Get it from the publisher, GSP.
Provost begins by quoting Wanda Landkowski, a renowned performer and teacher: ‘If everyone knew how to work everyone would be a genius! …To be aware, to be conscious at all times is what appears to me the worthiest in my thoughts and in my work [practice]. While interpreting, even at the most impetuous moments when a musical phrase overflows with passion I want to remain conscious. …Awkwardness and mistakes in playing are always due to lack of concentration.’
Underestimating, in that last thought, incompetence, a personal area of expertise. More seriously, except for a tiny number of brilliantly talented people, our entire musical careers are a negotiation between capacity and skill. This applies both to musical understanding and to physical performance. Whatever the validity of her inference (‘concentration = perfection’), though, her core thought stands: full consciousness is central.
Unpacking this, partially: the whole song, and where the song sits in the relevant repertoire, the current moment, that may overflow with passion (a lovely phrase), what it means for the current section, for the whole song, for the physical expression, for the emotional expression. Landkowski’s ‘conscious’ integrates self-monitoring, musical expression, physical performance, the physical quality of the sound being produced, the congruence of that with the musical intention, multiple levels of intention, cognition and metacognition. No wonder we’re addicted to playing music; no wonder it’s difficult.
Provost divides practice into four quadrants:
- Physical: technique, relaxation, body position, &c.
- Musical: the score and its implications
- Mental: the ‘thought process involved in goal-setting and problem-solving’
- Aural: listening to each note being played and to the relationship of the notes to the whole
Mathews, Viloteau, and Kappel describe the mental more as understanding the structure and meaning of the music, but that’s ‘musical’ in Provost’s ontology, while he uses ‘mental’ as (roughly) self-regulation and monitoring. Provost suggests very porous categories. I suppose we could interpret the ‘mental’ as executive function, but it seems pretty meta the way he describes it. So, for instance, self-regulation during practice combines dispassionate assessment of both physical and mental state with dynamic replanning.
Two types of practice:
- Development toward long-term goals re technique, repertoire, musical understanding
- Rapid learning, that is, quickly getting the song ‘under your hands’ but without perhaps the deeper interpretive understanding. This mostly applies to professional musicians, e.g., ‘the schedule changed and next Tuesday we want you to perform this duet you’ve never seen before.’ Rapid learning is double-edged: volume of repertoire is (for Provost) much less important than quality of performance.
Goal setting is central:
- Long-term (‘lifetime’), mid-term, and immediate goals.
- Immediate: Provost’s heuristic is, 15 min a day on a specific goal, and if you haven’t met it in a week, check with your teacher, or reassess the appropriateness/achievability of the goal. Either this is fairly radical or I’m really, really slow: five or six 15-minute sessions to achieve a goal only makes sense for a tiny goal, and depending on the physical/musical difficulty, may not be enough even for that. One would have to be truly gifted to master some of the anatomically strange movements the guitar requires so quickly. This is almost certainly age-sensitive.
- Goal tracking and regular review is necessary; Provost gives examples of guitar journals.
A note on goals. We mean multiple things: (a) outwardly-directed (‘I want to play brilliantly to a full hall’); (b) as signpost of musical achievement (‘Play Tango en Skai at tempo, musically, without errors’); and, (c) as guides to focus of attention. When elite musicians advise on goals, a nearly-universal qualifier is to make them concrete. This centers on the middle interpretation: the more specific and unambiguously evaluable a goal, the more tightly focused the feedback and the better we can understand where we are. As well, it may contribute to our ongoing assessment of which musical things can be achieved through practice and which might be a matter of capacity, that is, outside what our muscles and nervous system and minds can do. The third aspect, focus of attention, can have a narrowly pragmatic meaning, mentioned by Kappel and others, namely, to work on what’s weakest (region of proximal learning). It seems to me that particularly for adult learners, setting goals as a conscious decision about the day’s or week’s or month’s focus of attention, in a broader sense, is of high value. We want to engage with the music. Setting goals not as ‘relentless forward struggle’ but as a choice of which doors of concentration are most intriguing (‘simple songs at half-speed’): this seems an under-appreciated, and often unmentioned, value. Said differently, goals focused on going deeply into the present practice, in contrast with goals oriented toward future capability.
The learning concept of ‘desirable difficulty’ is central to goal-setting and monitoring: the sweet spot (though it doesn’t always feel like that!) where challenge is both within reach and expansive when accomplished in skill or understanding. Necessary to desirable difficulty is that how you practice matches how you play. (Schumann: ‘Always practice as though you were in the presence of a master.’)
Provost’s discussion of journals and regular review is important to the metacognitive skill of judging our own learning.
A warning on goals, though. There’s lots of evidence that goal-setting yields improved performance. However, excessive use of goals actually decreases performance and motivation.
