In 2010 I read a book that marked the beginning of what I might term my true musical awakening. It was not something from music history or theory. Not even Quantz! It was the book Bounce by Matthew Syed, an Olympic-champion table tennis player. The book explores the neuroscience behind human achievement, and I cannot possibly recommend it highly enough. It was this book that started me on the road to codifying my ideas about musicianship and practice. The final golden rule, discussed below, was one of the first of these developed ideas.

Around the same time I read Bounce, I had begun to wonder how I could help my private students improve more effectively. Their progress in lessons was great, but they often seemed to stall between our sessions. This led me to believe that there was something in the way my students were practicing that wasn't helping them attain lasting improvement. This hypothesis resulted in what I call the "practicing lesson," a tool I still use today.

In a practicing lesson, I would take 40-50% of the lesson time to watch a student practice and make notes of good and bad habits that impacted their learning. In the remainder of the lesson, I walked them through an alternative practice session, highlighting good habits and correcting bad habits. The real lesson for me, as the teacher, was the degree to which my students needed these sessions, given how little they seemed to know about practicing. And why should they know anything about practicing? No one, including me, had taught them how to practice! TEACHER FAIL.

In short, my students truly believed that any and all time spent at home with flute in hand = practicing. However, as every pro knows, this is not the case, as vividly stated by Syed in Bounce, building upon the writings of Malcolm Gladwell: "Purposeful practice also builds new neural connections, increases the size of specific sections of the brain, and enables the expert to co-opt new areas of gray matter in the quest to improve.... We can now see that the very process of building knowledge transforms the hardware in which the knowledge is stored and operated.... You can purchase access to this prime neural real estate only by building up a bank deposit of thousands of hours of purposeful practice. That, if you like, is the price of excellence."

It was the "purposeful" part that was missing from my students' practicing. Instead of giving their practice purpose by systematically addressing and fixing problems/mistakes (as I discuss at length in The Scientific Method of Practicing), students were either playing through problematic passages repeatedly, hoping the problems would fix themselves (violating Golden Rule #1 of Practicing) or worse, playing through exercises, etudes, pieces, etc., and ignoring problems altogether (which, when done repeatedly, breaks Golden Rule #4 of Practicing).

This led to a simple maxim, which I gave to my students and which has now become the final Golden Rule.

Golden Rule #5 of Practicing: Playing is not practicing.

I love that what we do as musicians is generally referred to as "play." This descriptor directly recalls the sense of joy I presume we have all felt when we have made music, and we should set aside time with our instruments simply to play and explore, when the only purpose is enjoyment. As essential as it is, however, this act in no way approximates the painstaking process of setting and achieving goals that is practice. While playing and practicing are well worth our time, for those of us willing to pay Syed's "price of excellence," more of our temporal currency must be spent on practicing.

As I tell my students, "Practicing might not be as fun as playing, but do you know what is fun? BEING A TOTAL BOSS ON YOUR INSTRUMENT. And that's what happens when you bank enough hours practicing."

With that, let the church say, "Amen." Happy Holidays!

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Need a boost in your practicing? I am now available for practicing lessons in person in Dallas and online via Skype! Contact me for information and rates.

Finally, if you like this post, then you'll love The Scientific Method of Practicing, where the underlying information is covered in detail. Head over to the publications page to pick up a copy.

"Perfect practice makes perfect." Or "If you never make a mistake, you'll never make a mistake." Thus spaketh many great musicians and teachers, past and present. And while I am a proponent of making friends with mistakes, as I discussed briefly last week and write about at some length in The Scientific Method of Practicing, there is a central kernel of truth in these epigrams. While actively trying to avoid mistakes is itself to be avoided, it is perhaps worse to repeat them (see Golden Rule #1 of Practicing). Ergo, the next golden rule, a corollary of Rule #1:

Golden Rule of Practicing #4: Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat--but only when it's right.

Repetition has a hallowed place in the practice of effective musicians (as well as artists of any stripe, scientists, mathematicians, historians, etc.). Dr. Robert Duke, Head of Music and Human Learning at The University of Texas at Austin, writes about this from a psychological point of view in his excellent book, Intelligent Music Teaching: "Repetition is the mechanism through which habit strength develops. The more often we repeat a given behavior, the more that behavior becomes a part of what we do."

