Why Practicing is a Waste of Time

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flute pedagogy, flute students, practicing

Many years ago, there was a high school student in my flute studio who reported to me that she was practicing three hours a day. Her friends that I knew also reported that she practiced a lot, several hours daily, during study halls and lunch. She was always practicing. What surprised me was that she was not a good flute player by any stretch of the imagination. Her tone seemed immature for her age and her rhythm skills were very weak. How could she be spending so much time in a practice room with so little to show for the effort?

Determined to get to the bottom of what was going on with this student, I questioned her further. She came from a family that had a lot of musicians and she felt she was expected to follow the family tradition and be a musician too. She was taught and believed that you had to put in the time to become a good musician. She also was really unhappy with what she was doing. In working with her, I discovered she had absolutely no process to her practicing. It was just playing through things over and over. It had never occurred to her that she needed to be evaluating what she was doing, identifying and solving problems, in order for her practice time to help her become better at playing the flute and learning to be a musician.

When you tell a student they need to practice, be sure you give them the tools they need to practice effectively. Virtually every day, kids demonstrate to me that they have no idea what practicing entails. My tongue-in-cheek analogy for this kind of “practice” is the “piñata approach”. Put on a blindfold and have someone spin you around until you are dizzy. You are given a big stick with which you then flail about wildly in the hopes that you hit something. Hilarious at a party, but useless as a strategy for mastering any of the skills needs to play an instrument well.

Here are practice tools that I offer my own students:

• Teach the student that they must have a plan, set goals, solve problems and implement the solutions.
• Provide flute specific exercises for tone, technique and articulation
• Help them develop their own concept of good flute playing through modeling good playing for them by my own demonstration, as well as videos and recordings available online.
• Teach them to evaluate themselves without judgement by asking themselves how they measure up to their own concept of good flute playing
• Help them devise remedies for areas of their playing with which they are dissatisfied.
• Show them how they can learn more quickly by breaking things down into bite-sized pieces, often called “chunking” in today’s parlance.
• Teach the students musical phrasing and inflection (strong and weak beats, pickup notes, so-called Curtis/Kinkaid groupings). Practice the chunks in a musical way.
• Walk the student through these concepts as many times as needed until they develop the personal habits to do this for themselves.

It takes more effort to teach this way than to teach by rote. When a student understands what they are doing and why, it fires their imagination and they start being more creative in their practicing. That is when you see them start to really make progress in their playing. This is what makes the extra effort pay off both for you and your students.

If you find these entries helpful, subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly for more flute tips. Please comment and feel free to ask questions. What do you want to know about flute pedagogy? Maybe the answer to your question will be the next flute tip. Find me on Facebook or email me your questions at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.

A Few Thoughts on Training Musicians

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rehearsal technique

If you asked me if I call myself a flutist or a flautist, I think the best answer I could give is that it doesn’t really matter because I consider myself a musician first, who just happens to play the flute. If you had asked Marcel Moyse the same question, I’m sure he would have said something to the same effect. He spent his career playing in the pit of the Opera Comique in Paris and performing with some of the top musicians, both instrumentalists and singers, of his day. He was so inspired by the example of musicianship and phrasing modeled out by these great artists, he compiled his famous Tone Development Through Interpretation, along with the 24 Little Melodic Studies and 25 Little Melodic Studies. These three books are essentially training manuals of phrasing, inflection, style and interpretation.

You might say to me that this material is only for advanced players at the conservatory level and professionals. And my response is the principles demonstrated in these three books are universal to music making at any level, from the youngest beginner to world famous concert artists. We need to live and breathe these principles into every note, every phrase that we play and teach. What are they?

• Teaching the hierarchy of beats in every time signature. In 4/4 beats 1 and 3 are strong, 2 and 4 are weak. In 3/4 beat 1 is strong, 2 is weak and 3 is weaker and so forth. And weak goes to strong. In other words, 4 leads to 1 and 2 leads to 3.
• Teach phrases or parts of phrases rather than measure to measure. Many phrases start with some sort of anacrusis. It can be as short as a 16th note or as long as half a measure. The anacrusis always leads to the down beat. Always make your rehearsal technique or practicing musical rather than just about mastering the technical skills.
• Teach correct breathing habits by how you rehearse your ensembles. In other words, breathe with the phrases or parts of phrases. Phrases are like musical sentences. Breathe at the ends of phrases or in the natural pause in a phrase. The biggest phrasing crime I see kids commit is breathing before the very last note of a phrase that ends after the bar line in the next measure.
• Teach your students the difference between a strong ending and a weak ending to a phrase. Have you ever noticed that strong dissonances often fall on strong beats in order to resolve into a consonance on the next weak beat? It is correct to lean into the dissonance to make the resolution sweeter.

It is easier than you might think to teach these principles right from the very beginning. If you teach them inflection and phrasing from the start, the kids learn to phrase naturally, musically and intuitively almost without knowing they are doing it. If you wait several years into their instrumental training, it is much more difficult to help them to phrase. The kids get locked into thinking it’s all about technique rather than using technique, tone, articulation and inflection to make music.

If you find these entries helpful, subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back next week for another flute tip. Please comment and feel free to ask questions. Maybe the answer to your question will be the next flute tip. Find me on Facebook or email me at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.