Provost doesn’t use the phrase ‘inner poise’ but says much the same thing, viz., don’t self-criticize but do be aware. (Not ‘I suck’ but ‘I’m rotating my wrist on this section and forcing a long reach.’) Dispassionate assessment.
From Kochevitsky’s The art of piano playing, Provost quotes five elements for technical development:
- Stimulus: What there is to be played, e.g., chords, arpeggios, scale passages, &c
- Auditory: Hearing in advance, knowing what sound we intend; this seems to correspond to knowing the song, as discussed regarding the Crane Symposium, or Iznaola’s ‘visualization’
- Anticipation: Mental, physical preparation for producing the sounds
- Execution: Doing it
- Evaluation: Relation between intention and result
The evaluation step is critical to effective musical learning. It’s easy (speaking from experience) to take step 4 as `done:’ now I can play the song, sweet, next? I wish I had encountered Kochevitsky’s perspective earlier, especially with regard to evaluation on multiple levels, e.g., phrase, passage, section, song, song suite. As above, judgement of learning, and as well, self-regulation.
Provost prefaced the discussion below by cautioning on speed. Speed matters, but Provost is clear that the issue is coordination.
- Coordination: `It is best to develop the correct movement, feeling, and sound by practicing slowly.’
- Reflex is described as response to stimulus (as defined above), a little circular, but the notion is once the movements, sound, feeling, and so on are automatic, we play by reflex. ‘…the fingers will work in an easy fluid manner.’
- Endurance means you can sustain correct playing, and Provost’s claim is that endurance problems are a signal that coordination has not been sufficiently developed.
This last seems naive: everyone would endorse minimum movement per task as being easier and less tiring, but do we have reason to believe that any physical movement, here specifically sustained rapid millimeter and millisecond precision movement of our fingers, can be sustained indefinitely? No-one in athletics would claim that coordination makes endurance issues vanish. Perhaps a better way to say it might be that coordinated, minimum movement maximizes whatever the baseline endurance might be for a particular player at a particular time. From a different perspective, endurance issues may be a useful diagnostic.
None of the books under review talk about practicing mental endurance, except in the ‘negative space’ of lagging concentration, which Kappel and Viloteau particularly emphasize is cause for a break or as in Iznaola breaking practice into sections, anticipatory/preventive breaks. (The jazz guitarist Barney Kessel said the same; and, Chopin.) You can’t completely dissociate while playing a song but the ‘reflex’ (stored procedure) can take over. Sometimes I find myself finishing a song with which I’m familiar and suddenly wondering how I got to the end and what happened to the song?
Provost refers to Sandor’s On Piano Playing, listing four types of memory used by musicians:
- Visual (what does it look like, in the score, on the fingerboard)
- Acoustic/aural;
- Motoric/kinetic
- Intellectual/analytic (what’s going on structurally that the sound is built on)
Of course these have porous boundaries, but unlike (say) Kappel or Matthews, Provost doesn’t provide ‘sample applications’ of this ontology. Other than acknowledging it, it’s not clear how knowing it would change our practice or performance, or in fact our learning. Perhaps the intent is that we consciously focus on different sensory modalities while practicing? E.g., score visualization, hearing the music in our mind’s ear, proprioception and exteroception in our hands, music-theoretical analysis? To the extent that all of the instructors recommend (insist) on small sections, this is an orthogonal way to decompose our study. For instance, we might take a small section, perhaps a measure, and look at it from each of the named perspectives, and so increase both savings (we’re packing it in by pushing on all sides of it) and retrieval (we can pull it out from any side).
Provost does not draw this out, and we don’t (to my knowledge) have empirical data on whether this is more effective than other practice approaches.
Sound is central. I asked the head of Guitar Salon International about how they chose strings for their various instruments. An interesting part of his reply was that, among their pool of expert players, a guitar strung with string brand/model X will in one player’s hands sound wonderful and in another’s far suboptimal. Yet changing the strings on the same guitar might result in the second, equally-skilled player sounding great. Aside from string choice being a black art, the point is that sound, and listening critically for sound, always matters.
Only three of the authors reviewed—Iznaola, Provost, and Van Betuw—make how to practice their central focus. (In contrast to how to play.) A common theme in all of the authors is that musical intention precedes technical performance. Van Betuw and especially Provost focus as well a level up: what rôle does playing music have in your life and what are your long-term goals as a musician?
Throughout these reviews the ‘standard unit’ has been the song or the technique (tremolo, arpeggio, &c), and discussion of learning has centered around it. Provost (and Van Betuw) raise the level of content to be learned to include one’s own self-assessment and intentions in the large.
Learning music on guitar 