This statement is so true that it plays out on a biological level in our brains, thanks to a material called myelin. Daniel Coyle writes about this phenomenon in his influential book, The Talent Code: "Every human skill...is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse.... [The neural insulator] myelin's vital role is to wrap those nerve fibers the same way that rubber insulation wraps a copper wire, making the signal stronger and faster.... When we fire our circuits in the right way--when we practice swinging that bat or playing that note--our myelin responds by wrapping layers of insulation around that neural circuit, each new layer adding a bit more skill and speed. The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates, and the faster and more accurate our movements and thoughts become."

In other words, Dr. Duke could just as well have said that what we do repeatedly becomes part of us, so it is important that we repeat what we want to be and don't repeat what we don't want to be. If we want to be great musicians, we have to play great, repeatedly. However, it is impossible to do that without embracing and processing our problems. In certain circumstances, as Noa Kageyama cites in his indispensable blog, The Bulletproof Musician, this process can be jump started by--gasp!--purposely exaggerating our mistakes.

Once we truly understand our problems, we can begin to choose to play differently, to play better, and that's the choice we should make over and over, starting on the scale of the individual problem. We should play any formerly problematic passage well, repeatedly, immediately after fixing it.

How much is repeatedly? Some teachers say five times in a row; others say seven or ten. I like to go for broke and set the bar at 15-20 times, allowing for one or two outliers. However, out of 15-20 attempts, if more than one or two go astray, I consider the problem not to be fixed after all and set about solving it again. After all, as Dave Booth commented on my Golden Rule #1 of Practicing, from his teacher Rupert Neary: "If you play it wrong once, remember that, and don't do it again. But if you forget, and play it wrong twice, mark it, because if you play it wrong three times, you are practicing it."

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If you want info like this regularly, subscribe to Dr. Tim's Teaching Tips on the right! I promise you'll only be emailed with new blog posts, never spam. You can also add the blog to your RSS feed.

Finally, if you like this post, then you'll love The Scientific Method of Practicing, where the underlying information is covered in detail. Head over to the publications page to pick up a copy.

Happy December, everyone! Picking up where we left off last time, and in the spirit of the shopping season, I'm giving you a two-for-one special. To start:

Golden Rule #2 of Practicing: You must understand the problem before you can fix the problem.

Mindfulness, our old friend! We meet again. We cannot fix problems if we are not aware that they are happening, as discussed last time. This relies on the development of a discerning ear, which is best guided by studying with a great teacher, one who will lovingly bug students about every little problem.

Once we begin to perceive problems, however, we must deepen our awareness. Where exactly is the problem? What exactly is the problem? Do we know what might be causing the problem? Questions like these lead us to understand the issues encapsulated by problems. After all, many problems we hear are just symptoms of greater, underlying problems. "Cracked note? Well, you're going to keep cracking notes until we get that air support in order!" (This could lead me down one of my favorite rabbit holes, the importance of daily fundamentals, but I'll choose not to digress just now.)

We must therefore seriously examine a problem before it can be solved, a fact that escapes many students in their rush to jump in and make improvements. Neglecting such examination frequently results in misdirected effort and, consequently, misspent time, as we haphazardly try out solutions to problems we do not fully understand. In these instances, if a worthy solution is found, it is thanks to luck, rather than wisdom or skill, and there is no guarantee that the problem won't recur. This is precisely why we should make friends with our mistakes, as I discuss in The Scientific Method of Practicing: the better we understand our problems, the more likely it is we can fix them for good.

This brings us to:

Golden Rule #3 of Practicing: Always practice the smallest amount you can to fix a problem.

Years of using the questions above to analyze playing problems has led me to this truth: 90% of problems (a conservative estimate) are rooted in the performance of 1-2 notes. Despite this, many students will play extended passages over and over again, hoping for improvement. Convincing students (including ourselves) to invest time and energy in the 1-2 notes that constitute the heart of a problem can be surprisingly difficult. Many feel as though the volume of work they have in front of them simply won't allow for the luxury of spending precious practice minutes on 1-2 notes at a time, a sentiment related to the previously described impulse to jump in and fix a problem before understanding it.

