Risks and Routines
Shortly after I began studying with my dear professor in Salzburg, almost 10 years ago now, I had a small inner crisis concerning my approach to music and practice. As it turns out, that was a pivotal moment in my life that completely altered my values, my musicianship, and my work practices, so it was all worth it and a very important, if difficult, life lesson.
What happened was this; I turned up to a violin lesson one afternoon, ready to play through a Mozart Concerto, confident in my week’s worth of practice. The play-through went well; nothing much happened. I had practiced enough that my fingers knew where to go, my musical ideas were so well-rehearsed, and I really didn’t have to think about much at all.
After I had finished, I looked towards my teacher. She was silent for a few minutes before asking if I had not had much time to practice that week. I didn’t understand, and tried to convince her that I had practiced just as much as normal! She said, ‘Ah, then you are not practicing in the right way’. What followed was a discussion about the importance of always searching for new ideas, of trying new fingerings and bowings, of never playing the same way twice. She was saddened by how boring my performance of the Mozart was, how it felt automatic and thoughtless - there was nothing fresh or exciting about my playing.
With this information, I went home and had a pretty traumatic week; I don’t think I slept very much, and emailed my friends constantly about how to achieve the feeling of ‘new’ in everything I played. I’ve just been reading back through these emails and they are pretty hilarious; “…and then i didn't sleep for the whole night and i can't stop thinking about it i just feel so bad for playing boringly and badly and i am so sorry! and i am so stressed about it!” Back and forth these emails went (there are 59 in total, in the space of two days). It seems like the main issue that we couldn’t figure out was how to keep our playing exciting and fresh when we were practicing five hours a day.
When you have to do something so mundane and repetitive as practice, is it possible to keep things interesting?
As you can see, this experience has clearly stayed with me - in fact, I think about this question all the time. A quick Google search will provide a multitude of articles citing the importance of routine, that humans are ultimately creatures of habit. And I absolutely agree; I don’t even know how I would manage to be at all productive if it wasn’t written into my daily routine. There are things that we ALL have to do, every single day, and for musicians, this means scales, technical exercises, note-learning, REPETITION - work that can require quite a methodical approach. But how do you prevent that work from becoming boring? How do you keep your mind sharp and your output fresh?
If I think about what my teacher said and the advice she was trying to give, it was that routines themselves can provide a platform for creativity. For example, my daily routine is to warm up with scales, but there are infinite ways of practicing scales! And even if I choose only one scale and then pick one way of practicing it, and I then want to perfect that one way, methodical repetition is only the beginning - each repetition could evoke a new character, shift on a different finger, start on a different bow, follow a different rhythm. I could spend hours on that one scale and never play it the same way twice, and at the end of all that, my rendition of that scale will be so much stronger for having practiced it in all those different ways.
To offer another example, the same goes for people who go running every morning as part of their daily routine. Maybe they choose a new route each day. Perhaps they listen to a different playlist. Maybe they incorporate a fresh walk-jog-run pattern or simply alter their speed. Ultimately, they are still doing the same thing every day; running. But it never looks or feels the same twice. And I believe this outlook could be applied to most activities/hobbies/fields of work.
With this comes, of course, the risk of a bad day. When trying something out in so many different ways, some are bound not to work. But I believe that old expression is true, that with great risk comes great reward, and that for all the attempts that don’t work out, there will be one that does and it will feel SO good. We have long been programmed to believe that failure is a bad thing, and this may be what often stops us from leaning into something new. In my opinion, we need to get really comfortable with the idea of failing, of things going WRONG, to be able to reach a life that is always interesting and exciting!
Some Interesting Things…
I recently learned what ‘Temptation Bundling’ is, and wanted to add it as an appendix to today’s article! If your struggle is just getting to a routine in the first place, this might be a good place to start!
Open Water, by Caleb Azumah Nelson, is just so beautifully written and such a gem of a book. Pick it up immediately.
We are now a couple of episodes in to this new show on HBO, The White Lotus, and I am completely invested. As usual with HBO, the characters feel fresh, the plot set-up is gripping, and the production value is really strong.
Dr. Fauci is wonderful, again and again.
This TikTok taught me that there are several Harry Potter Easter Eggs hidden on Android phones in the Google Assistant and my mind is blown. My phone is now my wand.
I’ve been reading these horrific memories by Tahir Hamut Izgil for The Atlantic. The genocide of the Uyghurs is so incomprehensible and inhuman, we in the rest of the world must rely on these precious words to know something of what is happening.
The story in this episode of This American Life was just incredible.
The Suns Cinema in DC is a small independent cinema, that also offers a quirky patio bar. Something about drinking wine from a can in this retro-style jaunt just felt right.
This fascinating documentation in the New Yorker of a woman's life in a small Wyoming town between 1899 and 1962. I adore stories from small town America!
This Instagram post from the Guggenheim, featuring a take on Munch’s sublime ‘Lovers In The Waves’ by a member of staff.
