A few weeks ago I made a post about investing time in practice.  The point of the post was that musical success is dependent on daily, consistent practice.  If you want to be in Wind Ensemble next year, you can't wait until July to start preparing.  You must start now.  Be a little better today.  Be even better tomorrow.  Go further the next day.  String several productive days together and see where you are in a week/month/semester/etc...

What I'd like to focus on here, though, is a word that was sandwiched in the middle of that previous sentence - "productive."  Plenty of students put in their hour or two every day but they feel like they are going nowhere.  They honestly feel like they are doing what their teacher asks by getting in the practice room, but when they show up for their lesson every week their teacher (me!) is never satisfied.  I would argue that 99% of the time this is because the student has not demanded enough of himself/herself in each practice session.

I grew up a Dallas Mavericks fan.  For much of my youth this meant I was a fan of the worst NBA franchise in America.  Things turned around when the Mavericks signed Steve Nash and Dirk Nowitzki.  One of the things that I admire about both of these players is that their free throw percentage is always around 90%.  This means that when they get to shoot the ball with no one flying at them trying to block the shot they make it 9 out of 10 times.  This is a very comforting attribute to have on your NBA team.  Contrast this with Shaquille O'Neal, who only shot around 50% from the free throw line.  This means that when the game was on the line Shaq would miss foul shots just as many times as he would make them.

Why do I mention my affinity for the (reigning NBA champion!) Dallas Mavericks?  Free throws should be automatic.  No one is guarding the player.  The distance to the rim is always the same in every arena and practice facility.  Other than people watching and the nerves involved in an actual game, there is no difference between shooting free throws in practice and in a game.  Sure, there may be physical differences from player to player that make it harder to be successful.  Typically, larger players do not have as many of the fine motor skills that aid free throws, but that hasn't stopped Nowitzki (who is 7 ft.) from shooting well from the foul line.  I would say these points are true of a musical performance.  Other than having an audience in a lesson or in a performance, nothing should be different between playing in a practice room, office, or recital hall.  Some people may be more naturally gifted and can therefore achieve a successful performance with less work than others, but does that excuse a sloppy performance?  I don't think it should.  Imagine how many more games Shaq's teams would have one if he had devoted more time to perfecting his free throw shooting?

Sure, you can say that nerves play a role in this.  I would agree with this, but where I think the issue lies many times is that students have not put enough pressure on themselves in the practice room.  It is not embarrassing to mess up in a practice room.  No one hears.  But suddenly when we are in a lesson or on stage everything becomes magnified.  We realize that, "Oh, yeah I guess I never really mastered measure 47."  

I don't think it is unreasonable to demand perfection from my students.  Now, I must clarify this a bit.  Do I expect that my students will perform with absolute accuracy every second of every day.  No.  That would be hypocritical.  I don't play that accurately.  But, I do practice in a manner that I expect any performance to be accurate.  I am human so I may slip up here or there, but I know going in to any recital that I am more likely than not to play accurately.  This is not because I am supremely talented (which I am definitely not); it is because I practice effectively and thoroughly.  I also believe perfection can be demanded at each student's unique level of ability.  I don't expect my freshman students to be able to play the Cosma Euphonium Concerto perfectly.  But, there is no reason why they shouldn't have a Rochut and Herring etude prepared accurately.  Demanding perfection also doesn't mean that I expect to agree with everything that is performed.  We all have preferences.  Someone might hear a phrase as angry while another hears the same phrase as melancholy.  Two professionals might perform the same piece very well, but usually I have a preference between the two.  There is no perfect interpretation of a piece - that is not part of demanding perfection. 

Practicing to achieve perfection is tedious.  It takes a lot of repetition of correct playing.  But, I also think it is an attribute that, once developed, does not take as much tedious effort to maintain later on.  The high school and college years are vital in the development of accuracy.  There was a time when I practiced scales religiously for 2 hours a day and I did the penny game (see below) with every solo I worked on.  I don't do either of these now, but the time invested doing scales and demanding perfection through the penny game continue to pay dividends in my playing.  

