8. Ricardo Iznaola: On practicing

Organized by section, with a brief summary and some comments. Book available here.

Inner poise

• Dispassionate assessment of current status; ease of action (minimum stress, minimum work per necessary action) (Not clear why this is in the ‘inner’ section; his ‘outer poise’ is about this.) He places this as the first thing to be discussed.
• In a later section he talks about the obverse, e.g., rigid expectations, comparisons to others, &c, which he labels as bad. Listening to others is why we want to play in the first place, though, and others illuminate musical possibilities, including both interpretive and technical, as in (for example) compare/contrast learning by watching and listening to expert players. I think he means negative self-talk by ‘comparison to others,’ because mimicking others is a primary human mode of learning.
• Practice motto: ‘me, today, here, now’

One assumes—Iznaola doesn’t say—that ‘me, here, today, now’ incorporates both near-term and long-term goals, the specific needs of this particular passage and the skills being used that generalize to multiple passages or musical intentions. The metacognitive skills to find and make the near-term/long-term balance are not straightforward, and are clouded further by the limitations of our own often-unreliable judgements of learning. I would have liked Iznaola to have addressed (or at least acknowledged) this.

Purpose of practice

‘To achieve specific goals while focusing on continuous improvement in quality and ease of action.’ Impediments:

• Too high a degree of difficulty for current capability; time versus volume of material; ‘the inertia of rhythmic flow,’ that is, letting the music draw one into performance rather than focusing on and mastering the fragment.
• Tempo, gist of which is, ‘slow down,’ though Iznaola is clear that playing slowly is only one of a graded set of stages.
• Iznaola writes that sight-reading is not practicing, which is interesting. Obviously it’s practice of sight-reading, but later he talks about the importance of memorization. It’s a strange statement.

Practice structure

1. Building: playing the notes in rhythm
2. Interpretive: how does the song work per section, across sections
3. Performance: the song as a whole, in front of people

This is a contrast with Viloteau and Mathews, who recommend developing a (draft) interpretation first, prior to and informing mechanics.

Materials

• Exercises, etudes, repertoire. (Etudes are songs written to stress a particular aspect of playing, e.g., arpeggios, tremolo, block-chord shifts, LH reaches, &c.)
• Practice time no less than 2-3 hours, no more than 5-6 hours
• Divide practice into sessions, recommends three per day, with at least a 15 min break between, each session an hour or less.

This last—sessions—implicitly recruits spacing. As well, it affords time for physical recovery, lessening the chance of tendonitis or of other repetitive stress injuries.

Problem solving: ‘the essence of good practice’

Identify (a) there’s a problem; (b) what it is; and, (c) where it begins and ends:

1. Understand the cause of the problem, in a usable way; ‘I suck’ does not lead to ameliorative actions
2. Iznaola treats prescription as such an obvious outfall of diagnosis that he doesn’t even mention it, going directly to assimilation.

This does not seem right to me. Not wrong, but incomplete to the point of being of low utility. For instance, m-a-m string errors, that is, hitting (say) the B string three times instead of B-E-B in an arpeggio. That’s the identification; the understanding (diagnosis) is ‘insufficient extension of the a finger roughly x% of the time.’ Is that the right diagnosis? Or is it merely a description? Is that actually the problem or just a symptom? Perhaps it’s the superficial expression of characteristically clenching my third and fourth fingers? Is it the angle of my wrist or palm? Are any of those, though, the source, or are they themselves symptoms? Is the observable symptom the result of a single cause, or the conjunction of multiple causes? Is it execution only or is there incomplete or incorrect intention as well? (An elite guitarist told me that after a quarter-century of scales he’d recently reframed his approach—that is, changed his intention—and his scales had changed significantly for the better.) Is the issue always present or only intermittently? If intermittently is there a pattern, like time of day? Is it influenced by what precedes or follows? What’s the prescription? ‘Don’t do that’? More etudes? Realign my shoulder-arm-elbow? Is the source a lack of skill (learnable) or basic capacity (not)? If the latter, is the correct prescription ‘live with it’? Change repertoire?

Problems can have multiple sources; sometimes ‘local’ repair is the right tactic, sometimes approaching from a very different direction is more productive. Sometimes the local repair causes other problems. Local optimization is not global optimization.

Like many (all), Iznaola recommends slowing down as a general prescription whatever the issue. The violinist Catherine Cho slows even as far as quarter-tempo in her practice. A problem with ‘slowing down’ as a learning and/or repair technique, though, is that full tempo is different than slow tempo. Imagine trying a volleyball spike or a tennis serve or a golf swing or a soccer free kick in slow motion. Not that there’s no transfer, e.g., of arm or hand movement, but coordinating the body at speed is not the same as in slow motion, and similarly the ‘localized’ finger motion required to play at-tempo arpeggios requires the early, slow practice to be compiled and performed outside conscious finger-control. When I’m playing at tempo, I may be feeling my RH fingertips and how they touch the strings, listening for evenness or emphasis, feeling my shoulders or neck, watching what my LH is doing, &c, but what I am not doing is sending conscious instructions to my fingers. Quantitatively, in some tremolo and arpeggio passages normal tempo requires ten or more notes per second. That’s 100 milliseconds per note. Olympic 100 meter sprinters’ best reaction times out of the blocks are around 140-160 milliseconds (and those men and women react way faster than the rest of us.)

