THE GAME OF PLAYING:
finding the balance between freedom and discipline
Photo by Colton Sturgeon
Listening to music is an emotional, intellectual, physical pleasure. One of the ways in which music triggers pleasure is by eliciting our sense of freedom and liberation:
emotional freedom (listening can liberate emotions such as melancholy, sadness or joy),
intellectual freedom (a Beethoven’s Symphony or a Bach’s Fugue can inspire new ideas, offer intellectual explorations or suggest meanings that transcend the dimension of pure aesthetic pleasure), and
physical freedom (what is dancing if not an opportunity to liberate our instinctual physical energies, by means of aligning our movements to external stimuli?).
If music relates so strongly with how we perceive, feel and experience freedom (along with other dimensions like expressivity, imagination, creativity, etc.), we would think that playing is an act of liberation. As many students know well, it is not always the case. And what about practicing then, is it fun, liberating as listening to music? I often discuss with students how come frustration and lack of motivation, rather than joy and inspiration, are daily companions of their instrumental practice.
On one side we are deeply attracted by the fulfilling experience of playing music; on the other we have a hard time accepting the struggles that come with it. By consequence, reasonably, we learn about a variety of methods that offer help. A good method would in fact ease our way through the many stages of learning; it would help us understanding the topics providing logical and clear explanations and would support our confidence on the way. Methods can address technique, theory, general music understanding, or affirm the necessity to organize our practice time, for example by breaking it down this or that way. Goal is to achieve the highest level of proficiency in the most effective way. All good.
So, why it is so hard for many passionate individuals to improve consistently with their instruments? While it is not a problem to develop a genuine interest for a musical instrument, it is a challenge to commit to the same material, the same practice drills, exercises, and pieces every day for weeks or months, without eventually grow some boredom. Others have the opposite problem: by never sticking to a medium to long-term practice plan they will never get bored of their time at the instrument, hence missing the opportunity to achieve actual progress.
Truth is that putting in place a method for efficiency might create conflict with the seek for freedom and liberation that motivates us to play in the first place.
It is not clear how one would liberate and free him/herself (emotionally, intellectually, or physically) through a path of planning, self-control, and order. How would you expect to enjoy activities like reading, gardening or conversating with a friend if you had to carefully prepare, rehearse, predetermine each single step? Moreover, believing that predetermination could result in any liberating effect is counterintuitive at the very least, and would need some examination (the divide between classical and jazz musicians is too often driven by the very superficial notion that reading from a score -therefore predetermine a performance- is somehow less liberating than improvising).
To those students willing to commit to a strict, efficient, time-constrained practicing schedule I ask: would you enjoy reading a book in an efficient way, like 5 words per second, every afternoon for 1 hour, 20 pages at the time no matter what, regardless its content? Pleasure and efficiency do not coexist easily, at least not in the same way for everyone: each of us has a very personal way of balancing duties with fun, and for many people one excludes the other. Plus, intuitively we all know when something feels fun, while we need some form of conscious reasoning for engaging in a due task, even when it’s for our own benefit. No surprise music (and art), through its harmony between the elements and balance of opposites, has such a cathartic and therapeutic effect.
Methods are obviously important and almost always necessary but sacrificing the pleasure for the sake of tangible results would make those results meaningless. A method that doesn’t lead you towards increasing the pleasure of playing is not a good method.
Perhaps pleasure and discipline meet somewhere: they balance each other on a line that is changing at the same pace in which we change as individuals. Consistent results might be difficult to achieve depending on how hard it is to find that balance, regardless the endeavour.
In music so many dimensions of our being are operating at once, so many variables are at work, and the challenge is ever harder. We must stay open, try different ways and see on the long run which one works best. In other words, we must keep experimenting, toying around with ideas, with strategies, with ourselves. Perhaps this is something to remember: take an idea, toy with it with discipline and commitment, and then move on, like a child would. Ever wondered why we refer to ‘playing’ music in the same way we refer to ‘playing’ games?
Playing an instrument offers a dimension of playfulness that cannot be lost in practicing: most of us feel it intuitively every time we approach our instrument, a kind of excitement for the music that we are about to make. It’s like the beginning of a new game every time. And like in every game there are rules to follow, or the game will not work. The fun happens when, by following the rules I get to play my way, freely and unconstrained.
But which rules, all of them? Not at all: perhaps just some, enough for me to enjoy a bit of freedom. Some practice session might be governed by too many rules, and there’s no fun, while in others we might be adopting rules that are too lose for us to learn anything. The game might suffer being overwhelmed by instructions or fall apart for having not enough rules. The game will stop, and the music too.
Playfulness is the key: no mistake is too serious to give up playing and there is no limit to the number of rules/strategies you may be willing to try. The only goal is to keep the game on. I constantly adjust the challenge to enjoy the game longer (say for example maintain a slower tempo so I could play until the end), or refine the challenge so that I could aim at one particular source of enjoyment (for example by concentrating on a single passage until it sounds more convincing to my ears).
Playfulness might be about which rule to follow on a given day: one day it might be about learning notes, the next about memorizing them, the next only about tempo and rhythm and the next about accuracy. [During one of my first Jazz Masterclasses in the 90s the teacher was suggesting me to practice each day in a different key: on a Monday I would study my repertoire all transposed in C, on Tuesday I would do it again but this time in C#, and so on. To mix things up I could practice everything in fast tempos on the first day, on slow tempos on the second etc. I won’t suggest every student to do that, but you see the challenging-but-playful approach.]
Many students suffer from wanting to fix every musical dimension at once. Of course, playing the game of reading notes isn’t enough for the full music to emerge; and so playing hands separately or improving the fluency of one difficult passage. But if you run each of these games one at the time, if you are playful with them, they will -one at the time- become simple enough, and by definition, less fun. Sign that it’s time to adjust the rules: you can try two of these games at once.
Playfulness might even apply to the way we meet-and-leave a song or a piece, without having committed to it completely. Like a child plays briefly with different toys before deciding to play an actual game, you could start with one song you like to learn (or one passage in a piece), play with it until something more interesting shows up, and you’ll move on, until you find a game you can’t leave. This is good advice for the constantly curious type of musician, including myself. I have never stopped jumping from one thing to the next: it is likely that I have fully learned one piece for every hundred I started..
The art is the ability to ride such ever changing line between freedom and discipline: we could say that music offers the opportunity to find that balance, and we could also think of music as being that balance. Which would explain why our emotions, ideas, bodies align with it so easily. Perhaps a topic for a new essay.
Alberto L. Ferro
I teach at the London Contemporary School of Piano, open to all students in UK and abroad. For inquiries contact me or the school directly.
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