However, what the seasoned pros know is that small-scale practice is not a luxury; rather, it is exactly what creates lasting improvement. Once we have taken the necessary steps to fix a problem, we can plug those 1-2 notes back into the longer passage. If the problem is well and truly fixed, the passage will be smooth sailing, and much time that might have been spent hammering away at the whole passage ad infinitum will have been saved. If the problem persists, zoom back in, work through the problem again (perhaps using different strategies), then zoom back out to the passage. Such back-and-forth is a necessity in effective practicing. To put it another way, we can't take in the beauty of the forest if each tree isn't in its place. Given this, some rewording might be in order: "To fix a problem, always practice the smallest amount you can."

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If you want to read stuff like this regularly, subscribe to Dr. Tim's Teaching Tips on the right! I promise you'll only be emailed with new blog posts, never spam. You can also add the blog to your RSS feed.

Finally, if you like this post, then you'll love The Scientific Method of Practicing, where the underlying information is covered in detail. Head over to the publications page to pick up a copy.

Happy (almost) Thanksgiving, everyone! Here in Dallas, my students have the entire holiday week off from school, so I'm thankful for a chance to spend more time with loved ones and recharge my batteries a bit. I am also thankful for the opportunity to reflect on the first third of the academic year, looking back on strategies that are working and those that need fine tuning, hence the restarting of this blog.

My primary job as a teacher is to teach my students how to teach themselves, or in other words, how to practice effectively. In lessons, I walk them through the process of practicing, and while strategies change to suit different problems, the framework essentially remains the same: find, fix, repeat (a LOT), move on.

However, as the semester has gone on, it has become clear that my students need more explicit guidelines for their practicing than an instruction to use the framework to fix all of their problems. So, after teaching well over 300 lessons since August, a light bulb finally came on in my head this week. (Clearly, this was a slow burn.) On the spot, I invented the first of my Golden Rules of Practicing, all of which I will discuss here over the coming weeks.

Golden Rule #1 of Practicing: Never play something wrong the same way twice.

This gets at the fundamental problem in most students' practicing, namely that they think simply having the instrument in their hands counts as practicing. Honestly, I was well into my professional life before I realized how far this was from the truth, so this problem isn't isolated to the youngest players. Golden Rule #1 is designed to help by keeping practicers from mindlessly running through music without making improvements. There's a lot hidden in this simple-sounding rule, so let's look at it from different vantage points.

The first consideration is that mindfulness is built into the rule: one can't know a mistake has been made twice unless he/she is playing with awareness. Focusing on the music we make as we make it puts us on the fast track to improvement.

Equally important is the urgency this rule implies. Students (and the rest of us) constantly complain that they don't have enough time to practice, so who has time to make the same mistakes repeatedly? If we are aware that something is wrong, we need to fix it. Now. Or at the very least, make a note of it so that it can be fixed soon.

Also, the specter of healthy guilt looms within Rule #1, thanks to that word we should never use, never. Perhaps this is controversial, but I communicate from the point of view of a musician who has been salvaged by healthy guilt. If I know something is wrong and don't fix it, an irritant gets into my brain, like a grain of sand in an oyster, and it continues to irritate me until I return to the practice room to work it out and make a pearl. If I don't want to be irritated, I can work the problem out when it arises, thereby avoiding the guilt. Acknowledging the power I have to take responsibility for my own playing is what makes the guilt healthy, and framing it that way helps students too. Bob Duke, Head of Music and Human Learning at The University of Texas at Austin, puts it this way (paraphrased): as long as someone is happy with the status quo, why would they ever want to change? In other words, sometimes we need to be irritated to push ourselves to do our best work, and we likewise need to irritate our students from time to time as well.

A final element of this first rule is the idea of playing something wrong the same way twice. There is a virtually endless number of ways to play something poorly. However, if we are focused on fixing a passage--inventing and trying strategies, making changes one at a time--and the problem persists, then we really aren't playing wrong the same way every time. After all, we're making changes, so we're not having the same experience every time. Investment in the process and constantly trying to find a solution: these are invaluable behaviors that will help us find a solution or at least rule out the things that aren't the solution. As such, they should be positively reinforced within ourselves and our students.

