Practising
Written by Leong Yee Hoo   
Tuesday, 26 August 2008 13:54

“Practising: A Musician’s Return to Music” by Glenn Kurtz  

“The remarkable odyssey of a classical guitar prodigy who abandons his beloved instrument in defeat at the age of twenty-five, but comes back to it years later with a new kind of passion.” – From the book description

 

This is one of the rare books in the market with classical guitar as the subject. It is sort of a self biography mixed with guitar methods and history. I highly recommend this book to all classical guitar players - however this article is not intended to be a review for the book. When I was reading this book, a few things struck me about the way we learn to play our beloved instrument – particularly, practising. 

I would like to share a few of my opinions sparked by some of Mr. Kurtz’s account in the book. 

The book starts with Mr. Kurtz describing the beginning of his practice session - filing his nails and tuning his guitar. Guitar students will instantly recognize small actions such as “I run my thumb over my fingertips. They are smooth as crystal.” But the similar feelings may end right here for many people.

What Mr. Kurtz did next was “…just play chords.” and “… concentrate on the simplest task, to play all the notes at precisely the same moment …”

Most of the time when students start practising, they just pull out their score and play the music right away. Some may start with playing scales but this only serves as a finger warm-up exercise. They think the purpose of a practice session is to play the whole piece from the beginning to the end. But they are only practising finger movements. In the end this is not enough to make them a good guitar player, as Mr. Kurtz will show you why in his book.

After giving many performances and receiving many praises in his local community, Mr. Kurtz entered a music conservatory to study, filled with ambitious dreams of becoming the next Segovia.

During his first lesson at the conservatory, his teacher asked him to play something, and he “… played a fast movement from a Bach lute suite, a technical tour de force.” His teacher then asked him to play something simpler; hence Mr. Klutz proceeded to play a sonata by Manuel Ponce, followed by one of Metteo Carcassi’s student pieces on his teacher’s instruction. Finally he was requested to play a scale. Upon finishing his scale, the teacher told him “Let’s stick with scales for a little while.” In Mr. Klutz’s words, “In fifteen minutes I’d sunk from concert guitarist to beginner.

It turned out that Mr. Klutz used too much of force to play, and it tensed his “…forearm or shoulders or neck or palm or wrist.” On playing a scale he hit all the notes but “…hit them badly, imprecisely”. All his notes “...sound wobbled instead of ringing, a clang instead of a bell tone”.

You may play a difficult piece of music fluently and think that you have accomplished something fantastic. But to trained ears, you play the piece without producing a single good tune or the chords are fuzzy or the phrases are disjointed. You make all the fundamental mistakes without realizing it, just like what Mr. Klutz did.

What makes us so ignorant of our own mistakes when playing the guitar? My own opinion is that we practice without listening. We may even need to practise listening. 

Listening is an essential skill we have to master in order to play an instrument at a higher level. Listening is not merely hearing. Listening requires efforts and concentration; when you hear a note, you have to ask yourself if it has a good tone. Can you differentiate good tone from the bad? When you listen to a piece of music, do you only listen to the melody? What does the accompaniment sound like? 

You may be studying the guitar for years and yet you may not possess this skill. This is simply because you never practise it.  

The next time when you start practising, resist the urge to play the pieces right away. Instead just play an open first string E note and listen, play it again and listen. Are the notes which you just played “...sound wobbled instead of ringing, a clang instead of a bell tone”? Does the second note sound different from the first one? 

Play an E minor chord and listen. Can you hear all the four notes? Does the G note ring ahead of the B and E? Or is the B note lagging behind the G and E? Have you “played all the notes at precisely the same moment”?

These are just a few exercises which can train you to listen more to your own playing and to practice producing a good tone. The key is that you have to listen consciously all the time to you own playing when you are practising. Be it the tone, the rhythm, the clarity and other basic elements of good music, all these can only be judged by listening to yourself play. Find out which aspect needs improvement and then practice to improve it.

So, practise the simplest tasks first and listen consciously; practise making good music instead of moving your fingers mindlessly. I end this article with a proverb I heard from somewhere:



“Theory without practice is empty,

Practice without theory is blind.”