in a variety of musical sounds, for example in different metres, tonalities, and styles of music, who have been sung to and who have had positive musical experiences such as parents, siblings, teachers or friends singing or playing to and with them, generally find it easier to achieve musically without as much external guidance - these are often the people labelled "talented" or "born musicians", however everyone still has to learn the language of music, and the more we can help raise aptitude, and allow students opportunities to be musical, the better. For me, musical "practice" doesn't start and stop at the piano. It starts with a curiosity to listen. Even everyday sounds can be musical, we have bird calls, all sorts of voices, percussive sounds and regular rhythms like trains on tracks. Then we have our standard musical listening environments - others singing, playing, incidental music in movies, TV shows, video games, or YouTube videos, pop hits on TikTok or Spotify, jazz standards on the record player, live concerts, and waiata and folk songs at school. It is just as important, or probably even more important, to listen, move and sing to sound and music than to press those keys on a piano. It is difficult to become a musician in a house without music, but I've been surprised in recent years, that even when students haven't "practiced" the pieces we had been working on in recent lessons, they've still been listening and beginning to audiate more familiar and unfamiliar music. The best thing parents can do is provide a musical and music-friendly environment. Although it does take practice to get really good at anything, making it work often saps the fun out of it, and I used to see many students give up because they had so much else going on, and they saw piano as more work on top of their other commitments. I would love students to be actively and passively be engaged in some musical activity most days, whether that's singing in the shower, paying close attention to the theme song in a TV show, jamming along to a favourite song, listening to the chord changes in a pop song, strumming a ukulele, tapping out a rhythm from something familiar and expanding on that, dancing and feeling the different levels of beat in a piece of music, audiating and remembering a familiar song at the piano, arranging or improvising on something known, or working on one of our pieces. None of this has to feel like work, and if it feels like play, it's even better, because that's how humans generally learn best. In terms of what we do at the piano, a lot of our musical information can be broken down into about four different parts, and often it's nice to focus on one part at a time, as doing everything all at once can be overwhelming. *Rhythm, body movement and intuition - where we are in space and time, flowing and feeling levels of beat and rhythm patterns, metre *Harmony, mood and colour - how it feels, brightness/darkness, tension and release, levels of harmony and tonal patterns, tonality *Melodic shape and gesture - how we move and sing, the shape of the melody through time *Notes, placement and fine details - where we are on the instrument, how to make the piano produce the music we've had in our bodies, brains and voices, keyality Sometimes it's best to just focus on one thing at a time. Most human brains work that way. If you know the notes and shape of a melody, and have the chords under your fingers, but have a hard time hearing when things change, maybe listen and sing or play through only the rhythm patterns, feel the big beats in your body. If the rhythm comes to you very naturally, but you're not 100% sure of the shape of the phrases, maybe focus just on listening and singing so that phrase makes sense by itself and within the context of the song, rather than just as a stream of notes and rhythms. If this all seems a little much at the moment, Parents and supporters might try a simple approach to supporting musical experience and "practice". Rather than "What's your homework? Go and practice those pieces from this week", have a go listening or singing along to something together, sharing what you like in the music, how it relates to other music you both know. Have a go listening to the person practicing, hearing what they're saying musically, without judgement about how close it sounds to versions you've heard before. Everything we create musically is an improvisation, no two phrases are ever the same, so see what you can draw from that. Even if you yourself don't have any technical words to describe the music "I liked how sparkly it was" or "those chords are really calming" or "that reminds me of...". If it all sounds the same to you, or the student, try changing something, anything at all, to see what happens. Play a song in a different range (higher or lower) louder or softer, or with different dynamic changes silently! with different rhythm patterns with different tonal patterns with a different intro or ending with a different melody over the same chord sequence with a different chord sequence under the same melody in a different metre in a different tonality in a different style ... On a related note there is a fantastic pair of audiobooks (and physical books) called The Listening Book and The Musical Life by the great musical philosopher and explorer W.A. Mathieu. Although he has had a vastly different musical life than me, I believe most of what he has to say here is good food for thought on musical living and living music. He also had some interesting things to say regarding practice, like here, in track 24 "What Should I Practice?". It is actually crazy how much advice is crystallised into a couple of minutes of words: "...spend about a quarter of your time on other people's music - Bach, Monk... a quarter on theory and technique a quarter improvising or composing and a quarter listening This is different for each person and each day..." https://clintgoss.bandcamp.com/album/the-listening-book-and-the-musical-life https://open.spotify.com/album/31yOnWgSqu1GoxvTsJn4nf?si=_sU5hnwgQdqUljDljXPvYw I hope this has been some use for some of you out there, and I'm keen to share more of the journey with you all. Let's keep musicking. Regards, Cam