Time?
Greetings to all my fellow strandees in the music world! Isn’t this a nightmare? Suddenly our lives are filled with double bar lines, tacet signs – silence. No concerts; very few lessons (and online teaching CAN’T be the same as personal interaction, even if it’s better than nothing); no income; and so on.
So what can we do? Re the income side, I’m afraid I have no advice – still trying to work it out myself. But how to fill our potentially empty days? That, as musicians, we can do, I’m sure (so long as we have our instruments to hand – and perhaps even if we don’t). I imagine that there are two extremes among musicians at the moment: those that take the opportunity to hole up and practise endlessly, and those who can’t see the point and therefore leave their instruments untouched. Of course, most people will fall between the two extremes, but they’ll probably lean towards one end of the scale or the other (the non-scale?)
As with almost all forms of extremism, both poles are fraught with dangers. To take the probably rarer case of those who are sitting in a room and playing or practising for multiple hours each day: my main advice would be – take care! I remember that one summer when I was a teenager, I was seized with some sort of mania and started to ‘work on my technique’ for seven hours a day (the only time I’ve ever practised that much). The result was that my technique got considerably worse in quite a short time. Relaxation is so important a part of playing any instrument (or singing, I’m sure); the more one hammers away at a problem, the more risk there is of ingraining that problem into one’s muscles. I once knew a cellist who boasted that she was practising the shift between the cello’s two opening notes in the Schumann concerto, E and A, a hundred times a day. Of course, when it came to the concert, she missed it. (At least she hadn’t been murdered by her neighbours – that might have counted as justifiable homicide.) If one has a technical problem, one should – ideally – examine it away from the instrument, self-isolate it (as it were) and try to solve it in the mind as much as possible before returning to the instrument. The important thing is to stay calm; practice-time is not a moment for getting excited. And take breaks – don’t hurt yourself! An aching, tight body will never allow you to play with the sort of fluency that is possible with a strong-but-relaxed approach.
And to those who can’t see the point in practising right now: there IS a point! This ghastly time won’t last forever. This is the moment to learn pieces of which you would normally think: ‘I’d like to play that sometime’. I know it’s not easy – I’ve been struggling with motivation these past few days (which is why I’m writing this, I suppose). I think the key is to set ourselves goals. ‘I have to be able to play this through by Friday’ (maybe at a certain tempo, if it’s a virtuoso piece); or ‘I’m going to record this in a week’s time’. Even if it’s only for yourself, it can be so useful – and satisfying – to reach these goals; and of course there can be any number of them, all of them leading on to other goals. I think I speak for most musicians if I say that if we feel good about our playing, we feel better about ourselves. If we’re well occupied, and enjoying what we’re doing, everything in our lives is likely to improve. And that’s why, as musicians, we’re lucky. Not in a practical sense at the moment, since we need large gatherings of people in order to ply our trade; but as people – and we should make the most of it!
