untravelledpath

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Doing Music Differently****Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog****The Indian Music Scene
Performance****Notation****Slow, Low, And Varied****Unspecialized
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There’s no way of avoiding it, conscientious performers must practice diligently to give their audiences error free music.

However, there’s a downside to such practice.

Most obviously, in the process of going over a piece many times it’s difficult to avoid losing spontaneous enjoyment of the music, leading to stale and over rehearsed sounding performances.

But as bad, by their very diligence musicians develop tastes and habits which then stand in the way of musical creativity.
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Practice is not Musically Neutral
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This is easier to understand once one realizes practice is not musically neutral.
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To not realize this is to make an error similar to that made by third world leaders who convince themselves imported technology is culturally neutral.  We’re talking about leaders who believe they can import cell phones, boom boxes, and automobiles without also importing western sexual morality, suburbs, and homogeneity…… and who are then always disappointed.
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Because when young musicians spend hours practicing in search of crisper, louder, and faster sound, they naturally come to believe sound is “better” when it’s crisp, loud and fast….. and then lose their ability to see beauty in any other type of sound.

Or to say it another way, the worshipful pursuit by young musicians of speed, volume, and surface perfection does not reflect any aesthetic imperative.  Rather it’s merely an expression of modern materialism with it’s culturally conditioned belief more is always better.  Not surprisingly this creates performers better at producing avalanches of accurate notes than at exploring subtle tonal nuances.
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Of course we’re not the first folks to make this observation.  Several years ago after attending yet another technically proficient soulless performance, one music writer for the New York Times headlined his review, “If practice makes perfect, practice less.”
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All of this helps explain why when “skilled, well-practiced” musicians try to play something slow and lyrical, more often than not they sound ridiculous.

To be sure hip music teachers have always stressed that good tone is the single most important goal, but usually this is little more than a “high sounding” part of their pedagogical rap.  Which is to say when it actually gets to the hard and “serious” work of drilling their students, in the name of accuracy tonal subtlety somehow gets forgotten……..

Fortunately since so much of our music is beyond slow, we don’t need to train our fingers to move with lightening accuracy, instead our little brains can focus on precisely these generally ignored nuances.  ( Slow, Low, and Varied )

Indeed one reason we’ve created such new and different music is we don’t practice like conventional musicians.  If we did, then we would be cranking out conventional music.  ( Doing Music Differently )
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Our Practice
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However this doesn’t mean we don’t play a lot of music.

It’s just we seldom do anything conventional musicians would recognize as practice..
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Many musicians seem to believe one must “earn” the right to play music by doing this unpleasant thing called practice.  Perhaps it’s a little like Jane Fonda urging her sweating aerobics students to “go for the burn”.  Or like doctors maintaining since they were brutalized during their medical training ( 24-hour days in the emergency room etc. ), being brutalized is the only proper way to get a medical education.
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By contrast our hours of playing music have been relaxed and full of fun.

For one thing since our music is our own and improvised, we’re not struggling to recreate something we’ve learned.

But also that we each play all of our instruments, has helped to keep our “practice” fun.

So if one day we’re unhappy with the way we’re sounding on some particular instrument, well the next we’ll be playing a different one.  Even if on consecutive days we play the same combination of two instruments, on the second we swap them.  ( Unspecialized )

And of course playing many different instruments has slowed development of the rigid habits which can so easily get in the way of musical creativity.  ( Performance )
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It’s also protected us from the repetitive motion syndrome injuries which plague so many musicians who play just a single instrument.

Non-musicians don’t realize how many musical adventures are ended by destroyed voices and damaged joints.  They don’t understand persisting long enough to become a successful specialized performer, requires being genetically gifted with an unusually strong body, with vocal chords and elbows of steel.

Note, the mental rigidity produced by excessive overspecialized practice is in effect a repetitive motion syndrome of the brain.
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However if all we did was play many different instruments, we would still consider ourselves wildly overspecialized.

Because we understand the instruments we’re ultimately learning to play are ourselves, or to say this differently, we’re convinced to make big music we must become big humans.

So we’ve generalized our notion of “practice” to include recording our music, building instruments, building furniture, taking regular walks, reading “good” ( which in our view usually means “old” ) books, and cooking healthy delicious food.  ( Unspecialized )

Our generalized “practice” even includes things like not listening to television and radio, sitting on the floor, and minimizing the time we spend in cars.

At this point it’s easy to imagine a conventionally trained musician jumping up and exclaiming, “Wait a minute, that’s just nutty!!”

But he would be flat out wrong, because the oddest thing about our peculiar style of practice is it works.

So while the music on our first CD has an innocent power, there’s no doubt but what we played for our second was more graceful and accomplished.  While the music we’ve recently recorded for Work In Progress is still better.

Doesn’t this means our practice is working?

By the way, there is one thing we do which does look quite a bit like “practice”, but we keep it short and sweet.

It’s a very simple vocal exercise involving softly singing long slow notes while accompanying ourselves on our lovely little harmonium ( an Indian instrument a bit like a floor mounted accordion. )  We start in an easy central part of our range and then gradually move down to lower and lower notes…… and that’s it.  Pretty easy heh?  And very serious relaxing fun…..
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It’s related to an exercise ( mandra sadhana ) Indian vocal instructors tell beginning students to do every day of their lives, but again this is mostly just high sounding rap since almost every student stops doing it as soon as they start learning “real” pieces ( The Indian Music Scene ).  However we’ve been doing it for more than 20 years and we still love it.  It opens up our breathing and reminds us relaxation is the key to beautiful vocal tone.
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Still Music Should Be Clean……
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But having written about why and how excessive practice can take the joy out of playing music ( and so get in the way of producing beautiful new music ), and how we’ve found our way to a “practice” which minimizes these problems, it’s time to take a step back and look again at the legitimate purpose of practice…..

…. which as we pointed out at the top of this page is to help provide the listener with clean and error-free music.  And this is a goal with which we could not agree more.

However since we are putting out recorded not performed music, practice is not the only route to a clean final product.  ( Performance )

Instead we’ve attacked the problem by editing in a way which is both radical and simple-minded.  Because our music unfolds as a series of sound islands separated by silences, and because it’s not constrained by the demands of any rigid unchanging meter ( Notation and  Slow, Low, And Varied ), we’ve discovered we can often just delete any sections or individual sounds marred by musical, playing, or recording errors….

….. leading to a final product as clean as any performance polished by practice, but one which is at the same time more spontaneous and so more truly “live” in feeling.

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Doing Music Differently****Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog****The Indian Music Scene
Performance****Notation****Slow, Low, And Varied****Unspecialized
Home****Buy Our Music

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