Jonathan Harnum

Quality v. Quantity

Some research shows that the amount of time doesn’t really matter, although it does matter a little since if you spend zero hours doing something, you’re not going to get better at all. But it turns out that the number of hours practiced doesn’t really matter, it’s all about the quality of your practice. What you do is important, but not how much you do. Duh, right?

This seems like a no-brainer issue, but researchers are notoriously skeptical about common-sense issues. We want to know for sure whether things are true. That’s one of the reasons behind a study by Duke, Simmons, & Cash (2009), titled It’s not how much; it’s how: Characteristics of practice behavior and retention of performance skills. These researchers had 17 graduate and advanced undergraduate piano players practice a 3-measure excerpt of Shostakovich’s Concerto No. 1 for Piano, Trumpet and String Orchestra (here’s a clip of Shostakovich himself playing part of it). Here’s the excerpt:

From the Top, With Feeling: Expressive Music Practice

Feeling is everything in music. Or very nearly so. No matter what kind of music we listen to, we know it when we hear it. It’s so important that most listeners can perceive the emotional content in just a 1 second slice of sound! What is it that makes a piece of music expressive? It’s the musician herself that does, of course. But how does one go about learning how to do that? How do you convey feeling through sound? It’s the same answer as just about anything having to do with musical skill: you practice! But what does that mean? How do musicians practice the expressive aspects of music? Well, it turns out there is a piece of 2009 research that chronicles how 18 classical musicians do it

Book Review: “Free Play,” by Stephen Nachmanovich

Free Play doesn’t deal directly with music practice, but it is nevertheless an important book for anyone interested in music (or other arts, or life). I strongly believe that improvisation benefits practice. To me, improvising is an essential musical skill, one possessed by musical greats (Hussein, Bach, Shankar, Beethoven, Duke, Mozart, etc.), and is practiced in musical traditions all over the world, as well as by young children who haven’t developed some of the fear associated with improvisation in those overly focused on the written notes. Remember when you drew letters over and over as a young child, taking great care (or not) with the shapes? Now imagine that despite all that practice time forming letters and sounding out words, that you never (ever) spoke extemporaneously. Crazy, right? To me, that’s about the same as practicing scales over and over until they’re memorized, but then never using that tonal material to improvise. Crazy talk! At the end of this review is a link to an mp3 of my improv group Meh! playing an improvised story with Nachmanovich.

When is Not-Practicing Practice?

A new piece of research shows that the “inherently unpleasant” idea about deliberate music practice may not be entirely true. In fact, we may continue to learn when we’re doing something completely different from that which we’re practicing.

Nap Your Way to Excellence

Set aside half an hour every day to do all your worrying; then take a nap during this period.
~Anonymous

There is more refreshment and stimulation in a nap, even of the briefest, than in all the alcohol ever distilled.
~Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid: 43 BC – 18 AD)

———-

Sleep is one of the key strategies the brain uses for learning. It’s called consolidation in the research literature. Basically put, your brain needs down time in order to process all that you’ve taken in during the day. Naps can perform the same function.

RIP Abbey Lincoln

I’m off in Alaska visiting friends and family and re-stocking my freezer with salmon and halibut, hence the lack of posts in the last 3 weeks. Here’s a great video by the incomparable Max Roach and vocalist Abbey Lincoln who passed away recently. Rest in peace, Abbey… she sings @ 2:40… Want to learn more…

Symmetrical Scales: Chromatic and Whole Tone Scales

So, the chromatic and whole tone scales are really useful to have under your fingers and in your ears. If you don’t know either, practice the chromatic scale first, as it’s the most useful.

Good luck and have fun with your practice!

The Cage Will Set You Free

I have nothing to say
and I am saying it
and that is poetry

~John Cage (US Composer, 1912-1992)

Reading & Writing Music is for Amateurs

There are worse musicians to emulate than Irving Berlin. He penned God Bless America, and the perennial classic White Christmas along with a whole host of other popular songs. Any songwriter would relish the royalties of either of these tunesand would probably both give their eyeteeth to have written them. Berlin knew the value of work. He didn’t believe in inspiration, but in effort. He wrote a song a day, regardless of fickle”inspiration.” The wonderful thing is that all of these musical accomplishments weren’t hampered by Berlin’s inability to read or write kusic. In fact, later in life, Berlin was convinced this inability was one of the factors in his success. He wasn’t limited by written music.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning/Krueger Effect is one of 19 Social Biases (go HERE for a visual guide to many others), also known as superiority bias, the “Lake Woebegon” effect, or superiority bias. We’ve all met someone like this, and may even be like this ourselves if we don’t pay attention. As far as I can tell, it works like this: people who are less able (let’s say a beginning musician), don’t have the skills to make a correct assessment of their ability and tend to overrate their expertise. They think they’re better than they are because they lack the awareness to know any better. I’ve seen this all the time with very young students who finally “get” a simple song and are elated, full of vim and vigor because they think they’re good. And in a sense, they are, they’re better than they once were, they’ve triumphed over something difficult. But they lack the range of experience to clearly understand that they have a loooong way to go. Watch the tryouts for American Idol and you’ll see LOTS of this, some of it quite hilarious or heartbreaking, depending.

The weird thing is another side of the DK effect: those who are competent tend to underrate their expertise. The bashful expert, the sheepish performer, the self-deprecating. Chances are such folks wrongfully assume others have equal understanding and this bleeds them of confidence. They don’t really believe in their greater expertise perhaps also becasue of an awareness of how much there really is to know, and this also makes it difficult to build confidence.

Major Scales and Their Kin

A series of lessons in which I explain the major scale, all its modes, relative minor, Major and minor pentatonics, and the related blues scale. I posted it to help trumpet players learn the fingering of their scales, but the concepts can help anyone and getting the sound of each scale into your memory is essential.

Nudge-Nudge, Wink-Wink, Say-No-More

It’s tough to change our behavior radically, or even significantly. It’s easier to give ourselves a nudge towards utopia. Some real-world examples of the nudge are putting fruit at the front of the school lunch line instead of pizza, because hungry kids (and let’s face it, adults, too) often grab whatever is closest to hand; or the new Illinois policy that changed the wording for the organ donor program so that drivers have to explicitly opt out of being an organ donor instead of signing up to participate in the program, a simple change that saves the lives of many. These nudges are examples from Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. In the book they suggest useful nudges that help us behave or perform better than we might otherwise. Others are from A. J. Jacobs, author and personal experimenter extrordinaire.