​On Thursday evening our ASU percussion ensemble had a concert. Was it too early in the semester? Yes Were we ready? No. Does it matter? No. This wasn’t the concert. It was the concert before the concert. Useful yes, but by no means a final product.

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Here’s what I mean.

But First: Survey Says

I’m starting a project with a colleague at ASU about linkages between the arts and sciences on themes of exploration. We’d love your help learning more about what drives exploration across disciplines, how we explore exploration, and investigating assumptions, instincts and insights. It will take 2.6 minutes, and I’d love for you to participate:

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Iterate and Incubate

Idea

Professional musicians rarely play a piece once. In fact, most of us know that an interpretation takes shape only after a number of performances. It’s rare to teach chamber music in universities this way, however. So often, outsized importance is placed upon a single event, a semester’s worth of work.

This approach places a lot of pressure on the success of one event, often without appropriate preparation for that event to succeed. Yes, our student groups rehearse a lot, but how many simulated performances do they have?

At the same time, this mindset emphasizes performance goals (”I must nail it or else!”) above learning goals (”I am going to improve my communication in chamber music situations”). Performance goals are a waste of time: they can only fail. Learning goals are permanent, and result in far better performances.

Use case

After these first performances, we continue working on the repertoire, digging deeper into ideas of voicing and pacing. Each additional rehearsal, performance, or recording session brings new insights, clarity, delightful new interactions and a sense of calm. This marination is called spaced retrieval, and it’s vital for deep and lasting learning.

An easy example of this for me is wearing your favorite concert shoes during a rehearsal. Wow, what a difference…

Frightening Experiments

Background:

We’re always thinking of ways to reduce performance anxiety (stage fright). Some ideas:

• study the music more effectively, so that a rich mental representation guides an altruistic performance style
• Practice a number of different interpretations. There is no “one” correct way to play a passage, meaning that “failure” is possibly
• making sure that there are as many waypoints as possible in the music so that a small mental mishap does not derail a performance
• Practice multi-modal retrieval and generation: visualize the music, rewrite the music, remember the physical motions to create an overlapping set of sensory anchor points.

Idea

How about a more obvious path: experience performance anxiety, study it, define it, and manage it? In design thinking, these steps are called prototyping, failing fast, and iterating. They are essential for testing the impact of a product and thus its design. Interpretations are products, and it’s absurd to think of not testing the most important part: the performance!

I challenge my students to be nervous in performance situations, to make mistakes. These “unforced errors” are vital data points. They can be used both to drive future practice, and push back against the idea that some people are just better performers than others.

Example: Mangos

It REALLY seems like Hercule Poirot has practiced cutting a mango in front of others a few times.

Use Case: Analyze

Record number of live performances. In listening, make note of deviations between your intentions and the realities of your performance, including: notes, phrasing, tone color, communication, pacing, and more.

Analyze: Are mistakes occurring in the same place, or randomized? Are they failures of mind or body? What else is going on that might be addressed or prepared for in the practice room?

When I get nervous on stage, I miss more notes. Over time, I realized that my missed notes generally NOT the result of inadequate preparation or mental lapses, but rather that I was performing an amateur version of Footloose under the instrument as I was performing. Result: more missed notes, increased hand tension.

Action step

While practicing, articulate where my feet will be at a number of waypoints within a piece, making these physical positions part of my mental model. Or, I might practice moving a lot more than I think while practicing.

Use Case: Calibrate

Reflect on how you felt during a performance. What went well? What failed? Where were you communicative? Flat? Compare these thoughts to the concert recording. To what extent was your assessment borne out by the “facts” of the performance? Were those mallets really too hard? Did you really play pianissimo? Was your performance as visually dramatic as you thought? Over time you align your proprioception with your “objective” performance.

Why it works

1. In Make it Stick, Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel emphasize the value of “desirable difficulties” in cementing learning. Vital to this process is making and correcting mistakes. While many of us are taught to avoid mistakes on stage, the authors demonstrate that “when learners commit errors and are given corrective feedback, the errors are not learned…”. More crucially:

Performance is not practice. Performers are taught to rigorously critique themselves while practicing, looking for places to improve. This mindset is terrible for performance, where being engaged in the flow of the music and communicating character and affect to an audience take priority. We can’t occupy both a performer and critic role at the same time, so recording oneself and gaining an outsider viewpoint is vital.More essential is recording PERFORMANCES, not simply rehearsals. In a performance, physical and environmental cues trigger a certain type of response, precisely what we want to study.

See you next time!

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