With our Head now suitably prepared, let’s turn to the mechanics of how we produce musical sounds with our bodies and instruments. A reminder that in our H4 Model, we refer to all the physical aspects of music-making as “Hands”.
As we have seen, preparing and performing can include much more than just whether or not we can technically play the music “correctly”—but of course there is no denying that we do feel more confident and deliver a better performance when our Hands know what they’re doing!
In Chapter 6: Superlearning we go deep on the topic of practicing and introduce a range of Superlearning techniques which can help you to learn pieces and technique faster, break through apparent sticking-points and plateaus, and memorise and retain music efficiently and reliably. All of these can greatly accelerate your progress in preparing music for performance.
Let’s look at how three of the main principles and techniques of Superlearning can be incorporated into our Performance Practice through Creativity, Conversation and Connection, to make sure that our Hands do as well during a live performance as they did in the practice room. These are: Deliberate Practice, Contextual Interference, and Retrieval Practice.
A. Deliberate Performance Practice
With Deliberate Practice, we use a three-part cycle of “Plan, Play, Reflect” to make sure our practicing is always focused on the highest-impact areas, and using our practice time most effectively. We Plan what we’re going to try next, we Play it, and we Reflect on the result, feeding into the next Plan, and so on.
We can see Deliberate Practice as the overarching approach to all our practicing, guiding us to make more productive choices for what we’re going to do next. We are able to identify the cause of mistakes and correct them at their source, and to become intimately familiar with every aspect of our music, preparing us for the kind of heightened levels of engagement that characterise the Flow state.
In Chapter 6: Superlearning we were primarily focused on using Deliberate Practice for traditional practice activities: the “take the music apart and work on small sections” process discussed earlier. What about the Performance Practice we’ve been discussing, where we play through the whole piece start to finish, intentionally treating it more like a “performance” than a “play-through”?
We need to draw a clear boundary for ourselves between these two modes: focusing on details and fixing things vs. playing through a piece from beginning to end as a performance. This way we learn how to keep going during a performance, no matter what—rather than being in the habit of always stopping to fix mistakes.
The overarching principle of Deliberate Practice can still be applied. We are now simply applying the Plan-Play-Reflect cycle to the performance as a whole.
Perhaps when you practiced performing, there was one particular section where you fumbled a few notes. You might choose to switch mode, and use Deliberate Practice on a smaller scale to address the root cause of that fumbling. Or perhaps there wasn’t a particular section which your Inner Listener picked up on as needing attention, but when you Reflect after the performance, you feel like it lacked a certain emotional oomph. You can use Deliberate Practice to experiment with the techniques of Chapter 17: Expression to dial it up—or simply practice the performance again, now with the Plan of playing more expressively.
In this way, Deliberate Practice becomes not just a tool for “fixing mistakes” and “getting up to speed”, but a highly versatile way to continually improve your musical performances.
So although it’s typically seen as a method for nitty-gritty technical refinement, we can see that Deliberate Practice can also be a powerful route into Performance Free-Flow:
- Deliberate Practice can be a very enjoyable and creative experience, particularly if you leverage the Creative Superlearning techniques of Chapter 6: Superlearning. As we expand our Creativity to help us reach greater depth and skill with our music, we prepare ourselves to keep a creative mindset during performance.
- Deliberate Practice can reveal the Conversations within the music, helping us to practice the back-and-forth input/output flow of musical awareness and decision-making.
- Deliberate Practice helps us forge deeper and more resilient Connection with our music both on a granular level and as a whole, leading to a more flowing experience when performing.
As well as this overarching approach to practicing performance, we can also make use of the “powertool” of Superlearning: Contextual Interference.
B. Contextual Interference For Performance Practice
Remember the research finding that a group of students will perform worse on a test if they take it in an unfamiliar environment? If you’ve read about Contextual Interference in Chapter 6: Superlearning, this result shouldn’t have surprised you! The same effect happens in music: our performance stage and our practice room are very different contexts, even when we’re playing the same music. Yet we somehow expect that we can prepare for performance out there in the wide world by practicing in the safety and comfort of our own homes.
The good news is that Contextual Interference works its magic just as reliably for tackling this type of context change, allowing us to become more resilient performers, able to perform our music reliably, no matter where we are.