A few tips:
1) Have a goal for each practice session.  You don't need practice an entire concerto in an hour.  Choose one thing to work on and make it perfect.  Then, make something else perfect in your next session, and so on...  If you string together 10-20 practice sessions like this then you will have your solo learned at a level where you can expect perfection. 

2) Don't practice until can play the passage right.  Practice until you can't get the passage wrong.  This means that once you have mastered a passage you need a lot of continued repetition of correct performances.  Another way of looking at it - if you play a passage wrong 9 times and then finally get it right on the 10th try - you only have a 10% chance of playing it right.  I guarantee when you show up to your lesson the next day you will play it wrong when the spotlight is on you.

3) Treat the practice room like it is a recital stage.  Sure, you are going to have to work out some kinks in your playing.  You won't play every second of every practice session perfectly.  But, there needs to be a time when you do "turn the red light on" and perform.  Imagine that people are watching.  Maybe, even bring someone into the practice room.  Put pressure on yourself so that when you are in a lesson or on stage you don't feel out of place.

4) Penny game.  I learned this from Øystein Baadsvik when I was a student and it challenged me to be as accurate and prepared as I could be.  The game is that you put 10 pennies on one side of a stand.  Choose a passage and perform it.  If you perform the passage perfectly (pitch, rhythm, sound, articulation, dynamics, etc...) you move one penny to the other side of the stand.  Do this 10 times in a row, but if you ever mess up you start all over.  You have to do the passage perfectly 10 times in a row.  This can be a very frustrating process, but it is one that will train you to demand perfection in your playing.  It is also a great way to build confidence.  After "penny-gaming" a passage you can say to yourself, "I just played that passage perfectly 10 times in a row.  There is no reason why I won't play it perfectly on my 11th try."

To sum up, I think all musicians should expect to play perfectly.  Just as when Nash and Nowitzki step to the foul line - they expect to make the shot and it is a surprise when they don't.  We all need to gear our practice in a way that on a daily and weekly basis we become more accurate players.  None of us will ever achieve perfect accuracy, but if we don't strive for it we will never approach it. 

I think my students are pretty good at seeing the big picture.  When I ask my students about goals they usually have well thought-out responses: make Wind Ensemble, participate in a summer festival, attend graduate school, get a teaching job, etc...  These are all great goals.  The tricky thing with most of these goals, though, is that they are off in the distance.  Most students' goals are a semester, year, or four years away from being met.  There is nothing wrong with long-term goals, and in fact, I would say all musicians need to have a list of long-term goals.  We all need direction in our lives.  Where the issue lies with many students is how to translate long-term goals into present practices.  

Even in my relatively short time at IUP, I have seen several students become increasingly discouraged as they progressed through their degree.  They began their academic career with high hopes of ascending to the top of the studio, sitting principal in the Wind Ensemble, and winning the concerto competition.  However, as each semester passed they realized that they were hardly any closer to meeting those goals.  The problem for most, if not all, of these students is in translating their goals into an effective gameplan.  They honestly desire to succeed in these ways, but they are either too ignorant to see the amount of work needed or they are lazy and distracted and would rather spend the afternoon playing video games than practicing.

You can think about goals as investments.  Let's take, for instance, buying a car (which I know is an awful investment).  Let's say you were bored over Christmas break because you didn't have a way to get around.  You'd really like a car so that you can get away from home if you want.  So, you decide that you'd really like to have a car by summer so that when you go home for break you can drive to a friends house if you really want to.  The problem is, you are broke.  What would you do?  You wouldn't just sit around hoping to get a car in five months - you would get a job and you'd start saving.  You would work day after day in order to meet the goal that you have.  After a day's work, you might only take home $30-40.  That doesn't make a dent in a down payment for a car.  It might be easy to just quit.  What's the point?  But, if you quit, you certainly won't have a car.  So, you trudge on.  A weeks worth of work means you might make $150-200.  Not bad, but still not anywhere near enough for a car.  A month gets you to $600-800.  Getting closer, but still, even though you have strung together 20+ days of work, you are a long way off from being able to buy a car.  But, if you worked steadily, day by day, week by week, month by month you might have $3,000-$4,000 after five months of work.  It might not be the prettiest car, but you can now  get yourself a starter car to get around for the summer.