So: heuristic help with diagnosis is minimal (‘too hard or too fast; the end’), and prescription is missing entirely. Iznaola seems to say, ‘practice doing it correctly, with ease of motion.’

Visualization

• Visualization is the central learning technique in Iznaola. ‘To visualize means to see your hands in the motions of playing and to hear the music internally.’ This is, to be clear, when not actually playing the notes.
• ‘…Without the instrument, trying intently to hear the music internally. Don’t stop until you achieve clear, precise visualization. Describe aloud the contents of [the current section]. Sing the melody aloud.’ Then, `Write down, from memory, [the current section],’ i.e., write out the score on blank staff paper.
• Do not mix regular practice with visualization. Iznaola qualifies this by specifying that visualization practice should be with music well below current technical capability.
• As encouragement to practice this as a skill, he notes that prominent musicians have played songs completely and perfectly the first time on the instrument based only on study/visualization of the score.

I’m not entirely convinced by this last example. It’s certainly true that people do this, but I think ‘visualization’ is being used here as a catch-all term for deep semantic understanding. For example, someone who plays a lot of Bach may not need to memorize where the ornamentation is, since it’s at the places you put ornamentation in baroque music. Or that this section has a descending melodic minor in the bass. It reminds of the chess studies where the experts’ errors in remembering board positions were substitutions of ‘equivalent’ positions, that is, putting (say) a knight in a different but legal position that made no change to the tactical/strategic relationship of the sides. Basically, remembering what the chess position or music means, and then the expression of that. From this view, visualization might be a manifestation rather than a source. But of course it can be both.

Saying this in different words, Iznaola is recommending constructing a detailed mental model of the song with the score being the locus between mental construction and music. So, for example, learning to reliably recognize a major third when heard, and to play a major third in any position/string pairing: this would qualify as musical semantics, and would assuredly aid in learning songs, but is outside Izanola’s approach.

The issue of internal versus ‘external’ arises when Iznaola recommends separating regular (with instrument) practicing and visualization. Researchers in situated cognition say we use our environments as a kind of ‘prosthetic memory,’ that is, to minimize cognitive burden we use physical structures and cues to guide behavior. We don’t, for example, devote endless practice hours to visualizing how far apart the strings are on our guitars. Automaticity of movement is necessary, which in turn necessarily involves the instrument. Perhaps Iznaola’s recommendation can be restated as ‘generate-and-test,’ that is, consciously generate the musical structures and patterns, then later, with the instrument, test what you generated. In this view, the instrument is the feedback device to confirm or correct your musical or technical understanding.

It is cognitively tiring to ‘visualize’ in the comprehensive way Iznaola recommends. Consciously learning in any domain is cognitively tiring. That does not guarantee that Izanola’s approach is optimal learning, only that it correlates—just because something is tiring doesn’t mean it’s making you stronger—but when practiced it seems very effective to me. Exercise: close your eyes and imagine playing the melody of a current piece on one or at most two strings. Imagine precisely, exactly the frets and the tone. Helpful? Difficult to do?

Iznaola’s middle point, practice visualizing on material that is ‘well below current technical capability’ implies that we wouldn’t practice it on the songs we’re currently working on for performance, which are generally at the upper end of our capacity. This makes no sense. I assume the (unwritten) intent is to develop the skill on simpler pieces so that it can be applied on the more complex.

Last thought on Iznaola’s visualization. It’s constructing and practicing on a mental model of the guitar, Iznaola advising that the more specific, detailed, and vivid the model, the more effective for learning. One could see this as a continuous self-test: if we take ‘what to intend’ as the gist of learning the motor skills of performing music, then this is practicing a pure version of that.

Some general notes

Izanola distinguishes practice from playing, the latter being fine to do but not practice. Matthews and Kappel in different ways echo this view. It’s a curious statement: playing full songs needs practice. Ossareh discusses this coherently.

Iznaola says, ‘Everything is possible.’ This is emphasized, but I’m uncertain of the intent. Viloteau expressly warns against it (but elsewhere says it). It’s so obviously wrong that perhaps it’s intended as encouragement? Saying something false as encouragement doesn’t sit well. There is for most of us a recurrent question of capacity and skill: skill can be improved, but not beyond whatever our capacity might be. We don’t have identical minds and nervous systems and coordination, nor the same emotional nooks and crannies and attachments, nor the same capacities for musical understanding. So this seems either inimical to or simply irrelevant to realistic self-assessment.

I’ve repeatedly seen people set goals in other domains that don’t fit their capacity, work energetically toward those goals for a while, become frustrated or injured or both, and then quit entirely. Saying ‘no limits’ isn’t merely vacuous, but potentially harmful. Discovering the edges of our own capacities, both physical and cognitive, is not straightforwardly obvious, but that does not mean there are no limits.

Iznaola doesn’t address general intention with the instrument and the music. Someone hoping to be a concert artist may for example require perfect practice, while that may not be a realistic goal for someone who likes the music and wants to play it for him- or herself (while perhaps fitting practice around a full-time job and young kids). Realism here is critical.

Csikszentmihaly writes in Flow that a necessary element in the ‘flow’ experience is the sense that a task feels achievable. We differ widely in capacity, both in dexterity and musical understanding. Iznaola touches on this when discussion impediments to learning (wrong difficulty level) but Provost is the only author reviewed to address it directly. The mental aspect of learning music is learning what to intend; there is a necessary companion metacognitive step, knowing (or discovering) what we should intend to intend.