Re: [Harp-L] The Woodshed vs. the Stage

[Aeskow@xxxxxxx]

It's fascinating to read about other  players' woodshedding techniques, and 
it's always great to see dedication in  action.  As someone who's fought a 
lifelong battle with Attention Deficit  Disorder, and spends a remarkable amount 
of time every day just looking for his  freakin housekeys, I've worked out a 
practice schedule that allows me to advance  without suffering--or at least 
without acting like too much of a martyr about  it.  But as the son of educators 
and a former teacher myself, I think the  "no pain no gain" concept should've 
gone out with glam-rock, leg-warmers for  workouts, and dot-com billionaires.  
Actually, it comes from a German  philosophy of education that was formed at 
the start of the 19th century to  stress the importance of fear, punishment, 
and--yeah--pain.  Children  should be, according to this philosophy--which is 
now the prevailing  one--hand-tooled into cogs of industry.  The kids that don't 
respond to  this technique are perfectly free to pursue other things, mainly 
the arts,  crime, or both.
 
Any "pain" associated with becoming a good  harp player is wasted emotion, 
and worse, a sure way to slowly kill, rather than  nurture, the impulse you had 
to be a harp player in the first place.  Are  you--or am I--willing to endure 
bloody lips, brutal frustration, and those  particularly creepy moments when 
it almost seems your brain is forcing you to  play the wrong interval when you 
KNOW the right one and have played it a hundred  times?  Sure we are--but not 
to be recognized as master technicians.   For the best artists I know, in any 
field, it's because there's  some powerful force inside them that would make 
their heads explode unless  they used their art to share it with other people.  
(As John Lee Hooker put  it, in telling his wife why it's OK for their son to 
boogie: "it's in him, and  it's got to come out.") Mastering technique is 
only a means to this end.   Acheiving full chromacity on a diatonic is a great 
way of expressing a full  range of emotion--but as we know from many past 
masters, not the only one.   Same with copping difficult licks, etc.  But I've 
found, over the years, a  pleasant surprise: sometimes you don't know what you know 
until you leave the  woodshed (where some of us were literally taken out for 
a beating--unfortunate  word) for the stage.  I'm happier on a stage than I am 
anywhere else.   My heartbeat slows.  I bask in the feeling of mounting the 
stage with my  posse of musicians.  I sense that we're about to send the 
crowd--2 or  2,000--into a free and joyful place where they're going to lose their  
self-consciousness in the music, shedding their "I'm too fat" or "I'm too shy" 
 or "I'm too old" inhibitions so they can dance and scream until everyone is  
completely drenched in sweat.
 
And the strange thing is: it's onstage  that I always find out how much I 
know.  When you're desperate to go  someplace on the harp, when your whole 
body--and not just your brain--needs that  piece of technique that you've practiced 
and practiced and supposedly never  "learned," it's amazing how often you nail 
it without a second thought.   Sure, you have to practice with focus and 
discipline, so the knowledge is there  to retrieve.  But unless you're driven to 
retrieve it by a passionate  need--and not just because you copped a Big Walter 
riff and want to display  it--how can you know what you know?  Sorry to go on 
so long, not sure I  expressed it well--maybe I can make it clearer this way: 
"No joy, no  gain."
 
Peace and Respect
Johnny T