[Harp-L] More Deifik on Practicing

[Ken Deifik <kenneth.d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I got some really great private responses to my last yammer on getting 
better and better.  Though most of these responses were sort of more 
defending talent over practice (nobody said practice doesn't count) it got 
me to thinking more about this issue.  Again, I think the subject is very 
germaine to a discussion group filled with musicians who are trying to 
perfect their art.

I do agree that pure musical talent counts for alot.  But the desire to 
invent new music and to work hard at it is also a talent.

The more I've thought about it the more I've been reminded of the pure 
mathematical talent I had until I hit high school.  I absolutely inhaled 
math until I smacked into tenth grade.

Then I went to a school for gifted kids, where I was anything but the most 
gifted kid.  The math teacher asked the most gifted math kid what he was 
interested in, and it had something to do with quadratic equations, so 
that's what the teacher taught.  I was totally at sea.  Math was over for 
me.  Math just plain disappeared off my radar.

At about the age of 40 I thought back on this experience.  Because I'd had 
absolutely no experience with working hard to learn anything in math, when 
I was faced with the prospect of having to do so I DIDN'T EVEN REALIZE THIS 
WAS THE CASE.  Math just faded away.  It didn't even occur to me that I was 
going to have to work hard to learn any more math, I'd had no experience 
working hard to learn anything up to that point.  By the time I hit 40 I'd 
had worked hard to learn many things and I could now see that if I would 
have put the time in - which I was perfectly capable of doing if it had 
occured to me at the time - I would have continued my math education.

Now this maps over to harmonica playing so easily.  If, when you pick up a 
harp for the first time, it grabs you - and that would be a nearly 
ubiquitous experience for Harp-lers - all the time you spend playing it 
that first year or two or three doesn't feel like hard work or practice, it 
feels like fun!

By the time I had to work hard to learn more on harp I was making my living 
being a hotshot harmonica player, and there was loads of competition, so I 
HAD to keep getting better, and in fact I enjoyed working hard at it 
because it was keeping me on top of my local heap.  I finally stalled out 
for a few years in my 30's and then got intrigued again.  At 55 I just want 
to see how good I can get if I practice every day for the rest of my life.

There's a really interesting article that (of course) backs up my 
point.  It's about a talk given Malcolm Gladwell, the wonderful New Yorker 
writer, called "The Myth of Prodigy and Why it Matters."

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2026

In his talk, Gladwell discussed child prodigies and how rarely they fulfill 
their potential.  For me, at least part of his arguement is that the 
children to whom certain skills come easily do not often acquire the skill 
of working hard to get even better.

The great pianist Bill Evans told of how he was not the hottest young 
pianist at the music camp he went to as a teenager, by far not.  But that 
most of the wizzes faded out, while he had to work very hard to learn every 
square inch of the technique that came naturally to others.  I think he 
referred to it as 'learning what every rope and lever did.'  (It's probably 
not exactly those words.)

Now, I had a neighbor in the early 80's who was Carmen McRae's pianist.  He 
practiced like a fiend, only he practiced stupidly.  He had three or four 
complicated pieces that he played incessantly, at least one by Chopin.  I'd 
hear him play this piece ten times a day AND ALWAYS MAKE THE EXACT SAME 
FLUBS.  He never worked at fixing those flubs, he'd just play the damned 
pieces over and over.

Real practicing is about perfecting, learning, going out to the edge of the 
cliff and building more cliff and finally learning how to fly, and then 
practicing flying.

The most talented musicians I know also relentless practicers, even into 
their 50's.  A number of them have even played Carnegie Hall.

K