The Hourglass Method for Learning Music: Part 3B - Balance and Mastery in Detail Work
We're passing through the neck of our hourglass, finishing up looking at the details part of our model. Here's a reminder of that model:
In this post I'll discuss a balanced way to approach detail work to ensure I'm covering all my bases and how to integrate those musical details into the playing so that they become unconscious and effortless.
Balance and Pie
Detail work has to be balanced. All of us have our "pet" things we like to practice, and those we DON'T like to practice! This happens in exercise, diet and just about anything else we know is good for us but requires discipline to follow through on!
For years, I loved to work on my tone and bow control, and HATED to practice intonation. I avoided intonation work like the plague, sighing internally or rolling my eyes whenever one of my colleagues wanted to work on it in a quartet rehearsal.
You can imagine how well THAT turned out! After a while I grew tired enough of my out-of-tune playing in my recordings that I decided I needed to do something about it. I CHOSE to become fascinated with how to play in tune (I'm not there yet, it's definitely a work in progress!).
If we only practice the things we like to work on, our playing will have gaping holes in it, or be completely unbalanced, like this bodybuilder with a huge upper body and chicken legs.
Having a PROCESS for the detail phase keeps me in balance during my practice of details. For many years I have used my own variation on Burton Kaplan's "Slices of the Pie" from his book "Practicing for Artist Success."
In Kaplan's method, you play a phrase 3-5 times in a row, each time observing for your strongest and weakest slice of the musical pie. So if I play a phrase five times I may observe something like the following:
| Strongest | Weakest |
| Tone | Intonation |
| Expression | Intonation |
| Rhythm | Intonation |
| Rhythm | Intonation |
In this case Intonation is obviously what I need to work on next! But I have also learned that I DON'T need to be working much on my Tone in this particular phrase. This is very valuable information! Now I'm saving time by NOT working on the aspects of my playing I believe are already strong.
In attempting this experiment with someone new to this method, the following scenario will often happen:
| Strongest | Weakest |
| Tone | Intonation |
| Intonation | Rhythm |
| Rhythm | Expression |
| Expression | Rhythm |
In this case it’s possible that the student is an untrained observer of their own playing, and are not really sure what they hearing. BUT, often what's happening is they aren't used to moving their awareness around in a methodical way, and they experience significant improvement in that slice just by focussing on it!
This is part of the genius of the Pie method - when we shine the light of our awareness on something, it often improves significantly! A simple method for applying this, which I will often use in my own practice, is to play a phrase many times, each time choosing to focus on one slice of the pie. By moving my awareness around to each slice, I am ensuring that there are fewer "blind spots" in my practicing, and I will usually experience improvement in the slice I’m focussing on. This also works well for listening to recordings of my own playing - I will listen to the recording multiple times, each time focussing on one musical slice, jotting down all the intonation issues in one column, musical issues in another etc.
A secondary but important benefit to Kaplan's method is that it promotes a healthy and balanced psychological approach to practice. To improve, I always need to be thinking about what aspects of my playing are weakest! BUT, if I constantly think ONLY about the weaknesses of my playing, then negativity about my playing will quickly rear its ugly head. Focussing only on the negative, to the exclusion of the positive, is a fast path to burnout!
Evidence of this focus on the negative in musical training is easy to find. Whenever I have a group of college students try out this method, inevitably around 50% CAN'T SAY WHAT THEIR STRONGEST SLICE IS. In other words, they can't think of ANYTHING positive to say about their playing! That’s a huge problem!
Now, I'm not one to say that everything is all marshmallows and rainbows, BUT everyone's playing has strengths and weaknesses! The problem, I think, is that people only compare their playing to that of those around them, they don't weigh the strengths and weaknesses of their playing on its own terms. Every person is at their own point in their journey with the instrument, and it can be hard NOT to compare ourselves to those around us (it's hard for me to accept that I don't sound like Tabea Zimmerman!). But as students become better self-observers, the quality of their practicing improves, and if they have a balanced view of their strengths and weaknesses, they can continue to improve for a lifetime and have a balanced image of their own playing.
Special considerations in the Pie Method for string players, which I learned from the inimitable Ralph Fielding, include practicing all bow changes, shifts and string crossings until seamless, and ensuring left/right hand coordination are in sync. From a nuts and bolts perspective, this coordination or "technical timing" aspect can be boiled down to a few rules:
The left hand finger always stops the string slightly before the bow moves (or as Mimi Zweig says, "finger before bow").
When crossing strings, the bow must move to the next string before pulling or pushing the string horizontally.
When placing the bow on the string, the bow must contact the string fully BEFORE pulling.
There's much more to Kaplan's method, in which he drills down deeper into each slice of the pie (what he calls "berries"!). But that is beyond the scope of this article. His book is fantastic so you should really just get it!
Mastering the Details - Towards Unconscious Competence
Once I've attend to as many details as I can, the other main consideration is how to integrate those details into my playing in a way that I'm not thinking about them. In other words, I've done the work of looking at all the small things, but in performance I don't want to actually think about all of those details, I just want to “play”! But how to do that?
In "The Violin Lesson" Simon Fischer outlines the four stages of competence, a theory developed in 1969 by Martin Broadwell. These stages are:
Unconscious Incompetence - I am unaware of a particular skill, AND my lack of proficiency in it. I always think of singers like this on American Idol (bless their hearts!), who seem completely unaware that they are poor singers!
Conscious Incompetence - I know I lack a skill, but I'm not yet proficient in it. This can be the most challenging stage of the process! When I know I can't do something and don't know how to move from inability to ability, it's easy to get frustrated. This is when a teacher, other experienced player or book/youtube video are particularly helpful!
Conscious Competence - I can execute a particular skill, but it requires effort to perform. THIS IS THE MOST DANGEROUS STAGE! If a particularly challenging shift or fast passage requires conscious effort to play, then there is a high likelihood that the anxiety and distraction of performance will cause it to crash and burn. In my earlier days I would be satisfied with nailing something 3 or 4 times in one practice session, thinking that this was sufficient to guarantee it would be solid in performance. From experience, and from learning more about how things move into long term memory I know that 3-4 CONSECUTIVE successful repetitions for 3-4 DAYS IN A ROW, is much more realistic. This is also why time is such a big factor in preparation - if I can move the "note learning" phase of the process earlier, it allows ample time for this kind of work to settle in.
Unconscious Competence - I can execute the skill automatically, and it requires little to no effort. In performance, this is where I want to live! During the detail phase of the hourglass I want to be moving as many parts of the music as possible to the Unconscious Competence phase. This reduces anxiety, increases confidence, and leads to artistic freedom in performance.
These two ideas of balance and mastery are central to my approach to details. In the next post I'll zoom out to the section and big picture levels to bring it all together for the performance.