BY MIRANDA ILCHEF, LEAD WRITER (NSW)
On the whole, humans operate marvellously well under small amounts of stress.
In fact, it’s sort of why stress evolved; to prepare our body for action. During a musical performance, and sometimes in the days and weeks leading up to that performance, bursts of adrenaline provide blood flow to our brains and muscles for concentration and movement. Essentially, we are well designed to meet goals and work towards short-term deadlines.
So what happens when all your professional deadlines and projects are cancelled, almost overnight?
It is a situation many musicians have faced this year. Auditions, recitals, and other performances that would have served as major goals for musicians have been cancelled, with no indication of when and how they will resume. When we look further down the road of our careers to see what we need to practice and prepare for next, the view is limited visibility at best, opaque fog at worst. Under these conditions, how do we drive ourselves to continue to grow and learn as instrumentalists, composers, and performers?
How do we drive ourselves to continue to grow and learn?
One of the consequences of this pandemic is that it has caused me to analyse and interrogate my own source of motivation. I had always naively assumed I was motivated by my own internal drive and love for music. So, when orchestra performances started getting cancelled, I was surprised to find myself at the music stand one day, wondering why I hadn’t sight-read any new scores for weeks. It turns out that, as a violinist, playing regularly in orchestras or other musical groups is one of my main sources of motivation, particularly when it comes to the maintenance of ensemble-specific skills such as sight-reading and repertoire knowledge.
When lessons and performance assessments at my university were cancelled (i.e. my main goals for solo playing), I began to worry about how my violin skills would fare. Flicking through my devastatingly underused 2020 planner, I could see that, even weeks and months ahead, there was quite literally nothing left to practice for.
Some days, I could not get myself to pick up the violin
Facing the truth of my motivation source was a confronting to me. I began to wonder whether I really enjoyed playing the violin and its diverse repertoire, or whether I just liked any old challenging project to work towards. Surely, I thought to myself, if I was a ‘proper’ musician, I would be wanting to play no matter my environment. I found myself thinking of the musicians aboard the Titanic who continued to make music as the ship sunk lower into the ocean and closer towards their deaths. Here I was, living very fortunately and experiencing the effects of the pandemic less than most, and yet some days, I could not get myself to pick up the violin.
Luckily, I have found a number of ways to cope with the change.
In this new era of last-minute cancellations and rescheduling, living in the moment is more of a necessary mindset than a personal preference. As someone who usually prefers to plan and organise, focusing more on the present than the future is difficult, but it has proven very useful in my practice. Instead of thinking about the big picture of an entire movement or piece, I try to focus on the individual phrase or note I am playing. Rather than aiming my practice around specific performance deadlines (i.e. ‘I must memorise this piece in the next month before my recital’), I try to think about what would help my playing in that very practice session (i.e. ‘If I memorise this phrase, I will be able to watch my bow contact point more carefully’).
Through this process, I found that a lot of the longer-term goals I was working towards can, with some creative thinking, be re-adapted to suit the present moment.
Creativity often grows best in challenging and unusual environments
The lack of performance deadlines and extra isolation left me with ample time to properly think about violin playing. I began watching some old DVDs of classic violinists – Oistrakh, Menuhin, and Szeryng. Without the mental chatter reminding me of things to do and places to be, my brain was able to slow down and really pay attention. I began to notice things I’d never noticed before; slight differences in their bow holds or subtle re-interpretations of famous pieces. As someone who struggles to mentally stay on task, I’d only really felt this level of quiet concentration during a week-long internet and social media purge some years ago.
In subsequent practice sessions, I found that I didn’t even really have to motivate myself to unpack and play: I was already eager to try these techniques and compare my own playing to the masters I’d just studied.
Like a weed in cracks of urban pavement, creativity often grows best in challenging and unusual environments. Now that some performances and deadlines are making their way back into my calendar, I find myself almost missing the blank slate of a schedule to which I had just grown accustomed. But this time, I know I will re-adapt just fine to these new sources of practice motivation. This tumultuous year is proving that I can think creatively and be flexible about not just how I make music, but also why.
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