Post your WOOP – Week of April 10th

[Ellen Johansen (Piano)]

This week is a vacation from teaching so i am using the time to regain my energy and move back towards daily practice.

Goal: learn liebestraum of liszt which my student is learning so i can go deeper with the student

This is a piece that has never been on my to dos and its been fun to try out the practice tools on a new piece.

Also preparing the george walker sonata for a public play on april 29…

ELLEN JOHANSEN

[Kim Harris]

WISH: I’ve been working on a challenging piece off and on for some months now. I started out excited to be learning it, but progress has become slower with more inconsistencies in practice, and I’ve been feeling discouraged. I want to get back to enjoying working on this piece and to continue making progress.

OUTCOME: The outcome I want is to once again feel joy and excitement both when practicing in general and when working on this particular piece, and to be making noticeable regular progress.

OBSTACLE: Competing priorities, getting bogged down and feeling discouraged from lack of progress.

PLAN: I prefer to do my personal practice in the morning, but then I prefer to do everything in the morning as I have more energy and focus then, but since everything won’t fit into mornings some things have to be done later. So my plan is to do my practice in the mornings when possible, and if I feel the need to prioritize something else then, I will practice in the afternoon even if I don’t feel like it. ???? I will also, at least for now, limit my practice on this particular piece to 10 minutes per practice session.

[Anne Brüggemann (violin)]

I like how you prioritise and at the same time limit practice on your special piece. Looking forward to learning how this works.

[Noa Kageyama]

@Kim_Harris In terms of feeling discouraged, and a lack of progress, I wonder if it might help to verbalize a few specific goals here? Sometimes goal specificity can help with facilitating and feeling more progress, and I wonder if we might be able to help with that process.

[Anne Brüggemann (violin)]

How it went last week: I sent off the first movement of the Haydn Concerto in C to my teacher for review, and I played Weill Youkali in a group rehearsal. I did some RRR on randomly chosen spots every 15 minutes, but only for part of my practice sessions. It helped with confidence and outcome, and, looking back, it also felt limiting.

• I reviewed my Haydn video after sending it off and I immediately saw that I was using a tilted bow all of the time, and with the baroque bow, whose band of hair is very slim anyway. In today’s practice, I realised that I had worked on the hidden assumption that tilted hair would give a more resonant sound, and I now think that flat hair combined with just the right balance of bow speed and weight is actually more effective, since it lets the complete bow with its own resonant qualities contribute. I am excited to explore that further. I also might have discovered the cause for my lack in sound quality earlier if I had videotaped myself and watched back (I had only used audio for RRR).
• As to the feedback I got in the rehearsal for Youkali, I feel that I got mixed messages, on the one hand affirmation that I was sounding good and had found many ideas how to vary the sound, on the other hand just a plethora of ideas from Teacher on what else to do and how to convey a different or at least modified message in the piece. I feel that spaced repetition with RRR stood in the way of me developing a larger picture of the piece.

Wish: I want to give a convincing and expressive performance of Weill Youkali in a community concert on tonebase Violin on April 18th.
Outcome: I will be flexible with my interpretative ideas and my technical tools so that i can create meaning in the moment.<div>

Process: I will do a number of mock performances and also cold-start video recordings and review them for musicality and for issues of technique in execution, followed by practice. I will also bring the piece to my lesson on Friday the 14th.
Obstacle: To be tempted to avoid that type of exposure.
Plan: I will schedule some mock performances and Google lives for cold-start recordings right now.

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[Noa Kageyama]

Terrific observation about your bow, @amaudpowellfan ! ????

[Seth Adelman (piano)]

At this point I’m continuing to refine two new habits: 1) to include some deliberate (problem solving) practice whenever I work on repertoire, and 2) to find multiple times for practice each day, so I’m not always waiting till the end of the day….

And basically, both goals are being achieved! As Noa says, deliberate practice is actually more enjoyable than ‘repeat and auto-correct’ practice, so this is becoming self-reinforcing. And even when I’m not specifically writing down impressions and suggestions, I’m still trying to think in problem-solving terms, about what can be improved, and I’m making more notes on scores than I have before.

Regarding practice times, Jason Sulliman’s presentation last week gave me a lot to think about. His idea of ‘particulate’ practice sessions of about 15 minutes is quite different from my default habit of just practicing till I get tired of doing so ????. I’ve always assumed that you need extended open blocks of practice time to make real progress. But it can often be tricky to find more than one of those blocks each day, at least in my life as I try to juggle diverse interests….

But it’s always easier to find brief chunks of time for, say, some warmups or focused repertoire work. I’ve tried this over the last week and indeed you can make progress in 15-20 minutes if you plan things well. It’s also easier for me to find regular practice times – for example, after breakfast – if I don’t insist that each session has to be, say, an hour or more.

My current goal is to work in 2-3 brief practice sessions daily, and on busy days to be satisfied with even one brief session rather than nothing at all. This would actually be more consistent than what I’ve done over the years ???? and should be more than sufficient to achieve my admittedly modest goals, as an amateur who performs occasionally.

[Noa Kageyama]

@Seth Yay for working those small practice blocks into your day. Yes – I think the practice until you can’t anymore approach is probably pretty standard, but I suspect this leads to a tiny bit of procrastination, because we know that we’re in for a commitment that’s pretty draining. Whereas if we know we’re only going to be working on something for a short while, it might be easier to get started because we know the commitment isn’t too great.

I don’t have much data on this, just some extrapolations of somewhat related studies, but I’ll be curious to hear what your experience of this might be.

[Grace]

My last WOOP plan worked well! The overall goal was to increase my security and expressiveness in the Schubert Ländler I’ll perform in the coming weeks. I played for various family members and my practice buddy, Paul, who gave me great feedback. I felt more secure and played with only minor slip-ups, and I was happy to hear that each dance had its own character and that my phrasing was nuanced. I’ve scheduled a lesson for this week with early music specialist Yuko Tanaka, who will hear me play on an Erard piano to get some ideas about how an earlier instrument might have influenced the sound and expression. I’m feeling pretty confident about the first public performance on 4/25, though I’m superstitious about saying so.

This week’s WOOP:

Wish: to feel more settled about how I end the set and even more confident going into the performance on 4/25.

Outcome: I’ll perform with confidence that I have done my best to prepare and that it’s OK not to be perfect

Obstacle: Practicing in the evening when tired is making it hard to stay on track with focussed and positive practice.

Plan: Continue isolating weak spots and also playing through the set. Have a lesson this Wednesday to refresh my motivation. Get in at least some practice in the morning or afternoon on most days.