Siegmund
Well-known member
This book popped up once in a how-to-practice thread last winter here.
I finally got hold of a copy last June, and started reading it, a few pages a night. Then got distracted until this month, when I came back to it and finally finished it.
I recommend it to anyone who wants to be a better / more serious / more polished musician.
Not every chapter will be applicable to everyone (there are bits about how to get along with your teacher, aimed mostly at college music majors.) But the portions about cultivating effective practice routines, avoiding injuries, and getting along with the other members of a band are relevant to just about everyone.
The advice is not specific to any one instrument. But there are a multitude of good suggestions: preparing your practice space, your materials, and your mindset before you pick up the instrument; not choosing material that's so hard it's going to cause you to despair of ever mastering it; and, in general, cultivating good habits.
One that particularly sticks with me is his advice to study (listen to / examine sheet music / etc) a piece, and think about your interpretation of it, *before* you start working seriously on the notes. The "learn the notes first, then add the dynamics and other stuff later" method -- which was how my violin teachers and many of my orchestra conductos approached things -- really does make it harder to incorporate the musicality. You commit a wooden version of it to memory, during the time you are only working on the notes, and have to un-learn some of that if you want to build in more interesting tempos and dynamics. I tried this with one of the new pieces I tackled this summer... and it really is quite amazing how different two approximately-equally-well-prepared pieces sound, when I did one the notes-first way and the other the plan-your-expressive-stuff-at-the-start way.
I finally got hold of a copy last June, and started reading it, a few pages a night. Then got distracted until this month, when I came back to it and finally finished it.
I recommend it to anyone who wants to be a better / more serious / more polished musician.
Not every chapter will be applicable to everyone (there are bits about how to get along with your teacher, aimed mostly at college music majors.) But the portions about cultivating effective practice routines, avoiding injuries, and getting along with the other members of a band are relevant to just about everyone.
The advice is not specific to any one instrument. But there are a multitude of good suggestions: preparing your practice space, your materials, and your mindset before you pick up the instrument; not choosing material that's so hard it's going to cause you to despair of ever mastering it; and, in general, cultivating good habits.
One that particularly sticks with me is his advice to study (listen to / examine sheet music / etc) a piece, and think about your interpretation of it, *before* you start working seriously on the notes. The "learn the notes first, then add the dynamics and other stuff later" method -- which was how my violin teachers and many of my orchestra conductos approached things -- really does make it harder to incorporate the musicality. You commit a wooden version of it to memory, during the time you are only working on the notes, and have to un-learn some of that if you want to build in more interesting tempos and dynamics. I tried this with one of the new pieces I tackled this summer... and it really is quite amazing how different two approximately-equally-well-prepared pieces sound, when I did one the notes-first way and the other the plan-your-expressive-stuff-at-the-start way.
