Practicing to Perform Differently

I started playing a lot more concerts in France and I was happy to be performing more regularly again.

By chance, I met a young recording engineer and as we were talking, I brought up the idea of making a duo violin and piano recording and promoting it through concerts built around a program of violin classics and written out jazz arrangements.

He thought it could work.

So the adventure began.

To start, I chose short pieces that were sitting around two jazzy arrangements a friend of mine had made for me. One was Porgy and Bess and the other was Thelonious Monk's Round Midnight.

With pieces like Ravel Ziggand and Chrysler's Grave woven around these two demanding arrangements, a piano interlude in the middle and two optional encores, the program ended up running about 64 to 70 minutes.

I don't think I had ever practiced so hard as the program was performed from memory.

At the time, I was taking a French class at a school in Paris so as a warm up, I arranged for us to play for my classmates and that's when things got real.

That's when I had to confront what it meant to make a mistake and realize I still had so much more music to play.

I mean, I had made mistakes before in performances but with so much more to play, there was a much greater chance that more mistakes would happen, especially since I was doing it from memory.

Well, I still remember that first mistake vividly.

I was so shocked when it happened because I immediately started worrying about what was coming next and to that my looking back at why it happened and I started to mentally fall apart.

But I held on even though I thought the concert would never end.

Well, of course it did and I accepted the applause and the after the concert congratulations.

But on the inside, I couldn't let go of all the mistakes I had made.

I got home and continued reliving what had happened.

I realized that I obviously needed to rethink how I had prepared for this.

So something had to change.

But what? Thinking it through, I decided I needed to learn better how to stay in the moment.

Looking back at that first mistake, I realized that my reaction to it had distracted me from what I was doing in that moment.

It had pulled me away from the music, pulled me out of my zone.

This realization pulled me away.

I had to learn how to stop thinking about them, stop worrying about what they might think. I had to learn how to stay centered and concentrate on the music.

That said, it's so easy to say concentrate and stay in the music.

But that pushed me to ask myself, how do you actually do that? That's when I realized that to be that concentrated, I had to really know what I was doing. Being truly aware of how I played every note and every gesture.

Flooding my mind with this information wouldn't leave room for anything else.

And this would allow me to concentrate, you know, stay in the zone.

So I started practicing differently.

I observed every movement I made as closely as I possibly could so that not only did I know where I was going, but I was totally aware of all the details of the gestures that I needed to get me there.

All right, but even though now I knew what I was doing and how, I realized if I tried to think about everything I had observed, it would lead to overthinking.

So instead, I put my attention on the beginning, the starting point of each activity, and let that bring me into the act of letting it happen.

That brought me into just doing it.

I gave another warm -up concert and noticed that looking at the audience before I played wasn't at all helpful to my focus. So I decided to avoid looking directly at the audience when I walked on stage. Instead, I picked a neutral spot in the hall to focus on while walking out and taking my bow.

I also decided to turn my back to the audience to tune, which gave me a chance to check in with my pianist. We would smile, maybe exchange a quick joke, then I would turn back with my eyes fixed between the bridge and the fingerboard at the spot where I had decided to begin.

And when it was time, I would bring the bow to the string in tempo and begin to play with the freedom that only knowing can allow.

Years later, I found myself drawing on these memories as I helped students prepare for performances.

So many of them told me about their fear of making a mistake, of having a memory slip, of experiencing that awful, lonely, out -of -control moment on stage.

But I really didn't have the time and a lesson to go into detail about my experience, so I just told them the bits and pieces that seemed relevant at the moment.

Now, with a bit of hindsight, I think that may have been a mistake.

I think if I had taken the time to tell the full story, they might have seen that what they were feeling wasn't unusual, that it wasn't a sign of weakness or failure, but that anyone can feel shaken or uncertain when they perform, even their teacher.

And maybe hearing the whole story could have helped them feel a little less alone as they explored their different ways to perform.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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