If I am being completely honest (and I am being completely honest), this blog post has very little to do with practicing Aho and more to do with practicing as a general concept. Check back to Day 4 if you want the nitty-gritty about my struggles with G quarter-sharp and realizing that I need to actually approach it as G-sharp lowered by three-quarters of a semitone, or if you want to read about my interpretations of a time signature which simply says “7” or another single Arabic numeral. This post is not about either of those things. Sorry to disappoint.
My students continuously inspire me to think deeply about things I often overlook or take for granted. I am so thankful for each and every one of them.
Yesterday, a particularly intrepid and devoted undergraduate asked me how specific practice tools - rhythms, metronome work, changing articulations, picking phrase points, recording, etc. - rank in my own experience of practicing. I paused, partially to take a sip from my still-too-hot coffee, and partially because I did not know how to begin to respond.
I sipped my coffee, put down the reed I had just tied, and hazarded a thoughtful reply which went something like this:
Let’s think about the 10,000-hour concept for a moment. It is a comforting idea until you do the math and realize mastery apparently requires a part-time job lasting a decade. Popularized by Malcolm Gladwell (love him or hate him, that is up to you), it suggests that greatness is less about being struck by lightning and more about showing up until even your excuses get bored. But the number is not a magic password: spending 10,000 hours doing something badly may simply make you impressively consistent at doing it badly. The real work is deliberate practice—stretching your abilities, getting useful feedback, and fixing the bits you would rather fix themselves.
Now, I would postulate that most musicians concerned with developing their craft can get behind the broader premise: getting good takes sustained, thoughtful work. Perhaps even more so the older and more experienced they become and the further into their careers they venture. Thousands of hours spent working at something? Seems reasonable enough. A universal threshold at which mastery arrives? I have questions.
First: When do you start tracking?
Second: What happens when you pass 10,000? Fireworks? You stop learning? You stop mastering? Maybe I just do not like the word “mastering.”
Third - and this is the big kahuna - how we practice our art changes as we gain experience. An hour spent learning how to practice is doing different work from an hour spent refining a skill we have developed over decades. The hours accumulate, but what we need from them keeps changing.
Why did I launch into this diatribe over a question about how I practice and what I find important in practice? I am getting there!
When my 10,000 hours started, I did not know how to practice efficiently, or even really how to practice at all. I used some combination of brute force and throwing myself at the piece or technique until I could sort of pull it off, then packed it away, pulled it back out the next day, and saw what stuck.
Since I started teaching in any capacity, teaching students how to practice has gone hand in hand with teaching them the fundamentals of the instrument and general music-making. We all know what to say to students and how to help them break down the difficulties, but how often do we actually pause in our own practice and practice what we preach?
I think it comes down to learned behavior. Practice becomes another “thing” that we do over those thousands of hours - it becomes a habit. I still know what effective practice looks like, but knowing it and actually doing it are different things. Comfortable habits have a way of taking over. Best practices (see what I did there?) do not always win out over comfortable ones.
I continued my answer. This was absolutely more information than my student bargained for or expected. The look in his eyes said it all.
I suppose my answer is that I cannot give those tools a fixed ranking. What matters is recognizing what the passage needs, rather than reaching for whatever feels most familiar.
Learning a piece like the Aho, because it is SO different and SO unfamiliar to me, has provided a shock to my system and is forcing me to practice in the ways that I know I should always be practicing. I have been making many more notes in my music, the tuner never leaves the music stand, the metronome is loud and proud, and I am not steamrolling my way from upper left to bottom right. Lo and behold, my retention has been great, and the transferable skills are transferring! Amazing how that works, isn’t it?
Don’t even get me started on 10,000 hours of reedmaking…