Practicing is a lot like saving up for your car.  If you look at a day's work, it might seem like it's just not worth the time.  In the case of the car, what's $30 when you need $3,000?  In the case of music, you have so far to go to make Wind Ensemble, and in the hour you just spent you were only able to speed your etude up by 3 clicks.  What's 3 clicks when you need to go 30?  Well, just like the illustration of saving for a car, you have to be willing to put in sustained work over a period of time before significant progress is made.  You have to be able to see that the microscopic improvement you made today is part of a larger picture.  It IS worth your time if you feel strongly about your goals.

Goals are great.  Goals, I would say, are even necessary.  We probably won't even meet all of our goals, but by earnestly striving to meet our goals on a daily basis, we will have (at the very least) grown in our musicianship.  I would encourage each of my students, as we begin the semester, to think about the goals that you have and resolve to work towards them on a daily basis.  Your work may seem so small on a day-to-day basis, but when you step back at the end of the semester you will be amazed at how you have grown in your musicianship.

One thing I thought I might do with the blog is highlight some fun and interesting videos.  I might use this as a chance to point my students towards something I think they should experience.  Or, in this case, I am featuring Mnozil Brass because IUP is fortunate to be hosting them on their upcoming tour.  In fact, IUP is one of only four U.S. stops (with the next closest being in Kansas!).  

The tuba and euphonium world is a funny place.  Compared to the rest of the musical world, it is a very small, tight-knit club.  Because of this, I would encourage my students to think before you type or speak.

I remember when I was younger, and had yet to attend any national music festivals, I had a naive perspective on the tuba world.  I bought my first tuba CD in 1997 as a sophomore in high school.  It was a recording of Roger Bobo.  I thought it was the most amazing thing in the world to hear someone playing solos on the tuba.  He seemed like a rock star that happened to play my instrument.  And, clearly he must be living a completely different life than me because he has a CD.  From my perspective as a high school musician, he was on a similar plane to a sports or TV celebrity (surely he was rich and lived in a beachfront mansion with four yachts, right?).  

Now that I am on the professional side of things, I have a different perspective.  Over the past decade and a half I have had the opportunity to meet many of the musicians that I grew up listening to and admiring (in fact, I am now peers with many of the musicians I listened to as a high school and college student).  I almost always come away from these encounters struck by the fact that these musicians that I have known only through recordings and reputation are real people.  These encounters also serve to remind me how small the tuba and euphonium world is.  In our profession, we could easily play 6 degrees of Arnold Jacobs, although we would really only need 2 or 3 degrees.  Everyone knows everyone.

I finally did see Roger Bobo in the flesh in 2002 when I was a college junior.  He was at ITEC in North Carolina.  But, I was so awed that I couldn't pluck up the courage to introduce myself.  

I could be wrong, but I think that the perspective I had as a high schooler is not generally shared by young musicians today.  I think that the internet has broken down many of the facades that I perceived.  In 1997 the internet was still somewhat in its infancy.  My only connection to Roger Bobo was his CD, and obviously anyone who could make a CD must really be somebody.  If he had walked into my high school band room I probably would have frozen in fear (since five years later I still couldn't bring myself to say "hi").  Nowadays, students can interact with professional musicians through Facebook and Twitter.  I think this has positive and negative results.

The good thing about this availability of information is that students hopefully realize that the great musicians of today are, by and large, regular people.  They started in the same way that the students now find themselves and they continue to work hard.  They weren't born as professional musicians, and they don't maintain professional lives without continued hard work.  The down side is familiarity that leads to forwardness and informality.  This is generally true as technology leads to a more convenient openness of information.  Every professor has had to deal with emails from students that say something like: "sry i missed class did we do anything 2day?"  I'm not a demanding person.  I'm pretty laid back, but I expect students to be a bit more thoughtful when they email me (particularly after skipping class to nurse their hangover).  

So, where am I going with all this?  I am glad that my students have the conveniences that we have today.  I am glad they are able to read about Sotto Voce touring.  I'm glad they can see pictures of Sergio Carolino in the recording studio.  I'm glad that they can easily contact a musician if they have a pedagogical question.  But, I don't want this accessibility and familiarity that technology affords us to lead to disrespect when interacting with professional musicians.

