The morning view from my windows of the sun shining in the garden and the surrounding fields is uplifting to the spirits as I begin my morning routine.
It is Mother’s Day today. Happy Mother’s Day to all Mothers in the world.
As we work on learning or refining a piece, we consider many details to improve our performance. This process resembles cleaning up, nurturing existing skills, and trimming unnecessary elements. While I tended our garden last week after winter, I saw parallels between perfecting music and maintaining a garden.
Perhaps one of the most arduous tasks I performed in the garden was removing dead twigs, branches, and plants that did not survive the winter. Therefore, dryness was a major issue affecting some of the backyard trees. How can this relate to refining a particular piece of composition as we play it? Sometimes, we must pay attention to the lengths of our notes and ensure we perform the value prescribed by the composer. If the note is held longer than indicated in the music, it loses some of the piece's character. Other times, we must be alert to how we taper off notes at the end of phrases so they are not left cut-and-dry. This concludes the phrase and sounds more pleasing to our ears, similar to dead branches being an eye-sore in a garden.
To my great disappointment, my husband cut my dear elderberry shrub, which had been growing under the huge cherry tree, equally loved. Then he reported that the latter was already infested with pests and had an ant-made hole in its trunk. That probably explains why the cherry tree was not doing well. Similarly, in our music-making process, we have to look for underlying causes when passages consistently miss the mark during the perfecting stage. That could be something quite simple that our teacher or coach can observe and let us know. Some positioning issues or some minor corrections can give us confidence in a specific problem section. For example, as I am somewhat new to the viola da gamba world, I continuously have to adjust the sound I produce on the bass gamba so it sounds like a gamba. My tendency is to fall back on my cello knowledge and understanding, therefore using techniques and tones that are more suited to the cello than to the viol. Recently, my teacher showed me a way to draw the bow that completely changed the sound from a cello to a gamba. It will still require me to practice it to perfect the technique, but it gave me a different perspective to work on.
In yet another instance, a row of trees in the back of the house years ago completely blocked the sun from the garden, along with other trees doing the same. And that alone reduced the possibility of having a vegetable garden as I had done earlier. And this can easily refer to our attitudes when we are refining a piece of work. We must allow the light to shine to keep us open-minded when we practice. It is easy to lose hope and faith when things do not work out as quickly as we wish. I had to share this with my daughters just recently, as they are preparing for several auditions this month and in June. In other words, staying vigilant when things don’t move at the pace we expected them to.
During the summer months, it seems that the grass grows by the hour. One week one cuts it, and the next week it is well underway to becoming an overgrown pasture. If the lawn is not mowed in good time, it will be problematic after a few weeks. Likewise, one has to continue tending to their playing daily. Otherwise, those old habits can creep in, and whatever was learned might need to be relearned, which takes more time and effort and may even cause frustration.
Mole hills are another charming event in the garden, and we have plenty of them. This year, I decided to use the soil to the garden’s advantage and added to the area where I thought the soil was doing poorly. And it worked. The new magnolia tree I planted has been doing quite well because of it. In our playing, we can find ways to make certain things that might otherwise be unpleasant work for us. For example, as I practice, I sometimes find that some positions work better in some cases but not in others. And since practicing is, in a sense, an exploration, one must try to find those moments when certain things work better in some circumstances but not in others.
Fortunately, any tweaking of our performance will not be as sad as losing trees in our gardens. We can approach practice with the rake of our common sense, accompanied by great joy, thus making the right decisions about what we cut, scrape, and add to our performance. In the end, it will be worth our time. When we leave things to their own devices, as in our garden, playing can become unmanageable.
Therefore, if you are preparing a piece and there are problem spots, pick up those tools and get busy. Clean up, shape, take out what isn't needed, and be adamant, because our musical garden needs patience and perseverance.
And when things are overwhelming, just like our garden at the moment, ask for professional help, like asking gardeners to do the work or calling on your teacher or coach.
Happy Practicing and perhaps gardening.
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