BY MIRANDA ILCHEF, LEAD WRITER (NSW)
This is the third interview in Miranda’s exclusive new CutCommon series Mastering your practice. Please note that these stories may include a more technical discussion of instrumental practice and the theory of music, as well as score annotations.
In this interview series, we chat with accomplished musicians about their thoughts on and experience with practice.
First up, we heard from conductor-violist Roger Benedict, and in our most recent interview we spoke with oboist Shefali Pryor.
For our third instalment, we chat with French horn player Francesco Lo Surdo (West Australian Symphony Orchestra) about the finer details of how we structure our practice.
In such a time as now, when formal structure is sorely lacking for many of us, planning and balancing our practice is important as ever.
Francesco, most students will start with a warm-up of some sorts. From the students I’ve asked, this can range in time from 10 minutes to an hour or longer, and the content varies wildly as well. As a horn player, what do you think are the most essential steps in a warm-up?
The best advice I’ve been given about warm-ups is that technically, you’re ‘warmed up’ after the first five minutes. Anything you do past that is essentially working on technique. So I prefer to refer to the daily starting point as a ‘routine’ rather than a ‘warm-up’.
Consistency is key when you commit to a daily technical routine. It’s not always going to sound great or feel great, but it’s a daily way to check in with your progress and mentally get you ready to perform. Think like an athlete – they don’t have the option of just not warming up if they aren’t really feeling like it that day, as it will lead to injury or at least poor performance.
As for structuring your warm-up routine, for brass players the first five minutes are just about the mechanics working — getting air moving and vibration happening in the lips — for example, simple long tones in the middle register, repeated notes, focusing on the release and sustain of sound on each note.
Then you will be ready to move on to other exercises – for example, scales, flexibilities, power and articulation exercises – with the goal of achieving good sound and facility over all registers.
There’s not a one-size-fits-all set of exercises I can recommend. It’s up to each musician to work out what combination of exercises will serve them best at that time and get them ready to play.
When you move to professional work, you won’t always have the luxury of a 60-minute window to warm up in a private room! So as much as I believe in the daily routine, you also need to be flexible and know how to get warmed up and ready to play if all you have is five minutes backstage after you couldn’t find the venue for the recording session, or your plane arrived late on the other side of the country — speaking from personal experience!
Do you organise your practice according to goal completion or by time allotments? Which do you think is more effective?
On a practical level, all practice is a matter of time allotment. But practising without first identifying your goals wastes that time you’ve allotted to it!
As a musician, the best thing you can do is know your short-term goals: get a fast passage under your fingers, prepare for a performance next week, etc.; and your medium- and long-term goals — addressing weaknesses in your playing, your plans after uni, your dream job, etc.
Musicians tend to have an obsession with ‘the hour’ practice session, but our brains just aren’t wired to concentrate for that long. I encourage 20-40 minute blocks of practice – it’s more efficient, achievable, and easier to fit in around the other things you have to do in daily life.
For me, because of the orchestra’s schedule, by default I work to time allotments around rehearsals, chipping away at my short-term repertoire prep and my longer-term goals for my playing, which I achieve through technical routines, studies, etc.
Is there anything important we should do before and after practice? What are your thoughts on pre-practice planning and post-practice reflection? Do you do either of these yourself?
Pre-practice planning is a must for focused, effective practice. At the start of every day, work out how many sessions you’re likely to fit in, how long they will be, and a clear breakdown of what you will cover in each session.
Having a clear structure to a practice session makes your work about the process rather than the immediate results. This is so important, because not all practice sessions ‘feel good’, do they? I learnt all about this in 2013 when I was in rehabilitation from a facial muscle injury. I couldn’t keep bashing away at practice out of frustration because it would worsen my injury. I had to learn to trust in the process and walk away from each practice session at the planned time, regardless of how my inner critic felt it had gone.
Even though I teach this focus on process, some post-practice reflection can be helpful. For example, I will often record myself and then listen back to the recordings to make sure my musical ideas and sound concepts are being expressed how I want.
How do you recommend balancing your practice so that a musician can fit in everything? Most musicians need to warm up, do technical exercises, play studies, learn orchestra parts, and practice repertoire. What is the ideal balance? Should we aim to do everything every day?
Short answer – yes – you should be aiming to cover all those bases every day. Especially while you’re a student. There’s such a clear structure of auditions, orchestra concerts, and solo recitals to prepare for — and you have the time, the resources, and the energy to devote to your studies! It all comes back to your goals, and your planning.
Do you suggest students make time in their practice for things like sight reading, improvisation, or aural skills? Is there anything we should be practising but aren’t?
Yes, definitely. Sorry to my students that may be reading this article, but if I know that sight reading isn’t a student’s forte, I will often set aside about 10 minutes at the end of a lesson to play through some duets. This is a great way to improve sight reading along with practising rhythm, intonation, leading, and sound matching – all incredibly important skills for being a good ensemble musician.
If you feel like sight reading isn’t natural for you, ask your teacher to chuck some duets in front of you at your next lesson, or grab a group of friends to sight read some chamber music. This will teach you more than hours of solo practice, in my opinion.
Let’s get practical with an example. Say a horn student was practising the following excerpt from the flute/horn duet in the first movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. The student is struggling in rehearsals, as it is high, quiet, and very exposed. Step by step, how would you recommend they practice it?
This is a beautiful, but honestly terrifying excerpt! This is the process-driven approach I would use myself, and how I would encourage my students to prepare it:
1. Listen to multiple recordings. Listen to different tempos, different players’ tone colours, how they phrase a line, where breaths are taken. There is no excuse to show up to a rehearsal, lesson, or audition having not listened to recordings — especially now online streaming services exist.
2. Ask yourself, ‘What’s hard about this excerpt?’. Or, if it’s on an audition list, ‘Why has this been set in this audition?’. What might you need to work on in your technique to be able to play it confidently? In the case of this excerpt, what’s hard: it goes quite high, features tricky slurs over wide intervals, and must be played piano.
3. Work out your game plan for the excerpt. Be deliberate in planning your tempi, rhythm, intonation, phrasing, and mark places to breathe that make sense musically and physically. These are the building blocks that give you something to rely on when you’re under extreme pressure.
4. Record yourself practising the excerpt. I’m always shocked to hear the difference between what I feel like I’m playing, and what the listener would hear.
5. Keep working on it, with confidence that a process-driven approach to music-making will help you be ready when the moment comes. I often like to play excerpts or orchestral parts along with a recording to prepare for the first time you will play it in context with the full orchestra.
Before we go, are there any books or resources on the subject that you would recommend to our readers?
If you are practising to prepare for something specific like an audition, I’d recommend Dr Don Greene’s books. There are also some non-music books that are helpful on the mental approach to practice and performance, such as Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect (Bob Rotella), or The Inner Game of Tennis (Timothy Gallwey). Obviously, there are heaps of resources online too — a great Australian source is Mark Bain’s Performance Under Pressure site.
But really, learning how to practice is something I think is best taught as an aural tradition amongst musicians. The best resources are your teachers and other musicians around you. Ask them about their practice. How do they manage their time? What are the methods, tools, exercises, sound concepts, mental approaches they take? How can you incorporate this into your own practice? Don’t be afraid to try new things and change it up – it’s a never-ending journey.
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Catch up on the previous story in Miranda’s Mastering your practice interview series with Shefali Pryor.
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