As we wrap up, a word of caution regarding the word "wrong." Many people tend to internalize it as a value judgment. Playing something "wrong" makes us "bad players," and that can be the beginning of a neverending spiral of shame. I'm clearly not against using the word, but as teachers, it's important to frame it well. "Wrong" just implies that something is inaccurate, problematic, not being played to the best of the student's abilities. It has no reflection on a student's character or potential, and in my view, it does not even reflect on a student's true abilities. It is important that students, especially the most serious ones, understand this, so that they have the mental and emotional energy to keep going, even when the problems they're tackling are great and many. The same goes for us professionals, as well.

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If you want to read stuff like this regularly, subscribe to Dr. Tim's Teaching Tips on the right! I promise you'll only be emailed with new blog posts, never spam. You can also add the blog to your RSS feed.

Finally, if you like this post, then you'll love The Scientific Method of Practicing, where the underlying information is covered in detail. Head over to the publications page to pick up a copy.

Recently, after a performance of several works in diverse styles from different periods, a well-meaning (and, might I add, excellent) musician said to me, "You are really great at contemporary music! You should do that!" On one hand, this is extremely flattering; we all like to be admired for something. On the other hand, I have gotten comments like this my whole career, as though I have some gift for contemporary music, handed down to me from Heaven. This could not be further from the truth. If you're a musician reading this, you can master contemporary works; the first key is an open mind, which leads to a desire to understand.

I remember, at age 14, the first time I heard a piece of "new music"--Robert Dick's Lookout for solo flute, played for me in the context of a lesson, when I could ask questions, by my forward-thinking flute teacher--and my first thought was, "WHOA! THIS IS SO COOL!" It spoke to me on a fundamental level. Ever since this overwhelmingly positive initial experience, I have stayed open to new music, and it has always intrigued me, whether or not I liked it. This makes it easy for me to buy into works that many people think are "strange," "ugly," "crazy," or just plain "bad." I want to understand Jennifer Higdon, Toru Takemitsu, and Jonathan Harvey the same way virtually all musicians want to understand Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. (Note: I want to understand those guys too!)

I have heard many times that hatred and fear frequently are born from a lack of understanding, and I think there is some truth to this. It certainly applies to people's attitudes toward contemporary music; I think that new works often turn people off or intimidate them because most folks have never had a chance to engage a new work and understand it. The fact is, understanding new works takes, well, work. Most people, whether musicians or not, have a baseline understanding of western music predating 1900; it might not be their cup of tea, but it just sounds like it makes sense. After all, it is all structured using the same system of tonality as "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and virtually every other children's song we have been singing for generations.

Not so with much new music. In addition to atonalism (in all of its guises, from free, to serialism, to aleatoricism, etc.), new music is often replete with "extended techniques," which, honestly, are becoming less and less extended and more and more expected all the time. I understand that if someone has never had the opportunity (or, to be blunt, taken the opportunity for themselves) to try and understand such music, they may well dislike it or feel intimidated by it. In this context, having an open mind means setting aside one's initial reactions to do the work it takes understand a piece. There will be plenty of time later to decide whether it's good or bad, likable or unlikable. In the meantime, in my view, there is a single guiding principle to help the new, new musician navigate a contemporary piece: treat it like it's Mozart.

Would you play Mozart out of tune? With poor finger technique? With a sound not appropriate to classical-era sensibilities? Without dynamics or clear phrasing and articulation? Most likely, the answer is no. Treat any piece of contemporary music the same way: commit first to understanding what is on the page and then to realizing it as best you can. This might mean that you have to dig up some explanatory texts on extended techniques and ask what feel like basic questions ("How do I do this?") of colleagues and teachers. It may mean you have to listen to a bunch of different recordings to hear how other performers have pulled off some gestures that are unfamiliar to you. You will absolutely have to commit to sounding horrible (many times) until you figure out how to execute the score, but you probably sounded horrible on Mozart in the beginning too! (I know I did!) This is commitment: hanging in there through all the slogging until you not only have it, but you can do it over and over again.

