Mental Practice

How do your objectives as a performer inform and shape your practice technique?

In the first place, by deciding to become a musician, we have to ask ourselves: why do we want to become musicians, what do we want to achieve; and do we really want to spend all of our lives dedicated to music? Music is a field that requires talent and dedication; and always being aware of the fact that ourcareer as a learner will never end. Being a musician means to be different to many other people in daily activities, as well as how we live our lives. When we make the decision to become professional musicians, we make a decision that affects the rest our lives. So having our intentions clearly-defined as a musician will play a huge role in our success.

People become musicians fordifferent reasons. There are people who play an instrument as a way of impressing others, or simply as a hobby. However, there are others who use music as a way of expressing inner feelings or passions which they are not able to express in any other way. As Nachmanovitch says: “what we play is a reflection of who we are, and what we feel.” (Nachmanovitch, 1990)

To quote Barry Green: “Music isform of self-expression which requires a balance of spontaneity and structure, technique and inspiration and it demands a degree of mastery over the human body”. (Green, 1987). So with this, it is clear that being a musician is physically and mentally exhausting. It requires never-ending hours of practice, commitment, time away from pleasures and spending most of our time in a practice room, but allthis effort is rewarded just with the satisfaction of a good performance or the mere fact of being an artist and making a living out of music.

In the case of learning to play an instrument, motivation and passion of doing it is simply not enough, although it will be really helpful to encourage our challenges. But these are completely useless without having the self-discipline topersevere, which plays a vital part in our musicianship.

It is a well-known fact that practice makes perfect. Sometimes it is stressed how practice is vital in learning and improving our musical skills and that is the moment in which we realize the amount of time we have to spend dedicated to our instrument, but this is not really a “sacrifice” for people who are committed to fulfilling theirgoals as a musician.

The most important thing all musicians should acknowledge is how to practice properly. All of us have experienced the feeling of not being in control of our body or our instrument, and then we ask ourselves what went wrong and why. Most of the time, we think that we did not practise enough and thus felt dubious of our capacity as a performer. Nevertheless, the right answerwould be that we did not focus our practice on what needed to be done. According to Buswell “to be effective, practice needs to be as well considered as performance.” (Buswell, 2006)

It is well known that body and mind are linked, consequently what we have in our mind will directly affect our body. This explains the fact that what we are thinking or feeling is reflected in our performance.With this in mind, one should consider the balance between mental and physical practise, the former being concerned with developing mental skills, technique and self-confidence. A great majority of musicians place too much emphasis on physical practice, and ought to spend less time with their instrument.

Most of us think that our system of practising is the right one, andsometimes what we perform is nothing like what we have been practising due to inner doubts about ourselves and many other factors that occur during performance. We get incredibly frustrated and our first feeling after the performance is that all that hours spent practising were a waste of time. As Green says “Learn from your own experience.”(Green, 1987)

We do not have to interpret a ´bad...