The Musician's Way Blog

“The details are not the details. They make the design.”
–Charles Eames, designer

For musicians and designers alike, our approach to detail largely determines whether our work soars or flops.

Compare, for instance, these two performers:

• Musician 1 performs with passion along with polished rhythm, tone, and intonation.
• Musician 2 is no less fervent, but heedlessly lets her timing drift and her accuracy falter.

Who would you rather listen to? Continue Reading

Itzhak Perlman

“The single most important goal for performing artists
is to see how they are doing.”
–Itzhak Perlman, violinist (The Musician’s Way, p. 202)

Suppose that you’re practicing a new piece. How do you know that one portion is learned securely enough for you to tackle another?

Later on, how do you determine that the music is concert-ready?

Then, following a performance, what enables you to pinpoint the aspects of your execution that need polishing? Continue Reading

Chapter 2 of The Musician’s Way is called “Practicing Deeply, Part I.” It lays out principles upon which deep practice is built and provides frameworks that get fleshed out throughout the text. Here are the titles of the sections within the chapter:

Practicing Deeply
Habits of Excellence
Essentials of Artistic Interpretation
Mental Imaging
Warming Up Continue Reading

This is the first in a series of posts in which I summarize how I use The Musician’s Way in my studio teaching. Here, I focus on Chapter 1. Continue Reading

Why write about music and music education?

Is it as futile as that old saw – “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture” – would lead us to believe?

Continue Reading

Zoom H2 Recorder

Imagine that you’re watching an artist paint in her studio: She spreads color on canvas, backs up to appraise her work, and then returns to her easel.

Sometimes she brushes briefly and assesses quickly; other times she paints at length before pausing to reflect.

Correspondingly, when we musicians practice, we proceed through cycles of execution, evaluation, and revision.

But there’s a big difference between our medium and that of visual artists because music exists in time, not space.

After we play or sing a phrase, it’s gone, except for our memory of it. Continue Reading