Remember that the only thing separating the piece in front of you from Mozart is the language, and with time, patience, and intelligent work (shout-out to Trevor Wye), you can learn that language. This is commitment. Also remember that, like Mozart, the composer of any contemporary work wrote what s/he wrote in the service of expression. This means that there is a reason for everything on the page, from the most bizarre, far-out sounds to commonplace rhythms, meters, pitches, and articulations. Both the new aspects of the musical language and your trusty, old musical fundamentals must be secure in order to render a compelling performance. If you commit to embracing the totality of any piece--new or old--in this way, you will find fear and apprehension falling away. Does this mean you'll love every piece of new music that comes your way? No, but I'd bet the farm you'll love a lot of it, and you'll likely fall in love with the process, resulting in whole, new repertoires to explore.

After many years of performing and teaching, one thing that puzzles me is why we in the larger musical community generally don't discuss the finer points of how to practice, both among colleagues and between teachers and students. I can think of no more important topic, especially for students who will ostensibly be on their own one day and will need to know how to prepare music for performance when that day comes.

This is one of the reasons I have developed my seminar, "The Scientific Method of Practicing," that explores how to apply logical (and sometimes explicitly scientific) methodology in the practice room. I have taught it at The University of Texas and Baylor University, where it has been very well received, and I am scheduled to teach it at the Brownsville Flute Festival in April. For those of you who are not near enough to attend, below is a description of what I refer to as the first fundamental element of practicing, taken from the handout I distribute when I teach the seminar. I hope it's helpful!

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Secure the Parameters: Set and accomplish limited, concrete goals.

On cop shows, it is not out of place when detectives are chasing a bad guy for someone to yell out, “Secure the perimeter!” This means that the detectives chasing the baddie must surround the location where said baddie is hiding so that he/she cannot escape. In our practice, this translates into knowing both where we must practice and what we must practice: not just a perimeter in space (i.e., a length of music) but multiple musical parameters. Which part of our music needs our attention the most? The opening phrase? The beginning of the second theme? Moreover, what are we listening for? Good tone? Fluid technique? Impeccable intonation?

This can seem overwhelming, which is why we must secure the parameters the way detectives would secure the perimeter. Would the police surround the entire neighborhood to accomplish their goal? No! That is terribly inefficient, and the culprit stands a pretty good chance of getting away. The same thing applies to our practice. If we try to practice too much at once (e.g., too long a section, too many elements at the same time), we risk getting little to nothing learned in any lasting way.

Setting concrete, limited goals is the best way to secure the parameters of our practice. Unless the goal is to build our endurance by playing through large sections, entire movements, or whole pieces (which, honestly, comes pretty late in the game when learning a piece), we should confine ourselves to the smallest section possible. If we are first learning a piece, we might start at the end of a large section, practicing just the last couple of measures. Once those are secure, we can work backward, adding one or two directly previous measures. Once those are secure, we can work backward again, and again, until we have arrived at the beginning of the large section. (Dr. Bob Duke, Professor of Music and Human Learning at The University of Texas at Austin calls this “backward chaining.”)

If we are in the middle of working on a piece, then we should be familiar with specific places that need our attention. We can then choose a small section that contains a problem--ideally, this will be confined to the one or two notes that represent the heart of the problem--and practice just that until the problem is rectified. (It is worth noting that if we have trouble rectifying the problem on this microscopic level, if is appropriate to ask ourselves if we are sure we know what the problem is so that we are not misdirecting energy.) Once the problem is fixed, we can expand our scope by adding a note or two after, or a note or two before (or both at the same time if we can do it without getting carried away). If we can play the music in this expanded context securely, we can expand again, and again, until we are nailing the complete passage from beginning to end.

Finally, let us address “the problem” that mentioned above. Problems are not negatives; they are simply, objectively, places that require our careful attention. If we know the exact nature of a problem (e.g., intonation, technique, articulation, etc.), we must be careful to limit our practice to that one parameter at first. Once we have it where we want it, we can expand to include other parameters, much as we can expand the length of music we practice once it has been secured.

Thanks for visiting my newly revamped website! I hope you like it. This space is where I will share my thoughts on teaching, flute, and music in general.

First up: "The Scientific Method of Practicing!" This article--a reduction of a master class I teach--will focus on how to make your practicing more efficient, effective, and enjoyable by sticking to a few simple steps. Look for it in the coming days!