The goal of Contextual Interference is to produce Desirable Difficulty: a level of novelty and challenge which keeps our brains active, engaged, and learning.
In our “practice mode” that might mean troubleshooting a difficult passage by playing it with different rhythms, different articulations, in a different key, or maybe even backwards. When we return to playing it normally, we find our abilities have improved.
So what does Contextual Interference look like for our “performance mode”?
We can begin our journey to the stage right in the practice room by altering our immediate surroundings.
Simply turn your chair around, face a different wall or window or mirror, stand up if you’ve been sitting or vice-versa (if your instrument allows), or play in a different room. All these changes in context will build your ability to focus on the music itself, as well as strengthening your brain’s representation of what a “good” performance looks and feels like.
The various phases and steps of the Performance Pathway introduced earlier, including recording yourself, can also all be seen as forms of Contextual Interference. Not only are you pushing your comfort zone emotionally, you are developing a more resilient ability to perform in a variety of contexts.
Close your eyes
As humans, we are very visually-oriented, especially in this age of ubiquitous screens and visual interfaces. But while we all love to watch our favorite singer or symphony orchestra, the greatest power of music is in the sound.
When we close our eyes, we enter a new world, where sounds come to life in a whole new way. And when we close our eyes while playing our instruments, we immediately gain more focus on the details of that experience, discovering sensations we overlooked when our attention was caught up with visual stimuli.
Try simply closing your eyes while you practice. Focus on the sounds, emotions, and the physical sensations of playing your instrument.
One Next Level client referred to this as “choosing to live in a world of sound” and found that committing to more eyes-closed practicing utterly transformed the expressiveness of his performances, as well as his confidence.
You might not believe that this is possible. How can you play without looking at the sheet music? Or watching your fretboard? And what if you don’t have the music memorised yet?
While it’s true that you may not be ready to play your whole piece right now with eyes closed, you may be surprised by how much you actually can do. More surprising still will be what the experience of playing music feels and sounds like when you do.
Contextual Interference and Performance Free-Flow
As well as building our resilience in performance, Contextual Interference brings other benefits. The idea of Desirable Difficulty can help us overcome emotional resistance to pushing beyond our comfort zone, as well as helping us shift from the black-and-white “no mistakes” mentality, to a Growth Mindset which recognises issues as the opportunities they really are.
Contextual Interference can also really loosen us up, providing more “scenery” for “driving during the day”, to return to our earlier analogy. Imagining new ways to “mess up” your music can bring fun and humour into your practicing, helping to shift our Inner Critic into its new Inner Listener role.
And on top of all that, Contextual Interference will do its primary job of stimulating deeper learning. What used to be a tedious process of fixing mistakes and struggling through difficult passages can become a creative process of musical exploration, and discovery of deeper connections with your music.
C. Retrieval Practice and Performance Practice
In the practice room we have the luxury of starting right away, warming up, and then playing a song repeatedly until we “get it right”. When it comes to a live performance… Well, let’s just say the audience might raise an eyebrow if you tried the same thing! There may be some waiting around before your moment to perform arrives, you may not have the opportunity to warm up, and you probably want to avoid starting the piece all over again if you flub a note or two.
So how do we prepare for that?
In Chapter 6: Superlearning we introduced the distinction between Encoding and Retrieval, and highlighted how the traditional practice methods tend to involve large amounts of attempting to encode the music, but very little practice of retrieving it from memory.
Retrieval practice is the ideal fit for preparing for those live performance situations. By its nature, the goal is to just “pull out” a piece at a moment’s notice, possibly in a new context, and perhaps without having played it recently. We play it through once, without stopping to correct mistakes or trying it a second time, and that’s that.
If you simply treat this retrieval as a performance rather than a play-through, you can effectively combine Retrieval Practice and Performance Practice.
Note this doesn’t mean that your Inner Listener isn’t still on the job! With our principle of Deliberate Practice, we can still Reflect, even if we won’t “Play” again immediately, so that we can Plan for improving our next performance.
We can also use the approach presented in Chapter 6: Superlearning for getting “off book” i.e. learning to play without reliance on the visual cues of sheet music or notation. Whether you expect to perform with or without the notation in front of you, practicing playing without it will again build your resilience for a variety of performance contexts which might arise, and lead you to a deeper connection with the music.