Books For The Journey: The Art Of Practicing-A Guide To Making Music From The Heart

About two years after starting harp lessons, I picked up The Art of Practicing-A Guide to Making Music From the Heart, by Madeline Bruser (New York: Bell Tower, 1997.) I was trying to figure out how to practice in a way that was deeper than my simple, and boring, repetitions of a couple of measures of music at a time. I knew how to work on small chunks of material and build them into bigger chunks. What I didn’t know was how to take the small chunk of me that was trying to be a musician and build that into a bigger chunk.

Mindfulness practice meets music practice – that’s this book in a very small nutshell. But the concepts about practice and performance that Madeline Bruser introduces have expanded my thinking about music, about practice, about performance, and about my place in all of these activities, far beyond this simple description.

This book is hard to write about, because the author describes it so perfectly. Here’s her description of her ten-step approach to practicing:

The Art of Practicing is a step-by-step approach that integrates movement principles with meditative discipline, which consists of focusing on sounds, sensations, emotions, and thoughts in the present moment. It cultivates a free and relaxed mind, an open heart, free and natural movement, and vivid, joyful listening.  . . .  Above all, I wish to encourage musicians to trust their experience of their own bodies and minds, and to believe that within their struggle and confusion lie the passion and intelligence that are the keys to joyful, productive practicing and powerful performing. 

Her ten steps define a path for the journey to becoming fully present with your music practice, your music and yourself. Each step is explained in its own chapter, with multiple examples taken from the author’s performing and teaching career. While she teaches piano, she relates the practice steps to the study of other instruments.

Bruser brings the same concepts of mindfulness to memorizing music and to performing. She sees performing as the opportunity to share with the audience not only your music, but also your energy and yourself. Her ideas about performance anxiety resonate with me, given the shaking and quaking that playing my harp can inspire. Rather than sharing tricks to avoid it, she reframes performance anxiety as a “courageous act” that is an avenue to personal transformation:

Every courageous act we commit in life transforms us in some way. When we take our place onstage shaking with fear and dare to make music, we re-create not only a musical composition but also ourselves. We give in to the power of life, which is bigger than we are, and become bigger through that surrender. . . . Each time you confront fear head on and let the adrenaline flood your body, you liberate the energy of fear and make it available for creative action.

I’ve read and reread this book several times now – it truly is a companion on my journey. And each time, it reminds me that the most important step I can take towards being a musician is to be present, in this moment, in this life.

Books for the Journey: “Making Music for the Joy of It”

Making Music for the Joy of It: Enhancing Creativity, Skills and Musical Confidence, by Stephanie Judy (Los Angeles, Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc,. 1990) is the book I most wish I had discovered when I started taking harp lessons, instead of four years later. Not because it ended up being less valuable to me then, but because as I started down the path of becoming a musician, I so needed to be told the following:

Feeling at ease with music making is, perhaps, the most important thing that an adult beginner can learn. . . . How then, do you learn to feel at ease? Many adult beginners blame their lack of ease on the physical challenges that accompany taking up an instrument or learning to sing. However, feeling at ease has more to do with clearing away self-doubts than it has to do with learning how to hold an instrument, how to move your lips or fingers, how to sit or stand, or how to breathe. Once you are rid of doubts about your musical self, you clear the path for progress.

What really determines musical aptitude is, therefore, desire. . . . So, musical potential comes to a matter of training your muscles and opening your heart.

In addition to supporting one’s decision to become a musician as an adult, this book covers all the topics that a new musician will find helpful. There are chapters on ways to learn to play an instrument, the different musical skills to be learned, how to practice, how to memorize, playing with ensembles, performing, and managing stagefright. The author interviewed both professional and amateur musicians for this project, and their experiences and suggestions are quoted throughout the text and in the sidebars. Reading the quotes from other adult music students, I felt like I found friendly colleagues who understood exactly what I was going through as an adult harp student.

The book was published pre-internet, so the resources mentioned do not include anything available on-line. And it shows its age by suggesting using video and cassette tapes. But the information about how to become a musician, and how to make music joyfully, is timeless.

Books for the Journey: “Never Too Late”

When I first started harp lessons, I knew absolutely nothing about the process of being a music student. I’d never studied an instrument, never had private music lessons. I had no clue about how to work with my teacher, what to expect in my lessons, or how to practice. And I felt totally alone with the thoughts, feelings, memories, and changes that emerged from the process of studying harp. A journal entry from that time reads, “Becoming a musician is turning me inside out.”

Nor did I know anyone else who was embarking upon trying to learn an instrument as an adult. My lesson was scheduled after a high school student and before a nine-year old, so I did not meet other adult harp students at my teacher’s studio. My friends had no musical interests, and looked at me with a “she might be a bit more off in her head than we realized” sort of glance when I told them I was both buying a harp and then paying for weekly lessons to learn how to play it.

What’s a woman alone in this situation to do? Why, hit the library and the bookstores, of course. I knew that somewhere, someone else had made the same incomprehensible decision to, seemingly out of the blue, learn to play an instrument, and that at least one of these people undoubtedly wrote a book about it. And so I began gathering books that became my companions for the journey to learn to play the harp.

I didn’t find any books written by adult harp students, but the experiences described by authors who were learning to play other instruments echoed my own, and gave me a sweet sense that I was not the only person on this path, and that I was not the only person whose life was so rapidly changed by the decision to study an instrument. In the pages of books I found that other adult students had the same thoughts and feelings, the same fears, and the same small triumphs that were bowling me over every week.

One of the first books I read was Never Too Late: my musical autobiography, by John Holt (Perseus Books, Reading, Massachusetts, 1978, 1991.) Holt was an educational reformer who decided at the age of 40 to learn to play the cello. This book details the story of his pre-music life, his choice to study cello,  and the life that emerged after that decision. The book is full of encouragement for an adult music student, no matter what instrument you fall in love with. He so accurately describes what happens in your head and in your heart when you start doing something that you know nothing about – playing an instrument – and that you are truly terrible at doing. And in the pages of this book, he encourages himself, and us, to continue to pursue this wild passion, no matter how bad we think we are.

I’ve printed out the following quote from the book and taped it to the front of all my music notebooks. There have been evenings after disastrous harp ensemble sight-reading attempts where these words were the only thing that kept me from giving up harp altogether.

“What I am slowly learning to do in my work with music is revive some of the resilient spirit of the exploring and learning baby. I have to accept at each moment, as a fact of life, my present skill or lack of skill, and do the best I can, without blaming myself for not being able to do better. I have to be aware of my mistakes and shortcomings without being ashamed of them. I have to keep in view the distant goal, without worrying about how far away it is or reproaching myself for not already being there. This is very hard for most adults. It is the main reason why we old dogs so often do find it so hard to learn new tricks, whether sports or languages or crafts or music. But if as we work on our skills we work on this weakness in ourselves, we can slowly get better at both.”

This book and all the others I’ve found and read during the past six years of harp lessons have been such boon companions that I’m starting a book list on my blog. The new page is called “Books for the Journey.” I’m not exactly sure yet what I’m going to do  – today my idea is to write a brief post about each of the books I put on the list, and this post is the first of those. I’ll see how that works out. I’ll include the publication information and the ISBN number so that anyone who wants to can find a listed book at their library or favorite used book store. And I’d love to hear about other books that helped you find your way on this music journey.