A few rules to follow when talking to musicians (i.e. your future colleagues and employers):

1. If you wish to contact a musician, do so in a formal way.  Email is preferable to facebook.  This will probably change in the next few years, but use email for now.  When you write an email, start it with a salutation to the person - not "Hey."  If you have a request, acknowledge the time that the individual will spend in answering your request and thank them in advance.
2. The tuba and euphonium world is a small world.  If you make a ridiculous comment on Facebook/Twitter/email/TubeNet you will be remembered as that guy/girl that said "...."  My education students have had this point - that their actions will follow them into employment -  drilled into them (especially concerning alcohol and drugs) but, the same should be true of words.
3. If you request a lesson from a professional musician, don't ask "do you charge for lessons?"  Assume that there will be a charge.  Their time is valuable.  It has a price.  As much as you might think that the time spent listening to you play your horn (instead of spent practicing, working, or with family) is reward enough, the appropriate thing to do in ALL situations is to offer to pay.  If it is unclear whether there will be a charge for a lesson, assume there there will be.  Bring your checkbook to the lesson.
4. Don't tell a professional musician that you know they sounded good because they play on X instrument or X mouthpiece.  They may play on expensive or custom equipment, but in the end they just put in hours and hours of practice time over many years.  They would probably sound just as good on your horn (trust me, I have heard Gene Pokorny play my horn and I have never been able to recreate that sound).

I want to be clear that I am not discouraging my students from interacting with professional musicians.  I wish I had the courage when I had the chance to introduce myself to Roger Bobo.  I have been fortunate in my position at IUP to have university support to take students to conferences and to bring guest artists to campus every year.  I want them to interact and ask questions.  But, I want them to interact in a manner that shows respect for the individual's status.  Musicians are busy.  Most are very kind people that are willing to share their time with students - particularly students that are respectful - but, their kindness is not an open door to disrespect.  

So, students, be thoughtful in your conversations with professional musicians.  They just may be your future employers and colleagues.

So, I've decided to start a blog.  I know that the world doesn't need another blog.  It especially doesn't need a blog written by me.  There are already blogs for every topic imaginable.  There are certainly people who are funnier than me, more well-traveled than me, and concerned with more important things than playing the tuba.  There are plenty of people that are better musicians, have more knowledge than me, and are better writers.  So, now that I have explained why there is no reason for this blog, I'll tell you why I am bothering to start it.

I believe it is my job to train young men and women to be successful musicians.  At IUP, most of my students desire to be educators.  By now they all know that I expect them to practice as though they are performance majors, but there is more to being a complete and successful musician than being a capable performer.  

I feel that over the course of a four-year degree I do an acceptable job of covering the necessary information of general applied musicianship (fundamentals, didactic materials, solo repertoire, chamber repertoire, etc...), but I don't feel like I always address the other situations and issues that they will almost all inevitably run into.  45 minutes a week is barely enough to say hello and hear what the student has worked on for the past seven days.  And even though the studio meets for 2.5 hours a week in Tubaphonium ensemble, it always seems like we are scrambling to put our next concert together (even though I always have the best intentions of doing more master classes).  I want this blog to be a place to bring up those issues and get my students to think about the things they are going to see in the future.

Also, there are times when I have a conversation with a colleague that sparks a thought that I want to share with my students.  However, by the time I see my students next, the thought has left me.  Or sometimes I run across an article or video that I think would be profitable for my students to read or see, but I have already cluttered their inboxes with reminders and don't want to send out one more thing to that will only be overlooked.  I'd like this blog to be a location where I can point my students to interesting information and music and start some conversations.

Lastly, this blog is for me.  I am not finished learning and forming my own pedagogical ideas.  Between my family, practicing, preparing classes, reading facebook and twitter, and keeping up with the Texas Rangers and TCU football, I am just as distracted as my students.  I'd like for this to be an opportunity for me to focus on what it is that I think will make me a better teacher for my students.

With all of that said, I don't promise anything with this blog other than typos.  I hope this will be a valuable growing experience for me and resource for my students.  

ZC